Adorno - Schubert

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Schubert (1928)Author(s): Theodor W. AdornoSource: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 003-014Published by: University of California Press

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19th-Century Music, XXIX/1, pp. 3–14. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2005 by the Regents of the Universityof California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content throughthe University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

1“Als erste umfangreichere Arbeit des Autors zur Deutungvon Musik,” Moments musicaux, in Gesammelte Werke(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 8.2Even though a small number of mainly German-speakingscholars have, over five generations, occasionally pointedto the essay as a profound influence on the developmentof modern musicology, neither comprehensive handbookssuch as The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and the SchubertHandbuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1997), nor any of the majorreference works such as the New Grove Dictionary of Music (including the most recent edition) or Musik inGeschichte und Gegenwart have so much as included it intheir bibliographies of either the philosopher or the com-poser. One collection of articles chose one of Adorno’s key

phrases for its title but refrained from engaging with theessay in detail: see “Dialekt ohne Erde,” Franz Schubertund das 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Otto Kolleritsch, Studien zurWertungsforschung 34 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1998).

“Schubert” to be his “first comprehensive . . .study of the meaning of music.”1

Now three-quarters of a century old, Adorno’s“Schubert” has gone virtually without men-tion and certainly without sustained discus-sion in the vast secondary literature on thecomposer.2 If mention has been made, this hasusually been in passing, acknowledging the

Schubert (1928)

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Introduction

Adorno was twenty-five when he wrote theessay “Schubert” in 1928. It was first publishedin the same year to open a special issue de-voted to the centennial of Schubert’s death inthe leading music journal Die Musik. Morethan three decades later, in 1964, when invitedby his publisher Suhrkamp to prepare a collec-

tion of his most important critical writings onmusic, Adorno chose “Schubert” to be part ofwhat became the volume Moments musicaux,named after Schubert’s famous collection forthe piano. By this time, five years before hisdeath in 1969, Adorno had produced hundredsof music-critical essays. Selecting “Schubert”for reprint alongside fifteen further texts, in-cluding such seminal pieces as “SpätstilBeethovens” (Late Style in Beethoven) (1937)and “Verfremdetes Hauptwerk: Zur MissaSolemnis” (Alienated Masterpiece: The MissaSolemnis) (1959), indicates that Adorno regarded“Schubert” to be of lasting critical and episte-mological significance. Indeed, in the forewordof the 1964 edition, the philosopher judged

Translated by Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey

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essay’s existence in a footnote, or possibly quot-ing a sentence or two, but foregoing any thor-ough critical engagement with the issues thisunusual text raises. Thus Adorno’s “Schubert”has yet to be discovered by a majority of read-ers. The potentially explosive force locked with-in Adorno’s proliferating images, as well as hisappraisal of Schubert’s compositional status,may well prove to be relevant to twentieth-

and twenty-first-century musicology. It is mostinteresting, however, that the essay invites de-bate about critical writing as a whole. Mark-edly literary in style, Adorno’s essay tells ussomething essential about Schubert’s musicwhile sending us back to it, to listen to it oncemore, and more receptively this time—the sur-est sign of the best kind of criticism. Further-more, Adorno’s discussion of a number ofSchubert’s most celebrated compositions ear-marks his text as a particularly rich resource:Winterreise (D. 911), “Der Tod und das Mäd-chen” (Death and the Maiden) (D. 531), “Der

Doppelgänger” (D. 957/13), the B -Major PianoSonata (D. 960), the A-Minor Sonata (D. 537),the Impromptus (D. 899), the Momentsmusicaux (D. 780), the “Unfinished” Symphony(D. 759), the “Wandererfantasie” in C Major(D. 760), the E-Major Piano Trio (D. 929), the“Great” C-Major Symphony (D. 944), the A-Major Rondo for Four Hands (D. 951), the Hun-garian Divertissement (D. 818), the F-MinorFantasy for Four Hands (D. 940), and the A-Minor String Quartet (D. 804).

The translation presented here was producedin 2001–02. Winning a commendation in the

2003 John Dryden Translation Prize Competi-tion by the British Society for ComparativeLiterature and the British Centre for LiteraryTranslation, it was the focus of two major in-ternational events: a special session, “Adorno’sSchubert: Four New Critical Approaches toMusical Substance,” at the 2002 joint meetingof the American Musicological Society and theSociety for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio,and a special study day, “Adorno’s Schubert,”in February 2003, sponsored by the Society forMusic Analysis, Music & Letters, the Centrefor Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, andHumanities (CRASSH) of the University ofCambridge, and King’s College, Cambridge. Thefive commentaries accompanying the publica-

tion of this translation are, apart from the specially commissioned commentary by RichardLeppert, lightly edited versions of the talks delivered at the Columbus meeting.

The present translation is based on the 1964edition of “Schubert,” in which the author incorporated a small number of local editoriachanges.3 What strikes one most here, especially in view of Adorno’s later, decidedly more

measured idiom, is his noninterference withhis own early work. More recently, the 1964 “Schubert” has been

reprinted in a volume of collected essays, Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse: Ein philosophisches Lesebuch, translated into English as Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader.4 The present translation isintended as an alternative and a reinterpretation, something that Adorno’s rich and problematic text virtually demands—and deservesWhat a new translation can offer is a new anddifferent reading of Adorno’s “Schubert.” In

deed, the idea of translating this text grew outof a shared fascination and enchantment withits verbal brilliance as well as elusiveness, anda shared interest in finding and—as is the casewith all reading, but especially when it comesto difficult texts—in making its meaning. Inthis sense, translating “Schubert” essentiallymeant reading it, except more closely.

