212 Part III: Emigration Years
In his letter to Helene Berg, Adorno revealed to her that he had
been initiated into her late husband’s secret from the beginning. Possibly
by way of offering consolation, he maintained, against his better know-
ledge, that Berg had needed unquenchable yearning ‘to enable him to
compose the Lyric Suite, and not that he had composed the Lyric Suite
for the sake of love.’^121 Finally, he even presumed to claim that the love
affair with Hanna was no more than ‘a romantic mistake’. Hanna Fuchs
(whom he referred to in the letter only as H. F.) ‘was a bourgeoise
through and through who once in her life was touched by the possibility
of being different, without being able to take advantage of it.’^122 At the
end of his letter, he even gave Helene Berg a piece of advice; she
should resist her inclination to give Hanna the original score of the
Lyric Suite. The score must not be degraded to the status of a ‘museum
piece’; it should not be ‘sacrificed’ for ‘the wrong reasons’; it was ‘too
good to be used to gratify the narcissism of a woman bored to death’.^123
The letter makes it plain that Adorno was very concerned both to
maintain a relationship with Helene Berg and to present himself as a
person worthy of her trust. He did not do this without an ulterior motive.
What he had in mind at the time was finding a suitable composer to
take over the task of completing the orchestration of the missing parts
of Lulu. He was obviously right to think that its fragmentary nature
prevented this masterpiece of a music drama taking its rightful place in
the opera houses of the world. And because an opera was no ‘sacred
text’ it must be possible for a composer intimately familiar with Berg’s
composing style to complete the score in the spirit of its creator. Thus
Adorno was preoccupied with the question of how best to proceed.
With this in mind, he immersed himself in Berg’s works with increasing
intensity. ‘I am studying with him for the second time’, he wrote to
Krenek from Oxford.^124 As he said, this was one way of trying to over-
come his grief. ‘Through work I am slowly coming to terms with Berg’s
death’, he wrote to his friend in Vienna in February 1936.^125 Neverthe-
less, the sense of loss would not go away. For in May 1936 he had heard
the Berg memorial concert broadcast in which the Violin Concerto was
performed with Louis Krasner as soloist and Anton Webern conducting.
A year later Adorno wrote to Horkheimer with reflections about death
and ‘Catholic hopes of an afterlife’. In reply to Horkheimer’s criticism
of Christian teachings, he expressed the view ‘that he could not con-
ceive of the death and irretrievable loss of loved ones without hope for
those’ who suffered an injustice, the greatest of which is death.^126
The idea of publishing a monograph on Berg with a collection of
Berg’s own writings was one that came from Willi Reich. It was intended
that Adorno and Krenek should contribute analytical essays. Adorno
was more than willing to contribute to a book that would champion
Berg’s oeuvre.^127 Despite his many commitments, he set about this
additional task and wrote the major part of the essays that appeared in
Vienna in 1937 in the volume edited by Reich.^128 Altogether there were