A mid-summer essay by Roy B Flemming.pdf

A mid-summer essay by Roy B Flemming
“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes."
T. W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven”
Late Style ---
Notes for an Obituary
ABSTRACT
The hunch that artists
exhibit a “late style” as
death draws near will
not itself go gently into
that good night.
Instead, late style
relentlessly hangs on
despite its frailties and
infirmities. Now, a
zombie concept,
though, unfortunately,
few recognize it as
such, late style
restlessly roams
academia, drawing
sustenance from
scholarly inertia,
professional self-
interest, and possibly
the lack of theoretical
alternatives.

Late Style: Notes for an Obituary Page 1 of 29
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
Before It’s Too Late…An Introduction
No, Edward Said’s book On Late Style isn’t a collection
of his columns from “GQ,” the men’s fashion magazine,
advising his readers on how to dress in their retirement
years although Said, who taught at Columbia University
and died at the age of 67 in 2003 after battling leukemia
for twelve years, was known for being a snappy dresser.1
Instead, Said shows his hand in the book’s subtitle,
Music and Literature Against the Grain, which clearly
has aspirations beyond dressing smartly. Said didn’t
finish On Late Style before he died. It was posthumously
published in 2006 and is something of a pastiche of
Said’s thoughts on late style that Michael Wood, a close
friend and Princeton academic, along with other
associates pulled together from Said’s lectures, essays,
talks, and remarks.
Ironically, Said owed his fascination with late style to
Theodor W. Adorno who died in 1969 without completing his own long-planned book on
Beethoven rooted in his 1934 piece on Beethoven’s last string quartets, Spätstil Beethovens or
“Late Style in Beethoven.”2
Adorno’s brief analysis not only influenced Said but many other
scholars and established Adorno as the theorist of aesthetic lateness. According to one scholar,
“To say that the impact of Adorno’s four-page essay…has been disproportionate to its length is
1
No should late st le e o fused ith Old “t le, the o -offi ial offi ial ee of the Chi ago Cu s. Fo “aid, if
necessary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno for
Adorno.
2
This essay was published in 1937 in a Czechoslovak journal. It a d Ado o s othe essa s o usi a e fou d
in Adorno, Essays on Music and in Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts. Adorno accumulated
over forty notebooks fo his ook o Beetho e . A o di g to his iog aphe , Fo Ado o the o pletio of this
great music project on Beethoven was a perpetual challenge, and it appears that it was less the difficulties of
su sta e that e e the p o le , tha those of o ga izi g the hete oge eous ate ials. Mulle -Doohm, Adorno,
p. . O e issue I e ot ee a le to esol e is as e tai i g the dates he Ado o s iti gs e e t a slated
i to E glish a d su se ue tl pu lished. The e s a lag i ol i g the t a slatio s that affe ts he A e i a
hu a ities s hola s fi st had a ess to Ado o s o k.
Late style, eh? Hmmm.

