Schönberg and Adorno

Sven-Olov Wallenstein

The relationship between Adorno and Schönberg was fraught with conflict, not only over the role Adorno played in the creation of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, in whose negative image of modern music Schönberg sensed Adorno's unfortunate influence. On a personal level, both seem to have retreated into the respective authorities assigned to them by tradition, the theorist versus the practitioner, although such a contradiction does them both equal injustice: Schönberg was a major theorist, just as Adorno, not least through his studies for Alban Berg, was intimately familiar with the musical craft. The personal controversies, however, are not my theme here, and I will leave the biographical part aside.

The best known and most commented treatment of Schönberg, which has often overshadowed all other of Adorno's many analyses, is to be found in Philosophy of New Music published in 1949. The book combines two separate parts: the first on Schönberg, written during the war of 1940-41, the second on Stravinsky, written in 1948. Although he would later claim to still support the main theses of the book, he nevertheless changes his mind on many points, which can be seen in the context of his reassessment of the modern tradition as such, as expressed above all in his studies of Mahler and Berg, and his admittedly tentative sketch of an informal music.

The antinomies of new music

As a whole, Adorno writes in the introduction to Philosophy of New Music, the book can be understood as a digression from Dialectic of Enlightenment, published two years earlier; its more specific point of departure with regard to music is the essay “The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938). The essay was concerned with how standardization penetrates reception and generates new forms of subjectivity, which in the subsequent book will now be developed further to the level of composing itself, on which music’s striving for integrity, autonomy, and authenticity leads it to reproduce in its interiority features of that against which it struggles.

This constitutes an objective antinomy for art, which Adorno—inspired by Benjamin's treatise on German Baroque drama and guided by a quotation from Schönberg's preface to his Three Satires for Mixed Chorus: “The middle way is the only one that does not lead to Rome”—wants to push to its limits, so that the extremes turn out to depend on an underlying problem that can only be grasped via a “philosophy of new music,” not via stylistic categories. This is also a polemic against the present, which for Adorno is characterized by attempts at compromise, retreat, and voluntary regression. One objection would be that the emphasis on the philosophy of new music would indicate that Adorno's project is purely intellectual and thus indirectly confirm the criticism that new music comes from the brain, not from the heart or the ear, that it exists only on paper and not in the senses. This would be misguided: Adorno'’ philosophical project is rather to rescue sensuality and subjectivity from the threat of objectification. In fact, he emphasizes, the mediocre modernist is more calculating and intellectual than his radical counterpart, in that he is constantly attentive to what is viable. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that sensuality and subjectivity are threatened, not only from without, but also from within, by the development of music itself, the negativity of which makes the traditional forms of identification and enjoyment no longer work: sensual enjoyment must be rescued, so to speak, from its automated and regressive variant, in which it appears in a domesticated and mutilated form. What it might mean to rediscover, or perhaps invent, such a sensuality remains a theme in Adorno's subsequent philosophy, not least his polemic against post-war serialism; it has an unmistakable utopian quality that cannot be excluded from his aesthetics or his philosophy in general.

To make the antinomy as clear as possible, Adorno sets up an opposition between Schönberg and Stravinsky, who are the extremes of the constellation. The opposition is not symmetrical: Schönberg’s progress can be examined on the plane of musical objectivity, while Stravinsky’s reaction, despite, or precisely because of, his rejection of all psychology, raises the question of the damage to the subject that forms the basis of his compositions. But although Adorno’s sympathies lie with Schönberg, and his remarks on Stravinsky sometimes seem like catalogs of negative epithets, the difference between them is not as simple as it might first appear, not least because the opposition between an analysis focused on the objectivity of music and one that penetrates the structures of subjectivity cannot possibly be the last word in Adorno's philosophy: the two sides are necessarily linked, not in a synthesis, but in terms of a conflict that constantly assumes new forms. In the case of Schönberg and Stravinsky, for Adorno, both lead the new music into a dead end and the way forward, if such a thing could even be imagined at the time of Philosophy of New Music, must lead beyond the alternative between them.

Adorno’s analysis follows Schönberg's development, from the early works that break through the boundaries of tonality, through twelve-tone music, to his late works, which show a new openness and a simultaneity of different tendencies; here I will only indicate a few points.

