Adorno read Schoenberg’s atonality as the rational endpoint of Wagner’s musical nominalism

Evidence

In Beethoven, and certainly in Brahms, the unity of the exploration of motifs and themes was achieved in a kind of balance between subjective dynamics and traditional`tonal’language. A subjective organization forces conventional language to speak once again, without intervening to alter it as language. The alteration of the language has been achieved along Romantic-Wagnerian lines at the cost of objectivity and definitiveness in the music itself. This alteration has dissolved the unity of motif and theme in Lieder, and substituted for it the leitmotiv and programme music. Schoenberg himself was the first to discover the principles of universal unity and economy in the new, subjective, emancipated Wagnerian material. His works are evidence of the fact that, the more consistently the nominalism in musical language inaugurated by Wagner is pursued, the more perfectly this language allows itself to be rationally controlled. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1267

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s broader critical-theory project and to the Marxist reading of artistic formalism as domination-over-nature. — connects to: Adorno read Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique as demythologizing rationalization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 365; Adorno read Schoenberg’s musical revolution as allied with Freud and Kraus; Serial music extended rational organization while dropping Adorno’s subjective complement — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2190 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno read Schoenberg’s atonality as refusing social compromise. #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 555