400 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
its nimbus.... Even the notorious gossip that is rife in Viennese music-
ality is not completely unproductive.’^169 He liked the realistic setting for
the production of The Bartered Bride with the much-admired soprano
Irmgard Seefried even though it crossed the boundary to kitsch. ‘The
images of the village had discovered the secret of stage scenery as a
form: the ability through yearning to bring things that are far distant
right up close, as if one were inside them, without diminishing the aura
of distance.’^170 He also liked Caspar Neher’s set for a production of
Wozzeck and he noted with pleasure that the Viennese audience was
now prepared to applaud Berg’s music.
Adorno was in contact with Egon Hilbert, the director of the Opera.
Hilbert was opposed to the so-called Karajan clique and Adorno was
able to put to him his proposals for the reform of the Opera. At a panel
debate in May 1966 in the Palais Palffy he developed his ideas on
‘Stagione or Ensemble Opera’, filling them out two years later in a
lecture. His ideas on reform amounted to liberating opera both from
the standard repertoire and the pomp of the star cult, the famous con-
ductors and soloists. ‘The stuffy, sloppy nature of the repertoire opera
which Gustav Mahler desperately battled to change has become in-
creasingly prevalent in the meantime. You only have to attend a normal
performance anywhere in the world... to see how dreary and god-
forsaken it all looks.’^171 In contrast, he lambasted the stagione opera
because of its fixation with top performances, because of its mistaken
ambition to present ‘only the most beautiful voices in the world’,
and because its ideology of ‘markets’ and ‘customers’ made it put ‘pre-
artistic, culinary, sensuous aspects of opera before everything else’.^172
The town and its surroundings which reminded Adorno of ‘the South
Germany of my childhood’^173 not only had an incomparable cultural
aura, but for Adorno it also had its culinary attractions, either in the
various coffeehouses or in such restaurants as the Hotel Sacher, one of
the best addresses for Austrian boiled fillet of beef (Tafelspitz) with
potatoes and horseradish. There, ‘among the habitués and their
acquaintances you find that easy communication that otherwise seems
natural only on the stage.... It is seldom that you dine there without
meeting someone you know or you see people meeting up with each
other, say, after the opera.’^174 One of the delightful aspects of the city
was the ease with which one could associate with the nobility, particu-
larly for Adorno, who had a foible for the aristocracy: ‘What is attract-
ive about the aristocracy and what attracts some of them to intellectuals
is almost tautologically simple: the fact that they are not bourgeois. The
conduct of their lives is not in thrall to the principle of exchange, and
the more discriminating of them maintain a freedom from the coercion
of purposes and practical advantage that is achieved by few others.’^175
From Vienna Adorno sometimes travelled on towards the south,
beyond the Alps, where there were places and landscapes in which he
felt happy. These included Tuscany, with its vineyards and cypresses,