Adorno

The Institute of Social Research 165

We can’t get away / from this old house... / And if we run in

fear / We’re still stuck here / We’re full of fear / we can’t get

clear.^109

Faced with Benjamin’s wholesale dismissal, Adorno defended him-
self with the argument that a children’s story could ‘present some
extremely serious things’. He was particularly concerned with ‘the ex-
pression of fear’.^110 Benjamin did not comment on Adorno’s remarks.
This lack of appreciation led Adorno to attempt to clarify his intentions
in discussions with other friends. In November 1934, he sent the libretto
to Ernst Krenek in Vienna, with a detailed explanation of its central
themes. He pointed out that Tom Sawyer frees himself from the irra-
tional power of the oath and that this is a piece of ‘de-mythologization’.
The story of Tom Sawyer attracted him, he said, because it shows in an
exemplary way ‘how a truly human morality proceeds from a kind of
psychological immorality’. His ‘original intention’ had been confirmed,
he thought, by Richard Hughes’s book A High Wind in Jamaica, ‘one
of the most important novels I have come across in recent years’.^111 He
also explained his ideas about the work in some detail. Only the text
passages written in verse were meant to be sung. Huck’s role was to be
performed by a girl soprano, while Tom’s part was to be written for
tenor.^112
Unfortunately, Adorno only ever completed two songs from the first
scene in manuscript form.^113 Huck’s ‘Entrance Song’ and Tom’s ‘Dirge
for a Tom-Cat’ were essentially written in twelve-tone rows combined
with free atonality. Thus in Huck’s song, every note used relates to the
twelve-tone row, although it is not obvious because of the overall shape
of the music. Tom’s dirge is like a children’s song, with a strong rhythm.
Taken together, the two songs suggest that Adorno envisaged a medium-
sized symphony orchestra. The libretto shows that he planned choruses
and intermezzos, and intended to add two finales and a quodlibet.^114
Having been forced by political events to leave Germany in 1933,
Adorno shelved the entire opera project. This was partly due to the
discouraging response to his attempts at music drama, but above all
because the future prospects of the ‘non-Aryan’ intellectual in National
Socialist Germany lay in ruins. The music he had envisaged for the
opera was evidently no match for the experience of genuine fear and
the trauma of expulsion.