Thinking Musically: Music and Philosophy at the Crossroads of Adorno’s Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George

Despite abundant scholarship on Theodor W. Adorno’s theoretical writings, his musical compositions have been largely overlooked. This article uses the example of his 1944 song cycle Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George to argue that Adorno’s music stands in dialectical relation to his philosophy. The German symbolist poet Stefan George is given pride of place not only in Adorno’s compositions but also in his writings: he returned to George as a subject four times over the course of three decades. It is argued here that Adorno brought two seminal aspects of his work together musically decades before he rendered them in prose, placing George at their intersection: his theory of the relationship between music and language, and his theory of the lyric. Answering Adorno’s call for the listener to become a “compositional partner” in making sense of his music, I use his own methods of interpretation to examine how music serves as an alternative means of cognition to philosophical. I begin with an immanent analysis, examining the structure of each song and its relationship to the cycle as a whole without recourse to Adorno’s philosophy. I then outline his theoretical explanation of both music and lyric before reinterpreting the cycle in light of the dialectic between subject and object that he discusses. Finally, I propose that the sociological critique that Adorno did not fix in prose arises from the interplay between music and language within the 1944 cycle, giving voice to the social context from which it arose.