ABSTRACT
By age twenty-five, Adorno had been publishing commentaries on music, specifically, performance reviews of concerts and operas in Frankfurt, for seven years. His “Schubert” essay, however, was something entirely new and different: a sustained, if still brief, foray that attempts to make sense of the œuvre of a major composer. Adorno’s essay is evidently inorganic, at least as regards conventional scholarship; it surveys an acoustic landscape that is in turn internalized: philosophically, subjectively, formally. Adorno listens to the familiar otherness of Schubert and finds mutuality, empathy. From childhood, Adorno was deeply attuned to the natural world; the metaphor of landscape in reference to Schubert’s music is for him a declaration of love. Adorno repeatedly invoked his early thoughts about Schubert and Schubert’s music, although often via an admiration tinged with the shadow of critique regarding what Schubert’s music “wasn’t”.
