In Hegel's Phenomenology we encounter at one point the disconcerting phrase 'fury of disappearance.' Webern's work converted this into his angel....His music tends to recede, but its center of gravity is located in the fact that it does not pursue its idea of pure expression in isolation. Instead it follows it into the heart of the musical shape, elaborating and articulating it to the point where it is capable of becoming pure expression. The whole of Webern's work revolves around the paradox of total construction as a means of achieving immediate utterance."
"But at the same time, Webern also resembles Klee in his rejection of abstraction. His expressivity does not correspond to what is meant by abstract painting, or to what is commonly condemned as abstract in music: he realizes the idea of desensualization in a sensuous way. Webern's musical minimalism is founded on the expressive requirement that excludes any independent phenomenon that is not at the same time expressive. This economy comes to influence expression itself -- to the point of silence. It is for this that he finally shows understanding. The absolute voice of the soul, which enables it to become conscious of itself as mere nature, is a simile in his music for the moment of death."
"What Schopenhauer says of human life holds good for Wagner's sound, which occupies the same place in the latter's work: 'Certainly human life like all shoddy goods, is covered over with a false lustre: what suffers always conceals itself.' And this remains true even when it gives expression to suffering."
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"Works of art owe their existence to the division of labour in society, the separation of physical and mental labour. At the same time, they have their own roots in existence; their medium is not pure mind, but the mind that enters into reality and, by virtue of such movement, is able to maintain the unity of what is divided. It is this contradiction that forces works of art to make us forget that they have been made. The claim implicit in their existence and hence, too, the claim that existence has a meaning, is hte more convincing, the less they contain to remind us that they have been made, and that they owe their being to something external to themselves, namely to a mental process. Art that is no longer able to perpetrate this deception with good conscience has implicitly destroyed the only element in which it can thrive. This is the case with Wagner: he has lost his good conscience, but nevertheless his art refuses to relinquish the claim that it is part of existence in itself. In consequence it is forced to exaggerate that claim and over-emphasize the natural character of his work the more, as aesthetic naturalness gives way to reflection and artifice."
"It would be rewarding to examine the heaps of rubbish, detritus and filth upon which the works of major artists appear to be erected, and to which they still owe something of their character, even though they have just managed to escape by the skin of their teeth. Shadowing Schubert is the figure of the tavern gambler, with Chopin it is the frequenter of salons, a type very hard to pin down; with Schumann it is the chromolithograph and with Brahms, the music professor. Their productive energies have asserted themselves cheek by jowl with their parodies, and their greatness lies in the minute distance that separates them from these models from which at the same time they draw collective energies. It is not so easy to discover a model for Wagner. But the chorus of indignation that greeted Thomas Mann when he let fall the word 'dilettante' in connection to Wagner suggests that he touched a raw nerve."
"A contradiction of all autonomous art is the concealment of the labour that went into it but in high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of exchange-value and with the contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time. This is the objective explanation for what is generally thought of in psychological terms as Wagner's mendacity. To make works of art into magical objects means that men worship their own labour because they are unable to recognize it as such.
No listener should be burdened with acquaintance with concepts that don’t inhere in what he listens to; concepts that don’t present themselves to him as mediated through the concrete structure. But the anti-intellectualism to which the old aesthetics of pure intuition has been reduced in the intellectual economy of the comfortable consumer won’t let itself be satisfied at that. Such anti-intellectualism gets itself annoyed at even the first sign of the synthesis of what appears sensuously. It is through this synthesis that the latter first becomes art at all; in it reception converges with the law of form. Anti-intellectualism tells itself that such effort would rob it of the enjoyment that it demands of art as something to be occupied with during free time. While, at least in ideology, it won’t do without the cultural concept of art as a spiritual matter—for why else listen to serious music?—it wordlessly defends its supposed naïvety with the idea that the intellectual moment is the expression of a feeling, and is always present in the singular sensual moment in time; it need do nothing more than nothing at all: than surrender to that which pleasantly flows over it. But there it deceives itself. In music, as in every art-form, that which the language of philosophy calls sensual and categorial moments are in each other. If the stubborn naïve listener is right that art tolerates nothing intellectual that does not appear sensually, then contrariwise the sensual itself already has an intellectual destiny. It is an illuminated window, and it has the light to thank even for sensual beauty. The perception of the sensual now and here is a function of structural perception, of the turn to the whole, and this is more than just intuition.
