ABSTRACT
Adorno never wrote a systematic history of music, but the main trends, if not the extensive story of modern musical developments, can easily be reconstructed from his writings. Adorno’s sociological explanation is perhaps too traditional, linking Beethoven with so-called heroic period of the bourgeoisie, totally neglecting the new, the Jacobin features in him, both in his tyrannically totalizing attitudes towards the soloist instrument, a frequent feature of the piano concertos, and in his gigantic wrestling with anonymous and blind powers, those which had been called by Saint-Just in his dramatic speech in Ventose la force des choses, the power of circumstances, which governs human destinies. In Adorno’s Essay on Wagner the composer’s work is characterized as the musical precursor of Fascism, the whole idea of Bayreuth and its popular musical festivity as the forerunner of later Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, his musical drama as a construct, the distinctive features of which are those of megalomania of Fascist festivities: pompousness and propagandists self-advertisement.
