Tag Archives: Virgil Thomson

Adorno Considers a Career Change: The Curious Relationship between Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson (Conclusion)

Historians labor under the burden of knowing what those they study couldn’t have known: how things turned out. In the spring of 1941 Adorno couldn’t be sure that he would join Horkheimer in California (Marcuse, after all, was already there). … Continue reading

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Theodor Adorno, Dagobert Runes, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism: The Curious Relationship of Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson (Part III)

On Saturday, November 15, 1941, Theodor Adorno began his journey westward to join Max Horkheimer in Los Angeles and begin the collaboration that would produce Dialectic of Enlightenment. His final days in New York were busy ones, capped by the … Continue reading

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Unbottled Manuscripts: On the Curious Relationship of Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson

At first glance, the American composer Virgil Thomson would seem an unlikely recipient of what may be the only surviving copy of Theodor Adorno’s revised translation of the Philosophie der neuen Musik. There is an understandable tendency to see them … Continue reading

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“The True Manuscript in a Bottle” — or, How I Found Theodor Adorno’s “Lost” Translation of the Philosophie der neuen Musik

In the introduction to his 2006 translation of Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik, Robert Hullot-Kentor notes that the book (or, more accurately, the first part of it) had been translated into English twice before: in 1973 by Anne G. Mitchell … Continue reading

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