Berg's Demonic Taste
















Your demonic taste for civilization and illusion would find ample sustenance here, for nowhere is civilization more glassy than in Italy, and intense, though in a different, more positive sense than with us, for the whole of life, lived as it were to the point of destruction, resists constant stabilization and mirrors its own transience in illusion.

-Theodor Adorno (letter to Alban Berg, 12 September 1925)