"Humanity and Demythologization" from Adorno's Beethoven

Humanity and Demythologization
P162
Possible epigraph for a chapter:
Und Freude schwebt wie SternenklangUns nur im Traume vor.[And joy is glimpsed in dreams alone, like music of the stars.]
Goethe, Skizzen zu Faust I, 81, ed. Witkowski, I, p.414.
Possible epigraph for the last chapter of the study of Beethoven:
Die letzte Hand klopft an die Wand,die wird mich nicht verlassen.[On the wall taps the last hand, and will not leave me.]
From Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
On Beethoven and music as language see Hofmannsthal, ‘Beethoven’, in Reden und Aufsätze, Leipzig 1921, p.6:
From an unbroken spirit, pious(!) despite its rebellion, he became the creator of a language above language. In this language he is present entirely: more than sound and tone, more than symphony, more than hymn, more than prayer: it is something inexpressible: in it is the gesture of a man who stands before God. Here was a word, but not the profane word of language; here was the living word and the living deed, and they were one.
P163
This quotation, in which some of the most profound insights (reconstruction of Language, gesture of someone standing firm – cf. this notebook, expression of the theme of the Ninth [cf. fr. 31]) are engulfed in a flood of cultural claptrap, should be introduced with utmost care. – Beethoven’s work in its entirety as an attempt at reconstructuction.-If Benjamin, in his early study on language, supposes that in painting and sculpture the mute language of things is translated into a higher but related language, it might be supposed of music that it saves the name as pure sound, but at the cost of separating it from things. Relationship to prayer.-The unique nature of music, to be not an image standing for another reality, but a reality sui generic. Not subject to the ban on images, and yet magical as a ritual of assuagement. Thus, at the level of mythology, both demythologization and myth at the same time. Therefore, in its innermost composition, identical to Christianity – it could be said that there is only as much music as there is Christianity in the world and that all the forces of music communicate those of Christianity. Music and the ‘Passion’, the incomparable pre-eminence of Bach. This imageless magic is, however, a demonstration: this is how the cosmos should be: Pythagoreans. Music says: Thy will be done. It is the pure language of prayer as devoted entreaty. Beethoven is deeply connected to this through the element of rhetoric. His music is the this-worldly prayer of the bourgeois class, the rhetorical music of the secularization of the Christian liturgy. The element of language and humanity in his music will have to be demonstrated from this standpoint.-From a comparison with any instrumental piece by Schubert (I was struck by this in childhood, listening to the A minor Piano Sonata) we can conclude that Beethoven’s music is imageless. Romanticism reacted against this. But this is not simply an Enlightenment tendency in Beethoven, but a sublation [Aufheben] in the Hegelian sense. Where his music contains images, they are images of the imageless, of demythologization, of reconciliation, never those which lay claim to unmediated truth within themselves.-P164The Larghetto of Beethoven’s Second Symphony belongs to the world of Jean Paul. The infinite moonlit night speaks only to the finite coach driving through it. Its confined cosiness reinforces the expression of the unconfined.This element is very important for the whole of Beethoven. I am thinking of the contingent and idyllic expression of Fidelio. But above all of ther Eighth Symphony. This is, in a sense, the negative of Hermann und Dorothea. If the historical process is reflected in the idyll of that work, in the Eighth the idyll is burst asunder by its own latent driving forces. The smallest detail can become the whole, because it is already the whole. This gives access to the late makes one switch abruptly into the other. – The strength of the early Beethoven is exactly measurable by the ability to juxtapose heterogeneous or widely separated shaped and to bind them together as a unity – as ‘simultaneous’. To be sure, certain limits are set to this – moments of ‘intermission’ [Aussetzen] – such as the accented chords in the overloaded Larghetto of the Second, which threatens to disintegrate. Perhaps the attempt either to transcend these limits or to mark them in the work itself is the true motor driving Beethoven’s ‘development’.