Between Oberrad and Amorbach 45Shortly after Kracauer and Adorno had been introduced to each
other in Frankfurt, Kracauer published his epistemological study Socio-
logy as Science, on which he had begun work in 1920. One of its
strands of thought is concerned with his conviction that the dissolution
of meaning in a chaotic world forces the isolated subject to rely on
himself. ‘The breakdown of meaning brings about men’s descent into
the hell of historical time; meaning, which was once a given, is now
sought by individuals... in different ways.’^68 For sociology, whose task
is to penetrate the concrete mass of phenomena, this loss of meaning
creates the necessity to ‘find a path back to the sphere of individual
reality.’^69 These ideas evidently made an impression on Adorno, who
was just embarking on the first term of his university studies and was
familiarizing himself with academic culture. For in the same year in
which Kracauer wrote those sentences, Adorno wrote a music review
in terms that came very close to his friend’s ideas. ‘Only from the
vantage point of the self and the decisions it makes is it possible to
transcend the self. No objective home shelters us; we must build our
own home.’^70
These sentiments could serve as the motto for the astonishingly well-
defined intellectual position of the young philosophy student. At the
time, he was still studying composition at the Hoch Conservatory while
tirelessly writing concert reviews and pieces of music which he tried
to have published. He was able to call on an array of distinguished
journals for this purpose. Examples are the Zeitschrift für Musik, the
Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and, later on, the Musikblätter des
Anbruch, which appeared in Vienna, as well as Pult und Taktstock.
What strikes the reader as unusual is the extremely self-confident,
elitist, and yet highly nuanced analysis of pieces of music and their
performance. Adorno reviews works performed during the regular
seasons of contemporary chamber music in the Verein für Theater und
Musikkultur, as well as the concerts put on by the Museumsgesellschaft
and the productions of the Frankfurt Opera. His views on the musical
life of the city suggest that he rarely missed a concert or an opera
production. This experience enabled him to pass judgement on the
compositions of such men as Schoenberg, Hindemith, Jarnach, Bartók,
Krenek and Stravinsky, as well as less prominent composers such as
Weill, Hoff, Sekles and Wolpe. To give one example, he dismissed
Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle with the scathing comment that it was a
‘late bloom of soulful impressionism’,^71 while he had no qualms about
pronouncing Bartók’s Sonata for Piano and Violin the best contem-
porary chamber sonata.
Anyone who felt confident enough to make such unequivocal judge-
ments could have no difficulty in distinguishing between good music
and bad. In fact, Adorno drew a sharp dividing line. On the one side
stood music as commercial art, as a mood creator, music with false
pathos and sentimentality appropriate to the level of the friends of