88 Part II: A Change of Scene
Quartet, op. 10, had been performed. There was a further scandal
during a concert of the Academy for Literature and Music in March
1913, when Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, Berg’s Altenberg-Lieder
and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder were on the programme. Eberhard
Buschbeck, the promoter of the concert, even came to blows with a
member of the audience, who subsequently turned out to be a popular
composer of operettas. When Adorno was told of these events by Lotte
Tobisch von Labotyn, who had witnessed them, he noted the irony of
the situation in which the low-brow culture of the operetta leapt to the
defence of high culture as soon as the opportunity arose to denounce
modern music as an attack on traditional artistic values.^19 Adorno
and Schoenberg met for the first time when Anton Webern was con-
ducting Bruckner’s F minor Mass in the local church in Mödling, where
Schoenberg was living. Schoenberg was fifty-seven and was regarded as
the authority on twelve-tone music. He was well aware of the special
place he occupied in the musical life of Vienna, and cultivated this
exclusive position in his dealings with the outside world. With his teacher,
Alexander Zemlinsky, he had already established the Society of Creat-
ive Musicians in 1904 in order to create a stable framework for the few
people interested in modern music. The Society for Private Musical
Performances which he created in 1918 provided a venue for intro-
ducing the compositions of the Schoenberg circle to a select audience
of genuine enthusiasts.
During Adorno’s stay in Vienna the general mood could not be called
optimistic, either in politics or in cultural affairs. On the contrary, he
found himself confronted with a peculiar mixture of Viennese ‘concili-
atoriness’, ‘fried-chicken culture’ and a systematic anti-traditionalism
based on tradition.^20 His moods alternated between boundless enthusi-
asm, dislike and nostalgia, as can be seen from his detailed accounts
of the city and the people he met, above all of Berg, to whose house
in Trauttmannsdorffgasse 27 in Hietzing he would repair twice a week.
‘At the time I thought the street was incomparably beautiful. With its
plane trees it reminded me... of Cézanne.’ He could recognize the
house from the dissonant chords that were being struck on the piano.
‘The name on the door was designed by Berg himself in artistic
script... with a trace of Jugendstil, yet clearly legible, and without
annoying curlicues.’^21
Adorno’s tuition with Berg was frequently interrupted by the latter’s
travels to give concerts or for recreation. What stayed in Adorno’s
memory of it was its unconventionality. Neither counterpoint nor the
study of form were given precedence. Adorno’s own compositions were
regularly subjected to critical discussion, which was so thorough that
Berg worked his own ideas into his pupil’s pieces, which were in them-
selves conceived basically on Bergian lines. ‘Usually, he would take a
long time looking at what I brought him and then come up with possible
solutions... that never smoothed over difficulties or skirted them with