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Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style.

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Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style. By Michael Spitzer. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006. [369 p. ISBN-10 0-253-34724-6; ISBN-13 978-0-253-34724-4. $39.95.] Music examples, bibliography, indexes.

Michael Spitzer is a master of detail--musicological, historical, and philosophical. He demonstrated this recently in his excellent book on the history of metaphor (Metaphor and Musical Thought [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003]). He demonstrates this again in his new book about Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's writings on Ludwig van Beethoven's late style. It is a lengthy study in which readers are offered extensive musical analyses, conceptual surveys, and modernist, philosophical arguments. Sometimes one has the feeling that the material does not hang together, not because the author is striving to reach his own late style, but rather because too much is going on. This is often a problem with books written about Adorno (I know it myself): there is an impulse to explain all and everything, from every angle, while yet explicitly resisting the idea that all and everything can be explained. Alternatively put, the writer has the aim or need to open up Adorno's thinking to contemporary readers while granting that, of historically necessity, the thought is--and must remain--hermetically concealed. Spitzer shares this aim, but compounds the difficulty of his task every time he draws on...

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