Adorno’s Vienna years were shaped by musical modernism, not Austro-Marxist politics

Evidence

Frankfurt, however, offered little beyond traditional musical training, and Adorno was anxious to immerse himself in the more innovative music issuing at that time from Vienna. In the spring or summer of 1924 he met Alban Berg at the Frankfurt Festival of the Universal German Music Society and was captivated by three fragments from his yet unperformed opera, Wozzeck. He immediately decided to follow Berg to Vienna and become his student. Delayed only by his university studies in Frankfurt, he arrived in the Austrian capital in January, 1925. … The Vienna to which he moved was less the city of Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, Rudolf Hilferding and Max Adler (the milieu Grunberg had left to come to Frankfurt) than the apolitical but culturally radical Vienna of Karl Kraus and the Schonberg circle. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts the political Vienna of Grunberg/Austro-Marxism with the cultural-radical Vienna — a genealogy detail that helps orient two strands of the Institute’s ancestry. — connects to: Adorno’s Vienna years fixed Schoenberg’s music as central to his aesthetics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 326; Adorno went to Vienna to study music with Alban Berg, not for politics. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 142; Adorno studied composition with Berg and piano with Steuermann in Vienna