adorno 365impossibility of forgetting what is felt to be lost.^30 What provokes the
rage is therefore often decried as sentimentality and bombast, but
this misunderstanding of Mahler is itself a symptom of a repression
of the situation that he articulates. The misunderstanding on the part
of Mahler’s critics is akin to a refusal to accept the need for mourn-
ing if one is to move beyond what one has lost. Rather than proposing
ana ̈ıve Nietzschean triumphalism at the liberation from metaphysical
constraints, Adorno sees that this liberation – which he in no way wishes
to revoke – is fraught with dangers that modern culture must counter
by finding ways of responding to what is lost.
How, then, is Mahler’s unique tone to be interpreted in relation to
the issue of music and philosophy? At times Adorno’s Mahler texts do
slip into mere repetition of the use of the ideas ofDoEinPhilosophy of
New Music. Mahler is, however, not just treated as ‘philosophical music’.
Adorno associated the idea of ‘organised emptiness of meaning’ with
new music, where any utopian sense in that music tends to become
a kind of negative theology. This approach gives way in the work on
Mahler to a focus on what Adorno terms Mahler’s combination of feel-
ing for meaning in ‘what has been abandoned by meaning’ (apparent,
for example, in his use of sentimental popular melody in the first move-
ment of the Ninth), with feeling for what has been abandoned by mean-
ing in established meaning (apparent in his ambivalent relationship to
musical expressions of triumph which suggest that things can turn out
all right) (ibid.: 181 ). The idea that true music should be critical of
acceptance of the status quo is essential to Adorno’s interpretation of
new music. However, in Mahler, the idea of the ‘experience of music’
as being that ‘something communicates itself to us as very specific but
as something from which, despite this, the concept withdraws’ (Adorno
2002 : 274 ) leads Adorno to a more plausible response to the power of
the music. This response is more convincing than his view that social
reality is so distorted that anything which is aesthetically successful must
constitute a criticism of it.
Adorno often subjects a too vaguely characterised ‘positivism’ to
exaggerated criticism because of its supposed confirmation of ‘the
given’ that results from seeking foundations for what is regarded as30 If one follows Kivy’s assertions about theEroica’s lack of meaning, it becomes impossible
to understand Mahler at all. Without a sense of what Mahler is reacting against and what
he affirms, his music provokes the kind of rejection Adorno describes. This need to hear
Mahler contextually is part of what Adorno means by the ‘linguistification’ of music in
modernity, in which awareness of convention becomes central to what happens in music.