Bartók after Catastrophe: Reading Bartók through Adorno in the post-war era

“Adorno’s Bartók” is a figure drawn most concretely in notes Adorno made on the composer in the 1920s, a composer who makes the “folkloristic,” between irony and interiority, dialectically progressive. Adorno’s views, however, changed enormously through the combination of catastrophe and exile, along with his engagement with the “young guns” of post-war music, while Bartók already becomes reduced to a footnote in his Philosophie der neuen Musik. This paper suggests a place for Bartók in the context of Adorno’s post-war aesthetics, proposing that, while Adorno sees, finally, in Bartók’s refusal to abandon tonality a reactionary, comforting nostalgia, instead a redoubling of the dialectic reveals this as, instead, fractured, alienated melancholy.