Quasi Una Fantasia

Essays on Modern Music

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by Theodor Adorno

Verso

Due/Published September 1997, 284 pages, paper

ISBN 1859841597

Another in Verso's Verso Classics series. A collection of essays on music from the author of Philosophy of Modern Music. First published in German in 1963, this volume contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and jouirnalism over more than three decades. At the book's center are studies of Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg, and a "dialectical portrait" of Stravinsky. There are also accounts of earlier works--including Bizet's Carmen--and a piece called "Natural History of the Theater." Musical kitsch is the target of several shorter pieces. Adorno's belief that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it runs throughout this collection as does Adorno's "demolition" of "commodity music."