The most brilliant exponent of Frankfurt School Marxism subtly interweaves aesthetics and ideology in this probing analysis of the controversial composer's oeuvre.
Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword by Slavoj Zizek situates Adorno’s reflections within present debates over Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the moral status of his work, proving why this book remains one of the most important character studies of the twentieth century.
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“A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature.” (Susan Sontag )
“An astonishing book, comparable only to the later Wagner tracts by Nietzsche . . . essential reading for anyone seriously involved with the composer, and now we can read it thanks to a superior translation by Rodney Livingstone.” (New York Review of Books )
“An astonishing book, comparable only to the later Wagner tracts by Nietzsche . . . essential reading for anyone seriously involved with the composer, and now we can read it thanks to a superior translation by Rodney Livingstone.” (New York Review of Books )
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Text: English, German (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
philosophical, sociological, and musical analyses,
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This review is from: In Search of Wagner (Paperback)
Brilliant criticism and insight by one of the most influential philosophers of the mid-twentieth century. The introduction by "The Giant of Ljubjana," Slavoy Zizek, is alone worth the cost of the volume.
Adorno is uniquely qualified by his encyclopedic knowledge, his profession of philosopher, and his extensive familiarity of music: many commentators have written exclusively about Wagner's sociological paradigms (e.g. George Bernard Shaw), or Wagner's philosophy of renunciation (Nietzsche), or Wagner's mythological influences (Joseph Campbell), or the music itself (Deryck Cooke). Adorno's analysis of Wagner, on the other hand, not limited to one type of analysis but provides a rare synthesis of many different insights. One caveat: an extensive familiarity with Wagner is assumed by this volume. To get the most out of this book, the reader should be familiar with the plots of Wagner's operas (they are ALL discussed). Additionally, the reader should have at least some background in music theory: enough to know that a dominant followed by a submediant is a deceptive cadence, that an F# over an E major triad forms a V9 chord, and basic definitions of terms like "leitmotiv," "development," etc.
8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
new translation of work by influential 20th-century thinker,
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This review is from: In Search of Wagner (Paperback)
The European emigre writer Adorno is a major mid 20th century author identified with the Frankfurt School of social criticism. Although this School is usually described as having a Marxist perspective, the social criticism of Adorno is not doctrinaire or propagandistic. Adorno's writings--as this current publication testifies again--have stood the test of time for their acuteness, rigor, and application of first-rate intellectual powers to subjects of the contemporary society. These qualities of Adorno's critical thinking are evident as well in his work "In Search of Wagner." In a 20-page introductory foreword, the philosopher/social critic Slavoj Zizek takes up the question "Why Is Wagner Worth Saving?" Wagner's music, ideas, and biography continue to draw the attention of thinkers in various fields because exploration of these and positions reached regarding them yield insights and assessments on power, anti-Semitism, art, psychology, and politics in the modern world. Written in the late 1930s, "In Search of Wagner" demonstrates Adorno's innovative, timely, and valuable methodology as it grapples with central questions of modern culture.
10 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
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great probing analysis into the last Romantic,
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This review is from: In Search of Wagner (Verso Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Adorno wrote this as a response to the growing inflated enthusiasm of Wagner's Operas during the War Years,with the darkest pages of Europa.It was inevitable the Third Reich was to seize upon these works primarily the more facile operas as 'Die Meistersinger','Lohengrin', and leave the more controversial RING to languish for history to ponder.