-Fidelio has a hieratic, cultic quality. In it the Revolution is not depicted but re-enacted as in a ritual. It could have been written to celebrate the anniversary of the Bastille. No tension, just the ‘transformation’ in Leonore’s moment in gaol. Decided in advance. An eccentric, ‘stylized’ simplicity of means. It is a correct instinct to play the Third Leonore Overture after the gaol scene. – Here, too, a bad Wagnerian element is held in good suspension.-On the hieratic element in Fidelio, cf. ‘secular awe’ (over ‘O Isis’) and the Magic Flute in general. Einstein, Mozart, p.466.-When, in Fidelio, the words ‘Der Gouverneur’ are heard for the first time, suspended, on the fermata, it is as if an oblique sunbeam had entered the gaoler’s gloomy dwelling, in which light it recognizes itself as part of the world.-In what does the expression of the human manifest itself in Beethoven? I would say, in the fact that his music has the gift of sight. The human is its gaze. But this must be expressed in technical concepts.-P165Benjamin’s idea of the ‘conditions of humanity’, that is, of indigence (in the collection of letters, in connection with the letter by Kant’s brother), should be taken up in the Beethoven study and traced in relation to my subject, the bareness of the material. Beethoven as one of the few who knew about this condition: hence the cult of Handel, of whose modest qualities as a composer Beethoven cannot possibility have been unaware. The Missa is decisively connected to this. On Beethoven’s horizon – as on Goethe’s – the idea of falseOpulence already appears, of goods abounding for profit, and he reacts against it (false opulence was represented for him on one hand by Romanticism and on the other by opera). He opposed progress out of radicalism: hence the retrospective tendency of his late phase. Expressed technically: only against the meager, the most limited material, is the mighty effect of the divergent possible: it vanishes as soon as the divergent becomes universal (since Berlioz). But this also applies, in a way still to be worked out, to expression and content. The bareness guarantees, as it were, the universal, the human in Goethe’s sense (as the abstract aspect of death?). Through it Beethoven stands opposed to the nominalism of progress, like Hegel. Take this further.-‘Poor instrumentation.’ It is easy to demonstrate that Beethoven was weak at instrumentation. As the arrangement of the score seemed to suggest, he always placed the oboes above the clarinets, without thinking of their specific registers. He used the brass to make a noise; the wretched natural tones of the horns protrude, without ever really forming independent parts. He did not consider the proportions of strings to woodwind: one woodwind player is treated as equivalent to a combined string voice, and in a dialogue the woodwind section is completely eclipsed. Specific colours are heard only as exceptions, as ‘effects’ – like the muted horn at the end of the Pastoral. But what does that matter? Is not precisely the meager, impoverished sound of this orchestra, always slightly shrill, with over-prominent oboes and bassoon humming along in attendance, inaudible stationary woodwind voices, the grunt of the horn, the inordinately simplified string writing (compared to the chamber music), deeply interwined with the music itself? Is not poverty a leaven of its humanity – as it were, the timbre of abstraction striking on humanity – for which this orchestra provides the convention? Is this not the poverty of Goethe’s death chamber, the sobriety of the greatest prose of the period? That the forces of production were not more highly developed instrumentally is, at least, not only a defect. This very absence, due to fettered productive forces, is in secret communication with the substance. What is banished is that which mustStay away in order to survive, and only against this lack does the voice of the instrument become an overwhelming sound. Here we can see clearly the questionable nature of artistic progress. The path leading from this orchestra to that of Salome is the same one which has so leveled musical expression through embarrass de richesse that the utmost ecstasy of the violins, filtered through the radio, hardly compels us to listen any longer.

