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  • “An All-Too-Secret Wagner”:Ernst Bloch the Wagnerian
  • Adrian Daub (bio)

Theodor Adorno’s essay on Ernst Bloch’s Spuren (Traces) (1930; repr. 1959) is a review somewhere between grudging deference and parody. Even when Adorno seems to attack Bloch, there’s a note of admiration; and even when he praises Bloch, the praise seems laced with irony. He writes of Bloch’s “charlatanism” but then grants that this charlatanism invites in those “whom the high philosophy of idealism keeps locked out.” Adorno doesn’t intend this statement as a criticism. Bloc Noten zur Literatur h opens philosophical discourse to contents that are usually banished from them ex cathedra; and Bloch doesn’t open it up by ignoring idealism but rather by seizing onto the remains of idealism’s decomposition: “There remains from the totality of German Idealism a kind of noise, and Bloch, musically minded and Wagnerian, lets [that noise] intoxicate him.”1

Bloch the Wagnerian: that’s Adorno’s formula for explaining Bloch’s musical sensitivity to the “noise” that constitutes the reverberations of idealism. It too is a double-edged characterization: Bloch surrenders to “intoxication,” he has, as Adorno writes later, “as little patience for technical-musical logic as for aesthetic preference.”2 But it is this “Wagnerian” intoxication that primes Bloch’s ears for the late echoes of German idealism. When it comes to Bloch’s thinking, “Wagner,” as Adorno would have it, doesn’t mean an individual composer but rather a form of perception. Bloch’s reception is “intoxicated,” free of “technical-musical logic”; he hasn’t freely chosen it: this intoxication has found him, and he has surrendered to it. Bloch certainly understood Adorno’s essay as an attack. In 1963 he wrote to congratulate Adorno on his sixtieth birthday, and even though the tone was conciliatory Bloch couldn’t resist referring to “your scorn [Hohn] about the ‘Great Blochmusik,’ which wasn’t worthy of you.”3

The point of this article is not to assess whether Adorno’s critique of Bloch’s style of thinking and writing, or Bloch’s pique over the same, were justified. Instead I will focus on the centrality that Adorno assigns to music in general and to Wagner specifically in Bloch’s thinking. After all, while Adorno’s essay puns on the German Blechmusik to impute to Bloch’s thinking a kind of general musicality, he [End Page 188] gets far more specific when he qualifies that musicality as “Wagnerian.” And here Adorno was almost certainly right—music was as central to Bloch’s thinking as it was for Adorno.4 But Adorno’s essay gets more particular yet: in identifying Bloch’s “intoxication” with Wagner, the far more sober Adorno points to what most centrally distinguishes these two Marxist aestheticians’ take on art, on music, and on Wagner. Adorno knows and studies Wagner; Bloch is a Wagnerian.

For both Adorno and Bloch, Wagner was an early and formative musical touchstone—they came of age as musical listeners and performers in a world still very much shaped by the Meister from Bayreuth. Bloch began writing about Wagner as soon as he began publishing, and his fascination with the composer remained a mainstay. Nevertheless, his relationship to Wagner was that of a knowledgeable amateur. He quotes the librettos like someone with dog-eared Reclam editions on his bookshelf, he points to passages he knows from regularly attending performances. We know that Bloch not only assimilated Wagner in Bayreuth but also played through his works at the piano—which emerges fairly clearly from his musical examples.5

This way of approaching Wagner left its traces in his works. In his earliest larger-scale essay on Wagner, “Rettung Wagners durch surrealistische Kolportage,” Bloch describes an “instructive” experience for understanding the composer, that of a boy who “had to make it through six hours of Wagner’s Ring.”6 Adorno too relies on autobiographical notes to explore a work of music, but he generally avoids such moves in the case of Wagner. Adorno grew up “in the sphere of Richard Wagner” just as much as Bloch, but he seems to have been at pains to keep references to this autobiographical cathexis...

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