From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 211addressed himself to Krenek, who was one of those responsible for the
special issue of the journal planned by Willi Reich, because in Adorno’s
eyes he was the fittest judge and one he could respect. Because he
felt so secure in his own love for Berg, and because he did not for a
second doubt Berg’s importance as a composer and music dramatist, he
believed he could ‘seek out the dead man’s flaws’. ‘Not’, as he observes
in the letter, ‘in order to defend them, but because there is no love that
does not dwell in these flaws, and also because the memory should be
so true that one can be conscious of it at every moment without feeling
shame, that is to say, in the face of those flaws. To name the flaws of
a human being one loves is the last act of love one can perform for
him.’^115 This was actually a superfluous justification anticipating the
possibility that his obituary might be criticized for its ‘lack of enthusiasm
and panegyric’. He then referred once again to that ‘darkest secret’
about which he and Krenek both knew, but which they wished not to
disclose. For, apart from the assertion that the composition of musical
time in the Lulu Symphony was to be deciphered as a ‘gesture of those
who love without hope’, Adorno’s two essays in 23 contained only a few
obscure allusions to the difficult years Berg had spent torn between
despair and the hope of fulfilment. Not until later did he analyse the
relationship developed in the opera between Alwa Schön (who bears
some resemblance to Berg) and Lulu. Alwa’s forbidden love for Lulu,
who was married to his father, was the vantage point from which he
‘surrenders to that love just as the doomed artist surrenders to the
beautiful woman’.^116
Adorno was much more explicit about Berg’s passionate affair in a
letter he wrote to Berg’s widow, but not until he had allowed over four
months to pass. He talked there, in a series of sophistical phrases, about
the poetic inspiration that underlay the Lyric Suite.^117 As Adorno wrote
to Helene Berg, he felt unable to ignore this in his interpretation. The
tone of his letter reveals his discomfort. Even so, this does not prevent
him from interpreting the Second String Quartet as ‘a virtuoso work of
despair’. As in the two great operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, the ‘musical
protagonist’ of the Lyric Suite ‘cannot master the alien world through
love’.^118 To characterize the Allegro misterioso of the third movement,
he evokes a poetic association: it is ‘a breathless timbral poem’, com-
posed for the most part ‘sul ponticello or col legno’. ‘Those who love
poetic associations may be reminded of a desperately passionate scene
in suppressed whispers, which erupts but once, only to revert again to
feverish whispering.’^119 In the lengthy letter in which Berg confessed
to Hanna Fuchs that the Lyric Suite was the expression of their love, he
explained that the Allegro misterioso depicted ‘the mysterious, whispered
nature of our meetings, into which the Trio estatico brings the first,
short eruption.’^120 There is some evidence that Berg told his pupil
about his musical intentions here and that Adorno had made use of this
knowledge later on.