to indulge in considerable understatement.”3
A second scholar states, simply, that Adorno’s
reading of late style is “the most influential and intellectually sophisticated interpretation we
have” of Beethoven’s last works.4
Last work, lateness, late work, and late style as theoretical and aesthetic issues have been on the
scene for some time. Georg Simmel, a foundational figure in the history of sociology, spent the
last decade of his life studying the late works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and other
artists. In 1905, he defined late style in this way:
In some of the greatest artists, extreme old age can bring about a development which
seems to reveal the purest and most essential of their art precisely through the actual and
natural decline of their vital powers. Forcefulness of form and shape, allure of sensual
presentation, and unconstrained abandonment to the immediacy of the world fall away,
leaving only the really bold lines – the most profound and personal signs of their
creativity; thus…Beethoven’s last quartets. While old age nibbles senselessly away at the
average and common man and destroys what is essential as well as what is useless, it is
the privilege of some great beings to be acted upon by nature according to a higher plan,
so that even where she destroys, she uses destruction to extract the eternal out of the
extraneous and the disingenuous.5
Roughly thirty years later, with Beethoven also in mind, Theodor W. Adorno put his thoughts
down in his famously short, sometimes cryptic, often elliptical analysis of late style. Adorno,
however, took a different tack than Simmel; the latter emphasizes the gerontological origins of
late style whereas Adorno stresses the aesthetic autonomy of art work as revealed by the “formal
law” of an artist’s late work; a distinction often lost, ignored, or glossed over in the literature.
The maturity of the late works of significant artists …. lack[s] all the harmony that the
classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding of works of art, and they show more
traces of history than of growth. The usual view explains this with the argument that they
are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, “personality,” which breaks
through the envelope of form to better express itself …. In fact, studies of the very late
Beethoven seldom fail to make reference to biography and fate. It is as if, confronted
3
Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature, p. 257.
4
Spitzer, Music as Philosophy, p. 4
5
As uoted “ iles, F o Titia to I p essio is : The Ge ealog of Late “t le, i M Mulla a d “ iles, Late
Style and its Discontents, pp. 19- . “ iles o e ie of the i telle tual histo of late st le provides an excellent
sta ti g poi t fo e plo i g the o ept. Al e t B i k a s Late Works of the Great Masters figures
p o i e tl i “ iles telli g fo se e al easo s ut ost i po ta t i ie is his idea that oth the histo of
art and individual artists follow similar life cycles, e.g., youth, maturity, and old age, with a general tendency for
oth to o e f o si ple to o e o ple fo s, hi h ould see to put hi i oppositio to “i el s
thoughts. Smiles has more to say about B i k a ; o e tha I ha e ti e o spa e to su a ize he e. It s
i po ta t to add that s hola l a d a ade i i te est i agi g a d late ess i a tists li es got se iousl u de a
in the 19th
e tu ; see Pai te , O C eati it a d Late ess, i Late Thoughts.

with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and
abdicate in favor of reality.
Only thus can one comprehend the fact that hardly a serious objection has ever been
raised to the inadequacy of this view. The latter becomes evident as soon as one fixes
one’s attention not on the psychological origins, but on the work itself. For it is the
formal law of the work that must be discovered….The formal law of late works, however,
is, at the least, incapable of being subsumed under the concept of expression....6
It’s interesting that both Simmel and Adorno assert only “some of the greatest artists” or
“significant artists” are likely to have late styles; most discussions of late style, including
Said’s musings, skip over this qualification for a late style.
It’s an intriguing idea and one that’s been extremely popular in the humanities. It reaches back
to the early 19th
century and has experienced a revival over the past 80 or so years. Google
Scholar, for example, generously, perhaps overly so, lists 1700 articles, essays, reviews, or books
with references to either Adorno, late style, or both. (On the other hand, PhilPapers, an on-line
index of philosophy, lists 1553 entries for and references to Adorno.7
) The following chart from
Google Ngram8
shows the trends in these references since 1900. It’s worth noting the spike
shortly after publication of Adorno’s article on Beethoven, written in 1934 and published in
1937, and the spike coinciding with the publication of On Late Style in 2006.
For me, Said’s book, a gift from a colleague and friend when I retired several years ago,
represented a Lucretian swerve in my interests that I hadn’t anticipated especially after another
6
Ado o, Late “t le i Beetho e i Essays in Music.
7
https://philpapers.org/browse/theodor-w-
adorno?hideAbstracts=&onlineOnly=&freeOnly=&proOnly=on&sort=pubYear&limit=50&new=1&sqc=&newWindo
w=on&categorizerOn=&start=0&cId=6493&cn=theodor-w-
adorno&showCategories=on&publishedOnly=&langFilter=&filterByAreas=&format=html&jlist=&ap_c1=&ap_c2=
8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer

