“An All-Too-Secret Wagner”: Ernst Bloch the

Wagnerian

n adrian daub o
stanford university

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Theodor Adorno’s essay on Ernst Bloch’s Spuren (Traces) (1930; repr. 1959) is a
review somewhere between grudging deference and parody. Even when Adorno
seems to attack Bloch, there’s a note of admiration; and even when he praises
Bloch, the praise seems laced with irony. He writes of Bloch’s “charlatanism” but
then grants that this charlatanism invites in those “whom the high philosophy of
idealism keeps locked out.” Adorno doesn’t intend this statement as a criticism.
Bloch opens philosophical discourse to contents that are usually banished from
them ex cathedra; and Bloch doesn’t open it up by ignoring idealism but rather by
seizing onto the remains of idealism’s decomposition: “There remains from the to-
tality of German Idealism a kind of noise, and Bloch, musically minded and
Wagnerian, lets [that noise] intoxicate him.”1
Bloch the Wagnerian: that’s Adorno’s formula for explaining Bloch’s musical
sensitivity to the “noise” that constitutes the reverberations of idealism. It too is
a double-edged characterization: Bloch surrenders to “intoxication,” he has, as
Adorno writes later, “as little patience for technical-musical logic as for aesthetic
preference.”2 But it is this “Wagnerian” intoxication that primes Bloch’s ears for
the late echoes of German idealism. When it comes to Bloch’s thinking, “Wagner,”
as Adorno would have it, doesn’t mean an individual composer but rather a form of
perception. Bloch’s reception is “intoxicated,” free of “technical-musical logic”; he
hasn’t freely chosen it: this intoxication has found him, and he has surrendered to
it. Bloch certainly understood Adorno’s essay as an attack. In 1963 he wrote to con-
gratulate Adorno on his sixtieth birthday, and even though the tone was conciliatory
Bloch couldn’t resist referring to “your scorn [Hohn] about the ‘Great Blochmusik,’
which wasn’t worthy of you.”3
The point of this article is not to assess whether Adorno’s critique of Bloch’s
style of thinking and writing, or Bloch’s pique over the same, were justified.
Instead I will focus on the centrality that Adorno assigns to music in general and to
Wagner specifically in Bloch’s thinking. After all, while Adorno’s essay puns on the
German Blechmusik to impute to Bloch’s thinking a kind of general musicality, he

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 2–3, pp. 188–204; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbu019
Advance Access publication on October 8, 2014
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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 “an all-too-secret wagner” 189

gets far more specific when he qualifies that musicality as “Wagnerian.” And here
Adorno was almost certainly right—music was as central to Bloch’s thinking as it
was for Adorno.4 But Adorno’s essay gets more particular yet: in identifying Bloch’s
“intoxication” with Wagner, the far more sober Adorno points to what most central-
ly distinguishes these two Marxist aestheticians’ take on art, on music, and on
Wagner. Adorno knows and studies Wagner; Bloch is a Wagnerian.
For both Adorno and Bloch, Wagner was an early and formative musical
touchstone—they came of age as musical listeners and performers in a world still
very much shaped by the Meister from Bayreuth. Bloch began writing about Wagner
as soon as he began publishing, and his fascination with the composer remained a

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mainstay. Nevertheless, his relationship to Wagner was that of a knowledgeable
amateur. He quotes the librettos like someone with dog-eared Reclam editions on his
bookshelf, he points to passages he knows from regularly attending performances.
We know that Bloch not only assimilated Wagner in Bayreuth but also played through
his works at the piano—which emerges fairly clearly from his musical examples.5
This way of approaching Wagner left its traces in his works. In his earliest
larger-scale essay on Wagner, “Rettung Wagners durch surrealistische Kolportage,”
Bloch describes an “instructive” experience for understanding the composer, that of a
boy who “had to make it through six hours of Wagner’s Ring.”6 Adorno too relies on
autobiographical notes to explore a work of music, but he generally avoids such
moves in the case of Wagner. Adorno grew up “in the sphere of Richard Wagner”
just as much as Bloch, but he seems to have been at pains to keep references to this
autobiographical cathexis out of his written work on Wagner.7 He frankly admits to
autobiographical valences in his ideas on Zemlinsky, who fled the Nazis, or Schreker,
whom the Nazis dubbed “degenerate”—but not in the case of Wagner.
Just the opposite was true for Bloch: neither his time in exile nor the era of na-
tional socialism seem to have dimmed or even fundamentally transformed his love
of Wagner. Even before the First World War, Bloch repeatedly made the pilgrimage
to Bayreuth. He kept up the habit when the Festspiele resumed in 1924, and when
he returned from the United States to East Germany in 1949. During the summer
of his emigration from the German Democratic Republic he met Wieland Wagner,
and it was somewhere around Bayreuth that he decided not to return to East
Germany after the construction of the Berlin Wall.8 Bloch remained true to his ori-
ginal understanding of Wagner throughout—the relevant passages of the magnum
opus of his postwar years, The Principle of Hope (1954–59) cite no other text as fre-
quently as his prewar The Spirit of Utopia (1917 and 1923).
Bloch was far less hesitant than Adorno in defending Wagner from being
instrumentalized by the Nazis. Adorno’s main work on Wagner, Versuch über
Wagner, written mostly in Britain and the United States, clearly reflects the author’s
shock over the Nazis’ seizure of power and his exile.9 Adorno is at times intemper-
ate in his judgments, he clearly believes he cannot afford the composer much
190 adrian daub

sympathy, and throughout the work runs a sense that something in Wagner’s
oeuvre “worked towards” Hitler and Nazism, to purloin Ian Kershaw’s famous
phrase. Bloch seems to have drawn almost diametrically opposed conclusions from
the same experience: as Benjamin Korstvedt has put it, “if anything, [Bloch’s] sense
of the Fascistic germs in Wagner encouraged him to imagine more precisely the
potential utopian traces in Wagner.”10 Korstvedt’s phrase “imagine more precisely”
seems apt: Adorno was surely not insensate to the utopian traces in Wagner (and
Korstvedt overstates his case ever so slightly in this respect), but the reality of
Nazism curtailed Adorno’s capacity for imagining and hearing another kind of
Wagner. Hearing the Meistersinger prelude after Nazism as though nothing had

