Adorno

Adorno’s Years in California 311

he could do no more than write. At the end of his letter, he said that,
with his father’s death, ‘his own life seemed like robbery’. This was an
idea that appeared here for the first time, but was one he would develop
subsequently in Negative Dialectics. It was the idea of ‘the injustice of
continuing to live, as if one were cheating the dead of light and breath.
The sense of such guilt is infinitely powerful in me.’^181

The Privy Councillor: Adorno and Thomas Mann

And at the beginning of October... we spent an evening with the

Adornos....I read out three pages about the piano that I had recently

inserted into my chapter which was becoming worryingly hypertrophic,

and our host told us something of his studies and aphorisms about

Beethoven.... Then Adorno, while I stood next to the piano watching him,

played the sonata, op. 111, right through and in a highly instructive way.^182

What did he talk about? Well, the man was capable of spending a whole

hour on the question: Why did Beethoven not write a third movement to

the Piano Sonata, Opus 111?... And then he sat down at the cottage

piano and played us the whole composition out of his head, the first and

the incredible second movement, shouting his comments into the midst

of his playing.... ‘Here it comes!’ and began the variations movement,

the ‘adagio molto semplice e cantabile.’ The arietta theme, destined

to vicissitudes for which in its idyllic innocence it would seem not to be

born, is presented at once and announced in sixteen bars, reducible to

a motif which appears at the end of its first half, like a brief soul-cry

• only three notes, a quaver, a semiquaver, and a dotted crotchet to be
  scanned as, say: ‘heav-en’s blue, lov-ers’ pain, fare-thee well, on a-time,
  mead-ow-land’.^183

Adorno and his wife valued the dry climate and loved the vegetation of
the hilly southern landscape of Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it is striking
how often they were unwell. Gretel needed continual treatment for her
long-lasting migraines, and her husband visited his doctor, Robert
Alexander, with the most varied symptoms – not simply acute psycho-
logical crises, depressions and oppressive feelings. In addition, on several
occasions he needed treatment for various stomach upsets and also
neuralgia.^184 In spring 1946 he had a serious illness of the coronary
arteries as a result of which he was bedridden for a lengthy period.
Later on, when diabetes was diagnosed, he was forced to keep to a strict
diet, and in addition he suffered from stomach ulcers.
All the more vital, then, were the vacations that he and Gretel
frequently spent in the mountains, on Lake Tahoe (on the border
between California and Nevada) or, during another summer, in Lugana
Beach near San Diego, which reminded them of the most beautiful
resorts on the French Riviera. Among the attractive sides of American