P166 Webern has revealed something of the double character of ‘poor instrumentation’ in the dances of Schubert. ‘The classical orchestra.’ Nothing in great music, moreover, is as near to classicism as this sound.-The idea of the totality mediated within itself will need to be brought together with the stratum of the chthonic (NB: the chthonic element in Mörike’s ‘Märchen vom sicheren Mann’, which comes very close to an interpretation of Beethoven). Probably the mediation lies in the Beethovenian moment. In terms of formal analysis this moment – and this is the core of my theory of the symphony – would be defined as the point where the individual in Beethoven becomes aware of itself as the whole, as more than itself(‘gaining momentum’). But this is always at the same time the moment of awe when nature becomes aware of itself as totality and therefore as more than nature. ‘Mana.’ Cf. the passage from the mythology study. The ‘spirit’ in Beethoven, the Hegelian element, the totality, is nothing other than nature becoming aware of itself, the chthonic element. Development of this insight is one of the main problems of my study. The anti-mythological tendency lies, however, in the music’s equating itself with myth precisely as spirit, totality, representation. Music withstands doom by being it. ‘That is the sound of fate knocking at the door.’-‘The sound of fate knocking at the door.’ But those are only the first two bars. A movement emerges from them, not to demonstrate fate but to cancel, preserve and elevate [aufheben] those portentous beats. -Mörike’s legend of the ‘sicherer Mann’, the giant Suckelborst, belongs in the context of the legends of Rübezahl [Spirit of the Mountains] recorded by Musäus, of the interwinement of the chthonic with humanity; a detailed interpretation will probably be needed in this study. Some verses in Mörike’s prose fairy-tale call to mind the adage-like themes of the last quartets.-P167The constellation of the chthonic and the Biedermerier is one of the innermost problems in Beethoven.An essential trait of Beethoven’s physiognomy is the coexistence of the great ‘humane’ individual with the subterranean goblin or gnome. The humanistic element in Beethoven is the chthonic which has gained mastery of itself in breaking through the surface. In Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Meyers Groschenbibliothek, Hildburghausen and New York, undated, Part Two, p.85), Musäus exactly and is description of Rübezahl, which seems to the historical and philosophical constellation: For Friend Rübezahl, you should know, has the make-up of a titanic spirit, moody, impetuous, odd; rascally, crude, immodest; proud, vain, fickle, today the warmest friend, tomorrow distant and cold; sometimes kind, noble and sensitive; but in constant contradiction to himself; foolish and wise, often soft and hard in two consecutive moments, like an egg which has fallen into boiling water; mischievous and strait-laced, stubborn and pliable; according to the mood brought urge to grab whatever catches his eye.-Insight into Beethoven depends finally in an interpretation of this complexion – the dialectic if the mythical. – The fairy-tale concerned is the one in which Rübezahl tears up the promissory note – a very Beethovenian gesture, which must be seen in conjunction with ‘Wut um den verlorenen Groschen’. – The relationship of Musäus to Jean Paul, for example, the ‘woodland misanthropist’. – In the world of fate and domination only the demon in the human being is human.-The symphonic widening at the end of Ferne Geliebte – ‘und ein liebend Herz erreichet’ – has something almost of the character of rage. The chthonic element in Beethoven cannot be separated from the symphonic. As imprecation. For whether ‘a loving heart attains’ its goal is highly uncertain in the state of alienation. It should do so, just as a dear Father must dwell above, and the music is not content of subjectivity. Not from abstract but from mythical subjectivity – the subject as nature. The demonic and the ideal are thus intertwined in Beethoven. The gesture of invocation can, however, remain impotent, and that is the case in the Missa Solemnis. Then it becomes abstract. Beethoven’s assertion that the Missa was his best work is such an invocation. (Take care in this very important note with the concept of the abstract. In a sense everything mythical is abstract; and in a sense Kantian transcendental subjectivity is, precisely, not abstract!) P168Beethoven’s character – the boorish, aggressive, repellent trait – has become a kind of model for musicians (Brahms, probably Mahler). The connection with Schopenhauer. – The element of tomfoolery in their humour (as early as Mozart). Here, in the nonsense, may lie one of the deepest approaches to Beethoven.-The legend of Nöck will need to be included in the Beethoven study – indeed, the dialectical schema of the whole construction – myth and humanity – might perhaps be modeled on it. It can be quoted from Jacob Grimm l.c. [Deutsche Mythologie, 4th edition, Berlin 1876], I, pp.408f: Here we should tell the touching legend in which, for his music teaching, the river spirit, ‘Strömkarl’ or ‘Neck’, did not merely sacrifice himself, but also promised himself resurrection and redemption. Two boys were playing by a stream, Neck sat playing his harp. The children called to him: ‘Why do you sit here playing, Neck? You won’t be blessed for that! ’ Then Neck began to weep bitterly, threw away his harp and sank into the depths. When the boys got home they told their father, who was a priest, what hah happened. Their father said: ‘You have sinned aginast Neck. Go back, comfort him and promise him redemption’. When they got back to the river, Neck was sitting on the bank, grieving and weeping. The children said: ‘Don’t cry like that, Neck, our father told us that you, too, have a Redeemer.’ Then Neck happily picked up his harp and played sweetly until long past sunset.-The last words of the Grimm version should perhaps be included in the treatment of late Beethoven. – On the ‘river’ my idea that Eichendorff’s poetry (for example, from Schumann’s Lied cycle) seems to echo not an object but the subterranean, incessant murmur [Rauschen] of language itself. Similarly, the Adagio of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata listens to the murmur of music itself, which at the end seems to sound back into the music. NB: What is this murmur? One of the basic questions concerning Beethoven. – NB: The dialectical counterpoint of sacrifice and promised redemption for Neck. – Beethoven’ anger: that is how Neck scolds the children. The throwing away of the harp as the gesture of the late Beethoven. – The return, the granting of grace as a revocation. – Neck’s sinking into the depths: humanity resides precisely in submersion in the chthonic. – Neck’s mourning is mute.-P169On my theory about humanism and the demonic, p.72 in this notebook [cf. fr. 342]. Imitation as a way of casting out demons. Beethoven like certain processions with the Butzemann [bogeyman] in German villages. The relationship of human being and demon is at the centre of the theory. Relate this to the survival of the material in the ‘Reason’ study. Beethoven transcends culture to the exact extent that it has not comprehended him. The human in the inhuman world as the barbaric. – Precisely here, Beethoven’s superiority to ‘classical idealism’.-Bring together the idea of music’s standing fast with that of its becoming corporeal [cf. fr. 263]. Does not music perhaps stand firm against fate precisely in becoming fate? Is not imitation the canon of resistance? I have said that the Fifth and Ninth stand firm through looking-in-the-eye. Is that not still too little? Does not the Fifth stand firm through taking-into-itself? Does not gaining-power-over-oneself, freedom, lie only in imitation, in making-oneself-similar? Is not that the meaning of the Fifth, rather than the feeble peraspera ad astra? Is this not altogether the theory of the ‘poetic idea’, and at the same time the law of the connection between technique and idea? Is not new light shed from here on programme music? To explain why the first movement of the Fifth is better than the rest.-Where the theory of standing firm is developed I should refer to Hegel’s Ästhetik, for example, I, 62-4. – Also cf. Hölderlin’s xenium on Sophocles.-Kant’s concept of the dynamically sublime in the Critique of Judgment, Beethoven and the category of standing firm. Quote.-One of the major categories in Beethoven is that of serious significance [der Ernstfall], of being no longer mere play. This tone – which almost always results from a rising to the level of form – did not exist before him. He is at his mightiest where the traditional form still holds good and seriousness breaks through – for example, the close of the slow movement of the G major Concerto, the opening motif below the stationary E [bars 64-7]. Also the great G minor chord in the first movement of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, before the start of the recapitulation [bar 324].-On the category of seriousness, apart from the passage in the slow movement of the G major Piano Concerto, the G minor triad (rather: the fourth degree of the subdominant key) before the recapitulation in the first movement of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata. Necessity arising from below.

P170
On the category of seriousness, the shrouding in clouds, the darkening of the stationary chords below the violin part in the first movement of op.59,1. – This long and important movement is very close to the formal idea of the Eroica: the second development contains s new theme which is conceived from the outset as a counterpoint. But it is probably related more to the opening material. This may help an understanding of the Eroica. – The coda, the weightless floating away, one of the most magnificent characters in Beethoven. – The changing interpretation of the theme as on and off the upbeat. The whole quartet is one of the most central pieces in Beethoven, the slow movement the absolute Adagio, one of the key pieces. NB: In the D♭ major passage of its development, the extra bar before the entry of D♭ major before the new melody begins; also the E♭ of the second violin over its cadencing [bars 70f], the immanence of protest. -It will be necessary in identifying expression in Beethoven to interpret minute variants like that in the second theme of the Adagio of op.31,2, where the syncopation appears [bars 36]. It causes the theme to ‘speak’, in just the same way as something extra-human-starlight – seems to bend towards the human being as solace. It is the sign of yieldingness – just as transcendence is presented as something invoked (but then demonically entreated) in Beethoven. The expression ‘humanized star’ in a poem by Däubler comes very close to this. This sphere, and its symbols, are especially relevant to the great Leonore Overture. -The connection of the ethical to natural beauty (cf. note on music as natural beauty in the green leather-bound notebook). That the solace and assuagement of a natural expression appears as a promise of goodness. The gesture of nature as good; the remoteness of nature, sensuous infinity, as idea. The decisive dialectical category which is relevant here is that of hope, the key to the image of humanity. On the E major adagio of the Fidelio aria.