Herbert von Karajan directing Verdi’s Messa da Requiem in Milan’s La Scala theater. Aired in West Germany on November 26, 1967.
From an interview in Der Spiegel (February 26, 1968).
DER SPIEGEL
Professor Adorno, you as soon as dismissed radio live shows as empty strumming and chirping. Does this characterization likewise apply to the performances of baroque concertos, classical symphonies, lots, and operas which are ever extra continuously out there for listening to and viewing on the primary and second tv channels? Is it doable to current an enough efficiency of music on tv?
THEODOR ADORNO
As an optical medium, tv is to a sure extent intrinsically alien to music, which is actually acoustic. From the outset, the know-how of tv events a sure displacement of consideration that’s disadvantageous to music. Basically music exists to be heard and to not be seen. Now one can definitely say that there are particular trendy items by which the optical side additionally has a sure significance. However no less than within the case of conventional music—
SPIEGEL
Clearly on German tv—other than the third channels—solely conventional music is carried out …
ADORNO
—within the case of conventional music there’s something unseemly about the entire thing, an unseemliness naturally occasioned by the truth that by analogy with its counterpart in radio, a chunk of equipment just like the television-production course of has received to be continuously fed, that one thing has received to be getting continuously stuffed into the sausage machine. On the entire I imagine that the very act of performing music on tv entails a sure displacement that’s detrimental to musical focus and the significant expertise of music.
SPIEGEL
We don’t imagine that the receptive capability of shoppers of tv is totally engrossed by the optical component. Don’t you assume that the medium of tv can be acoustically stimulating?
ADORNO
I not at all want to deny that the medium of tv can be acoustically stimulating, and even that its optical procedures can have sure advantages for music. Maybe I can make clear this with an instance: my late instructor Alban Berg was at all times toying with the seemingly fairly paradoxical thought of getting Wozzeck, which actually is among the final operas in a strict sense, made into a movie, not, to make sure, out of something like a need to interrupt into the so-called mass media—he had completely no real interest in issues like that—however as a result of he believed that by filming the work one might make its musical occasions extra malleable, so to talk, than is the case in regular opera performances. For instance, by means of the strategies of the roving microphone, which in fact correspond to the altering digicam positions within the movie, one might convey out the primary voice at any given time extra meaningfully, extra malleably, than was doable in an bizarre opera efficiency in Berg’s opinion.
SPIEGEL
Admittedly, such potentialities don’t appear to be out there in tv. … The technical means, the execution, the craftsmanship concerned beneficial properties primacy over the music.
ADORNO
Sure, one’s consideration is drawn away from the important issues and in direction of the inessential ones, specifically, away from the music as an finish and in direction of the means, the style, by which the keyboardists and wind gamers and string gamers are taking part in it. However I’d wish to level out that these irritating practices are nicely established within the strategies of all types of mechanical replica. In radio and in lots of gramophone recordings one additionally encounters a predilection for accentuating so-called principal voices or so-called melodies out of all proportion to their place within the musical cloth. That is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently have interaction in essentially fairly unmusical procedures by surgically extracting these voices, which is kind of in step with their—if I could say this—unartistic intuitions and can also be congenial to the extremely problematic style of the general public. … What outcomes from that is that sure middle-of-the-road so-called euphony, that culinary seasoning of the sound on the expense of all of the structural parts of the music.
SPIEGEL
The culinary component appears to us to be particularly outstanding in music broadcasts. A candlelit Karajan and Menuhin live performance framed by the plush furnishings of a Viennese salon; Bach passions and cantatas within the apparent setting, a baroque church. Because the distinguished vocal soloist is singing his half …
ADORNO
The listeners make furiously sorrowful faces …
SPIEGEL
… And the digicam fondles lovably chubby-cheeked putti and Madonnas. Is that this acceptable?
ADORNO
It’s horrible, the worst type of commercialization of artwork. Right here the mass media—which exactly as a result of they’re technical media are duty-bound to forgo every thing unseemly and gratuitous—are conforming to the abominable conference of showcasing girl harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit historic keyboards. I believe it’s greater than excessive time for purging the mass media of all this illusional kitsch and of the entire Salzburg phantasmagoria that’s endlessly haunting it. … It engenders a fully inadmissible picture, above all as a result of right here an illusional component additionally supervenes; it’s as if one had been current at some type of shrine the place a singular ritualistic occasion had been being enacted within the hic et nunc—a notion that’s utterly incommensurable with the mass replica that causes this identical occasion to be seen in thousands and thousands of locations on thousands and thousands of tv screens. … One can by no means shake the sensation that such issues should be considered grudgingly doled-out servings of schmaltz throughout the politics of programming, whereby the so-called wishes of the general public, which I’ve completely no inclination to gainsay, are oftentimes employed as an ideological excuse for feeding the general public mendacious garbage and kitsch. I’d additionally embody on this kitsch the kitschified manufacturing kinds utilized to the presentation of so-called—I might need nearly stated rightly so-called—basic cultural artifacts.
SPIEGEL
Take for instance Brahms’s German Requiem on the second channel. The photographs concurrently broadcast with it had been of bushes, forests, lakes, fields, monuments, and cemeteries.
ADORNO
The acme of wanton stupidity.
SPIEGEL
Professor Adorno, a pedagogical argument can also be at all times trotted out in reference to this. In keeping with this argument, televised music offers shoppers a preliminary introduction to the work and thereby stimulates them to attend live shows or opera performances in particular person. What do you consider this sort of musical remedy?
ADORNO
It’s improper. I don’t assume there’s any such factor as a pedagogical path to the important that begins out by getting individuals to focus on the inessential. This type of consideration that fixates on the inessential truly indurates; it turns into recurring and thereby interferes with one’s expertise of the important. I don’t imagine that in terms of artwork there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that step by step lead from what’s improper to what’s proper. Inventive expertise at all times consists in qualitative leaps and by no means in that murky type of course of.
SPIEGEL
There’s one more argument with which the cultural-industrialists rally to televised music’s protection. The truth that operas and live shows are reaching a mass viewers by way of the tv display screen is one thing they equate with a cultural resurgence. What do you consider that?
ADORNO
As soon as once more I regard this as a very improper argument. Though I’ve no need to place in even the faintest of excellent phrases for some fusty ultimate of interiority, it appears to me that above all one thing profoundly inauthentic is occurring right here, as a result of the works themselves aren’t detached to the style by which they’re offered. A televised Figaro is not Figaro. Consequently, when the lots come into contact with it, they’re not by any means coming into contact with the factor itself however moderately with a predissected, cliché-ridden product of the tradition business, which supplies them the illusory sense that they might change into actively concerned in tradition. For fairly a while now, so-called nice, conventional music has been following the identical trajectory because the one accomplished by Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia as soon as it was hanging on the wall of each petit bourgeois bed room.
SPIEGEL
So then, Professor Adorno, are you actually of the opinion that in the intervening time televised music is a pointless rigmarole?
ADORNO
Certainly, I actually am of that opinion. Televised live shows and televised operas are a whole waste of cultural exercise.
SPIEGEL
Professor Adorno, we thanks for this interview.
From Theodor W. Adorno’s Orpheus within the Underworld: Essays on Music and Its Mediation, translated by Douglas Robertson, to be revealed by Seagull Books this July.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was the writer of Minima Moralia, Philosophy of Fashionable Music, and Prisms, amongst many different books.
Douglas Robertson is a translator of German-language literature.
