(He changed his name to Theodor W. Adorno in the late 1930s). Maria and her sister Agathe were accomplished musical performers, and they instilled in the youthful Adorno a critical love for music that animates much of his mature work. From an early age he distinguished himself both musically and intellectually, training in piano with Bernhard Sekles and reading Kant's
Critik der reinen Vernunft (1781; translated as
Critique of Pure Reason, 1824) with family friend and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. From the latter, Adorno learned an approach to reading philosophy that looked skeptically on the Idealist tradition while foregrounding the ways in which texts reflect social and historical truth.
In 1921 he began a doctorate in philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. While attending a seminar on Edmund Husserl in 1922, he met Max Horkheimer, who later became the director of the Institut für Sozialforschung. The following year Kracauer introduced Adorno to a slightly older philosophy student named Walter Benjamin, who was engaged in writing Ürsprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928; translated as The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 1977), a Habilitationsschrift (the writing that qualifies a person for university appointment) on baroque plays.
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