98 Part II: A Change of Scene
believed that Adorno’s over-philosophical interpretations damaged his
[Schoenberg’s] pioneering contributions to the New Music in the eyes
of the public.
For his part, Adorno was supremely unconcerned about the public
and its approval. He insisted that ‘the criterion of all my intellectual
activity is truth ... not its possible impact on the public.’^14 Unlike
Schoenberg, Berg not only understood Adorno’s aims, he even endorsed
his rigorous strategy once he had familiarized himself with Adorno’s
approach to music analysis. An important marker of this change was
his attitude to Adorno’s discussion of Wozzeck immediately after the
premiere in Berlin. Under the influence of Schoenberg, and somewhat
to Adorno’s annoyance, he had initially found fault with incompre-
hensible passages. But a little later, Berg wrote, ‘You have completely
won me over. I know now that what you have written. ..could not
be expressed better, more precisely or shed more light on the entire
context than you have done.’^15 Berg went on to say that he was ‘con-
vinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music. ..,
you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfil
this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.’^16 At the time,
few of Adorno’s contemporaries were as prescient as Berg.
In order to advance his philosophical prospects at the same time as
his musical activities, Adorno resumed his contact with Cornelius with a
view to writing a dissertation for the Habilitation. Since Cornelius thought
highly of him not just despite his constant excursions into the realm of
music, but because of them, agreeing on a subject was straightforward.
The matter was not without urgency as only two years remained to
Cornelius’s retirement. Furthermore, Leo Löwenthal, a member of the
same circle of intellectuals, had also declared his intention of approach-
ing Cornelius to supervise his own proposed Habilitation thesis. For this
reason, Adorno set to work briskly. As on the previous occasion,
he took Cornelius’s Transcendentale Systematik as his model. On this
occasion, however, he was concerned not with Husserl, but with the
question whether and by what means Freud’s theory of the unconscious
could be reformulated on the foundation of a transcendental theory of
knowledge.
As early as December 1925, after some months of illness, he reported
to Berg that he hoped to be able to come to Vienna now that the
‘Habilitation question was more or less clear’.^17 This could only refer to
his agreement with Cornelius and the rough outline of the project. He
did not start work on it properly until the first part of 1926, a labour of
reading and writing that lasted until the autumn. Even so, by the middle
of September 1926, he had roughed out the plan for the dissertation for
which he was reading many books by Freud. He was particularly pleased
about this because he felt he had to complete the thesis before
Löwenthal, with whom he was in competition. Moreover, he couldexpect
sanctions from the family if anything went wrong with the Habilitation.