At 17 Adorno enrolled at the Frankfurt University. Although his chief interest was in philosophy, he took courses in psychology, sociology, and music, and wrote a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology. Impressed by the power and novelty of Wozzeck, Alban Berg's opera, Adorno decided to undertake a serious study of music. The two years that Adorno spent in Vienna among a group of innovative composers including Berg and Arnold Schoenberg provided him with a first-hand professional knowledge of contemporary music and led him even to attempt musical composition. But his gift was manifested in his consideration of the nature and genesis of the modern music, especially the atonal system of Schoenberg. In a number of articles Adorno propounded the view that Schoenberg had discarded the tonality which was bound up with the bourgeois phase of cultural development and therefore was not a universal or perennial form of music.
Upon his return to Frankfurt in 1925 Adorno wrote a Habilitationsschrift, the writing which qualifies a person for university appointment, dealing with the philosophical and psychological issues of that time in Germany. It was not approved. He was successful, however, with a writing on Soren Kierkegaard, sponsored by the theologian Paul Tillich.
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