-Hope and star: Fidelio aria and second theme from the slow movement of the D minor Piano Sonata op.31.-P171Hope and star. Nohl, vol, p.354 (as reported by Schindler), where a comment by Beethoven on the funeral march in the Eroica after Napoleon’s death is recorded: ‘Yes, in interpreting this movement he went further, claiming to see in the motif of the middle theme in C major the shining of a start of hope on Napolen’s adverse fate, his reappearance on the political stage in 1815, and the mighty decision in the hero’s soul to oppose the fates’ (NB: Star. Hope against fate!), ‘until the moment of capitulation comes, the hero sinks to the ground and is buried like any mortal.’-The character of the ‘star’: in the second theme of the Adagio of op.31,2; in the D♭ major passage in the Adagio of op.59,1; at the start of the trio in the funeral march of the Eroica, and in Fidelio. This character then disappears. Are its heirs the short song-like themes in the A♭ major Piano Sonata op.110, in the B♭ major and F major Quartets [opp. 130 and 135], and the Arietta [of op.111]?-Text 6: The Truth Content of Beethoven’s MusicThe claim that the metaphysical content of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Quartet op.59, no.1, must be true provokes the objection that what is true in it is the longing, but that that fades powerlessly into nothingness. If, in response, it were insisted that there is no yearning expressed in that D♭ passage, the assertion would have an obviously apologetic ring that could well be met by the objection that precisely because it appears as if it were true it must be a work of longing, and art as a whole must be nothing but this. The rejoinder would be to reject the argument as drawn from the arsenal of vulgar subjective reason. The automatic reductio ad hominem is too pat, too easy, to be an adequate explaination of what objectively appears. It is cheap to present these too facile measures, simply because they have rigorous negativity on their side, as illusionless depth, whereas capitulation vis-á-vis evil implies identification with it. For it is deaf to the phenomenon. The power of the passage in Beethoven is precisely its distance from the subject; it is this that bestows on those measures the stamp of truth. What was once called the ‘authentic’ [echt] in art – a word still used by Nietzsche though now unsalvageable – sought to indicate this diatance.-P172The spirit if artworks is not their meaning and not their intention, but rather their truth content, or, in other words, the truth that is revealed through them. The second theme of the Adagio of Beethoven’s D-minor Sonata, op.31, no.2, is not simply a beautiful melody – there are certainly more buoyant, better formed, and even more original melodies than this one – nor is it distinguished by exceptional expressivity. Nevertheless, the introduction of this theme belongs to what is overwhelming in Beethoven’s music and that could be called the spirit of his music: hope, with an authenticity [Authentizität] that – as something that appears aesthetically – it bears even beyond aesthetic semblance. What is beyond the semblance of what appears is the aesthetic truth content: that aspect of semblance that is not semblance. The truth content is no more the factual reality of an artwork, no more one fact among others in an artwork, than it is independent from its appearance. The first thematic complex of that movement, which is of extraordinary, eloquent beauty, is a masterfully wrought mosaic of contrasting shapes that are motivically coherent even when they are registrally distant. The atmosphere of this thematic complex, which earlier would have been called mood, awaits – as indeed all mood probably does – an event that only becomes an event against the foil of this mood. The F major theme follows with a rising thirty-second-note gesture. Against the dark, diffuse backdrop of what preceded, the accompanied upper voice that characterizes the second theme acquires its dual character of reconciliation and promise. Nothing transcends without that which transcends. The truth content is mediated by way of, not outside of, the configuration, but it is not immanent to the configuration and its elements. This is probably what crystallized as the idea of all aesthetic mediation. It is that in artworks by which they participate in their truth content. The pathway of mediation is construable in the structure of artworks, that is, in their technique. Knowledge of this leads to the objectivity of the work itself, which is so to speak vouched for by the coherence of the work’s configuration. This objectivity, however, can ultimately be nothing other than the truth content. It is the task of aesthetics to trace the topography of these elements. In the authentic artwork, what is dominated – which finds expression by way of the dominating principle – is the counterpoint to the