3Adorno replaced “mythischen” with “autoritären” [19]“echt” with “genuin” [21]; “echt” with “wahr”; “echtontologische” with “wahrhaft legitime” [all 25]“ontologisch” with “ansichseiende” [26]; “ontologischewith “konstitutive” [27]; “seinsgewaltigen” with“nachdrücklichen” [30]; “Behagen” with “Wohlsein” [31“rebellisch” with “unbotmäßig”; “ungehaltene” with“empirische”; “echten” with “nochmaligen,” “im Folklore, wie es Schubert wesentlich inaugurierte” with “inSchuberts Folklore”; “so nahe wie Ungarn” with “vor demTor wie Ungarn” [all 32]; and “nah” with “heranrückend[33]. These variants were identified by Esteban Buch andBeate Perrey in preparation for the joint AMS/SMT meeting in 2002.4Edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997)pp. 350–64; Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2003), pp. 299–313. There exists one further special edition, printed in 225 numbered exemplarsincluding original etchings by Rolf Escher, Adorno, TheodoW. (1903–1969), Schubert (Neu-Isenburg: Tiessen, 1984Thanks go to Christopher Gibbs for sharing this information.







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Adorno’s essay comes to us in the form of aquasi-all-continuous text, which, over some fif-teen pages and more than 5,000 words, dividesinto only two paragraphs. These two lengthytextual blocks gain in intensity by a high-volt-age syntax: never have Adorno’s sentences beenlonger, easily running at times across half apage or more; never have they been more im-bricated. While, unusually, punctuation serves

as a means of phrasing, adding nuance or em-phasis, another striking feature is the relativeabsence of full stops. These and many otherapparently purely formal characteristics are theleast of the considerable challenges this essayoffers to any translator. To the present transla-tors it was clear that Adorno’s text represents alevel of formality that resists division into dif-ferent sections, something that might suggesthierarchically arranged arguments.

Translating this kind of text requires weigh-ing up options and making decisions, and itinvites controversy, beginning with whether to

follow Adorno’s division into only two para-graphs and whether to approximate his punc-tuation. Unlike Livingstone’s, which does nei-ther, our translation does both. We sought tocapture Adorno’s verbal performance as well asthe substance of his thought, neither of whichcan be separated from the other. These deci-sions evolve quite apart from questions includ-ing what variety of English to aim for, how torender particular nuances concerning both styleand philosophical, literary and musical termi-nology, and, more delicately, how to respond tothe tempo, rhythms, and counter-rhythms of

Adorno’s intricate sentences and the sustainedargument developing throughout the essay.However, the passion and vehemence withwhich ownership over Adorno’s thinking isclaimed and defended—particularly in evidencewhen it comes to the translation of his texts—are, if anything, reassuring and a sign of thepower of persuasion that Adorno’s work stillholds today. His followers and admirers, theAdornisti of this world, will continue to read,read again, quote, emulate, imitate, translate,criticize, and oppose his work with the essen-tially uplifting, and no less reassuring feeling ofbeing close to (and associated with) this way ofthinking, this way with words, this brilliance,this depth.

In translating “Schubert,” our aim was notto produce an English “Schubert,” in otherwords to create a text that would read and feelas if it could just as well have been written inEnglish. As an ambition, this simply isn’t goodenough. Languages are not neutral carriers ofeither sense or sound. One language will notmove over and into another without gains andlosses, without putting up (or encountering)

considerable resistance, and without inevitabledegrees of injustice to source language or targetlanguage. A language is not an objective ex-change value. Rather, it is (like) a place of birth.To “be German”; to know German as one’smother tongue; to have begun life by tasting it“in German”; “in Germany” (including all thatthis implies: its landscape, its air, its food, itsculture, its history . . .) means to see the worldthrough its eyes, and to carry this world insideeach and every word one thinks, dreams, writes,and speaks—and with it a whole untranslatableWeltanschauung, let alone Gefühlswelt. It also

means, in an important sense, to see oneself aswritten in that language. It is in this sense,then, that Adorno’s “Schubert” could have beenneither conceived nor composed in any lan-guage other than German. The German ofAdorno’s “Schubert” is both its cause and con-sequence.

Adorno’s essay is interfused with culturally,highly charged and difficult terms and theirvariants such as “Geist,” “Wirkliches,”“Gebilde,” “Stimmung,” “Schein,” “Verstrick-ung,” “Widerspiel,” “Innerlichkeit,” and “Echt-heit,” to mention a few. Even when viewed in

isolation, words like “beleben,” “rauschen,”and “ersterben” are as much of a challenge asare whole expressions like “harmonischeRückungen als Umbelichtungen,” “leer fallendeWorte,” “innermenschliches Naturgefühl,” or“Dialekt ohne Erde.” The question here iswhether to construe these terms in English orwhether to opt for their closest semantic equiva-lent. Either way, the achieved accuracy willalways be relative. In the first case, one mayachieve greater immediate clarity in English,hence a better flow, more accessibility; at thesame time, however, one may have created adegree of lucidity that the original actually neverpossessed. In the second case, the closest En-glish equivalent may, despite its semantic ac-







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curacy, create a degree of awkwardness andsemantic opacity barely acceptable to the na-tive English ear.

