hegel, philosophy, and music 125secularisation and the rise of modern science can also be seen as related
to the crisis of musical forms signalled by the advent of atonality and
by the growing distance from the wider public of music which explores
radical new possibilities. However, even the music which reflects these
crises at the same time involves the ‘redemptive’ fact that it can be
experienced aesthetically, as an expression of human freedom.
The musical and philosophical stories can be explored via the links
between Beethoven’s music and Hegel’s philosophy (on this in more
detail, see Adorno 1993 ; Bowie 2003 ; and chapters 6 and 9 below). The
- inferentialist – idea in this context is that both Beethoven’s music and
Hegel’s philosophy rely on contradictions and tensions which are inte-
grated into a dynamic whole that gives the parts their meaning. In the
same way as Hegel begins with indeterminate moments of thought, like
the notion of ‘being’, which gain their full determinacy at the end of
the system, Beethoven sometimes uses thematic material which has little
intrinsic musical interest, but which gains its identity and significance
by being integrated into new contexts, like the simple rhythm and the
major third which begin the Fifth Symphony, or the open fifths and
broken minor chord of the opening of the Ninth. Adorno ( 1993 ),
however, is critical of the totalising tonal resolutions at the conclu-
sion of some of Beethoven’s heroic works, like the Fifth Symphony. He
relates these resolutions to what he sees as Hegel’s complicity with dom-
inant tendencies in modernity, such as the obscuring of the particularity
of things by the commodity form. The link of this criticism of Beethoven
to Hegel follows from Hegel’s claims to have completed a philosophical
system that integrates everything into modern forms of rationality. For
Adorno art’s forms of ‘appearance’ which harmonise particulars into
an integrated whole can, like Hegel’s philosophy, suggest rationality
where there is none.
The vital issue here is the status of such analogies between social and
cultural forms in modernity. Adorno’s criticism of Beethoven makes a
‘philosophical’ point about Beethoven’s music. He consequently runs
the risk of doing what he elsewhere often seeks to oppose, namely
reducing particular music to a questionable form of philosophical gen-
erality. What he tends to neglect is that one can hear Beethoven’s tonal
apotheoses in many ways, depending on the contexts of performance.
Hearing them in terms of a philosophical interpretation of dominant
tendencies in modern history is only one possibility. One could also,
for example, hear them in terms of an individual’s personal struggle
and their triumph over adversity, where the ideological aspect Adorno