MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

368 music, philosophy, and modernity

aesthetically alive, as it clearly is for Adorno too. This hope indicates

an ambivalence in Adorno’s view that I will consider at the end of the

chapter. What, though, of hope in Mahler’s world, the world of the

pending world wars and of the demolition of optimistic bourgeois world

views?

The situation of hope in the era of the decline of bourgeois heroism

is suggested when, inMinima Moralia, Adorno criticises the evocation

of sunrise in Strauss’Alpine Symphonybecause ‘no sunrise, even one

in the high mountains is pompous, triumphal, commanding, rather

they all happen weakly and hesitantly, like the hope that it might one

day be all right, and what is emotionally overpowering lies precisely in

the unprepossessing nature of the most powerful light’ ( 4 : 126 ). Any

heroic sense of hope has given way to something akin to the idea of

hope beyond hope. This is a consequence of his interpreting the worst

events as what unmasks the underlying nature of even the less traumatic

phases of modern history.^37 He suggests a further way of understand-

ing how truth does not exclusively have to do with knowledge when he

claims that ‘In the end hope, as it wrests itself from reality by negating

it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope the idea of

truth would hardly be able even to be thought, and it is the cardinal

untruth to present existence which has been recognised as bad as the

truth, just because it has been recognised’ ( 4 : 110 ). Mahler’s music

expresses hope by salvaging elements of culture which have become

conventional. At the same time it reveals the limits of hope in moder-

nity, even as it conveys the continuing affective power of hope for the

individual: ‘Mahler was the first musically to draw the musical conclu-

sion from a state of consciousness which has command of nothing but

the abundance – that it just about manages to gather together – of its

individual impulses and experiences and the hope that something will

emerge from them which they are not yet, without them being faked’

( 13 : 211 ). A direct connection between objective historical spirit and

music, of the kind suggested in the link between Beethoven and Hegel,

is now impossible. There is now just the residual hope that the indi-

vidual may, despite all, convert their experience into something more

universally communicable. The individual who succeeded in doing this

would then be articulating a more general truth through their very

individuality.

37 Adorno’s stance is often questionable, but the recurrence of a return to barbarism in
developed countries is a perennial phenomenon, given certain kinds of social, political,
and economic breakdown.