Theodor W Adorno

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (Frankfurt am Main, 1903 – Brig, Switzerland, 1969) was one of the central figures of twentieth-century musical thought. Trained as a philosopher and a member of the Frankfurt School, he devoted much of his work to understanding how music relates to the society that produces it. The son of a merchant of Jewish origin and a professional singer of Catholic Corsican descent, he adopted his mother's surname in the 1920s.

From childhood he received a solid musical education, with lessons in piano, violin and composition. In 1921 he began studying philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, with musicology, sociology and psychology as complementary subjects, and he continued his training in composition with Bernhard Sekles. His friendships with Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin shaped his intellectual development. He earned his doctorate with a thesis on Husserl and, from 1925, studied composition in Vienna with Berg, while also associating with Schoenberg and Webern. He edited the journal Musikblätter des Anbruch between 1928 and 1932 and contributed to several musical publications of the period.

His output as a composer was brief and small in scale: songs, chamber music, orchestral pieces and choral works, written in a free atonal idiom without highly elaborated motivic features. The Sechs kurze Orchesterstücke op. 4 show the imprint of Berg and Schoenberg, and his opera project on Huckleberry Finn remained at the sketch stage. By the early 1940s he had almost entirely abandoned composition in favour of philosophy.

The Nazis' accession to power in 1933 cost him the right to teach in Frankfurt. After a period in Berlin, he emigrated to England in 1934 and in 1938 moved to the United States, where he joined the Institute for Social Research. There he took part in empirical studies on radio and popular music and worked with Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. His dialectical study of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Philosophie der neuen Musik, came to influence the avant-garde at Darmstadt after the war.

He returned to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a chair in philosophy and to co-direct the Institute. In the following two decades he taught on the Darmstadt courses and published numerous essays on Wagner, Mahler and Berg, as well as his treatises on aesthetics. He took part in debates such as the positivism dispute, and left unfinished his work on Beethoven, which was published posthumously.

His legacy lies in a critical theory of music that conceives musical material as a historically mediated second nature. He distinguished between progressive music, which resists its status as a commodity, and regressive music, absorbed by the culture industry. His critics have reproached him both for his defence of Viennese modernism and for an alleged elitism, although his work remains the subject of study and debate.