Adorno

The Danube Metropolis 85

according to Adorno, there was a certain affinity with Gustav Mahler’s
symphonies, Berg’s will to construct negated the language of emphatic
subjectivity peculiar to the nineteenth century. This ‘renunciation of
psychologism by consummating it’ had its basis in the music’s technical
economy. ‘In that economy it calls for the responsibility of the person in
the face of the chaos of shattered forms. Their ruins are the material
it works with.’ In Wozzeck, Berg’s music immerses itself in the abyss of
mankind, by piercing its ‘psychological outer skin’.^10 In terms of its
conceptual grip and stylistic force, this piece is one of the most powerful
that Adorno wrote as a young man.
In addition to the Wozzeck essay, Adorno wrote about Schoenberg’s
Serenade, op. 24, a piece he was able to publish in Pult und Taktstock
in September 1925. Here, too, his starting-point was the end of express-
ive music and the disintegration of traditional musical forms. This
was the source of Schoenberg’s irony, which remains ‘equidistant from
bourgeois complacency and nihilistic polemic’.^11 He analysed the form
this irony took in the music by examining the solutions Schoenberg
provided to the emerging problems of the composition. For example,
he refers to his hidden use of a march within the seven movements
of the serenade. This enabled the piece to combine freedom of expres-
sion with the creation of new forms arising from the musical material
itself.
Years later, on the occasion of Schoenberg’s sixtieth birthday, Adorno
undertook the task of exploring in detail how this music worked. In that
study he begins by asking what the abolition of traditional harmony
means for modern music:

Schoenberg asks where this harmony is drifting, and goes on

to investigate the ‘instinctual life of sounds’; he distinguishes

between what is ornament and what is integral – and does away

with ornaments and symmetries that in this harmony and this

counterpoint become separated out from the matter in hand; he

considers how to eliminate the break between exposition and

development, now that the disintegration of the tonal unity of the

sonata has deprived it of meaning; how to do away with the false

predominance of one note over the other in the harmonic and

melodic structure, and how to prevent the collapse of horizontals

and verticals. And as a succinct, precise answer, he develops the

twelve-tone technique.^12

Adorno immersed himself deeply in Schoenberg’s oeuvre. He regarded
him as the revolutionary who transformed traditional methods of com-
position, and always emphasized the importance of his achievement.
Even so, it was Alban Berg whom he most esteemed and for whom he
felt the greater personal sympathy. It was for this reason that he sought
to demonstrate the individual qualities of Berg’s music and to display