In Search of a Career 107that they are celebrated as divine services.’^42 Adorno took a certain
malicious pleasure in mentioning this review to Berg in the same letter
in which he reported that nothing had come of the editorial post.
This rejection by Ullstein was not the end of his losing streak. His
return home to Frankfurt for Easter in 1928 was blighted by a serious
car accident. A taxi he was in collided with a bus. He had to be taken to
hospital, where he was found to have concussion, a head injury and
bruising. To his great distress, he was confined to bed for several weeks.
After his recovery, he wrote at once to Vienna, saying that his greatest
fear had been unfounded: ‘my hearing is quite unaffected.’^43 This letter
radiated self-confidence and energy for other reasons. Even before the
accident, he reported, he had finished a song, a setting of Theodor
Däubler’s poem Verloren. This piece is one of the Four Songs for
Medium Voice and Piano, op. 3, which he dedicated to Berg after com-
pleting the score.
Scarcely had he recovered than Adorno forced himself to face up to
the question whether he ought to make a second attempt to obtain the
Habilitation. Both Horkheimer and Kracauer urged him to do so, the
latter even suggesting that this time he should propose a topic con-
cerned with the philosophy of music. Adorno could not make up his
mind. For, as he wrote to Berg, an academic career was not really so
vital for him, ‘since I am entirely focused on music, or rather composi-
tion, and even if I were to obtain the Habilitation, my academic duties
would have to take second place.’^44 And this was where the matter
rested. When he had completed the song-cycle dedicated to Berg, the
premiere took place in Berlin in January 1929, in a performance by the
singer Margot Hinnenberg-Lefèbre, accompanied by Eduard Steuermann
on the piano. After that, Adorno threw himself with renewed energy
into the business of composition. He reworked the songs based on
poems by Stefan George that he had begun in Vienna, and added to
them. This brought him up against a new kind of problem, one that
would continue to preoccupy him. In a letter to Berg he raised the
question of how ‘the freedom of the imagination was to be reconciled
with twelve-tone technique’. He had been looking, he said, for ways of
shifting ‘the organization of the material behind the façade [by means
of the twelve-tone technique], i.e., behind the manifest sound of the
music, in order to create scope for the imagination’.^45 By calling for the
‘restitution of musical freedom’, he came into conflict with Schoenberg,
who nevertheless remained in his eyes the most important musical innov-
ator of the twentieth century.
To lay bare the nature of Schoenberg’s achievement was a principal
intention of the course of lectures on recent works of the new music
that Adorno gave at the invitation of the Frankfurt Musicians’ Associa-
tion. Alongside these lectures, he went on writing about music, as ever.
He continued to experiment with the genre of the musical aphorism,
producing a further series of texts of this kind, and publishing them in