friend and former colleague, who’s a Beethoven buff (I’m a Bach kind of guy) picked up on the
idea, and we started batting it around.9
This essay rests on my attempt to muster my thoughts
and reactions from our conversations and my readings, put them in one place, and see where I
end up although I have a pretty good inkling as to where this will be.
The title page of this essay quotes Adorno that late works are “catastrophes.” This is a tip-off
that I intend to subvert what Adorno meant to say.10
I feel late style has been catastrophic in the
sense that it’s been a fiasco or failure instead of being the denouement of a tragedy (in this case
“modernity” or “late capitalism”) which may be what Adorno had a mind. At the risk of
appearing to inflate up my abilities or talent, I hope to strike the following pose: “To be an
essayist in Adorno’s sense [means] to be permanently on strike from, and at odds with,
everything fashionable…”11
Since late style is fashionable, I’m agin it.
You could say I was predisposed to come to this conclusion. In my defense, I think I have a
reasonably open yet skeptical mind. I was prepared to accept that Adorno and Said were
onto something. Goodness knows, the literature spawned by this idea, hunch, hypothesis,
whatever it is, is vaster than I expected. The burden of proof for my critical stance, of
course, rests with me. I hope what follows convincingly discharges this burden. It would be
foolish of me, however, to entertain the thought that it’s possible to survey in anything
resembling succinctness the contours of a literature that goes back more than a hundred
years. So I will limit myself for the moment to some case studies of late style from a
collection entitled Late Style and its Discontents12
and then Said’s book to focus on the
things I feel will advance my argument.
Make It New…Again
When Claude Monet died in 1926, his fame was secure in France but not in the United States.
Things picked up in the Fifties when Clement Greenberg, an art critic and New York’s “art
czar,” championed Monet’s work.13
What intrigued Greenberg, who wasn’t bothered by late
9
Did Ba h, like Beetho e , ha e a late st le? We ould sta t o side i g The A t of Fugue itte i the last
de ade of Ba h s life, left u o pleted he he died, a ul i atio of his usi al e pe i e ts, a d o posed
with neither a particular instrument nor an audience in mind. Perhaps this essay will show whether this question
is worth pursuing.
10
Adorno felt the Holocaust proved that capitalism and modernism held within themselves the seeds of
catastrophe. He did not define, however, hat he ea t atast ophe i his iti gs o late st le although e
a take a sta at it a d assu e the f ag e tatio Ado o as i es to Beetho e s ua tets a e the
atast ophe he has i i d a d that it efle ts the o ditio s of late apitalism. The index to a recent book on
Ado o has o l o e efe e e to atast ophe despite its i lusio i the ook s su title. A d its ost e te ded
dis ussio of the te is a foot ote that egi s Ado o is at ti es athe diffuse he it o es to the term
atast ophe Ha e , Ado o’s Mode is : A t, E pe ie e, a d Catast ophe, p. 133.)
11
Said, On Late Style, p. 92.
12
McMullan and Smiles, op. cit.
13
Alice Goldfarb Marquis, 2006, Art Czar: the Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg. Boston: MFA Publications.

style concerns (mostly a European bugbear), was Monet’s ambitious project, Les Grandes
Decorations, which dominated Monet’s life for ten years before he died. Greenberg contended
Monet’s use of color and light, the gigantic size of the work, and its “all-over” quality (Grandes
Decorations lacks traditional perspective) made Monet a precursor of Abstract Expressionism.14
Promoting his ideas on “pure painting,” Greenberg appropriated Monet, declared him to be a
forerunner of abstract expressionism, and this caught the attention of American curators and
collectors; the rest is history.
Ross King states in
his exhaustive
(exhausting?) history
of Les Grandes
Decorations that
“Over time [Monet]
grew old, selfish and
cussed.” Monet was
over seventy when he
started Grandes
Decorations and
turned his back on
the world to devote
his remaining years
to this daunting
challenge. Then, his
wife died; next, his
son. World War I
broke out. His garden at Giverny, the inspiration for Grandes Decorations, was flooded.
Cataracts threatened his vision. There’s more. I’ll take two quotes from Monet I found on the
internet to make my point.
I have painted these canvases as monks of former times illuminated their missals;
they don't owe anything to anything else than the collaboration of loneliness and
silence, to a fervent, exclusive attention that borders on hypnosis.
As in a microcosm one noticed the elements' existence and the unstable nature
of the universe that changes every minute under our eyes.
14
Ki g s page, Mad Enchantment (2016), chronicles the years Monet worked on this vast project and offers
more detail than you might possibly want to read. An alternative is take a peek at this review of the book:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/monets-last-desperate-effort-to-create-the-worlds-
most-beautiful-paintings/2016/09/01/b9a805d2-6f8c-11e6-9705-
23e51a2f424d_story.html?utm_term=.4c1395107d13

