Schoenberg’s unrealized ideal of pure music still measured bourgeois society.

Evidence

On the deepest level, the ideal of the fulfilled work of art, taken from classical art, might not be compatible with the means he chose to realize it. The creation of a “pure” music, like Karl Kraus’s notion of a “pure” speech, might be ultimately unattainable.s, But Schonberg’s striving to attain it presented a constant standard against which the reality of bourgeois society could be measured. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 556

Categorization

• XREF: Jay’s own mention of Karl Kraus here recalls the earlier Vienna years and echoes the pure-speech parallel; also resonates with Adorno’s later negative-dialectics standpoint.