In the first expressionist phase, it is a matter of the breakdown of semblance (Schein) and the very category of the work: the “only works that count today [are] those that are no longer works,” writes Adorno in a somewhat hyperbolic formulation (in this sense, he sees Berg’s Wozzeck as a failure precisely because it is a masterpiece in the traditional sense that must suppress the centrifugal tendencies of the material). What results is a music based on impulses, affects, and the “life of the drives of sounds” (Triebleben der Klänge), in which it is no longer a matter of the semblance of passions as allegory, but of a direct seismography, protocols like the psychoanalytic dream protocols. They are, in a phrase that Adorno attributes to Kandinsky, “brain acts” (Gehirnakte), stains that seem to emanate directly from the unconscious. Schönberg thus challenges autonomy and the semblance of beauty, he denies the reconciliation between the individual and the general in music, and does away with conventions, pre-given elements, and formulas in a process whose beginning Adorno locates in Wagner’s nominalism. Music does not strive to become nature by taking the usual route via conventions, but says Adorno somewhat surprisingly, to become knowledge—certainly a knowledge of a very special kind, not something that can be formulated in sentences, but penetrates the constitutive layers of the subject. In Erwartung, the protagonist is surrendered to the music in a way that can be understood by analogy with the patient’s position in psychoanalysis, which also becomes the principle of the form, which opposes continuity and development, the distinction between theme and variation, form and content—everything is singular and in a certain way non-analyzable, as if the score registered the movements of the soul in the same way that the patient’s speech in the analysis follows the curve of the affects.


But the descent into this layer also points beyond the individual as such, and the question becomes how the punctual subjectivity of expressionism can reach beyond itself, if its I can become a We at all. Monadic solitude, Adorno insists, is itself conditioned by society and says more about this than communication; thus, he sees in Schönberg’s music drama Die glückliche Hand (1913) a precise rendering of the antinomy individual-collective, also of how the expressionist point is forced beyond itself by virtue of its negativity. Objectivity (Sachlichkeit) is expressionism in otherness, to which it passes via its immanent dialectic. As a protocol of expression, it is no longer directly expressive, but solidifies into the objective that it denies. But the rejected work that thus returns does so not only as a relapse into semblance, but also shows the appearance and untruth of individuality itself.

In the breakdown of traditional forms, an overarching organization is thus prepared, the “integral work of art” as it appears in the twelve-tone technique, which would later be pushed even further in post-war serialism, whose aporias here are still only on the horizon of Adorno’s presentation. The basic problem, however, is the same: if in expressionism the subject threatened to be closed in on itself, in the twelve-tone technique it is confronted with a simultaneously self-created and heteronomous order that allows dynamics to become static and paralyzes the dimension of time—the subject’s disposal of the material strikes back against freedom. Schönberg follows this logic without compromise, which shows his radicality, which is here contrasted with Berg and Webern (Berg is too conciliatory and, in his desire to be understood, relapse into an obsolete subjectivity, whereas Webern abandons the subjective as if the objectivity of the series were to speak by itself); only Schönberg fully faces the problems and the risk of petrification that composing must face. Entering this impasse is a necessity: the “integral organization,” Adorno writes, is “the only possible objectivity of the work of art today”—a sentence that must have constituted a hyperbole as early as 1949 and, in the light of his polemic against integral serialism just a few years later, seems even more questionable. Here objectivity appears, with a paradox whose consequences would soon become visible, as the result of autonomous aesthetic subjectivity and its striving to organize form in freedom, a freedom that becomes a self-created unfreedom.

The material becomes accessible to subjectivity in a new way as the distinction between the essential and the accidental, the center and the periphery, disappears. “In all its moments, such music is equally close to the center,” Adorno writes in a formulation that is found in several places in his work, but with varying meanings, positive and negative: the center around which everything revolves can be that whose absence deprives music of its development in time, as in Schönberg's twelve-tone technique, but also that whose absence gives music a new freedom in an informal structure that grows from below, as in the later comments on Berg, and finally a way for Adorno to characterize his own writing as it takes shape in the last unfinished main work Aesthetic Theory and which he summarizes in a letter to Rolf Tiedemann: “a series of sub-complexes which are, so to speak, of equal importance [... ], paratactic parts of equal weight, arranged around a center which they express by their constellation.”

The liberation of the late works

In the later Schönberg, however, there is a liberation, as noted at the end of Philosophy of New Music, even if the future there seems aporetic. Something can survive in the twelve-tone technique, but only if music is finally able to free itself from it by absorbing it in free composition and the “spontaneity of the critical ear,” so that composition no longer allows itself to be governed by series and rules, but “consistently reserves the freedom of action,” which also means that the ideal of the “authentic” must be abandoned.