Withdrawal from society, personal tragedies, a general grumpiness, doing art without an
audience in mind and that wouldn’t “owe anything to anything else,” paintings that capture the
flux and fragmentation of life, plus being old and fearful of going blind.
What does this add up to?
Late style!
Monet’s abrupt break from his established (mature?) style to embark on Grandes
Decorations and the instability or fragmentation that found its way onto his canvases
through the strokes and marks of applying paint to canvas seem to parallel Adorno’s general
characteristics for a late style.
If there is something like a common characteristic of great late works, it is to be
sought in the breaking through form by spirit. This is no aberration of art but rather
its fatal corrective. Its highest products are condemned to a fragmentariness that is
their confession that even they do not possess what is claimed by immanence of their
form.
Despite the seeming parallels between Monet’s last work and the Adorno, if not Simmel,
model of late style, Bente Larsen’s essay on Monet in Late Style and its Discontents
questions whether Monet had a late style in the Adorno-Simmel sense of the term.15
His
view is that the radicalism of Grandes Decorations simply reflected the natural evolution of
Monet as a painter without regard to his age, physical condition, approaching death, or self-
imposed isolation. Larsen concludes instead that “Monet’s late works were perfectly on
time, powerfully materializing an artistic intuition….”
Abrupt changes in style, like Monet’s last work, are not uncommon among artists. However,
like Monet, they do not necessarily fit the Adorno model. Igor Stravinsky, for example, fled
Europe for America in 1939 to escape the Nazis; he was one of the world’s most famous and
successful composers, and yet once he settled in the United States, he was for a while socially
and professionally isolated, and his career waned. The success of The Rake’s Progress in 1951
restored his fame but it led to a professional crisis.
He realized, despite his recent triumph, “I could not continue in the same [neo-classical] strain,
could not compose a sequel to The Rake, as I would have had to do.”16
He was 69 and would
live another 20 years before his death in 1969. Until this time Stravinsky had mostly ignored
Schoenberg (bad blood kept the two composers apart) and other composers like Anton Webern
although he began to cozy up to Boulez and Babbitt. Turning his back on his earlier work,
Stravinsky experimented with serialism and twelve-tone techniques pioneered by Schoenberg
15
Be te La se , The I fi it of Wate Lilies: O Mo et s Late Pai ti gs i M Mulla a d “ iles, Late Style and Its
Discontents.
16
Josef N. Straus, “t a i sk ’s Late Musi , p. 4.

and other composers associated with or supportive of the Second Viennese School “modernists.”
According to Straus’s analysis of Stravinsky’s late works:
No major composer, at a comparably advanced age and pinnacle of recognition and
success, so thoroughly altered his compositional approach, or created late works that
differ so greatly from his earlier ones….The result was an astonishing outpouring of
music, remarkable for its sheer quantity as well as its ceaseless innovation….Yet, with
the possible exception of [his ballet] Agon…the works of Stravinsky’s late period are
rarely performed.17
Paraphrasing a quip made by Babbitt about Schoenberg, Straus writes “Stravinsky’s later music
was never in fashion, and now it is neglected as old-fashioned.”18
The conventional view is that Stravinsky switched styles to curry favor with avant-garde
serial composers; not exactly an Adornist motivation. Straus challenges this interpretation
and argues Stravinsky found in serialism the constraints he sought throughout his career,
like his compositions for ballets, that gave his music shape and definition; an artistic and
professional motivation to make his music new again. Admittedly, Stravinsky’s late music
is not a soothing harmonious reconciliation of opposites as in classicism Instead it’s jagged,
disjointed, and inorganic, which might qualify it for Adorno’s late style19
… except it is an
outgrowth of a professional career; lateness is simply an artifact of being older.20
Two other essays from Late Style and its Discontents add further doubts: one on Jane
Austen21
and another on Charles Darwin.22
Let’s start with Darwin. In the years preceding
17
Straus, Ibid., p. 5
18
Aside f o se ialis falli g out fashio se ialis as e e espe iall popula i the fi st pla e , “t a i sk s late
works are neglected because of their difficulty, unusual instrumentation, and absence of advocates to promote the
music.
19
Things get tricky here. The motivation to change styles may not explain the subsequent content or substance of
the st le. “t aus e plai s “t a i sk s fragmented style, especially the Requiem Canticles (1966), as due to the
o pose s faili g health, the deaths of f ie ds, a d his o app oa hi g death. “t aus otes the Canticles were
o posed i a spe ifi all elegia spi it, pasti g i to the sket h ook as he went along the obituaries of friends
who died during its composition – an extraordinary reversal of his habitual refusal to associate his work with
u e t e e ts o feeli gs. “t aus, Disa ilit a d Late “t le i Musi .
20
Stravinsky is not the only composer to make dramatic changes in his style; Schumann and Liszt provide two more
examples. I suppose the list could be extended and get rather lengthy. The fundamental problem, as I will make
clear later, is determining the commonality behind these changes; otherwise the issue remains fruitlessly mired in
the specifics of ideographic details
21
Oli ia Mu ph , “uffe i g “ea Cha ges: Ja e Auste s Afte li es a d the Possi ilities of a Late “t le, i
McMullan and Smiles, Ibid.
22
David Amigani, Maki g Da i Late: Late Life a d “t le i E olutio a W iti g a d its Co te ts, i M Mulla
and Smiles, Ibid.

