Adorno treats Beethoven as the fixed point where accumulated formal possibilities culminate historically.

Evidence

So it is that for Adorno the work of Beethoven stands as a kind of fixed point against which earlier or later moments of musical history will be judged. It is, of course, not a question of degrees of genius, but rather of the inner logic of historical development itself, and of a kind of accumulation of formal possibilities of which Beethoven is the beneficiary and which suddenly makes possible an unexpected carrying through to their conclusion of all the unfinished trends, a filling out of all the hitherto empty spaces, and an actualization of the potentialities latent in the musical raw material itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the dialectical notion of formal possibility accumulation — the Frankfurt habit of reading aesthetic history as immanent development of the material. — connects to: Beethoven’s achievement was a historical equilibrium between subjective melody and objective form. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 94

Broader Connections

• Beethoven’s achievement was a historical equilibrium between subjective melody and objective form. #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 94