Quasi Una Fantasia: Essay on Modern Music (Verso Classics) [Paperback]

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (Author), Rodney Livingstone (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Verso Classics | Publication Date: May 1998

Quasi una Fantasia contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music, but in the range of its topics and the clarity of its arguments it stands alone among Adorno's writings on music. At the book's core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno's "dialectical portrait" of Stravinsky in which he both reconsiders and refines the damning indictment he gave in Philosophy on Modern Music. In 'Vers une musique informelle', an influential essay, he plots a course for a music of the future 'which takes up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom'. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, including Bizet's Carmen and Weber's Der Freischutz, along with an entertainingly caustic "Natural History of the Theatre." Which explores the hierarchies of the auditorium, from upper circle to foyer. 'The positive element of kitsch', Adorno remarks, 'lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.' Musical kitsch is the target of several of the shorter pieces: on Gounod's Ave Maria or Tchaikovsky's 'clumsy naivety'; on the 'Penny Serenade' of the transformation of Mozart into chocolate-box rococo. Yet even while Adorno demolishes 'commodity music' he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these writings. For Adorno, music and philosophy were inextricably linked: Quasi una Fantasia will enlarge our understanding of both.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is an extraordinary book ... one of Adorno's most impressive, fecund and elegant works. Readers who may feel intimidated by Adorno's reputation for obscurity should find this book (with its superbly assured and unobtrusive translation by Rodney Livingstone) a welcome surprise ... It will appeal to anyone who wishes to encounter one of the century's most challenging and provocative social theorists at his most openly enthusiastic. -- Graham McCann, Times Higher Education Supplement

About the Author

Theodor Adorno was born in 1903 in Framkfurt, and he died in Switzerland in 1969. he received his doctorate in 1924 for a work on Husserl, and went on to study piano and composition in Vienna with Alban Berg and Eduard Steuermann. He then taught at the University of Frankfurt until the advent of National Socialism, when he moved first to England, later to the United States, joining the institute of Social Research. In 1953 the institute returned to Frankfurt, and Adorno became its director. His books include Philosophy of Modern Music, Minima Moralia, In Search of Wagner, Prisms and Negative Dialectics. Rodney Livingstone is Reader in German at the University of Southampton. His translations include: George Lukac's History and Class Consciousness and The young Hegel, and Adorno's In Search of Wagner.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Verso (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841597
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841594
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,655,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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