Beethoven is Hegel in notes,

I wrote last post, thinking I'd hit upon something. But of course I must have read it, or something like it, somewhere in Adorno. In TWA's splendid, luminous essay "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel," after a particularly gnarly passage from Hegel's Subjective Logic, one finds this:

Music of Beethoven's type, in which ideally the reprise, the return in reminiscence of complexes expounded earlier, should be the result of development, that is, of dialectic, offers an analogue to this that transcends mere analogy. Highly organized music too must be heard multidimensionally, forward and backward at the same time. Its temporal organizing principle requires this: time can be articulated only through distinctions between what is familiar and what is not yet familiar, between what already exists and what is new; the condition of moving forward is a retrogressive consciousness. One has to know a whole movement and be aware retrospectively at every moment of what has come before. The individual passages have to be grasped as consequences of what has come before, the meaning of a divergent repetition has to be evaluated, and reappearance has to be perceived not merely as architectonic correspondence but as something that has evolved with necessity. What may help both in understanding this analogy and in understanding the core of Hegel's thought is recognizing that the conception of totality as an identity immanently mediated by nonidentity is a law of artistic form transposed into the philosophical domain. (Hegel: Three Studies, trans Shierry Weber Nicholson, MIT P 1993, 136-7)

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Skoteinos: darkness, obscurity. The essay among other things is a wonderful primer on difficulty in Hegel.