Adorno’s 1922 Pierrot Lunaire review framed atonality as expressing the homelessness of the soul

Evidence

At the beginning of 1922 Adorno reviewed a performance in Frankfurt of Pierrot Lunaire, and presented Schoenberg as a composer who, having been born into a baneful time', was singing, in Pierrot, precisely about the homelessness of our souls’; for whom what had once been the formal precondition for creative work had become the very material and content of it'; whose unique talent succeeded in creating structures with strict, externally imposed forms that were thoroughly animated [durchseelt]’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 279

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘homelessness of the soul’ motif connects to Adorno’s later famous line that ‘the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass’ and his homelessness-as-modernity theme. — connects to: Adorno read esoteric musical technicalities as indices of total social disorder — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2181

Broader Connections

• Adorno read esoteric musical technicalities as indices of total social disorder #exemplifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2181