This article examines Adorno's thinking on the relationship between musical analysis, interpretation and performance. Adorno's work is set in the context both of its aesthetic antecedents, particularly in the work of Schoenberg as composer and as music theorist, and of its subsequent critics. At the centre of the article is a discussion of the analysis seminars which Adorno gave during the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in the mid-1950s, on Schoenberg's Verklrte Nacht and Phantasy for violin and piano and Webern's Six Bagatelles for string quartet, op. 9.