his death, Darwin returned to an earlier enthusiasm for earth worms and began a
reassessment of a 1838 paper he had written that eventually led his final book, The Formation
of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits, published in
1881, which sold even better than On the Origin of Species when it was released. Now, perhaps
the key thing that makes this a matter of late style is that Darwin goes back to resume work
on a youthful project, which, we will see, Said says reflects an anachronism typical of the
late style. If late style means that elderly scientists kick over the traces of their discipline,
it’s hard to accept Darwin had a late style as The Formation of Vegetable Mould fails to fit
the late style mold. It’s a continuation of his empirical and theoretical interests in evolution
which was revolutionary in its implications.
Jane Austen I thought had a sunny disposition; the idea of a morose, gloomy Austen
suffering Adornistic alienation as she ages runs against my grain, plus we ought to
remember that Austen was only 42 when she died.23
Details of her life are sketchy and her
family assiduously filled in the empty spaces by promoting an image of "good quiet Aunt
Jane.” The temptation to challenge this hagiographic depiction head on surely tempts
literary scholars but perhaps it should be resisted. Making inferences without facts is a
treacherous scholarly business.
But many succumb to Adorno’s and Said’s siren calls. Olivia Murphy, the author of the
essay on Austen, picks at the fragments of unpublished, unfinished material, particularly the
incomplete novel that has come to be known as Sandition, seeking corroboration for her
hope that a late style might be found in there somewhere.24
To her credit, she admits
“Speculating about how distinctive a change in Austen’s style25
this work [Sandition] might
have become, had it continued, is also a rather futile endeavor” [emphasis added].
Nevertheless, pointing to Austen’s grave illness, which came upon her only in the last year
or so of her life, the narcotics used to numb her pain, and Austen’s emerging realization that
she may soon die leads Murphy to assert these factors “must have had an impact on
Sandition, although the nature of that impact is now unknowable” [emphasis added].
23
I su e i age of Auste efle ts e o ies of fil a d tele isio po t a als of Eliza eth Be ett. “till, a
quick check of Claire To li s iog aph , Jane Austen: A Life, did t e eal the a gst I asso iate as a s pto
of the late st le. I deed, Persuasion, hi h Auste ote a ea efo e he death, does t ha e, as I e all, da k
forebodings of growing old (how could she at the age of 41?) and her pending death but then again I lack the skill
and tools of a literary theorist; the symptoms may be there if you look hard enough.
24
I wonder if paintings disowned by artists (Monet destroyed more than a hundred of his lily paintings because he
feared their quality was compromised by his impaired vision) or writings never submitted for publication by
autho s a e assu ed to offe alid p oof of ha ges i a pai te s o ite s st le. Wo k left u do e, put to
the side, or perhaps destroyed surely should treated with analytical caution. How are we to assess the intent of
such work if it is ignored or shunned by the artist perhaps because they were failures or simply wrong for what the
artist wanted to do? Can we nevertheless use this information and assume they are reliable indicators of new
stylistic directions?
25
To ualif fo late st le, Sandition has to be distinctive o pa ed to Auste s pu lished o els; athe like
Mo et s Grandes Decorations and the many, many water lily paintings when contrasted with his earlier work.