domination of what if natural or material. This dialectical relationship results in the truth content of artworks.Paralipomena to Aesthetic Theory, transl. by R. Hullot-Kentor, London, Athlone Press, 1997, pp.284-5 -P173Music is name in the state of absolute impotence; it is also the remoteness of name to meaning, and both are the same thing. The holiness of music is its purity from dominance over nature; but its history is the inevitable development of that dominance as it became master of itself; its instrumentalization cannot be separated from its assumption of meaning. – Benjamin speaks of song, which may possibly rescue the language of birds as visual art rescues that of things. But this seems to me the achievement of instruments much rather than of song; for instruments are far more like the voice of birds than are human voices. The instrument is animation : just as there is always equivalence between subjectification and reification. This is the primal phenomenon of all musical dialectics.-Gretel asked me why composers, almost without exception, cling to vocal composition despite the spiritualization of music. I tried to answer: firstly, because the transition from the vocal to the instrumental, the true spiritualization (‘subjectification’) of music through its reification, was infinitely difficult for humanity, so that composers have repeatedly, and tentatively, reversed this form of is inalienably preserved in all instrumental music. Here we should not think only of the ‘vocal’ flow of the instrumental melody, which in turn determines the vocal flow in the Lied, but of something much more primitive, almost anthropological. For the imagination of all music, and especially of instrumental music, is vocal. To imagine music is always to sing it inwardly: imaging it is inseparable from the physical sensation of the vocal cords, and composers take account of the ‘vocal limit’. Only angels could make music freely. These ideas must be related to Beethoven. In musical terms, humanity means: the permeation of the instrumental with spirit, reconciliation of the alienated means with the end, the subject, within the process, instead of mere humane immediacy. That is one of the innermost dialectical moments in Beethoven. The cult of the vocal against the instrumental today points precisely to the end of humanity in music. -Soul is not invariant, not an anthropological category. It is a historical gesture. Nature, having become the ego, opens its eyes as ego (not in the ego, as its regressive part) and becomes aware of itself qua ego as nature. This moment – that is, not the breakthrough of nature but its awareness of differentness – is closest to reconciliation as also to lamentation. It is, however, re-enacted by all music. It represents the act of animation, of being endowed with soul, over and over again, and the differences in the content of music are really always differences in the way this animation is meant. In the case of Beethoven, therefore, one will have to ask: What, in this sense, is meant by soul in his music?
P174
Beethoven was furious if anyone cried while listening to his music – even Goethe.‘Les Adieux’: the clatter of horses’ hooves moving away into the distance carries a greater guarantee of hope than the four Gospels.-The sonata ‘Les Adieux’, a kind of stepchild, seems to me a work of the highest rank. Its simple, crude design in terms of programme music has yet provided an impulse for extreme humanization and subjectification, as if to be human were actually to be able to read the language of post-horn, hoof clatter, heartbeat. The outward is a means of inwardness. The question how the formula can come alive, a problem very closely related to the late style (in which it is inverted: How can the living become a formula, its own concept? The late style corresponds to Hegel’s subjective logic). Above all, the first movement, in which the simplicity of tone painting shifts suddenly into metaphysics. The deceptive cadence as early as bar 2 of the indescribable introduction, which turns the fifths of the horn towards seriousness and humanity, and then especially the transition to A major, one of the most magnificent allegories of hope in Beethoven, comparable only to Fidelio (to which the whole sonata is closely related), and to the great passage from the Adagio of op.59,1. The modulation conveys the unreality, the non-being of hope. Hope is always secret, because it is not ‘there’ – it is the basic category of mysticism and the highest category of Beethoven’s metaphysics. – The introduction, as in the late style, is incorporated as material into the main movement. In the latter, above all the airborne, pulsing character of the transition, of unparalleled subjective eloquence. A wise abbreviation of the development. The lyrical nature of the movement precludes dialectical work. By contrast, the coda, in every respect one of the most enormous passages in Beethoven. The harmonic collision of the horn chords; the indescribable moving away of the coach with the fourth (the eternal attached itself precisely to this most transient moment), and then the last cadence of all, where hope disappears as into a gateway, one of Beethoven’s greatest theological intentions, comparable only to certain moments in Bach. (As in Goethe, hope in Beethoven is decisive as a secularized though not a neutralized mystical category – this phenomenon, for which in my haste I can find