In a well-known scene in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, the Devil, in one of his transformations before the troubled composer Adrian Leverkühn, appears as the philosopher Adorno. With delicate understatement and a hint of caricature, Mann sketches the contradictory character of this most influential and controversial of twentieth-century writers on music. He highlights the extremes: intellectual sharpness combined with vulnerability, a cultivated tone which threatens to flip over into stridency, and fleeting visions of art's ‘promise of happiness’ juxtaposed with a cultural pessimism which sees the ‘new music’ on course for oblivion. ‘What is art today? ’, asks Adorno as Devil, and declares: ‘the decent impotence of those who scorn to cloak the general sickness under colour of a dignified mummery’.

In his most famous book on music, Philosophie der neuen Musik (on which Thomas Mann had drawn heavily in the writing of Doktor Faustus), Adorno uses the metaphor of the stranded sailor's ‘bottle-post’: radical works are like messages in bottles thrown into the sea, such is the extremity of their alienation. They tell the truth about our predicament in the world, but do so indirectly, in cipher form. It is the task of a critical philosophical aesthetics to decode and interpret these fragmentary ‘messages’, which nevertheless resist interpretation and retain something of a riddle-character.