What will certainly help both translation andunderstanding is an awareness of the influencesunder which Adorno’s language was evolving,as well as the resistances against which it wasworking, at the time “Schubert” was written.This awareness involves an understanding of

the sociopolitical climate of the early to mid-1920s Germany and its discourses, as well as,more concretely, the musical, literary, andphilosophical atmosphere to which Adornofelt drawn during his formative years. For“Schubert,” specifically, the reader might con-sult with profit Georg Lukács’s 1916 DieTheorie des Romans, Ernst Bloch’s Geist derUtopie as published in the first edition of 1918,and Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels, known to Adorno prior to its pub-lication in 1928, thanks to his lively exchangeswith the author since 1919.5 Finally, however,

even with our linguistic senses sharpened inthis way, prepared to perceive more acutely thefiner nuances of Adorno’s vocabulary and im-

ages, no translation will be as rich, or rich inthe same way, as the original. And this is animportant truth to bear in mind in the presencontext of an increasingly celebrated internationalization (or mondialization, to use the wordin fashion) of whatever values (cultural, political, economical, moral).

An interesting additional challenge is to decide how to render the author’s tone of voice—

that is, his way of writing (rather relentlesslyin the case of “Schubert”) so assertively. Thismight, once more, encourage translators to aimfor a similarly assured tone of voice in theiEnglish version, including the use of terms thawould suggest semantic certainty. Again, however, this may be a problematic way of proceeding. Occasionally English translations of Adornohave given his writing a somewhat over-straineddefiniteness and clarity, partly generated, nodoubt, by the kind of vocabulary the AngloAmerican tradition of analytical philosophyreadily provides. The temptation is to want to

normalize texts that, despite their almost ostentatious authoritativeness, nevertheless demonstrate, to no small degree, how thought andthinking, and capturing thought through writing, may themselves be a complicated and, attimes, complicating business. One alternativeis to view Adorno’s original texts, especiallyhis early writings, as bold yet highly articulatperformances in which the questions and conflicts of music-philosophical thinking becomethemselves the agents and actors in a play othought that, once dramatized in Adorno’s writing, reflect the theater of a mind constantly in

search of meaning.—Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey

5Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Litera-ture, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971);Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Walter Ben-jamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. JohnOsborne (London: Verso, 1977). For an informative andsubtle conceptualization, see Martin Kaltenecker, “Ground:La Forme, l’Interprétation et le Progrès dans les Moments

musicaux d’Adorno,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Momentsmusicaux, trans. Martin Kaltenecker (Geneva: Contre-champs, 2003), pp. 147–211 (esp. pp. 154–58).







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Tout le corps inutile était envahi par la transpar-ence. Peu à peu le corps se fit lumière. Le sang rayon.Les membres dans un geste incompréhensible sefigèrent. Et l’homme ne fut plus qu’un signe entreles constellations.6

—Louis Aragon

He who crosses the threshold between the yearsof Beethoven’s death and Schubert’s will shiver,like someone emerging into the painfully di-

aphanous light from a rumbling, newly formedcrater frozen in motion, as he becomes awareof skeletal shadows of vegetation among lavashapes in these wide, exposed peaks, and fi-nally catches sight of those clouds drifting nearthe mountain, yet so high above his head. Hesteps out from the chasm into the landscape ofimmense depth bounded by an overwhelmingquiet at its horizon, absorbing the light thatearlier had been seared by blazing magma. Al-though Schubert’s music may not always havethe power of active will that rises from theinmost nature of Beethoven, its endemic shafts

and fissures lead to the same chthonic depthwhere that will had its source, and these laybare its demonic image, which active practicalreason managed to master again and again; yetthe stars that burn for Schubert’s music are thesame as those towards whose unattainable lightBeethoven’s clenched fist reached out. So whenit comes to Schubert’s music we speak of “land-scape.” Nothing could betray the substance ofhis music more—since he cannot be under-stood in terms of Beethoven’s spontaneouslyintegrated personality—than trying to construct

him as a personality with the idea—a virtualcenter—of puzzling out dissociated elements.The elements of Schubert’s music go againstsuch a psychological picture, and in this they

seem to want to control the fragments of thatdeceptive human totality that we as free spiritswould like to enjoy [19]. Schubert’s music—immune to idealized synopsis as much as it isto the phenomenological exploration of “co-herence,” no more a closed system than it is,say, a flower growing to some purpose—offersus the interplay of truth-characters which hismusic does not create but receives, for that is

the only way in which truth-characters can beexpressed in us. Obviously, it is not as if thepersonal part of his compositional style wereerased from Schubert’s music entirely: the ideaof Schubert as the songsmith incarnate whoexpresses, just like that, without inhibition,whatever he happens to feel psychologically,would be as wrong as trying to eliminate com-pletely Schubert “the man” from his musicand, in the tradition of Bruckner criticism, want-ing to turn him into a vessel of divine inspira-tion or pure revelation; and any talk aboutartistic intuition, muddled up with cheap

psychological speculation about the creativeprocess and the random metaphysics of its out-come, will always act as a barrier to under-standing any art at all. These two views arebasically identical, although superficially insharp contrast; they are both dispensable forthe same reason. Both are rooted in a miscon-ception of the lyrical where, in the spirit of thenineteenth century’s outrageous over-estima-tion of art, art is taken for reality itself, eitheras part of something human, or as glimpses of atranscendental reality, while in actual fact whenthe lyrical appears in art it is always an image

of the real. In this it differs from other,nonlyrical images only in that it coincides withthe possible onset of the real itself. The subjec-tive and the objective, forming Schubert’s land-scape, constitute the lyrical in a new way. Thesubstance of the lyrical is never something thathas been manufactured: it consists of the small-est possible cells of actual objectivity, of whichit remains an image long after the large struc-tures of such objectivity no longer hold sway.These images, however, do not strike the soulof the lyrically receptive person like sunlightfalling on leaves: works of art are not actuallyalive. Rather, they are like targets: hit the bull’seye, everything changes, and reality shinesthrough [20]. The force behind all of this is

