Wiesengrund: The Jewish Heritage 17event? No doubt with a special joy, since three years previously Maria
had had a stillborn child.^10 David Theodor, the 65-year-old grandfather
of the newborn baby, must have regarded him as his son’s predestined
successor in the successful business, the preserver of the family tradi-
tion. Oscar must have been happy and relieved that his wife, who was
no longer young, had survived the labour so well and that he had a son.
The two women, his mother and his spinster aunt Agathe, joyfully rose
to the challenge of educating this highly promising child. They were
particularly eager to take charge of his musical education and of devel-
oping his mind more generally. From his earliest childhood, the boy
grew up surrounded by a world of music. His mother or his aunt would
sing him to sleep with Brahms’s Lullaby, a sleep protected by ‘the cur-
tain round the cot’. He found it unforgettable that he could dream on
‘until milking time’. He would also remember that other lullaby: ‘Sleep
in gentle ease / little eyes shut please, / hear the raindrops in the dark,
/ hear the neighbour’s doggy bark. / Doggy bit the beggar-man, / tore
his coat, away he ran, / to the gate the beggar flees, / sleep in gentle
ease.’ Later, he kept a note of these lines. They may have reminded him
of a vivid illustration by Ludwig von Zumbusch in the family copy of
Schott’s Song-Book of 1900, but in any event they were of the greatest
importance to him and he even intended to base an entire theory on
these verses.^11
On 4 October 1903, the Wiesengrunds took their son to Frankfurt
Cathedral and had him baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. This
fact emerges from personal documents belonging to Franz Calvelli-
Adorno and also from the baptismal book of the Catholic parish of
St Bartholmew’s.^12 While his mother’s religion is given as Catholic, the
entry for his father states: ‘Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, merchant,
Israelite’. The ceremony was conducted by Chaplain Perabo.
Family lore narrates that Adorno’s mother, a woman proud of her
origins, wanted her son’s paternal surname to be supplemented by the
addition of her own name: Adorno. As an adult, her son retained the
double-barrelled name Wiesengrund-Adorno, and used it at the start
of his writing and academic career. But later on it was subjected to a
slight modification. In his formal application for US citizenship in exile
in California, he gave his name as Theodor W. Adorno, and it was
under this name that his publications appeared thenceforth. His deci-
sion to jettison the Jewish name Wiesengrund in favour of the North
Italian name Adorno, which his Corsican grandfather had once adopted
because it sounded so impressive, tells us where his preferences lay. We
know from the memoirs of Peter von Haselberg, a friend of the same
age with whom he often played music, that, even as an adult, Adorno
was fascinated by the magic of his mother’s name, ‘Calvelli-Adorno
della Piana’. He seems in general to have had a definite penchant for
families with aristocratic titles. Once the two had come to know each
other better, the recently qualified lecturer proudly told Haselberg that