A Philosopher With New Disciples ...

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

I read somewhere that "Kretschmar's lecture" on
Opus 111 was also intended to resonate with, among
other things, certain parts of Eliot's, The Waste Land.
And, at least in translation, it does seem to do that
("What the Thunder Said," for example). I have always
found Kretscmar's rationalization for 111's truncation
of the sonatic form- just two movements instead of
the usual three- to be most interesting and ironic.
The Opus niumber: 1-1-1, for example, could be
interpreted as representing three, rather than one
hundred eleven, which again, reflects certain lines in
The Waste Land, regarding a third, rather less than
material presence, present whenever there are two
together.

The Christian overtones are easily discernable, but
there are certain "undertones," as well, e.g., the law
of diminishing returns. Kretschmar, seen in that
light, is a leit motif for someone else who turns up
later. Kretschmar seems benign enough, and he
does introduce Adrian (and the reader) to certain
potentials (and temptations?) in the music, but
there is always the danger that the art might be
taken too literally and be mistaken for that which
it represents, or similarly, allowed to take on a
life of its own, indepedent of reality.

The reclusive pianist Arturo Michelangelli"s
interpretation of sonata #32 in c minor is
the best I've heard. It's difficult to find these
days. Maybe vinyl.



In a message dated 9/14/02 3:29:38 AM, davidmmonroe at yahoo.com writes:

<< The New York Times
Saturday, September 14, 2002
A Philosopher With New Disciples (in Music, Not
Philosophy)
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

In Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus," the music teacher
Wendell Kretschmar plays Beethoven's Opus 111 piano
sonata for his students. As he plays, he speaks and
shouts and stutters, commenting on the music,
combining the most vulgar observations with the most
sublime. He invents lyrics, singing along with the
music's spare, otherworldly themes. He reveals how a
single note confers an "overpowering humanity" on a
simple musical gesture. And he spins out speculations
about subjectivity and death, culture and barbarism. 

But Kretschmar's influence went far beyond his
novelistic classroom. He was actually the voice of the
German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who, like Mann,
was an émigré in California during the 1940's. Mann
found Adorno's writing "subtle and deep" and his
musical knowledge "enormous." Adorno, who studied
composition with Alban Berg and piano with Eduard
Steuermann, had even played Opus 111 for Mann.
Adorno's teaching had as great an impact on Mann as
Kretschmar's did on his pupils. 

Now, over a half-century later, Adorno's impact, far
from diminishing, keeps growing. He was once popularly
known for his 1949 assertion: "To write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric." He was close friends with
Walter Benjamin and a collaborator with Max Horkheimer
at the Institute of Social Research. His collected
works, which comprise 23 German volumes and 10,000
pages, encompass critical theory, aesthetics and
political theory. But his writings on music have had
the greatest impact.

In fact, no other figure has influenced American
musicology more during the last 20 years. A major new
collection, "Essays on Music" (University of
California), scrupulously edited with commentary by
Richard Leppert, a professor of cultural studies at
the University of Minnesota, will codify that
accomplishment further, adding new translations by
Susan H. Gillespie to essays spanning Adorno's career
....

[...]

... the most urgent questions. Why is so little
contemporary music performed or loved? Why are
audiences preoccupied so obsessively with repetitions
of 19th-century repertory? Why does the art-music
tradition seem less and less central? What is the
impact of recording technology on music? How important
are these abstract musical sounds? What did they mean?


Adorno took such questions seriously and his insight
was often profound. If we pay close attention to
musical detail, he suggested, to the ways in which
phrases are shaped and compositions constructed, then
we begin to see not just arrays of chords and melodic
lines, but ways of thinking, ways of constructing
order. Like literature, music can be judged by the
kind of world it portrays and the ideas it represents.
For Adorno it becomes an intellectual drama, a form
program music. It also possesses political meanings,
since music constructs a society of sound, with its
own laws and liberties, its own convictions and
confusions.

Adorno's interpretations, though, were not always
felicitous. His accounts could be gnomic ("the
ontological region that lies beyond subjective
accident is exposed as subjective mastery over nature
that has been absolutized as a mere technique") or too
bluntly political ("if we listen to Beethoven and do
not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie . .
. we understand Beethoven no better than does one who
cannot follow the purely musical content of his
pieces.") But Adorno still succeeded in bringing music
back into the world, showing that much was at stake in
its sounds. 

[...]

The difficulty, of course, is in knowing when one is
discovering ideas in music and when one is imposing
ideas upon it. Here, the record is more spotted. I can
only point to one problem. As a Marxist, however
idiosyncratic, Adorno believed that music should be
politically "progressive." That meant, he explained,
that it had to speak about suffering and its origins
in bourgeois society without lunging into
sentimentality or straining at transcendence or
seeking distractions. For Adorno, the pained
expressionism of Schoenberg's music was truth-telling,
while the technologically crisp creations of
Stravinsky were not. 

But why establish that kind of "progressive" standard?
Why are expressions of suffering and assertions of
oppression the primary measures of authenticity?
Haven't other aspects of human experience also
inspired artistry? And is there only one "authentic"
way to deal with suffering? ... there are more
possibilities in musical heaven and earth than are
dreamed of in Adorno's philosophy. 

In Adorno, of course, there is frequent recompense —
elaborate and suggestive readings, theories about
music history and musical knowledge and the effects of
technology. There is even something heroic about his
philosophical enterprise. But there is also something
perverse. For while with one hand he caresses the
19th- and 20th-century art-music tradition, mourning
its marginality and meticulously teasing out its
meanings, with the other hand he tries, again and
again, to sweep away the contentious, striving,
bourgeois world that gave it birth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/arts/music/14CONN.html

Adorno, Theodor W.  Essays on Music.
   Ed. Richard Leppert.  Trans. Susan H. Gillespie
   et al.  Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9275.html

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9275/9275.intro.html