Quasi una Fantasia contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music, but in the range of its topics and the clarity of its arguments it stands alone among Adorno's writings on music. At the book's core are illuminating studies of thc founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, and an important “dialectical portrait” of Stravinsky. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, including Bizet's Carmen, along with an entertainingly caustic “Natural History of the Theatre.” Musical kitsch is the target of several shorter pieces. Yet even while Adorno demolishes 'commodity music' he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these remarkable writings.

Theodor W. Adorno was born in Germany in 1903, and he died there in 1969. He was Professor of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt for many years, and his other publications in English include Negative Dialectics (1973), Minima Moralia (1974), In Search of Wagner (1981), and, with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso Classic, 1997).

“This is an extraordinary book ... one of Adorno's most impressive, fecund and elegant works. Readers who may feel intimidated by Adorno's reputation for obscurity should find this book (with its superbly assured and unobtrusive translation by Rodney Livingstone) a welcome surprise ... It will appeal to anyone who wishes to encounter one of the century's most challenging and provocative social theorists at his most openly enthusiastic.”— Graham McCann, Times Higher Education Supplement