Adorno’s musical formation came from an intensely musical domestic environment

Evidence

The youngest of the Frankfurt School’s luminaries, Adorno was born in 1903 in Frankfurt. His father was a successful assimilated Jewish wine merchant, from whom he inherited a taste for the finer things in life, but little interest in commerce. His mother seems to have had a more profound effect on his ultimate interests. The daughter of a German singer and a French army officer (whose Corsican and originally Genoese ancestry accounts for the Italian name Adorno), she pursued a highly successful singing career until her marriage. Her unmarried sister, who lived in the Wiesengrund household, was a concert pianist of considerable accomplishment who played for the famous singer Adelina Patti. With their encouragement the young “Teddie” took up the piano and studied composition at an early age, under the tutelage of Bernhard Sekles. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 141

Categorization

• XREF: Explains the deep musical literacy behind Adorno’s later writings on music, philosophy of new music, and the culture industry chapters. — connects to: Adorno’s family combined Jewish, Catholic, and Corsican aristocratic origins around music — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 262

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s family combined Jewish, Catholic, and Corsican aristocratic origins around music #expands (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 262