Back in April, I linked to a notable discovery by the scholar James Schmidt: Adorno's own English translation of his Philosophy of New Music, which turned up in the papers of Virgil Thomson, at Yale. Schmidt has posted, on his blog, further details of the friendship between Adorno and Thomson, with extensive quotations from their correspondence. This relationship has been almost entirely overlooked in extant writing on the two men, and Schmidt's post is particularly revealing of Adorno's ambitions and frustrations during his American period. Among other things, Schmidt discovers that Adorno hoped to win a position on the staff of the New York Herald Tribune: "I think of working once again as a music critic . . . Do you know of any opportunity? What I should like most, of course, would be to collaborate with you, but I do not know whether there is any such chance." Thomson failed to respond to this inquiry, perhaps fearing that Adorno's English wasn't quite up to the task. But, as Schmidt points out, "it is only in retrospect that the prospect of Adorno working at the Herald Tribune seems less plausible than his having abandoned his studies in philosophy to begin a career as a music critic in Vienna or his leaving a bewildered Schoenberg in order to return to Frankfurt to resume his academic career and defend a Habilitation that would be published on the exact date of Hitler’s assumption of power." See also Part II and Part III of Schmidt's superb four-part series.
Previously: The Naysayers.