6All footnotes to the Adorno text have been added by thetranslators. The extract is from Louis Aragon, Le Paysande Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926, rpt. 1956), p. 230. Adornoquotes this phrase from the work by the surrealist poetand writer Louis Aragon (1897–1982) in the original French.The translators prefer to preserve the effect and signifi-cance that this presentational manoeuvre has withinAdorno’s essay and to confine an approximate rendering tothis note: “The whole futile body was suffused by trans-parency. Little by little the body turned into light. Itsblood into a beam. Its limbs froze in an unintelligiblemovement. And the man was no more than a sign amongthe constellations.”







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human, not artistic. It is human emotion thatanimates works of art. There is no other way tounderstand the equilibrium between the sub-jective and objective elements of a lyrical struc-ture. The lyric creator does not pour feelingsdirectly into forms, but rather uses feelings as ameans of getting to the truth in its minutestcrystallization. It is not truth itself that feedsinto the structure, but the structure does in-

deed convey truth, and laying it bare is the taskof the human being. The image-maker lays barethe image. Yet the image of truth is alwaysinscribed in history. The history of the image isits decay, that is, the decay of how truth ap-pears in detail, which the image does no morethan express: and it also means the unveiling ofits very transparency if the substance of thetruth is to be revealed; it means the truth con-tent which comes to the fore only in its decay.Now, the decay of the lyrical structure is thedecay of its subjective content. The subjectivecontent of a lyrical work of art consists entirely

of its material content. Through this, one canmerely brush against the truth content; theunity between the two is the historical mo-ment that then disappears. What remains inthe lyrical structure is not a set of unchanging,deep human feelings, as a belief in nature’sequilibrium would have it, but those objectivecharacters that are driven by fleeting feelings atthe time that the work of art first arises; mean-while, all subjectively conceived and reproducedcontent meets the same fate as those large,materially determined forms eroded by time.The dialectical impact of these two forces on

each other—the forms which can be read indeceptive eternity in the stars; and the materialof immanent consciousness that quite simplyexists—explodes both of them and along withthem the temporary unity of the work. Thissame impact opens up the work as the site ofits own mortality and finally sets free thoseimages of truth that form the brittle cover ofthe work of art. Only today has the landscapingof Schubert’s music become evident, just as itis only today that the plumb-line may measurethe Luciferian verticality of Beethoven’s dyna-mism. The dialectical liberation of the real con-tent in Schubert came only after Romanticism,an age to which in fact he barely belonged [21].That age read his work as if it were a language

symbolizing intentions, the challenge of its formbeing swamped in banal musicology; the psychological message read into it was exaggerated, and was used up as quickly as only thewrong sort of endlessness would allow. Yet ineglected a surplus—which is the better part othis music—as well as hollows in the outburstof this music’s subjectivity, and these crackswithin the poetic surface are visibly inlaid with

precious metal that was previously hidden under the routine declarations of the life of thesoul. As evidence of a loss of emotive subjectivity in the truth-character of this music, witness the transformation of Schubert the maninto that repulsive specimen of petit bourgeoisentimentality, whose literary persona, it is trueRudolf Hans Bartsch found in the figure of MrMushroom,7 but which secretly dominates alof today’s Schubert literature coming out oAustria; and finally, as the endgame of the wholeRomantic Schubert dreamscape, this sentimentality was behind the destruction of the

dreamscape by Lilac Time.8 For obviously inthis dreamscape the man has to shrink down tosuch an extent that he no longer blocks theview he inspired in the first place, while nobeing completely driven out of its charmedcircle, but which he must inhabit at the marginas the tiniest garden gnome; and once again wecan comply with that complex Schubert who, alaughing stock for the shop girls and even oneof them himself, lost in erotic hopelessness, ia much better, genuine reflection of his musicthan the Biedermeier dreamer who is alwayfound sitting by that brook, listening to it

babble. And it is certainly no accident thaLilac Time is about Schubert, not about Mozartnor about Beethoven; and the socially conditioned affinity between the Biedermeier andgenre postcards generating all the kitschificationof Schubert appears in the music itself as theongoing atomization of Schubert’s landscapeEven if Schubert’s form were to come to an

7See Rudolf Hans Bartsch, Schwammerl: Ein SchubertRoman (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1912).8English title for the once popular operetta Dreimäderlhauby Heinrich Berté (1857–1924), adapted from Bartsch’s popular novel Schwammerl with music by Franz Schubert. Thioperetta was premiered in the Raimundtheater in Viennaon 15 January 1916 and, as “Lilac Time,” in the LyriTheatre, London, on 22 December 1922.