The whole becomes, the sum of all relations, those of succession and also of simultaneity; because music takes place in time, is not already there at an isolated point in time, the structure is not present for the listener as something primary either. It is only a result, and the sense something mediated. That is why the comportment towards music that hopes to receive everything exclusively from the sensual moment in time is insufficient. And yet the totality of the work’s relations, in which the temporal tensions balance each other out, may lift it up out of time’s stream, and the pure time-art do away with time...For time to halt, as the image of the end of all transience, is the ideal of music, of the experience of it and also of musical instruction. This ideal is an ideal of insights, but not of any insight about art, but rather that insight which art itself is, as the correlate to the scientific: knowledge from within.
If four-handed playing has meanwhile fallen silent, then we cannot rightly be surprised. One hardly comes across novels of seduced piano pupils and seducing piano teachers in conservatoriums any more; the trots and gallops of the four-handed piano-equipages — with the rhythmically nodding heads of two good horses bringing their illustrious Mozart and their dignified Brahms proudly, if riskily, to the goal — will, in the world of automobiles with radios and gramophones, be equally rare. Four-handed playing has become a gesture of remembrance, and only few live — certainly amongst musicians — who practice its out-moded art. But one must needs think that some works that sound out vainly through powerful orchestral exertions will only reveal themselves to the shy gesture of remembrance, which shares with them the secret: to have a part in the life of society as a humane human being. If solitary ones, who have no listeners to hope for, and no reason to fear any, were on occasion to make an essay at four-handed playing, then it would not be their loss. Ultimately a child, too, will be found, who will turn the pages for them.
"In immersing oneself in Berg's music one feels at times as though Berg's voice were speaking in a tone combining gentleness, nihilism, and intimate trust to the point of utter enervation: 'Oh well, in the end, it's all really nothing.' Under an analytic gaze this music completely dissolves, as if it contained no solid components. It vanishes even while still in its apparently fixed, objectified aggregate state."
"Wagner, who was the first to compose essentially chromatically, defined composition as the art of transition. ... From that Berg developed a stylistic manner he pursued almost to the point of idiosyncrasy. He fused the art of thematic manipulation, of strict motivic economy, which he had acquired under Schoenberg's tutelage, with the principle of continuous transition. His music cultivates a favorite technique, probably dating back to the time of his studies: from each theme a remnant [ein Rest] is retained, even smaller, until finally only a vanishingly small vestige remains;not only does the theme establish its own insubstantiality, but the formal interrelationships between successive sections are woven together with infinitesimal care."
"...the urge to vanish seizes [Berg's] music itself, which relinquishes claim to an independent world of ideas. Despite a completely different technical approach, Berg is in this respect related to his friend Webern, whose miniatures are just as intent upon falling silent as the large Bergian forms are upon self-negation."
"The more deeply works of art become engrossed by the idea of harmony, of appearing essence, the less they can feel content with it. It is hardly an over-generalization or a misuse of philosophy of history to say that such divergent phenomena as the antiharmonistic postures of Michelangelo, of the mature Rembrandt and Beethoven are all attributable to the inner development of the concept of harmony and in the last analysis to its insufficiency. ... Dissonance is the truth about harmony."
"...in the abandonment of the illusion of harmony, there is an expression of hope. In Beethoven's late style this hope flourished very close to the margin of renunciation, and yet is not renunciation. And I would think that this difference between resignation and renunciation is the whole secret of these pieces. I should like to illustrate this with a few bars. The dying hand -- for all this really is bound up with death -- releases what it had previously clutched fast, shaped, controlled, so that what is released becomes its highest truth. To gain a certain impression of this, listen to a short passage from the cavatina from the Quartet in B-flat major op 130."
