392 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
The purpose of life: understanding the language of musicMusicians are usually truants from maths classes; it would be a terrible
fate for them to end up in the hands of the maths teacher after all.^117Even apart from his activities as a philosopher and sociologist, Adorno’s
influence in the late 1950s was not confined to a literary public. He also
had a growing impact on musical life in West Germany. The year after
his second return to Frankfurt, he had again taken part in the Summer
Courses for New Music in Kranichstein near Darmstadt, thus con-
tinuing the work he had done there in 1950 and 1951.^118 In 1951 he had
the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Dutchman Karel
Goeyvaerts, the pioneering exponent of serial music at the time. This
was an aspect of the musical avant-garde that was soon to become the
subject of passionate controversy. In July of the same year, the pre-
miere took place of Adorno’s Four Songs to Poems by Stefan George
for Voice and Piano, op. 7. The composer accompanied the soprano
Ilona Steingruber on the piano.
At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, he then conducted six semi-
nars on the topic of ‘New Music and Interpretation’, jointly with Eduard
Steuermann and Rudolf Kolisch, the ‘honorary old gentlemen’.^119 Adorno
began with an introductory lecture in which he explained the relation of
modern music to the musical tradition and that in his view its perform-
ance should be determined by its objective content. These ideas were
directly linked to his theory of musical reproduction.^120 In the course of
discussions with Kolisch about the seminar on music theory, he stated
that what was crucial was ‘to make clear to students what a structurally
meaningful interpretation is. I imagined that I could make a kind of
introductory talk out of my extremely numerous notes on the theory of
musical reproduction which we could follow up with Kolisch and
Steuermann giving practical illustrations.’^121
Kranichstein was the forum for modern music that had existed since
- Adorno had supported it energetically in public since 1952 and he
had defended it against attack.^122 There he saw himself not just as a
theoretician, but also as a practical, active composer. Indeed, as the
singer Carla Henius reported, he felt he was a ‘legitimate musician’.^123
In fact, if the summer courses became the focal point of new music, this
was in great measure his doing. He was particularly keen to be invited
by Steinecke in his capacity as a composer and as the author of The
Philosophy of Modern Music, and Steinecke did in fact invite him regu-
larly up to 1958. Adorno had a talent for defending the cause of musical
truth with passion. He was a powerful advocate both of free atonality as
the climax of Western music and of the Second Viennese School as
opposed to other trends. This led to controversy between the Viennese
school and the Darmstadt school, which consisted of the younger gen-
eration of composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen,