Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

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, but in the range of its topics and the clarity of its arguments it stands alone among Adorno‘s writings on music. At the book‘s core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, and an important “dialectical portrait” of Stravinsky. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, including Bizet‘s Carmen, along with an entertainingly caustic “Natural History of the Theatre.” Musical Kitsch is the target of several 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. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these remarkable writings.