542 Notes to pp. 238–2401952 with the title Versuch über Wagner (GS, vol. 13, p. 11ff. [Eng. trans.:
In Search of Wagner, 1981.]) The text that Adorno himself called an essay
was integrated by Rolf Tiedemann into the Gesammelte Schriften in vol. 13,
The Music Monographs. This corresponded to Adorno’s own express wish.
Cf. also Adorno’s letter of 8 February 1938 to Horkheimer, Briefwechsel,
GS, vol. 16, p. 383. On the book’s reception, see Richard Klein, Der
Kampf mit dem Höllenfürst, p. 167ff.; on Wagner, see Martin Gregor-
Dellin, Richard Wagner, and Barry Millington, The Wagner Compendium.
114 Ideological critique (Ideologiekritik), as Adorno understands it, attempts
to reveal the way in which mental artefacts are mediated by their historical
and social conditions. He defines ideological critique as the attempt to
uncover the social content of phenomena by means of an immanent mode
of analysis in which concept and object are related to each other. The task
is ‘by analysing a form and its meaning to comprehend the contradiction
between its objective idea and what it pretends to, and to name whatever
the consistency or inconsistency of artefacts tells us about the nature of
existence’ (Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, GS, vol. 10.1, p. 27;
see also Prisms, p. 32).
115 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 47.
116 Adorno dedicated the Wagner book to Gretel. The dedication also had an
epigraph: ‘Horses are the survivors of the age of heroes.’ When speaking
to Horkheimer and also his parents, Adorno often referred to Gretel and
himself as ‘horses’.
117 Ibid., pp. 17 and 25.
118 Klein points out that, ‘in his analysis of the relation between individual
instruments and the ways in which they merge in the orchestra,... Adorno
attempted the first systematic description of the basic problems of orches-
tration in the nineteenth century.’ Adorno was able to show ‘how Wagner’s
technique of continuously blended sound was developed by combining a
radical de-individualization of the individual colours simultaneously with
an extreme individualization of the total sound’ (Klein, Der Kampf mit
dem Höllenfürst, p. 183f.).
119 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 63.
120 Ibid., p. 85.
121 Ibid., p. 136f.
122 Ibid., p. 154f.; see also ‘Selbstanzeige des Essaybuchs “Versuch über
Wagner”’, GS, vol. 13, p. 506.
123 Ibid.
124 Benjamin evidently knew that while Adorno was in Oxford he had intended
to write an essay about decadence; as a motto he had envisaged a line
from Trakl’s Heiterer Frühling, which he often quoted: ‘Wie scheint doch
alles Werdende so krank’ (‘How everything that grows seems struck with
sickness’). Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928 –
1940 , p. 259.
125 Ibid., p. 265.
126 Adorno and Krenek, Briefwechsel, p. 128. [Eugenie Marlitt (1825–87)
was a highly popular writer of what are usually regarded as sub-literary
novels. Her novels are now forgotten; trans.]
127 On the occasion of this lecture, Horkheimer, the author of Traditional
and Critical Theory, warned Adorno urgently ‘to speak in a highly scientistic