48 Part I: Origins
- as could be seen from a superficial production of Die Zauberflöte.
How was this sterility to be explained? By the fact that musical culture
in Frankfurt was geared to ‘existing conditions, the true authority here
to which everyone must bow if they wish to remain here.’^76
Even so, there were rare exceptions to which Adorno repeatedly
drew attention. Chief among these was Hermann Scherchen, the con-
ductor of the orchestral concerts put on by the Museumsgesellschaft.
Adorno found his ‘earnest dedication to the matter in hand’ captivating.
Or, again, he singled out Erich Kleiber, the conductor of the student
orchestra of the Hoch Conservatory. He thought that Kleiber, who ‘as
a conductor belonged to the same type as Bruno Walter, possessed a
similarly relaxed naturalness and a crystalline love of detail, only harder,
less dreamy and tender. If such conducting was the product of routine,
then routine cannot be as bad as its reputation.’^77 In the same way, now
forgotten conductors such as Reinhold Merten and Ernst Wendel
received favourable notices, as did the soloists of the Rebener, Amar
and Lange quartets.
Adorno’s opera and concert reviews were remarkable, and not
just for their trenchant judgements. The language used by the critic
signalled that, over and above his musical concerns, he also had philo-
sophical intentions. His rather forced use of obscure images, such as
‘lack of commitment’, ‘the homelessness of the soul’ or ‘the disastrous
age into which man has been born’, pointed to an attitude critical of
cultural trends even though their youthful author whose academic stud-
ies were only just beginning had not yet fully internalized them. Such
phrases revealed a belief current among intellectuals at the time that
religious values had collapsed and all hope of transcendence and also of
a substantive ethic had to be abandoned. For this reason, every promise
of a new metaphysics was no better than a swindle. ‘No cathedral can
be built if no community desires one.’^78 These reflections on the historical
situation of mankind were shot through with elements of a particular
philosophy of life. This arose not just from his reading of thinkers such
as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schelling, but seemed to point to the
influence of Siegfried Kracauer, who at the same period had arrived
at a pointed criticism both of Max Scheler’s recent publication, Of
the Eternal in Man, and of Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Münzer. For the
existential inference that Kracauer drew from the universal chaos he
had diagnosed was – according to an article in the cultural section of
the Frankfurter Zeitung in March 1922 – the attitude of ‘waiting’ as a
‘hesitant openness’.^79 In Kracauer’s view, this attitude of waiting re-
sulted from a general philosophical insecurity. It arose because people
suffered from the meaninglessness of existence and the isolation of
individuals responsible for themselves: ‘Isolation and alienation from
the absolute leave their mark in an extreme form of relativism. Since
people affected by this have nothing firm to hold on to, their minds drift
without direction; they are at home everywhere and nowhere.’^80 There