only the most inadequate words here, must be exactly grasped and depicted, as it is of central importance. An image of hope without the lie of religion. NB: Hope is one of the imageless images which are conveyed specifically, directly by music; that is, it is a part of music’s very language.) The second movement is interesting for its early Romantic, eloquent quality, anticipating Tristan, as well as for its rhythmical relationship to the introduction, and for the two double stanzas, but it suffers from a weak and conventional transition to the Finale. If this had been as successful as in the E♭ major Concerto, the sonata would have been the equal of the ‘Waldstein’ and the ‘Appassionata’. – The Finale is perhaps the first of those movements which seem to last for only a moment: prototype for the Seventh Symphony, intensive totality.-P175Today the experience of leavetaking no longer exists. It lies in the depths of the humane: the presence of the not-present. Hemaneness as a function of traffic condition. And: is there still hope without leavetaking? -The meaning of Beethovenian coda is no doubt that work, activity, is not everything, and that the spontaneous totality does not contain its whole meaning within itself but merely as something pointing beyond it. Movement is directed towards repose. That is one of the primal motifs of transcendence in early Beethoven. Music – spread illumined before us. Often the expression of tanks. Thanks are one of Beethoven’s great humane categories (‘Euch werde Lohn’ and the prayer of thanksgiving in the A minor Quartet [op.132, 3 rd movement]). In its thanking lies the turning backwards of music – that which most deeply distinguishes it from brisk efficiency. Beethoven’s thanking is always related to leavetaking (‘Les Adieus’, close of first movement, is one of Beethoven’s decisive metaphysical figures). – In early Beethoven the expression of thanks is quite pure ay the close of the ‘Spring’ Sonata [op.24]./ Cf. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 146. Thanks and unhappy consciousness.-The close of the Arietta variations [of op.111] has such a force of backward-looking, of leavetaking, that, as if over-illuminated by this departure, what has gone before is immeasurably enlarged. This despite the fact that the variations themselves, up to the symphonic conclusion of the last, contain scarcely a moment which could counterbalance that of leavetaking as fulfilled present – and such a moment may well be denied to music, which exists in illusion. But the true power of illusion in Beethoven’s music – of the ‘dream in stars eternal’ – is that it can invoke what has not been as something past and non-existent. Utopia is heard only as what has already been. The music’s inherent sense of form changes what has preceded the leavetaking in such a way that it takes on a greatness, a presence in the past which, within music, it could never achieve in the present.-If Rudi’s [Rudolph Kolisch’s] theory were correct, Beethoven’s work would be a gigantic puzzle composed of the same characters in kaleidoscopic permutations. That sounds mechanical and blasphemous, but Rudi’s verdict carries far too much weight to allow the possibility to be dismissed without serious thought, and the statement about the seventh chords and Beethoven’s ‘stenography’ point in the same direction. But is it not the case that the finite mind has only a limited, countable number of ideas open to it – and was it not Beethoven’s whole art to conceal this very fact? Was the inexhaustibility of his ideas finally one with aesthetic illusion? Is not, perhaps, the infinite – metaphysics – precisely that which is contrived in art, and therefore not, as I always would like to think, the guarantor of truth but a phantasm, and all the more so the higher the art-work is ? Perhaps only an irrationalist aesthetic would answer Rudi’s theory – but in truth it touches on the frontiers of art itself. Also in this connection, Max [Horkheimer]’s criticism of Rembrandt, the element of the ‘posed’, of the studio, in his work, too.-Beethoven. If one can speak of the middle phase as the metaphysics of tragedy – the totality of negations as a position, the affirmation of what is, in its recurrence, as meaning – then the late phase is a critique of tragedy as illusion. However, this moment is teleologically prepared in the middle phase, in that the meaning is not present but is invoked by the emphatic nature of the music; and just this is the mythical stratum in Beethoven. The centerpiece of his construction.-Beethoven and the doctrine of the Cabbala, according to which evil arose from the excess of divine power. (Gnostic motif.)-On the metaphysics of musical time. Relate the end of my study to the teaching of Jewish mysticism about the grass angels, who are created for an instant only to perish in the sacred fire. Music – mod – elled on the glorification of God, even, and especially, when it opposes the world – resembles these angels. Their very transience, their ephemerality, is glorification. That is, the incessant destruction of nature. Beethoven raised this figure to musical self-consciousness. His truth is the destruction of the particular. He composed to its end the absolute transience of music. The fire which, according to his stricture against weeping, is to be struck from a man’s soul, is ‘the fire which consumes [nature]’ (Scholem, chapter on the Zohar, p.86). Cf. Scholem, 85f.