Wagner’s music masked its social-psychological origins as natural, a hallmark of authoritarian thought

Evidence

Here he introduced such terms as “conductorcomposer” and the “gestural type” of composition to illuminate the social content of the music. Another new concept was “phantasma goria,” which indicated Wagner’s tendency to mask the socialpsychological genesis of his music by making it appear to be derived from “natural” sources, a deception characteristic of much authoritarian thought, as we have seen in Marcuse’s and Lowenthal’s work. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 586

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘phantasmagoria’ as Adorno’s term for masking a work’s social-psychological genesis as natural origin.