"The music in which we are still immediately living -- and it does begin with Bach, after all -- labors from its inception under an internal difficulty, a contradiction. On the one hand it is tied into a system, the system of triads, keys,and their relationships. On the other hand, the subject is trying to express itself in it; instead of every norm that is merely imposed externally, it wants to generate the regularities from within. Certainly, one must not understand the relationship between tonality and composition, between the system that held sway, more or less, for 350 years and subjectivity solely as contradiction. tonality evolved ever more over the course of the centuries as a result of the subject's need for expression. It changed so much that in terms of the individual harmonic events, for example, the step from the boldest part's of Strauss's Elektra to Schoenberg appears quite small. At the same time, tonality has also determined the impulses of composers. The most powerful formal types that music has crystallized out of itself, and in which it has found fulfillment, the fugue and the sonata, are generated by tonality down to the most intimate details. Despite this, the great composers, in particular, have always felt dissatisfaction with the external, compulsory moment in music, which imposed constraints on what they themselves actually wanted. The greatest fully polyphonic works of Bach, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Art of Fugue, and individual pieces from The Musical Offering, bear witness to this dissatisfaction. For this reason, Bach drew on the polyphonic arts of the medieval Low Countries, which were already archaic in his era, in order to overcome the gravity of the schema by dint of the complete integration of all the voices, as it appears in his work even in the dance movements; so that the music, as it were, owes nothing to anything except what it itself is, here and now."
"Now, the event in the case of Schoenberg is nothing else than the break through of the subcutaneous, that what it is inside is turned out. This explains why the effort of Schoenberg, and the effort of his listeners, are needed. Artistic invention cannot, in the long run, stand to orient itself according to two concurrent sets of laws that are always growing farther apart, the external, traditional one, and its own. It strives to forge what has been imposed externally, which was by no means meaningless and accidental, but which gradually paled, into something entirely internal. Already in Bach, certainly in Beethoven, the balance was precarious, and the abysses of the latest Beethoven are those of the irreconcilability of the two principles. It convinced Beethoven ultimately to forego the appearance of reconciliation and instead to oppose the bedrock of tonality with the enlivening subjective elements starkly and in an unmediated way. In Schoenberg, however, who bore within himself the entire heritage of romanticism, subjective differentiation and above all the urge to let pass only those things that he was able to fill entirely from within himself have become extreme...The overwhelming compulsion to express himself refused to allow him, as it refused to allow his contemporaries, the expressionists, any compromise with the traditional schema....Schoenberg literally experiences the external musical structure as a false façade, and it has to fall, in order for what is functionally necessary to become audible."
"Vor Schuberts Musik stürzt die Träne aus dem Auge, ohne erst die Seele zu befragen: so unbildlich und real fällt sie in uns ein." / "
"In unregelmäßigen Zügen, einem Seismographen gleich, hat Schuberts Musik die Botschaft von der qualitativen Veränderung des Menschen notiert. Ihr antwortet zurecht das Weinen: Weinen der ärmsten Sentimentalität im Dreimäderlhaus nicht anders als das Weinen aus erschüttertem Leib. Vor Schuberts Musik stürzt die Träne aus dem Auge, ohne erst die Seele zu befragen: so unbildlich und real fällt sie in uns ein. Wir weinen, ohne zu wissen warum; weil wir so noch nicht sind, wie jene Musik es verspricht, und im unbenannten Glück, daß sie nur so zu sein braucht, dessen uns zu versichern, daß wir einmal so sein werden. Wir können sie nicht lesen; aber dem schwindenden, überfluteten Auge hält sie vor die Chiffren der endlichen Versöhnung.
"In irregular movements, like a seismograph, Schubert's music has registered the message of the qualitative change in man. One answers it rightly with weeping: the weeping of the poorest sentimentality of Das Dreimäderlhaus and the weeping of the shaken body alike. Before Schubert's music the tear streams from the eye without first asking the soul: so unpainterly and real does it strike us. We weep without knowing why; because we are not yet as this music promises, and in the unnameable bliss of knowing that it [the music] only needs to be so to reassure us that we one day will become so. We cannot read them, but the fading, overflowing eye pauses before ciphers of eventual reconciliation."