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changed was, in a way, an act of barbarism. In his 1939 essay “Über die Wurzeln
des Nazismus,” Bloch argued that the music of Nazism “is not the Meistersinger
overture, but the Horst-Wessel-Lied.” He warned against letting the Nazis “cheat us
out of any part of the German cultural heritage,” especially when it comes to
Wagner.11 For Bloch, listening to the Meistersinger overture and hearing it as the
equivalent of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” meant letting the Nazis win. Unhearing
what one had to hear after 1933 was an ethical imperative of sorts: a surgical strike
of the imagination that excised what told only of Nazism, thereby better to liberate
that which suggested another future altogether.
Nor do the theoretical points of orientation of Bloch’s critical understanding of
Wagner seem to have shifted significantly in the sixty years that elapsed between
his first essays that mentioned Wagner and the posthumous publication of
Experimentum mundi (1975). This is remarkable, considering that these works were
composed variously in the German Empire, in exile in Switzerland, in the Weimar
Republic, in European exile, in the United States, in East Germany, and in the
Black Forest. From the first, Bloch’s critical reflections seek to unearth a “Wagner
who has remained all too hidden,”12 to protect Wagner from his own uncritical re-
flexes and from his even more uncritical adulators.
Bloch centrally imputes to Wagner’s works a certain “dynamite,” which only un-
folded its true power in the twentieth century. Only with the onset of classical mo-
dernity could Wagner “be freed from the poison of his immediate context.”13 This
is Bloch’s mission, which continues from the first essays to the posthumous ones:
driving out what “poisons” Wagner with the medicine of modernity, pulling him
from his “immediate context” by confronting him with things seemingly external
to him, as well as with the “paradoxes,” that is to say the contradictory or dialectical
elements within Wagner himself.

The Spirit of Utopia—Wagner and the “Labor of Hope”

In his essay on Bloch’s Traces, Adorno writes that music occupies “more space in
[Bloch’s] thinking than even in Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s.”14 The book that
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 191

first made Bloch a mainstay in the philosophical discourse of the Weimar Republic,
The Spirit of Utopia, shows that Adorno was right. Bloch published it in two ver-
sions, a first edition appearing in 1917, a second in 1923. The latter version was re-
published in a slightly modified edition by Suhrkamp in 1964. In both versions,
music remained central to the titular “spirit,” and the section on music underwent
only cosmetic changes. While the 1923 edition is a good deal shorter than the 1917
version, the extensive section on “The Philosophy of Music,” in which Wagner
plays an important role, remains equally massive in both editions.15 In the first
version, this section is so enormous that Bloch even thought about giving the
entire work the title Music and Apocalypse.16 He once commented that the first

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version was just as much inspired by Beethoven as by Hegel.
Bloch’s argumentation in the section on music changes little from the first to
the second version of the text, which both aim to accomplish the same two goals.
First, Bloch is after a true metaphysics of music, something of a rarity in the aes-
thetic writings of the Frankfurt School. Second, he attempts a philosophical history
of music. Both aims converge in the claim that music is ontologically referred to
the future, to possibility, to the unexpected, which historical composers (and Bloch
makes it clear that he’s interested particularly in the “German line” of composers)
harnessed in their works using a variety of strategies. There is something always an-
ticipatory in music—putting it to conservative or even regressive purposes requires
foreclosing on music’s very essence.
It is clear why Bloch didn’t feel the need to abandon or even modify this metaphys-
ics of music after Hitler’s accession to power. The ways in which the Nazis instrumen-
talized Wagner, Beethoven, and others simply seemed to prove his point. More
importantly, however, even within the narrative of Bloch’s theory of music, where
composers either harness or fail to harness music’s inherent future-directedness,
Wagner was important in ways that would remain stable after the Nazi seizure of
power. Wagner mattered for the purposes of Bloch’s argument because he decisively
un-limited melodic and harmonic structures. In Bloch’s view, Wagner broke up the
self-contained and self-sufficient sonic structures of the Biedermeier era and, by
“through-composing” his works, opened his music to both the past and the future,
and replacing old song structures with “speech singing.” In so doing, he returned the
human voice to its “psalmodic” origins. Wagner’s music, through its openness to the
future and its return to origins, orients itself before a horizon of time and history, an
orientation music had lacked in the generation since Beethoven. Bloch’s Wagner is a
revolutionary seeking to shatter the flow of historical time. But Bloch validates only
his revolution of musical form—Wagner the political revolutionary is beside the point
in this narrative. Wagner’s “true” political importance, arising from his reconception
of musical form, thus differs dramatically from his own political ambitions.
Already in this early version we can detect ideas about Wagner that would
remain constants for Bloch’s thinking. When Bloch wrote the first version of The
192 adrian daub

Spirit of Utopia, his Wagner was intended as an attack on the Wagner reception and
the Wagner idolatry of the turn of the century. Like George Bernard Shaw, Bloch
wanted to save Wagner from those heirs who repressed or simply failed to notice the
revolutionary element in Wagner’s music. Both Shaw and Bloch stress that Wagner’s
work wasn’t revolutionary only in its own day, insisting that its explosiveness lived on
into their own. Bloch was not interested in reappraising what Wagner once accom-
plished. He was interested in eliciting an attunedness to that which Wagner’s music
still can accomplish, “that [element] in [Wagner] that keeps working.”17
It is noticeable that the Marxist superstructure makes no appearance in Bloch’s
critique of Wagner—neither in the pre-Marxist version, nor in the second version,