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end, while Beethoven’s and Mozart’s were tolive on quietly and remain intact, a questionthat obviously cannot be answered without aclose look at those forms, then the world of thepotpourri—giddy, banal, odd and as socially in-adequate as can be in relation to how thingsare—guarantees Schubert’s themes a new leaseof life [22]. The potpourri condenses those fea-tures of a work which the downfall of subjec-

tive unity has dispersed within it, forming anew, unified entity which, even if admittedlyunjustified in itself, can nevertheless show howunique such features are in comparison. Thesurvival of the theme as theme is guaranteedby the potpourri fitting theme against theme,without the need of any of them having endur-ing consequences. No theme from the past couldpull through after such unmediated proximityto another one; a terrifying rigor mortis hauntsthe nineteenth century operatic potpourri. InSchubert, though, the themes are forced to co-exist without evoking the figure of Medusa.

Still, it is only the way they are assembledcompletely at random that brings their originsto light as well as opening the way intoSchubert’s form retrospectively. For potpourrisseek to reclaim the lost unity of works of art onthe off-chance, simply by putting bits of musictogether. They can exist only when their unityis not generated subjectively—as could neverbe expected of a game of chance—when it arisesfrom the configuration of captured images oftruth. But this appears to be defending an im-age of Schubert that is false, both traditionally,and in its concept of the lyrical: for it views

Schubert’s music as a plantlike organism un-folding regardless of any preconceived form, orperhaps irrespective of any kind of form at all,and which grows and blooms so delightfully.Potpourri construction, on the other hand, de-nies the music anything to do with organicisttheory. For such organic unity would have tobe teleological: its every cell would necessitatethe next one, and its coherence would speak ofthe living motion of subjective intention, al-beit one that died away, its revival surely notlying in the spirit of the potpourri. Wagner’smusic, cast in the mould of the organic, cat-egorically excludes the potpourri, unlike thatof Weber and Bizet, which is indeed related toSchubert. The cells that the potpourri throws

together must once have been interlaced ac-cording to a law different from that of a livingorganism [23]. Even conceding that everythingin Schubert’s music is natural rather than arti-ficial, this growth, entirely fragmentary, andnever sufficient, is not plantlike, but crystal-line. As the preserving transformation into thepotpourri confirms the formerly configurativeatomizations characteristic of Schubert—and

through this the fragmentary character of hismusic, that makes it what it is—it illuminatesSchubert’s landscape all at once. It is no coinci-dence that in the nineteenth century the pot-pourri appeared at the same time as did surro-gate musical form, to which the miniature land-scape had transformed itself, in bourgeois con-sumer objects of all kinds, including the pic-ture postcard. These virtual landscapes are mo-tivated by wanting to escape history, cutting itoff at a stroke. Their fate does lie in history,but only in so far as they are acted out on thestage of history: never is history their actual

subject matter; rather, in these landscapes theidea of a timeless mythical reality presents it-self as demonically depraved. Hence potpourrisdo not carry time within themselves. The per-fect interchangeability in their thematic detailpoints to the ahistorical synchronicity of allevents. From this synchronicity we can tracethe contour of Schubert’s landscape, in an in-fernal reflection. Any truly legitimate deprava-tion of aesthetic content is inaugurated byworks of art that succeed in revealing imagesto such an extent that the luminous force oftruth no longer restricts itself to such images,

but breaks through to what is real. This kind oftransparency, for which the work of art has topay with its very life, intersects perfectly withthe crystals of Schubert’s landscape. Here, fateand reconciliation lie side by side; the potpourrishatters their ambiguous eternity so that thislandscape can be recognized. What we havebefore us is the landscape of death. Just as thereis no history between the appearance of oneSchubert theme and a second one, so equally,life is not the intentional object of his music.When it comes to the problem of hermeneuticswith which Schubert inescapably confronts us,to date this has been consigned to polemicsagainst Romantic psychology, and it has notbeen addressed with the necessary intensity







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[24]. The criticism of all musical hermeneuticswill rightfully discard any view seeing musicas the poetic reproduction of psychic content.But it does not have the right to undo the linkwith targeted, objective truth-characters, norto replace cheap, subjectivist acts of contem-plation of art with faith in art’s blind imma-nence. No art is about itself; its symbolic mean-ing cannot arise as an abstraction separate from

its material realization. In its very origin themeaning is inseparably connected to the real-ization, and the two only ever come apart whenfaced with history. Over the course of historythe work of art reveals its different contents,and it is only when we are done with the workthat it exists for itself. Schubert’s œuvre, for allits depravation more eloquent today than anyother of its age, escaped fossilization preciselybecause it survives the passing, subjective forcesof close copying. Right from its origin it neverhad anything other than a nonorganic, erratic,brittle, mineral existence, so deeply steeped in

death that death held no fears for it. This hasnothing to do with a psychological reflex todeath experiences, and the countless anecdotesthat tell us of the premonitions of death thatSchubert the person may have had are of hardlyany significance. Much more important is hischoice of texts, since it is these that getSchubert’s landscape moving, although of courseit becomes buried under the sheer number ofthem in no time at all. Remember that both ofthe great cycles are stimulated by poems inwhich again and again images of death appearbefore the person who sees them and who wan-

ders among them as demeaned as the Schubertof Lilac Time. Brook, mill and black winterwastes, expanding in the Nebensonnen twi-light, as in a dream, outside time—these arethe signs of Schubert’s landscape, dried flowersare its mournful bloom; the objective symbolsof death trigger the images, and the feeling ofthose images reinforces the symbols of death.There you have the Schubertian dialectic: itabsorbs with all the force of subjective interior-ity the fading images of an objective presencein order to rediscover them in the smallestcells of any musical realization [25]. The alle-gorical image of Death and the Maiden evapo-rates along with it not in order to sink intoindividual feelings, but rather to resurface in

