116 Part II: A Change of Scene
But if atonality were not to become obsolete in its turn, it would be
necessary to practise a ‘free music style’ whose point of no return could
only be a constant process of varying the musical material by means of
‘construction springing from the imagination’ or ‘through the freedom
of the constructive imagination’.^24 And, in order to vary the musical
material in a constructivist way, what was needed were the modalities
of twelve-tone technique.
In this phase of his theoretical development, Adorno conceived of
twelve-tone technique as a rational procedure concerned with the mater-
ial of music, rather than with its aesthetics. In other words, he distin-
guished between technique and work. Twelve-tone technique is the only
adequate contemporary method of shaping the material of music, but
this is not to say that it can satisfy the aims of musical and poetic
expression. He did not tire of emphasizing that to think of it as a refer-
ence system analogous to tonality was a crass misunderstanding. To
think of twelve-tone technique in mathematical terms was to commit a
similar error. Just as Adorno was no orthodox serial composer in his
own works, so too he became increasingly uncertain about the import-
ance of twelve-tone technique on a theoretical plane. Between 1925
and 1935 his views of twelve-tone technique kept shifting and were
also being refined. Alongside his purely theoretical analyses of music,
a document of particular importance for an assessment of his position
with regard to twelve-tone music was the correspondence he had begun
with the composer Ernst Krenek in the spring of 1929.
Krenek was born in Vienna in 1900. He had met Adorno as early as
1924 in Frankfurt, where his comic opera in three acts, Der Sprung über
den Schatten, op. 17, was in rehearsal. His first reaction was that Adorno
was an ‘over-articulate youth’. Initially, he was unimpressed, but soon
he became fully convinced of Adorno’s ‘critical temperament’, his
‘astuteness’ and the ‘originality of his formulations’.^25 Adorno had al-
ready heard Krenek’s music a year before they met, at the Composers’
Festival in Kassel. Adorno was there to write about the festival and he
heard a performance of Krenek’s Second Symphony, op. 12, which came
as a pleasant surprise. Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf of 1925 fore-
shadowed the style of Weill’s Mahagonny and Die Dreigroschenoper
and made him famous overnight, not least because of his incorporation
of jazz elements in the work. Adorno had seen it in Frankfurt in
December 1927. In his review of the production he wrote that ‘Krenek
has enough demonic energy to enable him to launch a general attack’,
but that this production of Jonny ‘lacked the power of the absurd
that had created that terrifying fortissimo at the end of the Second
Symphony.’ Moreover, the content of the opera was suspect because ‘it
portrayed America as the ideal society of the future.’^26
In the next few years, the two met with increasing frequency. Adorno
introduced Krenek to Kracauer and Benjamin. Topical questions
about contemporary music brought both similarities and differences of