Before becoming a famous critic of culture, Adorno trained as a composer under Alban Berg
Theodor Adorno is remembered as a sharp-tongued philosopher of the Frankfurt School, but he first wanted to write music. As a boy he played Beethoven by twelve; in 1925 he moved to Vienna to study composition with Alban Berg, who predicted his pupil's musical insight would one day yield great philosophy.
Named Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund at birth in Frankfurt on 11 September 1903, he was the sole child of a Corsican-born Catholic singer who had performed at the imperial court in Vienna and an assimilated Jewish wine exporter who had converted to Protestantism. His mother wanted her surname in his, so early publications read Wiesengrund-Adorno; the Wiesengrund was dropped when he applied for American citizenship. His aunt, a singer and pianist, lived with the family.
As a teenager he read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on Saturday afternoons with the critic Siegfried Kracauer and later said he learned more from those sessions than from his professors. The eagerness with which leading German intellectuals such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel backed the First World War left him and friends like Walter Benjamin deeply distrustful of inherited authority.
He studied philosophy at Frankfurt while publishing concert reviews that championed the avant-garde yet mocked failures, calling a Stravinsky piece a dismal Bohemian prank in 1923. In Vienna he met the satirist Karl Kraus and the Marxist theorist Lukács. His own pieces, some in strict twelve-tone technique, were performed in Vienna and Berlin. His first attempt at a habilitation, in 1927, was withdrawn on his supervisor's advice.
During the Second World War he lived in California in exile, advising Thomas Mann on the music in the novel Doctor Faustus and working on studies of authoritarianism and propaganda. Books such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics attacked fascism and what he called the culture industry, and inspired the European New Left. Back in Frankfurt he debated Karl Popper and criticised Heidegger. He died on 6 August 1969, and his Aesthetic Theory appeared the following year.
Source: Theodor W. Adorno
