Intention as the mind's stay against entropy, or—to cast Adorno's resistance to intention in quasi-Platonist language—as a failed attempt to mend the breach between art and Being. That is, Adorno's separation of art from intention is central to his ontology of art. For the most part, this claim extends a familiar interpretation of Adorno's aesthetic theory. His poetics directs the eye to the rupture, the unresolved dissonance, because in the world as presently constituted, beauty and harmony can give no remedy to the inescapable and baleful tensions in social life. Music can offer modernity only the slimmest of consolations, which is as a sensuously embodied hope—but only a hope, a glimmer— against the large improbability of being both modern and happy, of being able to find a way over that “chasm separating praxis from happiness.” Here is how Julian Horton describes the Adornian knot as it constrains music: “If music pursues a notion of community, then it embraces a lie of collectivity; if music honours the material's immanent tendency, then it forever condemns the composer to isolation.” Horton, I think, gets this just right in syntax as well as in substance. Music is the agent, not humans, and yet even music has to lower a knee before, has to “honor,” the “immanent tendency” of the material. It is easy to see how such a theory grants the person of the composer only a marginal presence. Indeed, with the finest art—especially late Beethoven—the artist as person nearly vanishes. One point this chapter develops is that Adorno's diagnosis relies on a wavering understanding of what material is and how composers use it, such that his conclusion about the disappearance of the living person from even “ravaged” works of art needs revisiting.

That said, there is another line of Adorno interpretation that coaxes out of some of the same writings a strikingly different conclusion. Although it does not go so far as to ascribe an intentionalist theory of art to Adorno, a learned and searching inquiry from Michael Spitzer describes, in the name of Adorno, a late Beethoven whose achievement epitomizes an idea central to theories of art as an intentional act, which is that composers have some ownership over the works they make.