Customer Reviews

Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link

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Adorno first met Alban Berg in Frankfurt during a festival of new music in June 1924. Excerpts from Berg's opera "Wozzeck" was being performed. Adorno ultimately studied composition with Berg but did not pursue a career as a composer rather Adornor became a brilliant philosopher of negative dialiectics with a profound work on aesthetics,his last major statement. In these short essays on Berg written over the course of his life, Adorno is at his weakest link. They are analytical in content traversing all of Berg.The "First Piano Sonata", The"Lyric Suite" for string quartet. Although brilliant, the complexity of thought we usually encounter in Adorno, dense loci of continuous cross-referencing, and associations of images interspersed with other artisitic genres is not to be found here. And in terms of pure musical analysis this is fairly basic representations,and ultimately not Adorno's possessive thinking realm.Academia today hates Adorno for his philosophical more socially-bound emphasis away from just this kind of note-for-note, moment-to-moment analysis along Schenkerian dimensions. Still there are conceptual meeting places in the center as George Perle's excellent work on the two Berg operas. And academia has much to fear given Adorno's impressive legacy of his writings on music . In this brief volume Adorno's thoughts on Berg's opera "Lulu" is the high point.And in a way we meet the more personal,conversational Adorno, a rare treat.

This is the definitive work on Berg I believe. This is Adorno at his best. You might already know that Adorno is notoriously difficult to read- as in his Philosophy of Western Music- but this is wonderful.