238 Part III: Emigration Years
mediation of psychology.’^110 Benjamin had evidently understood his
friend’s intentions perfectly. Of course, Horkheimer had long since
known all about Adorno’s work on Wagner’s operas. Ever since Adorno
had started his studies of Wagner, Horkheimer had followed them with
a very personal interest. As early as the second issue of the Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung for 1936, he had expounded his own thoughts about the
changes in the ‘anthropology of the bourgeois era’ in his essay ‘Egoism
and Freedom Movements’.^111 He had hopes that Adorno’s demonstra-
tion of the simultaneously authoritarian and rebellious elements in
Wagner’s character and works would provide confirmation of his own
ideas. And Adorno did indeed attempt to pursue this line of thought.
‘I believe that the gesture of recoil, of betrayal of revolution, such as
becomes most evident in Wotan’s treatment of Siegmund, also provides
the model for the structure of musical form in Wagner right down to
the minutest cells of the music.... The intertwining of revolution and
regression extends in Wagner right down to the melodic ideas, or rather
the way in which these are mutilated by the power of society.’^112
What Adorno had read out in San Remo were the first drafts of a
manuscript that he was able to complete relatively quickly, despite the
strains imposed by the imminent move to New York. In 1939, under
the title of Fragments on Wagner, he published three sections of the
much larger study (‘Social Character’, ‘Phantasmagoria’, and ‘God and
Beggar’) in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.^113 Adorno approached
his subject from the point of view of ideological critique,^114 a fundamental
tenet of which was the idea that ‘progress and reaction in Wagner’s
music cannot be separated out like sheep and goats’.^115 In the book
version,^116 which is subdivided into ten sections, Adorno begins by
analysing Wagner’s social psychology, ‘the configuration of envy, senti-
mentality and destructiveness’, and his anti-Semitism which is located in
the no man’s land ‘between idiosyncrasy and paranoia’.^117 The emphasis
of the music analysis in the stricter sense lay on Wagner’s use of melody,
harmony and orchestration, and finally on the theory of instrumenta-
tion that Wagner practised.^118 At the core of his essay, according to
Adorno himself, stood what he calls the phantasmagoria, the series of
illusory images. He spoke of Wagner’s regression ‘to the non-temporal
medium of sound’ which proves to be the source of ‘the really pro-
ductive element’ in his music. ‘This element, with its two dimensions
of harmony and colour, is sonority.... It is as expressiveness that the
subjective force of production makes its boldest advances at the level
of harmony; inventions such as the sleep-motif in The Ring resemble
magic spells that are capable of enticing all subsequent harmonic dis-
coveries from the twelve-tone continuum. Wagner’s anticipation of
impressionism in his use of harmony is even more striking than in his
tendency to atomization.’^119
Adorno did not stop there. On the contrary, he emphasized that the
sonorities become magic when Wagner transforms them into seemingly