184 Part III: Emigration Years
himself explicitly from the official eulogies. He emphasized the purely
musical dimensions of a work that appears ‘both alien and familiar to
the contemporary listener, like childhood dreams’. Its secret lies in its
use of chromaticism. Whereas Adorno characterized the music of
Meistersinger as ‘the breakthrough of the instincts in the midst of
bourgeois order’, he noted the innovative technical features of Tristan,
which enabled Wagner to liberate the music from ‘the shell of indi-
vidual expression’. ‘To enable the illumination of the world to rise up
from the mineshafts of the unconscious.. .that is the aim of Wagner’s
music. It has chosen demythologization in the shape of the mythical as
the secret of its artistic magic.’^41 In these notes Adorno distinguished
between the musical character of the work and its political effect.
Ignoring the fact that Wagner and his music were being exploited by
the National Socialists, he was able to create a positive picture of the
composer. He would produce a more nuanced and critical view of
Wagner later in his major study of the composer.
He took a different line in another essay that appeared in the
Europäische Revue. In number 5, also published in 1933, he provided
a gloss on the regulation that had just been issued banning the broad-
casting of ‘Negro jazz’ on German radio. Without directly endorsing
the Nazi prohibition of ‘un-German [artfremd] music’, he made the
extraordinary assertion that the decree approved retrospectively what
had already taken place in music, namely the ‘end of jazz music itself’.
There was nothing in jazz that could be defended or salvaged, it ‘has
long been in the process of dissolution, in retreat into military marches
and all sorts of folklore.’^42 Jazz was disappearing from the stage of
autonomous artistic production thanks to its own ‘stupidity’. What is
eliminated along with it ‘is not the musical influence of the Negro race
on the northern one, nor is it cultural Bolshevism. It is a piece of bad
commercial art.’^43
Perhaps Adorno was attempting a sarcastic reaction to the senseless
Nazi prohibition. However, his terminology – ‘eliminate’, ‘race’, ‘cul-
tural Bolshevism’ – is not too far from the abuse practised by Goebbels.^44
Adorno showed himself to be culpably careless on one further occasion,
in 1934, when he gave a favourable review in Die Musik, a journal
immediately taken over by the Nazis, of Herbert Müntzel’s cycle for
male choir on poems by Baldur von Schirach, Hitler’s youth leader. To
characterize this choral music which ‘derived from the more ancient,
polyphonic German folksong, especially of the sixteenth century’, he
made use of Goebbels’s term ‘romantic realism’.^45
Years later, in the winter semester of 1963, the Frankfurt student
newspaper Diskus published this review at the suggestion of a student,
Claus Chr. Schroeder,^46 who issued a challenge to Adorno in an open
letter: ‘As is well known, you have persistently condemned all those
people since the war who were guilty in 1934 and after for the way
Germany developed. (I refer, for example, to your discussion of