Here Adorno sees a final reversal, a detachment from both the natural material and the mastery of nature. The aesthetic totality that expressionism opposed is now gone, as is the attempt to reconstruct it via the twelve-ton technique, which allows the subject to appear indirectly, in a new self-determination made possible by alienation, while the illusion of organic musical language has disappeared.

In this final phase Schönberg rejects the illusory necessity that emanates from the idea that the musical material would enforce certain solutions, both the dissolution in which the expressionist subject appeared and its aporias in the following twelve-tone technique. Here lies a power to forget, to throw off what has been acquired and allow subjectivity to leave behind the structures it has itself created, thus restoring art to its freedom: “The dialectical composer invites the dialectic to stop.”

Adorno would return to Philosophy of New Music in many shorter articles, picking up where the book leaves off. In “On the Contemporary Relationship between Philosophy and Music” (1953), he says that the book’s mistake was to derive its claims from overarching historical-philosophical theses—as could be indicated by its presentation as a sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment—and to treat the material in an abstract way, not in terms of immanent analyses of works. The book argues as if music could ultimately be resolved into a knowledge that is independent of its monadic concreteness (and thus would be opposed to the knowledge attributed to Schönberg in the expressionist phase), while the concrete must include Schönberg's many shifts not only from one phase to another, but also within phases, that his development is anything but linear, a particularly consistent inconsistency. In the end, Adorno says, what in one perspective seems like the waning of creative power can lead to a new immediacy, as Adorno finds in the dance around the golden calf in Moses and Aaron.

Central to understanding this immediacy is the concept of musical space, which is to be grasped in terms other than the static to which twelve-tone music threatened to revert, that is, not as opposed to temporality.

In Schönberg, the spatiality of harmony is first eliminated in a way similar to what had happened to perspective in painting—in the third of Schönberg's early piano pieces, op. 11, Adorno perceives a sense of spacelessness or two-dimensionality in which the listener is not enclosed, but rather struck as if by a “blow.”

In this way, in both painting and music, the respective spaces turned out to be historically conditioned and not natural. In his late pieces, where the twelve-tone technique is treated in a completely free manner, a new sense of space is created through timbral color and superimposed instrumentation, showing the relative nature of spatiality and that we should not see its dissolution as a one-way process, but that, like temporality, it is a function of content; space and time are not opposed to each other, as if constituting the exterior and interior of music, but form a specific whole in the individual work—an argument that Adorno alternately asserts and retracts in his late writings, not only with regard to Schönberg, but also in his drafts of a theory of informal music, which takes Berg in particular as its point of departure.

In this respect, too, there is an element of self-criticism in relation to Philosophy of New Music, in which the dimensions of music were perceived as independent, whereas now they seem to be able to take each other's place. We find early elements of this in Schönberg's use of the Klangfarbenmelodie, as in the third of the five orchestral pieces, op. 16, where it is the orchestration that creates form. If depth can be created by other means, this also affects polyphony, which refutes the earlier criticism that Schönberg makes it too easy for himself by simply neutralizing harmony.


Adorno emphasizes here that the philosophical interpretation of music must not engage in what Schönberg himself called a “dance of death of principles.” What is decisive is a form of intensity that renders harmony meaningless; counterpoint, together with color, can become a new means, which shows that in the previous book he jumped to conclusions. The compositions themselves must be allowed to correct what is merely a tendency in the material, and interpretation must avoid superior conceptual constructions that leave the works behind in favor of a “false superiority of distance,” an apparent higher knowledge that misjudges the possibility of creating binding works of art today,

Two years later, in “Zum Verständnis Schönbergs” (1955, rev. 1967), Adorno points out that Schönberg’s composing takes place through contradictions, the uninhibitedly expressive is opposed to the demand for construction down to the smallest detail, and they form two trunks that, like intuitions and concepts in Kant, at least according to the interpretation Adorno adopts here, have a common root in the “musical spontaneity that wants to avoid everything given.” Schönberg’s development consists in trying to overcome this contradiction, which first takes shape in a disintegration of the temporal unity, with the brevity of the early piano pieces as a clear example. From this perspective, the twelve-tone technique is an attempt at synthesis, not an application of mathematics or a technique as an end in itself, but something that should enable the free composition of even larger works. That this led to contradictions and inconsistent solutions, such as the return of traditional forms associated with tonality, shows the difficulty of the problem, but also Schönberg’s free relationship with tradition and his relentless attempts to find the common root of expressivity and construction.

The text is based on a lecture given at the symposium “Arnold Schönberg 150 years,” organized by Forum Modernism, Stockholm University, December 2024.