In 1955, around the twentieth anniversary of Berg's death, Theodor Adorno felt compelled to restore what he regarded as Berg's rightful place in the history of musical aesthetics, as well as his legacy as a composer. One of Adorno's chief complaints was related to the changing perception of Berg's music: “During his lifetime he was a leading member of the avant-garde and would have never felt himself to be anything else. He now finds himself lumped together with others under the label of ‘modern classics,’ a label from which he would have recoiled.”

Referring to audiences of the 1920s as well as to well-informed critics of the 1950s, Adorno argued that they had misapprehended one of the principal aspects of Berg's work: its musical logic, from rhythmic and phrase structures to the large-scale formal organization. While this sort of misapprehension was probably true then as now, Adorno's main goal in his essay was to repudiate what he saw as a widespread perception of Berg as a Wagnerian composer. In his critique, Adorno points out that audiences “need only hear a few bars of Berg to start talking automatically of Tristan-like Romanticism, as if chromaticism and the leading note were the most important aspects of Berg's mature music, and as if determining what his searching, infinitely subtle sensibility succeeded in making of such elements were irrelevant.”