Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969) was a philosopher, composer, sociologist, and aesthetic theorist. He spent his last days beset by the “emergencies in democracy” prompted by the student movement of the 1960s; the students simultaneously treated him as friend and foe.

After studying in Frankfurt in the 1920s and being unable to find employment in the first years of Nazi Germany, Adorno moved to England in 1934. Four years later, with his new wife, Margarethe (“Gretel”) Karplus (1902–1993), he moved to the United States, first to New York and then to Los Angeles. In 1949 they returned to Frankfurt where Adorno worked both as professor at the university and as public intellectual, participating in radio and television programs on philosophy, society, education, and the arts.

Born into a comfortable bourgeois home, he was the only son of a Protestant wine merchant of Jewish descent, Oscar Wiesengrund, and of a Catholic singer, Maria Calvelli-Adorno. Before his move to the United States he was known by his father’s name and after by his mother’s. However, though “Wiesengrund” was abbreviated to a middle initial, the name was honored in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), the exemplary novel on the fate of musical modernism to which Adorno significantly contributed. The Beethovenian tones of the Wiesengrund—meadow-ground—expressed an early promise of happiness for the bourgeois age that would eventually be shattered, leaving the ill-fated dodecaphonic composer Adrian Leverkühn no choice but to complete his life with a melancholic requiem composed to the former greatness of German art.

Adorno wrote broadly on metaphysics, the history of philosophy, epistemology, political philosophy, and ethics. He is most widely known for his attempt to reveal the intricate historical and dialectical relationships between philosophy, society and the arts, or between philosophy, sociology, and aesthetic theory.