Adorno

38 Part I: Origins

prince. Leaning on his mother’s chair, he answered the questions

I put to him in a dull tone that contradicted the large, mournful

eyes that gazed out from beneath long lashes. Their expression

hinted at a mystery that lay hidden in the youth in the same way

that he was concealed in the coarse material.^45

For Adorno too, who is called Fred or Freddie in the novel, the meeting
was of considerable importance.

I was a student at the Gymnasium when I met him towards the

end of the First World War. A friend of my parents, Rosie Stern,

had invited the two of us to her house. She was a teacher at the

Philanthropin, where Kracauer’s uncle, the historiographer of the

Frankfurt Jews, was a member of the faculty. As was probably our

hostess’s intention, a close friendship sprang up between us.^46

The friendships of the so carefully guarded child of the Wiesengrunds
developed in proportion to his ability to free himself from his parents’
overprotectiveness as he grew older. Music was one way to achieve
this. Whenever possible, he looked for and found partners to play duets
by Haydn, Brahms, Schubert and Mahler. ‘Playing duets made me a
present of the geniuses of the nineteenth century at the beginning of
the twentieth.’^47 This almost daily music-making had nothing to do with
what used to be known as ‘edification’. Adorno was already deadly
serious about music. He even entertained thoughts of becoming a pro-
fessional musician or composer. So it is not surprising that as early as
his final year in school he started to attend the Hoch Conservatory. This
conservatory was established by a citizen of Frankfurt, Dr Joseph Hoch,
who grew up in a wealthy family that later fell on hard times. Thanks
to an inheritance in later life, Hoch came into the possession of a con-
siderable capital. His will provided for the foundation of a conservatory
that would enable young people to enjoy the same thorough musical
training that he had been denied in his youth. As early as four years
after his death, in September 1878, the conservatory was inaugurated
initially in the Saalhof opposite the Eiserne Steg, the iron footbridge
over the River Main, and then, ten years later, it was housed in its own
new three-storey building on a larger scale.^48 This important foundation
was clearly modelled on the Leipzig Conservatory that had been estab-
lished by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. It provided the commercial city
of Frankfurt with a sustained and enduring stimulus to its musical life,
not least through the additional opportunities for performances in the
framework of the concert series organized by the Museumsgesellschaft.
After the First World War, the Hoch Conservatory fell on hard times; it
was badly affected by the hyper-inflation of those years. This crisis phase
coincided with the time in which Wiesengrund-Adorno studied composi-
tion with the respected Bernhard Sekles and piano with Eduard Jung.^49