Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (1865–1952) and Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946). His mother, a Catholic from Corsica, was once a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name, Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno. His childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve. At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school, before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write: Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, as well as his friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out in support of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional knowledge arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself. Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm established close professional and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s; after fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Adorno were married in 1937. At the