ABSTRACT
This chapter could have borne the title “Late Style” in reference to Edward Said’s posthumous collection of essays On Late Style, Music and Literature Against the Grain. In his last book, Said explored the notion of “lateness” in the works of an eclectic selection of composers, musicians, and writers, showing “how near the end of their lives their work and thought acquires a new idiom.”1 Inspired by Theodor Adorno’s reflections on Beethoven’s final period, Said identified an “experience of late style that involves a non-harmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against.”2 The artistic lateness described by Said is not about maturity and serenity, but quite the opposite: “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.”3 Acutely aware of death waiting in the wings, the aging artist abandons communication with his circle, achieving “a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”4 He quotes Adorno on the special attitude that underlies Beethoven’s final compositional mode, especially the string quartets: “The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks the bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind.”5