"Ask the musician if the music is a pleasure, the reply is likely to be -- as in the American joke of the grimacing cellist under Toscanini -- "I just hate music." For him who has a genuine relation to art, in which he himself vanishes, art si not an object; deprivation of art would be unbearable for him, yet he does not consider individual works sources of joy. Incontestably, no one would devote himself to art without -- as the bourgeois put it -- getting something out of it; yet this is not true in the sense that a balance sheet could be drawn up: 'heard the Ninth Symphony tonight, enjoyed myself so and so much' even though such feeble0mindedness has by now established itself as common sense. The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better."
"Yet since the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of high capitalism, the category of the new has been central, though admittedly in conjunction with the question whether anything new had ever existed. Since that moment no artwork has succeeded that rebuffed the ever fluctuating concept of the modern. Works that thought they would save themselves from the problematic attributed to the modern only accelerated their demise. Even a composer as immune to the charge of modernism as Anton Bruckner, would not have attained his most important achievements had he not worked with the most advanced material of his period, Wagner's harmony, which he then of course paradoxically transformed. His symphonies pose the question how the old is after all still possible, which is to say as something new; the question testifies to the irresistibility of the modern, whereas the 'after all' is already something false, which the conservatives could deride as something incoherent."
"The coda [of the first movement of Les Adieux], 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 attaches 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...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 flagging of energy to be found in Schubert and Schumann is the price exacted for the attempted transcendence of form. More form is less. This flagging -- in Schubert the unfinished works, in Schumann the mechanical element -- is the first manifestation of the decay of music as an objective language. The language falls breathlessly behind the moment invoked, or its empty shell."
"The human in Beethoven is linked to tact, as it is in the old Goethe. 'O dass ich dir nicht lohnen kann.' Schumann is tactless; if he cannot reward, he gives himself instead. And still falls short of Beethoven by making things too easy between himself and the world."
"If one wakes up in the middle of a dream, even the most troubling, one is disappointed and feels as if one had been cheated of what is best. Yet there are as few happy, fulfilled dreams as, in Schubert’s words, happy music. Even the most beautiful ones retain the blemish of their difference from reality, the consciousness of the mere appearance [Schein] of what they grant. That is why even the most beautiful dreams are somehow damaged."
"In Beethoven everything can become anything, because it 'is' nothing; in Romanticism everything can represent anything, because it is individuated."
"On the relationship between Beethoven and Romanticism: Euripides is accused (by Mommsen) of 'slovenliness' in his manner of tying the dramatic knot in the prologue and untying it by divine intervention. What happened after Beethoven is analogous, while Schoenberg leads the attempted reconstruction."
"Only Beethoven dared to compose as he wanted: that, too, is a part of his uniqueness. And it was, perhaps, the misfortune of the Romanticism which followed that it no longer faced the tension between the permitted and the intended: this is a position of weakness. Now, they could dream only what was allowed. Wagner."
"We do not understand music -- it understands us. This is as true for the musician as for the layman. When we think ourselves closest to it, it speaks to us and waits sad-eyed for us to answer."
"On my childhood image of Beethoven: I thought the 'Hammerklavier' sonata must be an especially easy piece, associating it with toy pianos with little hammers. I imagined it had been written for one of those. My disappointment when I could not play it."
"The difficulty of any musical analysis lies in the fact that the more the piece is dissected into its smallest units, the closer one comes to mere sound, and all music consists of mere sounds. The most specific thus becomes the most general, abstract in the wrong sense. But if this detailed analysis is omitted, the connections elude us. Dialectical analysis is an attempt to sublate [aufheben] each danger in the other."
"[In late Beethoven] the compulsion of identity [of precondition and result, subject and object] is broken and the conventions are its fragments. The music speaks the language of the archaic, of children, of savages and of God, but not of the individual. All categories of the late Beethoven are challenges to idealism -- almost to 'spirit'. Autonomy is no more."
"Beethoven's polyphony is in the most literal sense an expression of the waning belief in harmony. It presents the totality of the alienated world. -- Much music by the late Beethoven sounds as if someone, alone, were gesticulating and mumbling to himself."