Hearing Wozzeck fragments resolved Adorno’s 1924 Catholic-conversion crisis

Evidence

Nineteen hundred and twenty-four was the year of Adorno’s great crisis, in which he thought that it might be possible to reconstitute the world, which had gone awry, through the Catholic ordo' and in which he was close to conversion’ to Catholicism, an obvious enough step to take as the son of a highly Catholic mother'. In June of that year he heard the first performance of three fragments of Berg's opera Wozzeck at the music festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (German Music Society) in Frankfurt. Wozzeck became the work typifying expressionism in music, and the most successful work of the Schoenberg school. It seemed to Adorno that the fragments were Schoenberg and Mahler together all at once, and it was in my mind that this really was the new music’. Schoenberg and Mahler together all at once meant, for him: structured longing, a music of longing for vanished meaning, the longing to break out of a baneful and, at the same time, self-satisfied world. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 285 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Adorno’s 1924 Catholic conversion crisis was resolved by discovering Berg’s Wozzeck — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 285; A near-conversion to Catholicism preceded and framed Adorno’s reception of Wozzeck

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s 1924 Catholic conversion crisis was resolved by discovering Berg’s Wozzeck #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 285
• A near-conversion to Catholicism preceded and framed Adorno’s reception of Wozzeck #expands (0.82)