Theodor W. Adorno News
German philosopher, sociologist and theorist (1903–1969)
- piano
- classical music
- United States of America, Germany, German Empire
- philosopher, composer, musicologist, sociologist, university teacher, literary critic, music critic, aphorist, pianist, writer, academic
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2024-03-12
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2023-09-17 15:59:00
Das Floß der Medusa, Komische Oper, 16 September 2023
[…] having seen or heard a note of it. It was neither the first nor the last time that his enemies claimed that the desire of ‘someone who was not hard up but who had a roof over his head and contracts with an appreciative Establishment … to become a spokesman for minorities, for the underprivileged and for opponents of the system’ must be bogus. Luigi Nono and Peter Weiss wrote letters on Henze’s behalf; Theodor Adorno nearly did, then (according to Henze) backed out on learning of such communist involvement. At any rate, a shot across the bows, at least in retrospect, had been fired when, in an interview with two journalists, eight days beforehand, they asked the composer what he would do in the case of ‘unpleasant scenes’. Maybe they knew; maybe they did not. At any rate, something already eerily amiss backstage, the chaos initiated when someone unfurled […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2023-08-24 13:25:23
Music Remembers Wartime Trauma
[…] conversant with the biographies of these composers will learn much from the extravagance of historical detail surrounding their lives and music, their friends, their countries, their times and their religious and political choices. A huge swath of European, Russian, and American luminaries made indelible appearances and alliances. Little seems to end well for most of these walk-ons—particularly writers and librettists—who paid a huge price for describing the “murderous contradictions” of their worlds. Philosopher Theodor Adorno fled into exile. The critic Walter Benjamin took his own life while trying to flee Nazi-occupied Europe, as did the writer Stefan Zweig while living as an exile in Brazil. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova suffered through war and revolution. The novelist Vasily Grossman died with his crowning masterwork unpublished and, as he put it, under permanent “arrest” by the KGB. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who invented the entire concept of collective memory, perished […]
2023-03-21 00:57:27
"The way in which every American child can more or less continuously eat a so-called ice-cone, a cone with ice cream, in that moment one can find a kind of fulfillment of children's happiness, toward which our children once craned...
2022-10-03 14:16:11
Arnold Schoenberg, part IV, 2022
[…] for the East Coast in 1936 was one of many eminent German refugees living around LA. Many of them settled in the Pacific Palisades, not far from Brentwood. One of their meeting places was Villa Aurora, the house of the writer Lion Feuchtwanger. Here are some of the German refugees living in Pacific Palisades at the time: writers Tomas Mann and his brother Heinrich, Franz Werfel and Alfred Döblin; the playwright Bertolt Brecht; philosophers Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Marcuse and Max Horkheimer; Schoenberg’s pupil composer Hanns Eisler; F. W. Murnau, the filmmaker and Albert Einstein. Schoenberg knew most of them but was not necessarily friendly with all. He developed a difficult relationship with Tomas Mann who wrote Doctor Faustus, a book about the fictitious German composer Adrian Leverkühn who invents a new musical technique, a 12-tone system. Schoenberg was outraged, accusing Mann of “stealing” from him. Mann, who did talk to […]
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