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which overflows with references to Marx and communism. This too does not really
change in the following decades. Bloch’s essay on “Paradoxes and the Pastorale in
Wagner” many years later makes reference at several points to Adorno’s Versuch
über Wagner. Adorno’s book emphasizes categories such as phantasmagoria, the
commodity character of the motif, and the role of exchange in Wagner’s chromati-
cism, subjects that Bloch avoids. He refers explicitly to the Marxist critique of the
leitmotif, mentioning attacks to this effect by Stravinsky, Debussy, and (without
using his name) Adorno, but he quickly dispenses with this idea by pointing to
Wagner’s own Opera and Drama.18 Bloch’s Wagner, at least the Wagner that mat-
tered, was not just a product of nineteenth-century capitalism but centrally con-
cerned with its transcendence: “Wagner’s symphonic opera was in its own time
pure dynamite [Sprengung], and we don’t have to remind the reader of the commo-
tion it caused,” Bloch writes. But this “dynamite” in Wagner’s work soon “settled
and became dogma,” and Bloch’s works on Wagner all share the mission to shake
up this “settledness” and to confront the “dogma” with its own “paradoxes.”19
Bloch never makes entirely clear how consciously Wagner put these paradoxes
into his work. Like Adorno, Bloch seems to assume that some world-historical sen-
sibility almost seismographically transmitted itself into the work through Wagner’s
composition and writing. The examples Bloch cites for “paradoxes” in Wagner’s
operas run the gamut from consciously chosen aesthetic effects or points (for in-
stance, the imbrication of fear and sexuality in Siegfried) to others that seem to run
counter to what one usually assumes was the composer’s intent (for instance,
Beckmesser’s Prize Song in Die Meistersinger, which Bloch understands as a precur-
sor for Dadaism and musical modernism, even though Wagner intended it as the
rejection of any such anticipation).
This is the same as saying that Bloch doesn’t much care for Wagner the man.
Wagner’s biography is important to Bloch only when it plugs him into the central ob-
sessions and ideologies of the nineteenth century. Bloch’s Wagner, like Adorno’s, is a
kind of location on which contradictory (and even paradoxical) political, ideological,
and aesthetic lines of thinking conduct their strife. Put differently, he treats Wagner
the way Walter Benjamin treats the Passage des Panoramas or the Avenue de l’Opéra.
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 193

As Bloch writes in the text from the 1920s that most clearly draws on Benjamin’s
work, Wagner’s “music connected to the dream collective of its age.”20
For Bloch, Wagner was a point at which the utopian potential of the nineteenth
century intersected with the seeds of its coming catastrophic disappointment.
Bloch took his cue from Benjamin in another way: in tracing the different “dreams”
of the nineteenth century intersecting in Wagner’s oeuvre, Bloch remained loyal to
the constructive impulse of the 1920s. The narratives in which he embeds Wagner
are often unexpected, frequently counterintuitive, sometimes plausible, and some-
times fanciful. He is a Wagnerian in the thrall of his own private Wagner—
nowhere more so than when it comes to Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer.

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Wagner and Schopenhauer in Bloch’s Musical Philosophy
From The Spirit of Utopia until the late essays, Bloch’s readings of Wagner consis-
tently proceed by taking supposed “paradoxes” of and in Wagner as their guide. But
that doesn’t mean that the term “paradox” didn’t shift meaning over the decades.
Part of the reason lies in the strange fact Adorno pointed to, namely that Bloch was
“Wagnerian.” What is “paradoxical” in Wagner is not simply those elements of the
work that run counter to the Meister’s intention, or to the compositional logic of the
work itself. No, Bloch’s “paradoxes” refer to the entire historical phenomenon of
Wagner, including Wagner’s reception and the way he was understood. Everything
in Wagner that seemed redolent of “Wagalaweia and blonde beast” had to be con-
fronted with something external to it.21 The confrontations were as manifold as the
targets of Bloch’s critique. The “dynamite” in Wagner had “settled and become
dogma” in many different ways, and thus the “paradoxes” that stirred up that which
had falsely settled had to be quite different in character as well.
The formula of “Wagalaweia and blond beast” already points to one of Bloch’s
preferred targets, namely Wagner’s instrumentalization by Nietzsche idolaters in
Germany and the unproblematic equation of Wagnerian ideas with those of his great
inspiration, Schopenhauer. Bloch couldn’t allow this equation, for the simple reason
that his own metaphysics of music proceeded from a rejection of Schopenhauer by
means of categories drawn ultimately from Hegel. This also explains why Wagner
is so important for Bloch’s musical philosophy: Bloch turns Wagner into a star wit-
ness against his own (misunderstood) source of inspiration.22 While Bloch draws
on Wagner in a multitude of contexts, one thing remains constant: the works, pas-
sages, characters, and moments that interest Bloch the most are those in which
Wagner is at his most anti-Schopenhauerian.
In Bloch’s early works, the metaphysics of music proceeds from a correction of
Schopenhauer. Bloch’s earliest remarks on Wagner draw on a György Lukács–
influenced “romanticism of alienation,”23 for that which music anticipates, where
it wants to go, is a totality of meaning and sense much like Lukács proposes in The
194 adrian daub

Theory of the Novel. At this point there isn’t much sense that this totality has sociopo-
litical implications, that we should do something to get there. In one of his earliest
essays, “The Melody in Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music” (1914),
Bloch writes that following Wagner’s “traces” will remain “a distant goal, until an
unexpected genius constructs for us the riddle of the great religious fugue, of an
unambiguously signative symphonics within a new epoch that feels mythically.”24
The hope for an “unexpected genius” (in a letter to Lukács, Bloch speaks of “the
Unknown” as the still-to-come composer of “ontological” counterpoint)25 makes
clear just how much Bloch’s early work still remained within the primacy of the aes-
thetic. Still, the argument is already symptomatic for the musical philosophy of his

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later work. For Bloch, the music of his age speaks about the transcendence of the
given. Rather than an unconscious, a not-yet-conscious speaks through it. Bloch
turns to Schopenhauer’s picture of the will as the source of music, but, unlike in
Schopenhauer, that will is not seeking relapse into the species, into the most given,
but rather seeking to push forward toward transcendence of the given. Bloch’s
musical philosophy accepts Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the nonrepresentational,
noumenal character of music, but it refuses to understand that character as an
index of a preindividual and unconscious will. Instead it is perceived as an early
rumbling of something that has not yet risen to consciousness, something that is
not yet given, but that should and will exist. In The Principle of Hope, this phenome-
non goes by the moniker “not-yet-conscious” (Noch-Nicht-Bewusstes), which con-
tains “true futurity.”26
In this scenario, music matters for the same reasons for which it mattered to
Schopenhauer. Music doesn’t represent, it shirks any easy reference to the world of
things. Bloch doesn’t connect this refusal to Kant’s “thing in itself,” but rather to
the spirit of German Romanticism. Music transcends the given, frees itself from
language and discourse, from nature and specifically animal nature. When music
sounds, it is undeniably real, impinges upon our senses with great power, but it
speaks of something that doesn’t seem to exist in our reality. It frees itself, as Bloch
writes in the first version of The Spirit of Utopia, from “that which has already been
formed.”27 As he puts it in The Principle of Hope:

The earthly root that drives music ever onward is in the final instance the human
being who seeks a world adequate to himself, that is to say the utopian tendency,
rather than the fixation on the archaic. And [music’s] creative obscurity is not the
darkness of Schopenhauer’s will, but the unknown side [Incognito] of the Now
which suffuses all there is. Music, in its unsurpassable closeness to existence, is the
closest relative and public organ of the unknown side.28

Wagner seems like an unlikely star witness in correcting Schopenhauer in this way.
If anything, Wagner has usually been taken to represent the more regressive ele-
ments of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. The fact that Bloch was not willing to
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 195

understand Wagner in this way is not just due to his “Wagnerianism,” that is to say,
to an overriding sympathy for the composer, which let him overlook Wagner’s
more unsavory aesthetic conceits. Bloch’s “Wagnerian” intoxication attuned him to
those aspects where Wagner’s fealty to the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the
Will was shaky. In The Spirit of Utopia Bloch refers to the “total work of art” as a
“viable, even if in principle uncanonical category,”29 and this essentially sums up
Wagner’s theoretical importance for the early Bloch. For Bloch, Wagner is a
kindred spirit. Like Bloch, he operates with “viable” categories that are nevertheless
“uncanonical.”
This kinship also distinguishes Bloch from Adorno, who approached Wagner

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from the first with the oedipal shudder of a post-Wagnerian composer and Berg
student, and who banished any moments of unambivalent (or undialecticized) in-
toxication by Wagner into the farthest reaches of childhood memories. There is an
essay where Adorno seems to accept the salvation metaphor at the heart of Parsifal,
but it’s not an essay about the composer at all; it’s a short newspaper piece on his
memories of summering in the little town of Amorbach in the Odenwald when he
was a young boy. If Adorno takes pains not to let Wagner get to him, Bloch takes
pains to let him.
What Bloch’s critique of Schopenhauer is after can be shown by considering a
passage on “tone painting” in The Principle of Hope. Bloch describes the develop-
ment of “nature painting” in music, by which he doesn’t mean simply the dunder-
headed depiction of birdsong, but rather a kind of mimesis that does not simply
remain a “nugatory copy” of a “surface,” instead excavating “a sounding and point-
ing” from nature. Bloch distinguishes between two forms of musical mimesis of
nature, each of which combines philosophical positions with those of musical
history. The first is the line Bach–Beethoven–Hegel, the other one is the “not very
savory parallel line to Hegel–Feuerbach–Marx,” namely Schopenhauer–Wagner–
Nietzsche.30
The first of these “lines” emulates nature in fluxus nascendi. In thought or in
music, it emulates nature in its development, seeking to assimilate autonomous
human form giving to the form-giving power of natura naturans. In works of this
line, “nature, be it pretty or violent, is reproduced out of the fluidity of its sound.”31
This form of emulating nature, which Bloch sees most clearly in Beethoven’s
Pastoral Symphony, takes its cues from natural processes and then brings those
processes into a fleeting moment of agreement with the artificial canon of musical
form. Works of this type historicize nature, even if only for a brief moment.
Bloch distinguishes this kind of “nature music” from “romantic tone painting,”
as exemplified by the water motifs in the Rheingold prelude. Unlike the tone paint-
ing in the Pastoral Symphony, which springs from observed nature and ushers in a
humanization of nature, this type of tone painting aims at “emulating nature
through wavelike motion, and toward something dreamed at and mythical.”32
196 adrian daub

Wagner’s imitation of nature feeds on “ferment, thunder, phosphorus, fervor and

drive.”33 This nature not only penetrates the characters, it acts through them and
turns them into mesmerized mediums of its own presubjective aims. Senta, Elsa,
Hagen, Mime, and Siegfried are not extreme cases but rather the rule when they
are subject to the forces of this nature, which pursues through them ends the indi-
vidual can scarcely comprehend and from which there is no escape. When Wagner
listens to nature, he hears fate and submission to it, and what we hear when we
listen to his singers is “the unenlightened nature which acts and sounds through
them.”34
While musical “nature painting” since Bach depicts the “electricity” of nature,

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of potential and possibility, Wagner’s music turns nature into a cipher of unfree-
dom. What runs through the characters as pre- or transsubjective “Will” is simply
“the inhuman world, the world of the Norns, the world of fate, and music knows
no escape from it.”35 In the realm of aesthetics, it is Schopenhauer who most deci-
sively pursues “an all too nocturnal rooting of music in the Will.”36 In Wagner,
Bloch claims in The Principle of Hope, there is no “escape or freedom”: “the real
will, that is to say the human will, is entirely missing from this work of nature.”37
In The Principle of Hope, Bloch decides that Wagner’s reference to and reverence
for nature is not “attuned to an aeolian harp” nor “to the signal of liberation that
would break with the compulsions of nature.”38 But in other works he points to
moments where Wagner clearly does hear such signals. In his essay on “Paradoxes
and the Pastorale in Wagner” ( published in Merkur in 1959), Bloch discusses a
passage in Die Walküre in which the music seems to allow one of the figures a
moment of autonomy.39 It is the scene in which Brünnhilde tells Siegmund that he
will die and invites him to run off with her to Valhalla. Bloch points out that in the
orchestra we (unlike Siegmund) can hear distant pre-echoes of Siegfried’s funeral
march from Götterdämmerung, a signature of inevitable fate: “Even before he has
decided to fight, Siegmund is as inescapably doomed to die as is his son Siegfried
on his bier.”40
But the moment of inevitable fate is unexpectedly disrupted by what Bloch calls
“an unexpected bit of Beethoven.” Brünnhilde’s description of Valhalla avoids all
bombast and heroism. Absent is the vulgarity with which the Valkyries will collect
the remains of dead heroes at the beginning of the next act. No, Brünnhilde’s
Valhalla is all pianissimo, “very close, very human, very much without the clatter of
waves.”41 And this moment of unexpectedness is followed by further surprise:
Siegmund rejects Brünnhilde’s act of mercy “in a resolution of the fate motif in the
major key, which occurs only at this point” in the Ring.42 His “absolutely human re-
sistance” turns her from a reluctant agent of blind fate into a rebel against that very
fate.43 At this moment, then, Beethovenian humanism ruptures the airtight fabric
of fate in the Ring, and the “musically radiant core of the subject” ruptures the
“world-wave of the Schopenhauerian will.”44
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 197

