Adorno

394 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

Adorno’s importance as a philosopher of music showed itself in the
fact that he analysed not just the works of the avant-garde and their
implications, but also the works of composers of the classical and late
romantic tradition, such as Beethoven and Mahler. Admittedly, as far
as Beethoven was concerned, he did not get further than a large number
of handwritten sketches in a variety of notebooks.^132 But taken together,
these fragments provided sufficient material for a fairly bulky volume
that appeared posthumously, dealing with Beethoven as the composer
of the bourgeoisie as it emancipated itself and achieved hegemony. In
the dynamics of Beethoven’s music could be seen, in Adorno’s view, the
productive energies of this bourgeois society, with its utopian hopes for
a new world. At the same time, it is informed by ‘the conviction that
the self-reproduction of society as a self-identical entity is not enough,
indeed that it is false.’^133 With Beethoven’s ascetic restraint towards
spontaneous inspiration, ‘this music is precisely the way to elude
reification. Beethoven, the master of positive negation: discard, that you
may acquire.’^134
Elsewhere in his anthology of provisional notes, in his comments on
the Eroica, Adorno notes:

An expression of pride, in that one is allowed to be present at such

an event, to be its witness; for example, in the first movements of

the E flat major Piano Concerto and of the Eroica. ‘Exaltation.’

How far this is the effect of the composition – a joy which rivets

the listener’s attention to the dialectical logic – and how far the

expression creates an illusion of such joy, rests on a knife’s edge.

Expression is a prefiguration of mass culture, which celebrates

its own triumphs. This is the negative moment of Beethoven’s

‘mastery of the material’, his ostentation. This is one of the points

which criticism can engage.^135

As with the Beethoven fragments, whose philosophical contents
derived from a host of analyses of individual compositions, the book on
Gustav Mahler was a study of the composer’s work. When it appeared
in 1960 as volume 61 in the Bibliothek Suhrkamp, Adorno made clear
from the outset what he aimed at: not to portray the composer’s life,
his personality and the innermost motives behind his music, but to ap-
proach the works through the ‘constellation of... individual analyses’
of his compositions.^136 To probe Mahler’s subjective intentions was
a matter of secondary importance since intentions could rarely be
elicited. Instead, the artist should be regarded as ‘the executive organ’
of ‘the objective logic of the art-work’.^137
Apart from this approach, a central pillar of Adorno’s view of art,
the Mahler book showed once again that Adorno thought of his texts as
literature even when they consisted at least in part of technical analyses.
What he said of ‘decent prose’ in general was to be true of this book,