Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was influential to the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's jargon of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy.

Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch.

Upon moving to Vienna in January 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture which had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch.

Yet Adorno ’ s work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner ( published in 1939 as " Fragments on Wagner "), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera.

“ In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe ,” Horkheimer wrote, “ our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle ” As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Soren Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing.

Because Adorno ’ s American citizenship would have been forfeited by the middle of 1952 had he continued to stay outside the country, he returned once again to Santa Monica to survey his prospects at the Hacker Foundation.

Adorno ’ s entrance into literary discussions continued in his June 1963 lecture at the annual conference of the Hölderlin Society.

Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the " world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz ” The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit.

Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the reactionary thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching.

In works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics, Adorno and Horkheimer theorized that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.

1963 The debate was continued by Jürgen Habermas in the Festschrift für Adorno.

As the work proceeded — and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorization — Adorno excitedly remarks in a letter to Berg that he is writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work.

Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno himself felt, while writing, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating.

Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled " Charmed Language ," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again.

A range of slightly later composers in West Germany, including Helmut Lachenmann, Nicolaus A. Huber ( both of whom were students of Nono ), and Mathias Spahlinger responded to political concerns in a more abstract fashion, reflecting to some extent the ideas of Theodor Adorno and writing in opposition to the perceived demands made upon music ( in terms of passive listening, audience pleasing, and so on ) made by the culture industry.

Adorno started writing it during World War II, in 1944, while he lived as an exile in America, and completed it in 1949.

One of the nuns in this group was Saint Catharine Fieschi Adorno, who died on September 14, 1510.

Berg passed this on to his students, one of whom, Theodor Adorno, stated: " The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different ".

Such work may be based on feminist, gender studies, queer theory, or postcolonial theory, or the work of Theodor Adorno.

Theodor Adorno produced numerous reports on the effects of " atomized listening " which radio supported and of which he was highly critical.

Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, anti-semitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany.

Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking.

Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch.

Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced: According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's use of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to provide instructions for the composer.

Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an Habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic.

Receiving favorable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the University conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931 ; on the very day his revised study was published, in March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.

Though Adorno was not himself an Institute member, the journal nevertheless published many of his essays, including " The Social Situation of Music " ( 1932 ), " On Jazz " ( 1936 ), " On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening " ( 1938 ) and " Fragments on Wagner " ( 1938 ).

At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects-like " musical material "-as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of " value-free " sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held on to an idea of truth.

Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete ; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition.

Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology.

Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, what would later become Minima Moralia.

At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the latter ’ s Arcades Project.

Adorno would have us understand modernity as the rejection of the false rationality, harmony, and coherence of Enlightenment thinking, art, and music.

As early as 1938, Theodor Adorno had already identified a trend toward the dissolution of " a culturally dominant set of values " ( Beard and Gloag 2005, 141 ), citing the commodification of all genres as beginning of the end of genre or value distinctions in music ( Adorno 2002, 293 – 95 ).

At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt-in which one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith-but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung.

In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky ’ s The Soldier ’ s Tale, which he called in 1923 a “ dismal Bohemian prank .” In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: “ No cathedral ,” he wrote, “ can be built if no community desires one .” In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius.

In a proposal for transforming the journal, Adorno sought to use Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the " stabilized music " of Pfitzner, the later Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith.

Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discuss the Project ’ s plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music.

Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: “ I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it .” Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lasarzfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project ’ s topic, “ Music in Radio .” Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life.

In California, Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944.

Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music.