the solace of musical form. Musical solacebrings a qualitative change as a result of thisdialectical process: but it is a qualitative changeonly at the level of smallest detail; at the highest level, death. One only has to look at thecyclical layout of both sets of songs: their circularity lies in the timeless path between birthand death, as dictated by blind nature. Andtraversing it, the wanderer. The full and deci

sive dignity of the concept of the wanderer hasnever been discussed in terms of the structureof Schubert’s works; and meanwhile this concept opens out for us an even deeper insighinto Schubert’s mythological world as completely distancing itself from Wagner’s mundane symbolism, and it already contains thegenuine form of what in Wagner is merelyquoted. If psychoanalysis has used “journey”and “wandering” in its objective death symbolism as archaic residues, then it is with goodreason that we look for them in the landscapeof death. The ex-centric construction of tha

landscape, in which every point is equally closeto the center, reveals itself to the wanderewalking round it with no actual progress: aldevelopment is antimatter, the first step as closeto death as the last, and the scattered featuresof the landscape are scanned in rotation by thewanderer, who cannot let go of them. Schubert’sthemes wander just like the miller does, or hewhose beloved abandoned him to the winterThose themes know of no history, but onlyshifts in perspective: the only way they changeis through a change of light, and this explainSchubert’s inclination to use the same theme

two or three times in different works, and different ways; he does so most memorably byrepeating the lasting melody which serves asthe theme of a set of Piano Variations, as avariation theme in the A-Minor String Quartetand in the Rosamunde music. It would be insane to explain this recurrence as some kind ofixation in this musician who could have foundhundreds of other themes in his almost excessively trumpeted melodic treasure chest; thewanderer encounters these repeated features innew lighting—they are timeless and appear tobe disconnected, isolated [26]. This scenarioconcerns not only the repeated use of the sametheme in different pieces, but in actual fact thevery make-up of Schubertian form. What also







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happens here is that the themes remain devoidof dialectical history; and if in Schubert’s varia-tions the structure of the theme is never tam-pered with as it was in Beethoven, but is adornedor neglected, then here it is the circular wan-dering that is Schubert’s form, where the cen-ter is manifest: far from it—this center givesitself away only through its power to entrapanything in sight. The Impromptus and Mo-

ments musicaux are structured like this, as areall the sonata forms. It is not only the func-tional negation of all thematic, dialecticaldevelopment that sets them apart fromBeethoven’s sonatas, but the repeatability ofunaltered truth-characters. That in the first A-Minor Sonata there are two ideas constitutinga movement, not in contrast as first and secondtheme, but contained within both the first andthe second thematic groups—this is not some-thing to ascribe to a motivic economy that issparing with material for the sake of unity, butrather to the return of the same in diversity.

This is where to find the origin of the idea ofatmosphere, one that prevailed as much in nine-teenth-century art in general as it did in land-scape painting in particular: atmosphere is whatchanges around things that remain timelesslythe same, and this change makes no differenceto them. All that needs to happen is for thecontext of what remains to be loosened in or-der for atmosphere to be seen as the mere ap-pearance that it is. For this reason, Schubert’satmospheric perspectives rely for their validityon the validity of the identical content theysurround. And it is because they were targeted

that they escaped the demise of the art of at-mosphere. What is repeatable is only what is initself unique, and never what has been createdsubjectively and thus over the course of time.It is not the repetitions as such that endangerform in Schumann and Wagner, but the repeti-tion of the unrepeatable, at a place in a formdictated by subjective dynamics in their owntime [27]. Not so in Schubert. His themes oc-cur as truth-characters, and his artistic remit isto restate their image passionately, again andagain, once this image has appeared. But cita-tion can happen only once at a time, and so theatmosphere is different each time: Schubert’sforms are forms of invocation of what has al-ready appeared; they are not transformations of

something that had been invented. This basic apriori completely took over the Schubertiansonata: here, harmonic shifts replace develop-ing transitions like changes in lighting expos-ing a new part in the landscape, that itselfentails as little development as any earlier part;and here too, in development sections, motivicunpicking of the themes—exploiting for thesake of dynamic sparks their every little ele-

ment—is renounced, and the recurrent themesare disclosed progressively; here too he takesup themes from earlier that are encounteredbut not consigned to the past; and the sonatacovers all this like a thin, rustling husk spreadover the growing crystals and ready to shatter.A proper formal analysis of Schubert, whichhas yet to be undertaken but for which themethodology is clearly already laid out, wouldabove all need to follow up the dialectic thatmediates between the standard sonata schemeand Schubert’s “second practice” of crystallineform that yields up that form only when inspi-

ration has to take over from the deceptive dy-namic of the sonata; nothing can bolster themesmore than their own inner compulsion to gov-ern a kind of form that is in fact unpalatable tothem. The crucial difference between inspira-tion and invention, which does not simply meana difference between grace and will, but whichin fact cuts through both of them, is perfectlyexemplified in Schubert. For dialectically bothrelate equally to the objectivities of form. In-vention prevails through constructive powerderiving from subjective existence and dissolvedin the assertion of the self—nothing more nor

less, that is, than a product of form. Inspirationshatters form through dissociation by confin-ing its constitutive role, wasted on the largescale, to the smallest remainder, where it com-municates with subjective intention [28]. It isin the spheres of the endless task that inven-tion labors, wanting to construct totality; in-spiration copies the figures of truth itself and isrewarded—it succeeds in its quest. Now wecan see the meaning of our discussion of theimage as “struck”: it is struck both like amarksman’s target, and like truth in represen-tation; in the way that a photograph is a “true”likeness when it really looks like someone,Schubertian inspirations are good “shots” oftheir perennial models, the traces of whose eter-







