There were two things on the one hand, a kind of spiritual need for expression, which from an early age found an adequate medium in philosophy in me. But then there was also the need that the feeling that I had originally and very early on did not believe in the facade. It was too modest to find out what the surface of the experience leads one to believe, but rather to find out what the tried and tested laws are actually behind it.
That was, of course, a bit of a demand for teaching at a German university. That meant measuring, naming, generalizing. The everyday life of people was not mentioned here, any more than the question of how people feel when science looks at them.
He found the academic world to be very boring, says Cornelius Kornelius, although he was also relatively versatile and interested in art, as a professor not necessarily gorgeous and neither are other colleagues. Instead, Adorno had these very interesting contacts early on with people outside of the academic world or with people who for various reasons did not come in or did not want to come in. In 924 he had finished his dissertation, and he had worked on it beforehand, also works in Kronberg and then describes how he visited Horkheimer and Pollock in their Villa Holzweg. And that these two were Marxists after all, and that a great deal was granted to each other. You really notice how an exciting conspiracy felt that you stood against the rest of the world and this thinker afforded baldness .
Max Horkheimer was the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer from Zuffenhausen. His father wanted to make him his successor. But he preferred to lead the life of an intellectual outsider with his childhood friend Friedrich Pollock. Difficult to say which came first, the rebellion against the father or the rebellion against society. Young Adorno didn't have such problems.His father had less money, but he helped wherever he could.
But one can also say that the father does not exert as much pressure as is usual in middle-class families. And that's why Adorno never had to stutter, while Horkheimer needs psychological treatment so that he can give lectures. One cannot imagine that Adorno would have married his father's secretary, so like an Oedipus . Opposition rides weren't even necessary.
Max Horkheimer not only robbed his father of the private secretary. He also accepted his worldview, not that of the successful Jewish entrepreneur who believed in progress and the Enlightenment. From a Marxist perspective, the father was an exploiter, and decades later Horkheimer can only make his turn to Marxian theory plausible through his father.
After the First World War I was very restless inside. Because my father, with whom I was initially in business, had always taught me that advancing wars were more and more out of date for mankind, that in reality there should be no more wars. Then the war was 1914-18. Hope had shown itself as a possible optimism. I said yes to myself, there is something wrong with this optimism.
Adorno, however, hesitated to join the young Marxists and traveled to Vienna in March 1925.
After hearing excerpts from Alban Berg's Wozzeck for the first time, he wanted to study composition with Berg and be an artist. Not just anybody, but an avant-garde. Like Arnold Schönberg, the strict headmaster of the Vienna School, the twelve-tone technique no longer looked like disturbing avant-garde in the mid-1920s and Adorno was already not so happy with the members of the Vienna School. Schönberg had been his idol since he first tried his hand at being a music critic in the magazine when he was 18. Since then, his musical worldview was fixed for the rest of his life.
I believe that apart from the music of the New Vienna School, he also accepted the music of Stravinsky and Bartók. But that was the end of it for him. I don't think that for any kind of popular light music, apparently music, it took place outside the concert hall.
As a mere amusement, Adorno and Schönberg looked like a desecration of art, but spread rapidly through the new medium of radio, the flight over the ocean or is it always turning against the unknown?
Apparently not anymore.
Adorno Art was also a serious matter and the artist was not an animator, but someone who only had his right to exist as an avant-garde.
Adorno.
Prefers an art that in a way has its back to the audience.One is practiced in the Catholic Church the change, the holy of holies. The priests turn away. You have to do this to offend the audience, but to protect what is happening at the core of the art. It is this gesture that the artist not only expresses no courtesy, but the severity of the art, the material itself, the artistic material, to follow this logic and not make compromises that are pleasing to the eye. If we do it like that, then we'll end up with a select audience in a different way, but don't want a barker. Just no adjustments.
But as radical as Adorno was as a composer, he never got beyond what the masters of the Vienna School had created. That was quite disappointing for someone who always wanted to be at the front.
If you didn't care for Adorno and you could see his scores without knowing that they we