Adorno

Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 395

which was particularly rich in metaphors, for example, his statement
that such prose resembles the candle ‘that is lit at both ends. Where
the two flames meet, the title must flare up.’^138 In this case: Mahler: A
Musical Physiognomy.^139
Adorno called his Mahler monograph his ‘jungle book’; never before
had he ‘known so little’ about what he had created through his writ-
ing.^140 This statement referred less to the fact that he had written it
under great time pressure – he had retreated in spring to the Bad Hotel
in Überlingen on Lake Constance – than that this was a highly personal
piece of work in tone and in the vividness of his style.^141 He told Arnold
Gehlen that this book was far less sociological than others of his.^142 His
aesthetic approach became apparent in his linguistic inventiveness,
as for example when he remarks that the epic nature of Mahler’s sym-
phonies reminds him of ‘the long gaze of yearning’ of Proust’s A la
recherche: ‘In both, unfettered joy and unfettered melancholy perform
their charade; in the prohibition of the images of hope, hope has its last
dwelling-place. This place is in both, however, the strength to name the
forgotten that is concealed in the stuff of experience. Like Proust, Mahler
rescued his idea from childhood.’^143 This interpretation reveals the close-
ness of Adorno’s childhood memories to those of Proust, but also of
Mahler, since his memories of music-making in childhood were a deter-
mining factor that reverberated even in his theoretical texts.^144
Adorno confined his discussion chiefly to the nine great symphonies
and some of the songs. Tracing out ‘the mimetic gesture of the music’,
he analysed in particular the use of variation, the popular tone, and the
Chinese element in Das Lied von der Erde. It was this work above all
that attracted Adorno’s physiognomical gaze. This work, and the Ninth
Symphony even more, inspired the comment that on this music ‘lies
beauty as the reflection of past hope, which fills the dying eye until it
is frozen below the flakes of unbound space. The moment of delight
before such beauty dares to withstand its abandonment to disenchanted
nature. That metaphysics is no longer possible becomes the ultimate
metaphysics.’^145 What Adorno highlighted as the chief characteristic of
Mahler’s musical idiom was his use of familiar musical materials whose
traditional meaning was then fractured. ‘Each Mahlerian symphony asks
how, from the ruins of the musical objective world, a living totality can
arise.’^146 At the same time, the composer did not create the illusion of
reconciliation, preferring instead to dismiss the principle of ‘coherence
or rightness’ (Stimmigkeit), and thus to end up indicting the course of
the world. Collapse appears as ‘negative fulfilment’, as truth. Mahler’s
‘music is a plea for peasant cunning against the overlords, for those who
desert their marriages, for outsiders, the persecuted and incarcerated,
starving children, forlorn hopes. The term socialist realism would fit only
Mahler if it were not so depraved by domination.... Berg is the legitim-
ate heir of this spirit.’^147 The element of expression in Mahler’s music
is true in its moments of rupture. It draws its force from unconscious