110 Part II: A Change of Scene
8
Music Criticism and
Compositional Practice
Adorno’s intensive and sustained study of the writings of the Danish
thinker Søren Kierkegaard began towards the end of 1929 or early in
- He devoted just over a year to the laborious task of producing
a second dissertation. This task still lay in the distant future in the
summer of 1928, when he went touring on holiday with Gretel Karplus.
As in the previous year, they headed southwards. In September 1927,
they had travelled round Tuscany and the Ligurian coast, whereas on
this occasion they stayed briefly in the Dolomites, in Cortina d’Ampezzo,
before moving on to Naples so as to spend a few days on the isle of
Capri. However, the journey took less time than Adorno would have
liked because Gretel, who managed her leather-processing business in
Berlin single-handed, did not want to stay away too long.
Between late autumn 1928 and early in 1930, Adorno was involved
in editing the Musikblätter, though he was not the editor in chief.
Despite this constraint, he was willing to put his dissertation on ice for
the time being in order to devote himself to the journal. In this sense
his preparatory work on the reform of the programme for the journal
paid off. Where he had control, he tried to implement his ideas
during the following months. He took immediate steps to enlist the help
of Alban Berg, supported the publication of an essay by Ernst Bloch,
and secured contributions from Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill and Hans
Redlich.
The first issue of the transformed journal, which was henceforth named
simply Anbruch, contained an editorial that plainly bore Adorno’s hand-
writing, but was couched in more defensive terms than the exposé of
the summer of 1928. The truth was that he could not ignore the views
of Paul Stefan and Hans Heinsheimer, who still had the final word on
editorial matters in Vienna. In the first issue of 1929, the claim is made
in an understated fashion that the journal’s yardstick is the modern
music that has dawned (angebrochen) with the emergence of free
atonality and the twelve-tone system. Its contemporary relevance, how-
ever, remained to be demonstrated, it was claimed, through the medium
of music criticism.