Nature is indestructible. Music … resembles these angels. Their very transience, their ephemerality, is glorification. That is, the incessant destruction of nature. Why is the world so sad? Even money decays. On December 14, 1925, Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg attended the premiere of Berg's Wozzeck in Berlin.1 By then, the brief period in which Adorno lived in Vienna and studied with Berg had come to a close. Adorno had returned to Frankfurt, in part to pursue his Habilitation under his old dissertation advisor, Hans Cornelius. And with this return from Vienna and Berg to Frankfurt and Cornelius, Adorno also began his lasting turn from composition to philosophy.2 Nonetheless, he and Berg remained close. They exchanged letters, sometimes regularly, sometimes sporadically, until the early end of Berg's life. Adorno continued to address Berg as “master and teacher,” and the biographical reflections he wrote later in life are careful to portray him as Berg's intimate. He recalls sitting with Berg after the premiere of Wozzeck. The composer was “embarrassed like a young boy,” Adorno writes: “I was with him until late into the night, literally consoling him over [the opera's] success.”3
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