This is what Bloch is after: a correction of Schopenhauer through the work of

his self-proclaimed disciple Wagner. Bloch’s essays and remarks on Wagner repeat-
edly gravitate to moments in which the work supposedly inspired by Schopenhauer
turns against itself, in which for a sudden and unexpected moment something like
freedom, autonomy, and humanity appear. Bloch’s “all-too-secret Wagner”45 stands
at the precipice between pessimism and hope, between Schopenhauer and Marx,
between accommodation toward the objective state of affairs and genuinely lived
human autonomy. Bloch is aware that these are moments that tend to contravene
the spirit of the Wagnerian artwork in general. He doesn’t refer to them as para-
doxa in a strictly philosophical sense but rather in the etymological sense of the

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word: they go against the doxa, against that which Wagner thought of himself and
what his admirers thought about him.
Unlike Adorno, who approached Wagner from the perspective of the generation
of composers who sought to emancipate themselves from Wagner’s musical influ-
ence, Bloch never had much sympathy for such attempts. In his “Paradoxes” essay,
he professes shock at the swiftness with which the “turn away” from Wagner
became “fashionable,” and annoyance at the supposedly “cooler, simpler youth” of
“so-called new objectivity and fat-less fashion.”46 He submits Wagner to a thor-
oughgoing critique, but he retains a certain fealty, the fealty of the dilettante or fan,
not that of the professional musician or composer. His is the devotion of the
Bayreuth pilgrim and the amateur pianist who, “without final exactitude” but with
“great verve and excitement,” “thundered” through Wagner.47
Of course Adorno’s Wagner isn’t a simple-minded late Romantic either. If any-
thing the Versuch über Wagner accuses Wagner of having covered up his own moder-
nity with regressive gestures. But Bloch seems better attuned to the futurity in
Wagner’s oeuvre. This emerges quite clearly when one considers Bloch’s and
Adorno’s divergent readings of Beckmesser’s infamous Prize Song in Die
Meistersinger. Adorno, however dialectically he approaches the work, understands
Beckmesser’s aesthetic failure very much in terms of Wagner’s intention—
Beckmesser is forced to register the failure of musical practices Wagner considered
outmoded and un-German.48 And in Beckmesser himself Adorno sees “a crassly
negative figure,”49 an “anti-Semitic caricature,”50 a “victim of denunciation.”51
Bloch’s take couldn’t be more different. Judaism doesn’t feature in his discus-
sions of Beckmesser. Even though he is elsewhere quick to connect music and
Jewishness (calling Mahler’s music, for instance, the epitome of “Judaism in
music” in The Spirit of Utopia),52 the caricatural valences of the Beckmesser figure
don’t seem to bother him. This is not because he is trying to avoid talking about
Wagner’s anti-Semitism, but because Wagner’s intention seems to matter little to
him. Beckmesser’s Prize Song, Bloch thinks, may well have started out as a nasty
caricature of Judaism in music, as a persiflage of the petit bourgeoisie and the
social division of labor. But objectively it does something quite different. For it is in
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this song that travesty demonstrates “what it can do with the unexpected,” as Bloch
writes in his essay on the Prize Song.53
The category of “the unexpected” (Imprévu) often marks those moments that
Bloch finds worth discussing and holding on to. What he means by the term (and
by the related term paradoxon) is a flash-like appearance of something entirely dif-
ferent—“the shock-like interruption,” as Bloch calls it in his “Paradoxes” essay,
“which irritates without wearing itself out.”54
Bloch’s aim is not to “spotlight so-called pearls,”55 that is to say particularly
beautiful or telling moments. When he highlights passages in which the “paradox”
haunts the text “as a kind of para-textum,”56 he often points to the surprise or the

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interruption in those moments that were most suspect to the left-liberal postwar
spirit: moments of Germanic breastplate Romanticism, moments of cheap resigna-
tion, moments of ill-considered musical sorties against those who came before
Wagner or were different from him. These are the preferred spots where Bloch
starts looking for “charged exceptions,” in which intention and technique suddenly
turn against themselves and produce effects that don’t fit, that aren’t expected, and
that aren’t easily assimilated.57 This is what happens for Bloch in Beckmesser’s
Prize Song. We know what the scene intends to do: music and libretto conspire
against the poor scribe. As Adorno is quick to note, even the comedy of the scene
has something cruel about it—it isn’t a funny scene per se, it’s sadistic.58
Bloch doesn’t try to salvage Wagner’s intention. He too understands the
ominous continuity between Wagner’s denunciations of Beckmesser’s music and
those of the Nazi cultural propagandist Hans Severus Ziegler seven decades later.
“Much here reminds us of the kind of music the petit bourgeois likes to call degen-
erate,” he writes.59 But he understands this as a double continuity: Wagner’s
denunciation of Beckmesser is an anticipation of the savagery visited on suppos-
edly “degenerate” modernist art in the twentieth century; at the same time the
song’s text anticipates this very modernism. Without meaning to, Wagner reveals
something reminiscent of Christian Morgenstern’s “object-less world ballets,” as
Bloch writes.60 Wagner attacks the incomprehensible, that which is not of its time,
that which is unexpected, but his opera faithfully transmits it nonetheless.
In “Paradoxes and the Pastorale,” Bloch expands this reading to include even
the music of Beckmesser’s ill-fated song. Compared to Walther’s “vulgar” Prize
Song, Beckmesser’s sounds “far more ‘modern,’ far more willing to go against the
current.”61 Walther’s song strains for effects, seeks to ingratiate itself with its audi-
ence. The libretto depicts Walther as “a genius of a new beginning,” but really he is
“the Trumpeter of Säckingen”—Bloch is here referring to an 1853 verse epic by
Joseph Victor von Scheffel, which has become a byword for the kind of nationalist
treacle popular in Wilhelmine Germany.62 There is indeed something stolid about
the newness Wagner’s opera claims to be celebrating, and its final chorus has
sat more uneasily with the opera’s listeners with each intervening decade. But
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 199

