London Review of Books, August 5 2004.
Said examines the way in which the work of some great artists and writers acquire a new idiom at the end of the their lives – a late style.
Beethoven: his late works are a form of exile from his milieu.
“There is heroism here, but also intrasigence.”
“Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality.”
Adorno on Beethoven, sees his late works “as communicating a tragic sense in spite of their irascibility” and that Beethoven seems to “inhabit the late works as a lamenting personality.”
“The late works are about lost totality, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic.”
“Beethoven’s late style, remorsely alienated and obscure, is the prototypical modern aesthetic form.”
“The prerogative of late style: it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.”
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