Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (Ger. Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno) was a German philosopher of Jewish origin, sociologist, and music theorist. He was a representative of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He studied musicology. He studied and later taught at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. From 1934 he was in exile in Great Britain, and from 1938 in the United States. From 1949 he again lived in Frankfurt am Main.

Theodor Adorno was born into a family of Jewish and Corsican origin. His father’s family, that of Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946), moved to Frankfurt from the town of Dettelbach in Franconia in the late 19th century and was engaged in the wine trade. The Wiesengrund trading firm in Dettelbach had been founded by his father, Beritz David (later Wiesengrund), in 1822. Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund greatly expanded the firm, exported wine to Great Britain and the United States, and opened a branch of the company in Leipzig. Adorno’s mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952), was a singer. Her father, Jean François Calvelli, a native of the southern Corsican commune of Afa (later Calvelli della Piana), settled in Frankfurt after his marriage and worked as a fencing teacher.

In 1921 Adorno entered the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, where he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology, and sociology. At the end of 1924 he defended a dissertation devoted to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Since the early 1920s Adorno had been publishing as a music critic. In 1925 he settled in Vienna, where he studied composition with Alban Berg, whom he had met the previous year in Frankfurt, and took piano lessons from Eduard Steuermann. After returning to Frankfurt, Adorno taught at the university; the Nazis’ rise to power forced him to emigrate to Great Britain in 1934 and then, in 1938, to the United States. In 1949 he returned to Frankfurt am Main.