In Search of Wagner by Theodor W. Adorno

As the leitmotif recurs, it creates a dramatic thread throughout the work that accumulates further meaning as it appears in new contexts and in combination with other motifs. So, as the audience becomes familiar with these musical ideas and their implications, it enables Wagner to subliminally link past or future ideas and emotional states to the drama occurring in the present. Wagner himself described the motives as ‘emotional guideposts through the whole labyrinthine edifice of the drama’ (in his work Opera and Drama) and this quotation demonstrates that Wagner acknowledged the complexity of the musical dramas he created and the effect for the listener. In In Search of Wagner, Adorno wrote that Wagner’s leitmotivic style of composition created repetitive, atemporal music and in turn, linked these compositional practices to sociological categories of listening.

In Search of Wagner is a book that must be understood in the context of its zeitgeist and particularly, Adorno’s experience of fascism and anti-Semitism. In the preface of the book, Adorno describes its subject—Wagner—as ‘classic of the Third Reich’ (Adorno, Search, 504). However Adorno’s criticism of Wagner does not approach the political, but attempts to invalidate Wagner’s music in order to make a wider philosophical argument about about fascism and its associated art. Primarily, in this book Adorno is concerned with the dialectical relationship between art and society and between Wagner's music and the larger social order within which it functions.

As with most of Adorno's writings on music, In Search of Wagner overrides traditional forms of music criticism, where scientific analyses can tend to prevail. Much of Adorno's analyses of music relates music back to socie...

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...e. Adorno sees the repetitive leitmotivs in opposition to structured, temporal musical forms whereas Berg ‘following the impulse of his creative strength…never lost sight of the totality of the musical whole’ despite the wholesale reworking of the traditional sonata form.’ (Adorno, Berg, 53).

In conclusion, Adorno views the sociological impact of the musical work as a crucial component of his critical writings. Through his analysis of Wagner, Adorno is able to ascertain the commodification of art as arising from aesthetic modernism itself. Adorno’s reception of Wagner has received critical attention from scholars in various disciplines and many musicologists disagree with Adorno’s combination of aesthetic and ideological criticisms – although ironically this method mirrors Adorno's argument that in the artwork aesthetics and ideology are inseparably intertwined.