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nity is often pretty well preserved, as if theythemselves had already existed and were sim-ply being discovered; but also they enable thewanderer to march in to the region of truth asdecisively as only a sharp-eyed marksman can.Either shot happens in an instant, lit up as if bylightening—you know it is over the momentyou see even a wisp of it. The evidence of theseshots is a gap in the targeted, structural fore-

ground, and what also lights up the way toSchubert’s ineffable, true form is the asymme-try of his themes, in precocious defiance oftonal architecture. It is in their irregularity thatthe autonomy of the shot prevails over ourabstract urge for pure formal immanence—thatirregularity makes justifiable chinks in thestructure of our subjective intentions and theirhistorically determined stylistic assumptions,so that the work must remain fragmentary allthe same. It is in Schubert’s finales that thefragmentary character of his music becomes amaterial reality. The circularity of groups of

songs disguises what in each temporal series ofatemporal cells must come into play the mo-ment they are supposed to move closer to theorganic time of the sonata: that the finale ofthe B-Minor Symphony could not be writtenhas something to do with the shortcomings ofthe finale of the Wanderer Fantasy; it is not thedilettante who cares passionately about how apiece is destined to end, but Schubert, in whoseworld the “Tartarus” question—“is there noend?”—holds sway far and wide and hypnoti-cally, and so his music falls silent. For thisreason, when Schubert does leave us accom-

plished finales, they are perhaps the greatestrays of hope to be found in his œuvre. Admit-tedly, none of this is yet to be found in theWanderer Fantasy [29]. Even with its sylvansparkle it will cower, in the song-based Adagio,into a dark, Acherontian abyss. The hermeneu-tics of death, which insinuate so many of theimages into Schubert’s music and inflect itsobjective character, nevertheless do not tell usthe whole story. Death—because it is the affectof sorrow about the human condition, not inour inner pain, that is modeled in Schubert’slandscape—is the gateway to the underworldinto which Schubert is escorting us. Interpreta-tion in words is useless down there, for theyhave barely been able to even just follow the

transition into death. There is no longer anymetaphor to cut a swath through the ice-crystal thicket, the jagged stalagmites, like deadleaping dragons; the bright upper world whereour journey to that region always begins is littlemore than a way of opening up the perspectiveof the first and second dimensions to the third—that upper world is as thin an organic cover asthe organic-dialectical sonata is to Schubert’s

second formal practice. His habit of blindlychoosing mythological poems, and withoumaking much of a distinction between Goethand Mayrhofer, is the most dramatic indicationof the uselessness of words in this deep placewhere poems offer nothing but the materialsand words are incapable of breathing life intothem. The wanderer follows nothing but emptywords into the deep, rather than their brighilluminated intention, and even his human passion becomes a means of open-eyed descenleading not to the seat of the soul, but into thetangled web of fate. “Ich will den Boden küs

sen / durchdringen Eis und Schnee / mit meinenheißen Tränen / bis ich die Erde seh.”9 It idown there that the harmony takes us, the truemeasure of music’s profound nature: nature isnot, though, what makes sense of the profoundhuman instinct for it, but the images of natureare allegories of the chthonic deep—as uselesas allegories as are any words of poetry. It is nofor nothing that the moods in Schubert, whichnot only revolve, but can also collapse, arebound up with harmonic shifts, with modulation, which sheds light, at whatever level oprofundity, on things that are always the same

Those sudden, nondevelopmental modulationocclude daylight like camera shutters; the introduction of the [30] second subject in the firsmovement of the great B -Major Sonata; or saythe violent chromatic progression in the E Trioor indeed the opening of the beginning of theC-Major Symphony transition—these havetransformed the links in the sonata model entirely into a collapse of perspective that opens

9“I will kiss the ground, my hot tears piercing the ice andsnow, until I see the earth,” Winterreise, Song No. 4“Erstarrung,” verse 2: text and translation given in SusanYouens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’Winterreise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 145







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up harmonic depth, and the fact that in thesethree major-mode works the second subject ap-pears to move towards the minor means, ac-cording to the modal symbolism that still heldtrue for Schubert, a real step into the dark. Theswitch to the demonic way of the deep happensthrough the diminished chord. In the dual land-scape of major and minor, this chord pointsboth upwards and downwards, as ambivalent

as mythic Nature herself; its brilliance is paleand the expression that Schubert’s techniquesof modulation invests in it is one of fear—fearof seeing the world’s fatality and of seeing theannihilation of the merely human: this is howthe mirror-image in the Doppelgänger proclaimsthe fundamental sadness of human kind. It isonly because harmonic modulation and trans-formation had been infiltrated into the idiomof tonal structure that they gained such powerat that point in history. In their interplay withthe natural, upper world, they debase it; aftertheir dissolution, modulation and transforma-

tion were dragged into the empty dribble ofsubjective dynamics, and it was Schoenbergalone who regained Schubert’s command of theharmonic principle, only in order to snuff it outfor good. Schubert’s harmony, which the coun-terpoint follows as a three-dimensional shadowof the melody, reaches its lowest point at thepure minor mode of mourning. Just as death’seffect was to be the entry to the deep, so isMother Earth herself, when we reach her atlast, the incarnation of death, and the tumblingsoul brought before her comes to see itself as aconsort, inextricably entangled in the web of

