The young Adorno found Schoenberg uncanny and oppressive yet identified with him

Evidence

His face is the face of a shadowy, perhaps of an evil man … nothing `serene’ in it (he is completely without age), it is obsessed from top to bottom. And then a pair of enormous, almost glassy eyes, and a powerful forehead. There’s something uncanny and oppressive about the chap, and all the more so when he tries to be conciliatory. Berg gave me his handwriting to analysewithout knowing whose it was, I refused, because it looked so much like my own, but I saw that simultaneously hunted and collected quality in it nevertheless. All things considered, I think he’s probably all right. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 290

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Schoenberg rejected Adorno as composer and critic despite Adorno’s veneration — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 297; Adorno synthesized Lukacs, Kracauer, and Benjamin to justify Schoenberg’s twelve-tone revolution