The meeting of two colossus of Western culture could only give a result: a great work of music and music philosophy.

The double training, philosophical and musical, from Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno tine of a special color The many writings that he published on theory and practice of music, including the magnificent monographs about Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg. Only a composer was resisted, in a certain sense. Nor in a single period of his active life he left an adornment of annotating thoughts about the figure and the work of Ludwig van Beethoven, but never came to close a global vision that his intellectual honesty would judge enough coherent to justify a book a thousand times announced And as many applaces.

Paradoxically, the number of notes on Beethoven found in the legacy of him and ordered by the Rolf Tiedann editor has ended up constituting musical monograph not only more extensive, but also more intense, ever written by ornament. Fragmentary and partial, the analyzes in it gathered are, however, as incisive and rich as maybe only Nietzsche - another thinker artist, or vice versa-managed to be in the aphorisms of him. And the same confession of not having been able to fit the Solemnis Missa in Corpus Beethovenian turns out, rather than the affirmation of a failure, that of a triumph of understanding: the triumph of an unfinished book but not incomplete, finally converted into a Great work of music, philosophy and philosophy of music.