nature. The last great allegorical poem in theGerman language, Matthias Claudius’s imageof Death and of the Maiden, shows us the wan-derer reaching the chthonic center of his land-scape. And with this, the essence of the minoris revealed. Yet in the way that the deed of thechild caught out is punished, and that the sim-plest proverb tells us help is always at handafter trouble, [31] so too is consolation alwaysthere, after mourning. Salvation happens in thetiniest move, in the transformation of the mi-nor third to the major; these are in such prox-imity that the minor third, once the major hasappeared, turns out to have been its mereshadow. Thus it is hardly surprising that thequalitative difference between mourning and

consolation—to which crucial questionSchubert found a musically concrete answer—was overlooked because there were too manydistractions, given that the nineteenth centurybelieved it had found a formula for theSchubertian way, through the term “renuncia-tion.” But reconciliation that comes from sub-mission has absolutely nothing to do withSchubertian consolation, which means the hope

of an end to life’s deadly confusions. No matterhow much Schubert’s mourning drags us down,and no matter if even the despairing wandererhimself is drowned at birth, consolation willalways be there for him, and it gives us thehope that he does not have to go on forever inthis entangled, magical spinning of nature. Thisis where time comes alive in Schubert’s music,and the successful finale comes from a verydifferent place than that of death, and of coursealso from another place than Beethovenian“fate.” Compared with Beethovenian joy, de-manded with menaces, hard-won, conceptually

clear but materially unattainable, Schubertianjoy is its muddled echo, although in the end itis a safe, direct joy. Only once did it generatereal energy, and this is in the initial build up ofthe finale of the C-Major Symphony, in which—with its woodwind tune, as if using real voices—the energy disrupts the musical scenario andexplodes it—music exploded from within in away that was rarely to happen again. But else-where the achievement of joy in Schubert takesother, wonderfully wayward paths. In the greatA-Major Rondo for four hands we hear the songof rounded well-being, only as lasting in real-

ity—and as different from Beethoven’s elevatedmeaning—as good food is lasting, and differentfrom the immortality promised by practical rea-son. Even the reach of Schubert’s movementscan often amount to joy, and the designation“heavenly length” is truer than was ever in-tended. The themes are ranged timelessly indeath’s landscape [32], and in a comforting waymusic fills time regained, far from any deathlyend, with the premature steadfastness of eter-nity. The repeatability of Schubertian detailsstems from their timelessness, but their mate-rial realization gives them back to time. Thisrealization, however, does not by any meansneed extensive movements, or indeed the pa-thos of large form. What it really does is to stay







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in a much deeper sphere than the overt prac-tices of the musically bourgeois. For the genu-ine joy in Schubert’s world—the world of dancesand military marches, of paltry four-hand pi-ano music, of latent banality and slight tipsi-ness—has as little to do socially with bour-geois, indeed parochial strumming as it everhas with the naive affirmation of existence. Ifyou insist on pigeon-holing Schubert as a job-

bing musician, you must always bear in mindthat the kind of musician we may thus be talk-ing about is a social outcast more in line withtraveling folk, with jugglers and tricksters andtheir wanderings, than what we think of as acraftsman. So to find simple joy in Schubert’smarches is in fact excessive, and the time-worldthat they place us in is not the time-world ofpsychological development, but much ratherthat of seething humanity. In unmediated rev-elation, Schubert’s joy is formless: ready-made,it skirts a lower empirical reality, almost al-lowing that reality to make use of the joy as it

breaks free from the sphere of art. One whofound such anarchic joy in music, had to havebeen a dilettante—and when did revolution everfail to appear to be dilettantish to the elderstatesman? But this dilettantism is a dilettan-tism of starting over, and what seals it is theautonomous organization emanating from thatbeginning. In Schubert this organization re-mains a matter of compositional technique;yet the image trembles. Nowhere does it getnearer to the truth than in Schubert’s folk-lore—in a completely different sense than any-one who tried after him. Schubert was never

attempting to regain a lost proximity throughunattainable distance, for transcendental dis-

tance became directly accessible to him. It inext door like Hungary, but as distant as theincomprehensible language there [33]. Hencethe secret that not only runs through the Hungarian Divertissement, the F-Minor Fantasy andthe second theme of the A-Major Rondo, butalso runs like fine criss-crossings throughSchubert’s entire œuvre, tangibly approachingand then disappearing like a phantom in the

C

-minor theme of the finale of the A-MinorQuartet. The language of this Schubert is in

dialect, but it is a dialect from nowhere. It hathe flavor of the native, yet there is no suchplace, only a memory. He is never further awayfrom that place than when he cites it. In theseimages of death the earth reveals itself: in itsdirect accessibility, we see the dissolution onature itself. Thus there is no pathway inSchubert to genre and to home-grown art, buonly one to fundamental depravation and tothe barely expressed reality of the liberatedmusic of people transformed. In jagged lines

like a seismograph, Schubert’s music has recorded the tidings of man’s qualitative changeThe right response is tears: the desperately sentimental tears of Lilac Time, and tears from thetrembling body. Schubert’s music brings tearto our eyes, without any questioning of thesoul: this is how stark and real is the way thathe music strikes us. We cry without knowingwhy, because we are not yet what this musicpromises for us. We cry, knowing in untoldhappiness, that this music is as it is in thepromise of what one day we ourselves will beThis is music we cannot decipher, but it hold

up to our blurred, over-brimming eyesthe secret of reconciliation at long last. l

Adorno - Schubert

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