Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (Verso Classics) - Hardcover

"This is an extraordinary book ... one of Adorno's most impressive, fecund and elegant works. Readers who may feel intimidated by Adorno's reputation for obscurity should find this book (with its superbly assured and unobtrusive translation by Rodney Livingstone) a welcome surprise ... It will appeal to anyone who wishes to encounter one of the century's most challenging and provocative social theorists at his most openly enthusiastic."--Graham McCann, "Times Higher Education Supplement"

"Quasi Una Fantasia" contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or his monograms on Berg, Mahler and Wagner. Its themes and references range from Mozart to Boulez, the minuet to the jitterbug. At the book's core are studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Zemlinsky and Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno's "dialectical portrait" of Stravinsky, in which he refines the damning indictment he gave in "Philosophy of Modern Music". In "Vers une musique informelle" he plots a course for a music of the future" which could take up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom". More unexpecedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, such as Bizet's "Carmen" and Weber's "Der Freischutz", along with "Natural History of the Theatre", which explores the rituals and hierarchies of the auditorium, from dress circle to foyer. Musical kitsch, be it Gounod's "Ave Maria" or the "Penny Serenade", is the target of several of the shorter pieces. Yet even while Adorno demolishes "commodity music" he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it.