newness does stir under the medieval pomp, just not in the place where Wagner
seems to want it to.
In an opera obsessed with what newness sounds like, the truly avant-garde
moments belong to the subaltern and ridiculed character of Beckmesser. Walther
himself, as Bloch remarks in another essay, constantly invokes the rule “which not only
allows exceptions, but which constitutively includes exceptions, in particular exceptions
with no new rules.”63 Beckmesser’s song does this far better than Walter’s own, which
seems to flinch and retreat into new rules, when it should defend the exception.
Bloch is not quite as positive on Wagner’s music in his essay on the Prize Song.
There he suggests that the music Wagner composed for Beckmesser actually re-

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treats from the prophecy contained in the song’s nonsense text—as though Wagner
himself lost his nerve over the radicality of what he made Beckmesser say. In either
case, what is important for Bloch is that the Prize Song is not the origin point of an
avant-garde future, or that it contains any drive toward such a future or “paints it
in,” as Adorno put it in a radio discussion with Bloch. Instead, in a moment of vul-
garity, of rancor, of conservatism, something altogether unexpected appears—and
then disappears almost immediately. The moment inaugurates no new tradition, it
doesn’t unfold some kind of effect or create a reception. It appears only under
the category of possibility: “Wagner sets down Beckmesser’s text with a sneer, but
the text is nevertheless like a beginning of Dadaism, or what else emerged from the
word laboratories [of modernism]; even though he has witnesses, Beckmesser’s
song remains in its own location almost without tradition.”64
These flashes that come and go without leaving a “tradition” are usually those
that run counter to the ideology of the so-called total work of art. Here too Bloch’s
understanding of Wagner differs from the doxa of his day, and he suggests “that in
Wagner, much more so than in Italian opera, music and word coincide in a way
that’s easily accessible to ear and sense.”65 Even though Bloch never explains how
he understands the term “total work of art,” and even though he declares the cate-
gory “uncanonical” in The Spirit of Utopia, it is clear that Bloch’s criticisms are
aimed at an understanding of the term in which word and music mutually rein-
force each other without tension or ambivalence.
This is how we are to understand his remarks on that “paradoxical” moment in
Die Walküre, in which “the text opens itself to the pathetic, roving orchestra,” which
“then finds its place in its language in a multitude of ways.”66 The total work of art
creates in itself a charge, an energy: multiplicity, polyvalence, ambivalence. This
perspective no longer sounds particularly radical today. And it clearly takes aim at
Wagner reception and staging practices more than at the man himself. For Bloch
must have been aware that Wagner never intended for the Gesamtkunstwerk to be a
tautology of media, in which one medium simply reiterated what another already
accomplished independently—that, in other words, friction and productive tension
were part of the Gesamtkunstwerk from the beginning. But Bloch understood that
200 adrian daub

what Adorno would call the “identitarian” aspects of the Wagnerian artwork were
also those that perpetuated Wagner’s worst impulses among his admirers. Bloch
therefore saw his critical work on the composer as his contribution to a two-
pronged attack on Wagnerism: to be productively intoxicated meant recovering a
new understanding of Wagner’s works, but it also meant staging them differently.

Staging Practices
The question is now how this not-yet-existent, “traditionless” streak in Wagner’s
oeuvre can be made visible. In answering this question Bloch remained a child of

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the 1920s. For him, that utopian streak in Wagner, which can flare up in the seem-
ingly least utopian passages of the master’s work, was best made visible through
juxtaposition and montage. In a 1929 essay entitled “Wagner Saved by Karl May,”
Bloch suggests that Wagner’s works should be interpreted through “surrealist col-
portage,” as the expanded version of the text clarifies in its title. “We have to hear
Wagner the way we read Karl May” as children, he suggests; we have to “follow him
to the carnival.”67 In a letter to Siegfried Kracauer from the same period, he speaks
of this constellation of “tension, surprise.”68
Wagner, for Bloch, needed to be liberated from the cloud of incense his faithful
had draped over his oeuvre, and also from productions that were so intent of dispers-
ing the waft that they ended up with an overly intellectual Wagner. Bloch’s essay,
heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin, was also clearly written under the impression
of Weill and Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper. The Wagner he envisions is not the ascetic
who would hold sway in the “New Bayreuth” after the war; instead he is “wild, color-
ful, colonial.”69 At least in these early essays, Bloch wants to reinvigorate Wagner by
bringing out his intrinsic proximity to the masses, to the carnival—for “only colpor-
tage is truly close to the people, it’s become our soil and our air, our popular song and
our church song.”70 Bloch’s emphasis on “colportage” in Wagner is influenced on
one hand by Lukács’s lamentation for the “epopeia,” while on the other his concept of
the carnivalesque is akin to that developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, who regarded popular
culture as a playful upending of all doxa. At least in these early years, Bloch regarded
his mission as connecting Wagner’s oeuvre with Brecht’s and Weill’s critique of it, so
that “Wagner can climb aboard his pirate ship, with eight sails and fifty cannons.”71
This is the image of Wagner that influenced the productions that Bloch helped
mount at Berlin’s Kroll Opera between 1927 and 1931.72 Once Otto Klemperer, a
longtime friend of Bloch’s, became the company’s director, the philosopher was
tightly integrated into the Kroll’s distinctive way of staging and rehearsing, the
“avant-garde counterproposal to the Linden Opera [Berlin State Opera].” Bloch
claims to have been present for “a great many” rehearsals, advising Klemperer and
functioning as a propagandist for his vision.73 The colportage essay was intended
as such philosophical vindication.
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 201

The Kroll Opera stint was an experiment, and it didn’t last long. In 1931 the
Prussian state government slashed its funds, and seven years later the Kroll stagings
were attacked as “degenerate music” in the exhibition by the same name. But the em-
phasis on colportage, on the surreal, which was so defining for the performances of
those years, never left Bloch’s image of Wagner–even after he became the champion
of the more ascetic Wagner that emerged after the Nazi years. The opening section of
the “Paradoxes” essay is a hymn of praise for the “new” Bayreuth created in the 1950s
by Wieland Wagner: “The new Bayreuth stagings undertake nothing short of the
rebirth of its stage from the light direction [Lichtregie] of its music.”74
Bloch interprets Wieland’s way of proceeding as a realization of his own ideas.

