During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's Three Fragments from Wozzeck, op. 7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna, he attended public lectures of the satiristKarl Kraus with Berg and met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Alban Berg, the man Adorno referred to as "my master and teacher," was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends:
[I am] convinced that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.[12]
After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for String Quartet," op.2 were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the Habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique," as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his Habilitation manuscript, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche, to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking. In this manuscript, Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged from Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature."[13] Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself once again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op.3 was performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adorno sought to use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinskyand Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer.
At this time, Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, with whom he discussed problems of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a letter of 1934 Adorno sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg:
Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.[14]
At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an Habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealismand Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive forexistentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics.[15] As the work proceeded—andKierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, in March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.[16]
Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality."[17] In line withBenjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments which should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."[18]
Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the Institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" (1932), "On Jazz" (1936), "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938) and "Fragments on Wagner" (1938). In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the language of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition.
As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved chillingly prophetic: "Only one thing is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predications have any plausibility."[19] In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flag pole of town hall, the Institute's offices were searched by the Frankfurt criminal police. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature was denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of character and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation."[20] Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into fifteen years of exile.
