ABSTRACT
Theodor W. Adorno worked for 18 years on his Ludwig van Beethoven project, leaving it unfinished at his death. Hence he never completed his demonstration, in a kind of lament for a utopia "that has already been", of how the music of Beethoven's late period expressed the loss of an entire bourgeois musical tradition. The distorted version of Beethoven's Lebewohl motive that opens the Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano functions partly as a formal announcement that, on the eve of his 60th birthday, Gyorgy Ligeti had the "courage to be old-fashioned". Ligeti's trio begins with an Andante con tenerezza whose gently weaving lines and arpeggiated horn melody recall the Andante of Johannes Brahms's Trio Op. 40, even as their contrapuntal relationship alludes to the Adagio mesto. While Brahms used only one crook, Ligeti requires several to achieve harmonic glissandi in different keys that push even more forcefully against the boundaries of equal temperament.