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The new stagings, he writes, constitute “the long-overdue twilight of Wagner, but a
twilight on the morning side, not just on the evening side.”75 Once again, Bloch
reviews the points of orientation that have guided him through Wagner’s oeuvre
from the first: “Twilight of Wagner on the morning side” means nothing other
than a Wagner tied not to Schopenhauer, but to Marx; a Wagner not of cheap pessi-
mism, but a Wagner of hope malgré tous; a “paradoxical” Wagner who cannot be
embalmed by his followers, but a Wagner who is liberated by them and from them.
To explain the contribution he takes his essay to be making to this project of creat-
ing a new Wagner, Bloch coins the phrase “light direction in thought [gedachte
Lichtregie].”76 That is to say, he frames his intervention as a critical complement to
what Wieland does in his stagings. Bloch regarded stagings such as those at the Kroll
Opera as precursors to the postwar innovations in Bayreuth, which culminated in
Chéreau’s centennial Ring. As David Levin has shown, he certainly wasn’t altogether
wrong to think so.77 Bloch considered his own contribution to have demonstrated how
to “listen [to Wagner] around the corner,”78 to approach opera “entirely differently,” as
he writes in one of his articles on the Kroll Opera.79 He also regarded himself as in
league with those who wanted to change the reception of Wagner’s works.

Constructive Reception
It would be easy to charge Ernst Bloch’s perceptions of Wagner with a lack of subtlety
and nuance, especially when compared with his colleague Adorno. That would be
both right and wrong. Bloch’s approach to Wagner is not primarily that of a thinker—
that’s his great weakness and his great strength. He approaches him as a listener and
even as a participant in the production. He had a much easier time with the intoxica-
tion Wagner excited in him than did Adorno. Adorno felt this exuberance too, and he
was able to make an uncritical element part of his critique—Adorno’s essays on
Zemlinsky and Schreker make that clear. In those essays Adorno admits that when
the professor, the critical theorist, the resident of the Grand Hotel Abgrund approach-
es these works, a “fourteen year-old boy” listens too, who first got excited in 1918 about
the promise of the “shockingly erotic goings-on” in Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten.80
202 adrian daub

But Adorno hesitates to extend such generosity to Wagner. Bloch doesn’t bat an
eye before doing so. He is, as Adorno writes, perhaps with a bit of jealousy,
“Wagnerian.” He lets himself be seduced by Wagner. But the Wagner who seduces
Bloch looks entirely different from the one that seduced the nineteenth century, or
the one celebrated by the Nazis. This is what Adorno’s essay on Bloch’s Traces ne-
glects: Bloch follows traces that he himself has created. The Wagner who could
seduce Bloch was a Wagner that Bloch had created in the first place.
The shock of the Nazi appropriation seems to have impacted Adorno’s thinking
on the composer more profoundly than it did Bloch, but Adorno underwent no sea
change in his understanding of Wagner. Still, Adorno remained more reluctant to

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apply the lessons of Walter Benjamin to Wagner: his Versuch über Wagner was scru-
pulous while being speculative; he was careful to ground himself in Wagner’s own
works and words, to draw in biographical details and philosophical influences—
something he was usually loath to do.
Bloch, on the other hand, was almost compulsively creative in his appropria-
tions of Wagner. In the 1920s that creativity asserted itself in unusual pairings
(Wagner and Karl May, Wagner and surrealism) or in enthusiasm for new and
unusual staging practices. But even as early as The Spirit of Utopia, it asserted itself
through insertions into narratives: Wagner frequently appears when Bloch launch-
es into one of his grand stories, connecting religious movements, philosophers, lit-
erary texts, and musical works that are centuries and sometimes millennia apart,
stories about which one can never say with complete certainty how seriously he
wants us to take them. The Spirit of Utopia suggests that Wagner’s through-
composed vocal lines are a return to the primordial scream from which all music
emanates and which had been caged and overly formalized by his predecessors. A
paragraph later, Bloch inserts Wagner’s tendency toward syncopation, “this drag-
ging, this rushing, this retarding and anticipating,”81 into a narrative about the dis-
appearance of dance as pure, unstructured bodily movement, ascribing the return
of the “dictatorship of the lower body” to Wagner.82 Only a few pages later, he ex-
plains how Wagner’s “weave of chords” (Akkordteppich) constitutes a restitching of
the “carpet” of Bach’s fugues.83
Benjamin Korstvedt has done an excellent job in tracing the complexities of the
semantic field that Bloch navigated in calling music a Teppich—Stefan George,
György Lukács, Vassily Kandinsky, and others number among the metaphor’s an-
cestors.84 By that token, the idea of a “weave” seems like a good description for
Bloch’s narratives and metaphors themselves: pull at any one point and either nar-
rative or metaphor (often, one in the guise of the other) will pull you in two direc-
tions at once. All these directions are plausible enough in themselves. Some of
them are more speculative than others. Some are drawn from Bloch’s voracious
course of reading in musical history, some of them spring from his own fancy. But
the way in which especially the first version of The Spirit of Utopia compounds
 “an all-too-secret wagner” 203

narrative upon narrative, flitting from one grand, not to say grandiose, story to the
next in the space of a page or a paragraph, signals that it is the coexistence (not to
say the Ungleichzeitigkeit) of these narratives that matters to him—what is impor-
tant is the pattern they weave, the Teppich of simultaneous references. Bloch’s
stories unsettle as much as they integrate, they are methods of estrangement as
much as they are modes of explanation. He can spin narratives and connections in
which Wagner pops up in strange places (the move from Hegel to Wagner, in par-
ticular, is always jarring), and he can tell stories in which Wagner is conspicuously
absent. For instance, a discussion of the idée fixe in Berlioz can lead to Dante, then
to Goethe, and then to Schoenberg, with no Wagner in sight.

