adorno 353his judgement lies in the fact that the hopes of the revolutionary era
in which Beethoven lived, which gain unparalleled expression in his
music, are no longer ours. We in developed Western democracies can-
not recreate circumstances in which this music is a concrete utopian
expression of, and a motivating force for a better collective future. It
is, though, also implausible to maintain that we lose all connection
to its communication of hope, as the playing of Beethoven when the
Berlin Wall came down suggests. Beethoven’s survival as part of mod-
ern culture is not least a result of the ways in which his music sus-
tains a non-delusory sense of hope. Adorno’s reference to tonal music
‘as a whole’ points, however, to another problematic feature of his
analysis.
The claim about tonality is explained by his more general comments
about the ‘affirmative’ – and therefore ‘ideological’ – nature of music.
Music’s ideological character is present in the very fact ‘that itbegins, that
itismusic at all – its language is magic in itself, and the transition into its
isolated sphere has an a priori transfiguring aspect’ which is the result of
music’s setting up a ‘second realitysui generis’ (ibid.: 25 ). Because of its
inherently consoling aspect music as a whole is ‘more completely under
the spell of illusion (‘Schein’)’ (ibid.), which means that it contributes
to injustice by reconciling listeners to the status quo. Tonality is perhaps
the clearest example of Adorno’s analysis of musical techniques as the
means of access to social issues. For such analysis to work the frame of
reference employed has to depend on the contentious philosophical
conception which we have already encountered. The following version
of a recurrent criticism of Beethoven in Adorno makes this clear:
Not for nothing are some of Beethoven’s most compromised concep-
tions based on the moment of the [sonata] recapitulation as the return
of the same. They justify what once was as the result of the process. It is
thoroughly illuminating that Hegelian philosophy, whose categories can,
without doing violence to it, be applied in detail to a music where every
influence from the history of ideas is excluded, has the recapitulation in
the same way as Beethoven does...However, that the affirmative gesture
of the recapitulation in some of the greatest symphonic movements of
Beethoven takes on the violence of the repressively imposing, authori-
tarian ‘That’s the way it is’ and goes beyond what is happening musically
in a gestural decorative manner is Beethoven’s coerced tribute to the
ideological nature of music, under whose spell even the most elevated
music falls that aims at freedom in a state of persistent unfreedom.
( 14 : 412 – 13 )