Vol. 26 No. 15 · 5 August 2004
pages 3-7 | 6248 words
Thoughts on Late Style
Edward Said
Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with its correspondence to its time – the fitting together of the two – and is therefore defined by its appropriateness or timeliness. Comedy, for instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman (May in December), as in Molière and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness through the komos with which such a work usually concludes – the marriage of young lovers. Yet what of the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health (which, in a younger person, brings on the possibility of an untimely end)? These issues, which interest me for obvious personal reasons, have led me to look at the way in which the work of some great artists and writers acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives – what I’ve come to think of as a late style.
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Letters
Vol. 28 No. 21 · 2 November 2006
From Christopher Hampton
It was strangely disconcerting to read two years ago what Edward Said had to say about Beethoven in his ‘Thoughts on Late Style’ (LRB, 5 August 2004), to which Frank Kermode now returns in his review of Said’s On Late Style (LRB, 5 October). Said’s commentary on the Beethoven of the last piano sonatas and quartets, the Diabelli Variations, the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony seems to me perversely to misread the evidence of these final works, their intensity and concentration, their control and command of the material.
Said takes his cue from Wendell Kretschmar’s view of Beethoven’s art in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: that it ‘had outgrown itself’ to become the voice of ‘an ego painfully isolated in the absolute’, ‘a chilling breath issued to terrify his most willing contemporaries’. But this doesn’t get anywhere close to describing the works themselves: the originality of their formal structures; the density and clarity and inventiveness of their texture; the astonishing articulation of melodic, rhythmic and harmonic lines; the energy and coherence of motivic development within the framework of each succeeding movement, as between one movement and another – from the brooding contemplation and drama of the slow movements to the speed and rhythmic propulsion of the scherzos that so often emerge from them.
Does this bear any resemblance to what Said paraphrases or quotes from Adorno: ‘a peculiar amalgam of subjectivity and convention, revealed precisely in the thought of death’? Is it possible to define such vitality in terms of death? What does it mean to talk of death appearing in Beethoven’s music ‘only in a refracted mode, as allegory’, or to say that this music ‘leaves only fragments behind’? And when Said/Adorno speaks of ‘the episodic character of Beethoven’s late work, its apparent carelessness about its own continuity’, as a ‘fractured landscape … devoid of sweetness, bitter’, ‘irresolute and fragmentary’, what can this be said to mean, set beside the rigour of the argument Beethoven pursues in his late work? I cannot make sense of his view of the Opus 110 Sonata as ‘somewhat distracted, often careless and repetitive’. True, this work is not driven, like the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, but that is because its lyricism – its intimate melodic appeal, culminating in the ‘Arioso Dolente’ and its return between the fugue and its inversion – is organised along different lines. Can this expansion of the essence of melody, so delicately balanced, be adequately described as ‘process, but not development’? Apparently it can. Or at any rate Adorno insists that in works like the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, the Diabelli Variations and the last quartets, Beethoven himself proclaims that ‘no synthesis is conceivable’ – though such an absurd conclusion is at every turn contradicted by the unfolding logic and momentum of the music, and nowhere more cogently than in the germinal motivic developments of the C sharp minor Quartet. The Said/Adorno view of late Beethoven seems to me not only unrecognisable, but to make no sense at all when measured against the evidence of what Beethoven achieves through his mastery of form and structure in these last works.
Christopher Hampton
Vienne, France