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Adorno was right in this respect as well: there’s an element of “charlatanism” to
Bloch’s Wagnerian inclinations. What Adorno’s critique perhaps does not make ex-
plicit enough: part of Bloch’s charlatanism, what makes it so capacious and so invit-
ing, is the fact that he is not at Wagner’s mercy any more than a three-card monte
dealer is at the mercy of happenstance when he flips his final card. His sixty years
of sustained thinking about the Meister were an experiment in calculated surrender.
Adorno once claimed that Hegel’s thinking was “cunning in itself,” in the way it
sidled up to the given only to explode it; Bloch’s Wagnerism is intoxication, but it is
likewise a cunning one.

NOTES

Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Amorbach,” in

Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of
Tristan’s Shadow (University of Chicago Press,
2013) and Four-Handed Monsters (Oxford
University Press, 2014). This article incorporates
material from a German-language essay first
published in Wagner-Spectrum, Vol. 9, No. 1.
1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Ernst Blochs Spuren,” in
Noten zur Literatur (Gesammelte Schriften 11)
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 238.
2. Ibid., 241.
3. Ernst Bloch, Briefe, 1903–1975 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1985), 451.
4. Several scholars have pointed to this
centrality of music in Bloch’s thought. See also
Benjamin Korstvedt, Listening for Utopia in Bloch’s
Musical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Peter Palmer’s
introduction to Ernst Bloch, Essays on the
Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
5. Friedrich Burschell, “Erinnerungen an den
jungen Ernst Bloch,” Stimme der Pfalz 21, no. 3
(1970): 4; Karlheinz Weigand, ed., Bloch: Eine
Bildmonographie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 41.
6. Ernst Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch
surrealistische Kolportage,” in Erbschaft dieser Zeit
(Zürich: Artemis, 1935), 280.
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1977), 303.
8. Weigand, Bloch: Eine Bildmonographie, 171.
9. Horst Weber, “Das Fremde im Eigenen:
Zum Wandel des Wagnerbildes im Exil,” in
Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich, ed. Saul
Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: Beck,
2000), 212–29.
10. Korstvedt, Listening for Utopia, 97.
11. Ernst Bloch, “Über die Wurzeln des
Nazismus,” in Politische Messungen
(Gesamtausgabe 11) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970),
320.
12. Ernst Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale bei
Wagner,” in Literarische Aufsätze (Gesamtausgabe
9) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965), 302.
13. Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch
surrealistische Kolportage,” 286.
14. Adorno, “Ernst Blochs Spuren,” 241.
15. Korstvedt, Listening for Utopia, 20.
16. Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London:
Routledge, 1996), 15.
17. Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch
surrealistische Kolportage,” 286.
18. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale,” 318.
19. Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch
surrealistische Kolportage,” 286.
204 adrian daub
20. Ibid.
21. Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu
Hegel (Gesamtausgabe 8) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1962), 381.
22. Ernst Bloch, “Richard Wagner und die
Musik des Weltwillens,” in Leipziger Vorlesungen
zur Geschichte der Philosophie, 1950–1956
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 4:392.
23. Peter Furth, “Romantik der Entfremdung,”
in Phänomenologie der Enttäuschungen:
Ideologiekritik Nachtotalitär (Frankfurt: Fischer,
1991), 44–93.
24. Ernst Bloch, “Die Melodie im Kino,” Die
Argonauten 1, no. 2 (1914): 90; Wiegand, Bloch:
Eine Bildmonographie, 42.
25. Bloch, Briefe, 173.
26. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Berlin: Aufbau,
1954), 218.
27. Ernst Bloch, Der Geist der Utopie, 1st ed.
(Gesamtausgabe 16) (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971),
219.
28. Bloch, Prinzip Hoffnung, 1279.
29. Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 132.
30. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, 381.
31. Bloch, Prinzip Hoffnung, 1272.
32. Ibid., 1273.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 1274
36. Ibid., 1275.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 1273.
39. The essay first appeared under the title
“Paradoxa und Pastorale in Wagners Musik,” in
Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches
Denken 13 (1959): 405–35.
40. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale bei
Wagner,” 310.
41. Ibid., 311.
42. Ibid., 310.
43. Ibid., 311.
44. Ibid., 310.
45. Ibid., 302.
46. Ibid., 294.
47. Burschell, “Erinnerungen an den jungen
Bloch,” in Wiegand, Bloch: Eine Bildmonographie, 41.
48. Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1971), 103.
49. Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Bekämpfung des
Antisemitismus heute,” Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 20.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 383.
50. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, 103.
51. Ibid., 19.
52. Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 123.
53. Ernst Bloch, “Über Beckmessers
Preislied-Text,” in Literarische Aufsätze
(Gesamtausgabe 9) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965),
210.
54. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale,” 302.
55. Ibid., 304.
56. Ibid., 309.
57. Ibid., 308.
58. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, 19.
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59. Bloch, “Beckmessers Preislied-Text,” 212.
60. Ibid.
61. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale,” 300.
62. Ibid., 306.
63. Ernst Bloch, Logos der Materie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 2000), 308.
64. Bloch, “Beckmessers Preislied-Text,” 213.
65. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale,” 309.
66. Ibid.
67. Ernst Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch Karl
May,”Anbruch, no. 11 (1929): 4.
68. Bloch, Briefe, 298.
69. Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch
surrealistische Kolportage,” 280.
70. Ibid., 284.
71. Ibid., 285.
72. Korstvedt, Listening for Utopia, 97.
73. Ernst Bloch, “Erinnerungen an Klemperer,”
Frankfurter Opernhefte, April 1974, 26; Wiegand,
Bloch: Eine Bildmonographie, 103.
74. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale,” 296.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging
Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 22.
78. Bloch, “Paradoxa und Pastorale,” 297.
79. Ernst Bloch, “Die Oper, ganz anders,” in
Experiment Krolloper 1927–31, ed. Hans Curjel
(Munich: Prestel, 1975), 7.
80. Theodor Adorno, “Schreker,” Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 16 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 374.
81. Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 133.
82. Ibid., 136.
83. Ibid., 139.
84. Korstvedt, Listening for Utopia, 11n.