The twentieth century was unquestionably a terrible time in human history—“the century of death,” Leonard Bernstein called it—but proximity to terror does not obligate the artist to make terror his subject. Theodor Adorno, who helped to write the musical passages in Doctor Faustus, saw modernism and kitsch as polar opposites, yet even he admitted that modernism can bring forth its own kind of kitsch—a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of superannuated adolescent angst. Georg Lukács, in a critique of Adorno, remarked that the philosopher resided in a “Grand Hotel
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