Summary
Composer whose dodecaphonic method is, in the forty-third essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, the perfect realization of Leverkühn’s devil-gained temporality in Mann’s Doktor Faustus and, in Adorno’s Philosophie der Neuen Musik, the point at which music withdraws from society into unheard silence (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.475-478).
Details
- Leverkühn’s Lamentations motif is borrowed from Schönberg’s system: a basic twelve-note phrase that becomes the basis of all the music, responsible for the identity between the crystalline angelic choir and the hellish yelling of the Apocalypse (PDF p.476).
- Music with Schönberg — Mann’s reluctant model for Adrian, translated into words by Adorno — has withdrawn completely from the social dialectic that produced it; Adorno’s account of his epochal significance, and of Stravinsky as a forerunner of fascist primitivism, is in Philosophie der Neuen Musik (1948) (PDF p.477).
- In Adorno’s account Schönberg carried music beyond Wagner and even atonality into unreconciled intransigence; new music has taken upon itself “all the darkness and guilt of the world”, dies away unheard without an echo, and sees absolute oblivion as its goal: “It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.” (Adorno, quoted PDF p.477).
- For Adorno, new music liberated from tonality after Wagner must represent its own self-termination and unrelieved silence; Beethoven and Schönberg are his privileged figures (PDF p.478).
- Cage sought freedom from the tonal system central to Beethoven, Wagner and Schönberg, and his anti-aesthetic aimed to free music from the authoritarianism of Wagner and Schönberg (PDF p.480, 482).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Richard Wagner, John Cage