Adorno always had a nerve-ending unbalanced by Wagner's penchant for the arbitrary largesse, the amplitude, the inflated-ness of his creative procedures,the "Gesamtkunstwerk", that while addressing the problems of all artistic genres resolved none of them in the end. Wagner's pathological ways of endowing characters and dramatic situations as sometimes reflections of things he himself had experienced was not the way to proceed in art,but skewed imagery that worked nonetheless in certain respects like his trip to the hellish London Docks as a metaphor for the oppressive beneath the earth Nibelungen-land.His inconsistentcy of character building as the power of the gods being determined by Wotan's Security Agreements with himself.Well this conceit is what had preserved the aristocracy in Europa,again as a metaphor in the "Ring". Poor Brunnhilde,once a god for example becomes a mortal,but it was necessary for her to have to bring the destruction of the gods. (None of her Sister Walkure helped) Adorno utilized the "fetish" concept from Marx his entire life it was a triggering point for determining what had remained "Art" for him and what had transgressed into the vagaries of whatever the market had necessitated as popular culture, detective film noirs jazz and the post-war avant-garde. Some beleive Adorno went a bit into the metaphysical for no known reason and the jazz he had listened to was the surface kind Hollywood would have promoted, he never heard John Coltrane for example or Cecil Taylor.(It is odd that Adorno only found "innovative-ness" in certain forms and not others, Schoenberg and not Stravinsky) But with Wagner he is on his own turf with the hypocrisies residing within modern German culture(something the Ring had profoundly represented actually) of the Junker ruling Classes as he had looked at what culture was promoted and what then was considered"subversive" (His diatribe against Richard Strauss is another example where he claimed his melodies reached for the sky without much content or constructive ontology as the Krupp & Thyssen smokestakes from the Ruhr Valley. The book on Wagner has chapters on various aesthetic categories, "Tone", "Dramaturgy","The Social" "Text","Orchestration", and "Phantasmagoria" that"other" dimension. Wagner was in fact far-looking, he thought of his operas as time related "cinemas" inhabiting durational frames of the magical,Valhalla, the Real and the Below-the-Earth,different levels of the Symbolic, The Imaginary,and the Real;( Lacan in retrospect would have been a good reservoir for analysis as well.(See Slavoj Zizek's writings on opera) Adorno's primary argument with Herr Wagner is one of construction,of development,of agenda that his working means are quite arbitrary since the music is dependant on the narrative,where characters go,why they go and their demise.(Although the structure of the RING can be considered a symphony with grandiose development internally) The constructive focus we have is the leit-motiv found simply tossed wandering around as Deleuze's "rhizome".Where is the the vigours of motivic construction,of developmental variations.Adorno was too conservative to look at this paradigm in this perspective as a buddening element of modernity itself of "fragments"coexisting together of the "incomplete"propelled forward for its tension state of irresolution. (Curious again that/how Adrono had the highest regard for the rationed irrationality of Samuel Beckett)(Recall the context of Wagner at this time, the Thirties when there were not high level productions nor interpretive insights into the political and cultural content of Wagner's operas.Brunnhilde still wore cumbersome breastplates and Wotan with his Viking attire as everyone in the Ring inhabiting a neverland of mountains, Rocks and boulders with Giants pounding the pavements)But there are also acknowledged points of sophistication,as the intersting differences in orchestration in the four parts of the "Ring".(The pastoral "Die Walkure" contrasted to the "flying" and the darkened keys of "Gotterdamurung",the divisi strings,and other worldliness as Alberich's dream-like "dialogue" with Hagen where many motives are introduced assemblage,collage-like) One chapter "Tone" for example is a term from the lifeworld of the visual arts and here in music it resides in orchestration as the excessive and interesting use of strident timbre; brass and primarily tenor and bass voices in "Siegfreid",but then again all this amplified puffed-up "Strength" is for a hero who is quite naive,ignorant and unperceptive,easily dupped into doing anything.And yet again the mists let us say of anti-semiticism in the character of Mime are well present( Certainly Wagner's audiences knew of this reference.)Whereas today it is ignored as a "relic" of the past?? This iswhere the "Social" element comes into view for his interjecting the "exchange" relationship as oppsed to the "true" one as Siegmund and Sieglinde one based on love (although incestual) whereas Sieglinde's relation with Hunding is strictly based on "exchange" something to be eradicated or resolved in some way. Likewise Alberich renounces love(he pays a price) from the seductive advances of the Rhinemaidens for the power of gold,power is created only in "exchange" in Contract and Lease Agreements; the Ring whereas Wotan never renounces his power he simply looses it and becomes a "Wandering" pilgrim in search of his Security Agreements.(Wotan had lost an eye however recall when he married, loss of vision)The remaining gods and the Rhibemaidens loss their longevity. It seems Adorno has great fun with Wagner's pre-Ring operas,"Lohengrin" and "Tannhauser" the immature factor at work,the atrempt to write the Verdi-ian stopping point aria as in "Tannhauser"(Evening Song) and the dancing bachanal of Venusberg Act One(dance as an enduring genre in opera) for he had not really found himself,so he simply followed rather than embarked on innovation as Adorno would have required; in fact not until "Parsifal" can we say this,where the technique meets the concept in full fruition. Still Adorno brings a wealth of thought to again why things are created the consistency of durational frames or lack thereof of narrative and plot.(He does similar workings with his book on Mahler, again seeing the negative and positive).Finally Adorno did not see the future of modern music as residing here in Wagner,he saw it as the ends of. . .
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