Schubert and Beethoven - Adorno’s Early Antipodes of the Music in Bourgeois Epoch Cover Image

Šubert i Betoven - Adornovi prvobitni antipodi muzike građanske epohe
Schubert and Beethoven - Adorno’s Early Antipodes of the Music in Bourgeois Epoch

Author(s): Dragana Jeremić Molnar, Aleksandar Molnar
Subject(s): Music
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: Franz Schubert; Ludwig van Beethoven; Arnold Schönberg; music; bourgeois epoch; revolution; mimesis;

Summary/Abstract: In this article the authors are reconstructing the dichotomies which the young Theodor Adorno was trying to detect in the music of the bourgeois epoch and personify in two antipodes - Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven. Although already a devotee of Arnold Schönberg and the 20 th century music avantgardism, Adorno was, in his works prior to his exile from Germany (1934), intensively dealing with Schubert and his opposition towards Beethoven. While Beethoven was a bold and progressive revolutionary, fascinated by the “practical reason” and the mission to rise up and reach the stars, Schubert wanted none of it (almost anticipating the failure of the whole revolutionary project). Instead, he was looking backwards, to primordial nature and the possibility of man to participate in its mythic cycles of death and regeneration. The lack of synthesis between this two opposing tendencies in the music of early bourgeois epoch lead to the “negative dialectics” of Schönberg and 20 th century music avantgardism and to the final separation of Beethovenian musical progress and Schubertian musical mimesis.

  • Issue Year: 23/2012
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 221-236
  • Page Count: 18
  • Language: Serbian