Adorno placed Schoenberg’s artistic project on par with Freud and Karl Kraus

Evidence

I am certain at last that a book on Schoenberg, if I write it, will be extremely importantin terms of its contents as well [i.e. in addition to the good publicity the Institute would gain from it]. As you know, I tend to see Schoenberg’s achievements in the same light as those of Freud and Karl Kraus, and, in the same sense and with the same qualifications, to see his cause as our own. To explicate this would be the main task of the book. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 980

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s self-positioning here reveals the Frankfurt School’s core belief that radical art, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique were one and the same emancipatory cause.
• XREF: This ‘his cause as our own’ claim is essential background for Adorno’s later writings on modern music and for the philosophical project of Negative Dialectics — the artist as diagnostician of social truth. — connects to: Adorno fused Lukács, Kracauer, and Benjamin to justify Schoenberg’s musical revolution. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 365; Adorno read Schoenberg’s musical revolution as allied with Freud and Kraus; Adorno’s Vienna years fixed Schoenberg’s music as central to his aesthetics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 326 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno read Schoenberg’s atonality as the rational endpoint of Wagner’s musical nominalism #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1267
• Adorno read Schoenberg’s atonality as refusing social compromise. #expands (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 555