The Institute of Social Research 161the latest, into a specific programme of philosophical interpretation.
Thus, Adorno did not conceive of music primarily as a distinct form of
art whose different elements – tone, melody, rhythm – had to be ana-
lysed in isolation. Instead, he investigated the intellectual substance of
different works of music and attempted to understand and to elucidate
them in their historical and cultural context. The core theme of his
detailed philosophical analysis was contained in two fundamental ques-
tions. One explored the historical nature of the material of music, while
the other investigated what it was about musical form that made it
possible for a work to cohere into a harmonious whole. He saw musical
compositions as works created by the conscious shaping of material in
a way that was appropriate to a given stage of historical development.
What was expressed in the construction of musical form was a valid,
objective, supra-individual truth. Adorno’s postulate is that, if music
aspires to be art, it must be historically true; in other words, it must
contain cognitive qualities that make it possible for the good and the
beautiful to shine through.
As an exceptionally prolific writer, Adorno worked tirelessly to ex-
pound his philosophical ideas in the form of concrete analyses. Admit-
tedly, up to the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, these attempts
at exposition were still somewhat tentative, despite the sometimes
impatiently assertive tone of his writing. Nevertheless, parallel to his
increasing philosophical output, his writings on music became steadily
more assured. His growing mastery stimulated him to write more and
more music criticism and to speak out boldly on philosophical matters.
When we consider his daily output, it is hard for us to imagine how, in
addition to his strenuous activity as a writer, lecturer and public speaker,
he could also have been a practising musician. For, as if all his other
activities were not enough, he once again took up composing early in
the 1930s. It did not come easily to him. In a letter to Alban Berg
written late in September 1931, scarcely five months after his inaugural
lecture and a few weeks after a holiday in Berchtesgaden and Salzburg,
the 28-year-old Adorno complained that as a composer he was in an
absolute crisis. ‘For the last two-and-a-half years I have not succeeded
in finishing any sizeable piece of work.... I cannot tell you how this
weighs on me. It poisons my entire existence and fills me with hatred
for the university that steals my time in this way.’^99 He explains this
stagnation self-critically by saying that he has too little courage and no
inspiration, a condition connected in his mind with the ‘sterile imagin-
ative horizon’ to which people living in Germany were condemned, a
sterility that ‘robs me of all freedom and genuine productivity.’ Despite
his lack of confidence as a composer, this lecturer in philosophy ‘thought
of himself as nothing if not a composer’ and a man who would willingly
let everything else go to the devil.^100
He did the opposite. In the very same letter to Berg he evidently
relished giving a list of the different engagements and jobs of recent