Murphy ultimately concludes, pessimistically, that “It seems unlikely that [Said’s] schema
could be appropriate to an author who seems to have developed a fully mature subjectivity
by the age of thirteen.”26
Where does all of this leaves us? Stepping back from these essays, late style as a concept
and how it’s deployed runs into a couple of problems. One is the meaning of “late.” Austen
was only 42 when she died. Schubert, the subject of another essay27
, died when he was 31.
Did they have the time needed to develop a late style before their deaths? Frankly, how
useful can late style be under these conditions? If an artist dies young, should we therefore
refer, alternatively, to their “last style” as some art historians suggest? But how can this
substitute provide the foundation for the claims made by Adorno and Said regarding how
aging painters, novelists, poets, or soon to die musicians and scientists ply their trades?
As Humpty Dumpty Once Explained to Alice…
I’d like to explore the experience of late style that
involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and
above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive
productiveness going against….
Edward Said 28
Said doesn’t finish this sentence. Instead he leaves
us in the air with that tantalizing, irritating ellipsis
making us wonder what it is that “a sort of
deliberately unproductive productiveness” is going
against. The “grain” perhaps?
Said breathed new life into Adorno’s ideas about
late style, promoted the idea, and On Late Style was
26
Mu ph , “uffe i g “ea Cha ges, i M Mulla a d “ iles, op. cit.
27
Lau a Tu idge, “a i g “ hu e t: The E asio s of Late “t le, i M Mulla a d “ iles, Ibid.
28
“aid s puzzli g comment is no match for Ado o s o s u a tis . I deed, “aid lu tl o fesses, No o e eeds
to be reminded that Adorno is exceptionall diffi ult to ead e ause Ado o s p ose st le … assu es little
community of understanding between hi self a d his audie e. On Late Style, p. 14.) Subotnik claims Ado o s
te ts a e eall a tite ts that a e concent ated, pti , a d ellipti al. Moreover, she says, Adorno deliberately
made it difficult for readers to separate his opinions from what he was writing about while simultaneously
imbedding his thoughts in a multitude of relationships about each Adorno had several opinions. Plus, Adorno was
typically impatient with empirical detail; he gave little notice to establishing the precise boundaries between
Beetho e s pe iods, for example. Last ut ot least, the i te al i o siste ies of Ado o s a gu e ts a e
se ious e ough to keep ost stude ts of Ado o i a state of pe petual disag ee e t “u ot ik, Ado o s
Diag osis of Beetho e s Late “t le, pp. 243, 251). To which Said (p. 27) a o l ag ee: Ado o so eti es
te ds to the i ohe e t o at least the deepl a i ale t.
Now, Said said…what…e actl ?

greeted enthusiastically by reviewers29
In 1989, Said broached late style in his Welleck Lectures
at the University of California at Irvine. Shortly afterward he started work on a course entitled
“Last Work/Late Style” at Columbia University. Four years later, in 1993, Said focused more
specifically on the topic in his Northcliffe Lectures in London. A 2004 article in The London
Review of Books on late style published after Said’s death received wide attention. It is from
these materials and fragments that On Late Style was assembled. The earlier Google chart
suggests that, until Said kicked off his campaign, interest in late style was declining. There’s lots
in Said’s book that can be read with profit and pleasure as long as you don’t take it as a serious
or critical assessment of late style or as a rigorous analysis of Adorno’s theorizing.
The book’s opening chapter succinctly, clearly, and against the odds summarizes Adorno’s
thoughts on late style. (It’s an excellent starting point for anyone seeking a knowledgeable,
sympathetic guide keen to take them on a tour of the Adornian labyrinth.) What is particularly
important, as Said takes pains to point out, is that Adorno wanted to free the idea from its
biological and biographical entanglements; an ambition routinely thwarted by most writers who
cite Adorno, only to ignore his injunction to look at the “formal law” of late works. Adorno
never defines what he means by “formal law,” as far as I know, but it would seem to be the
unifying, aesthetic force behind late style.
After clearing away the underbrush that’s crept into discussions about Adorno, Said feels
content enough to proclaim: Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that late
works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor.30
Is it all really that simple and self-evident? Written with such declamatory confidence, a
cautious, perhaps timid reader without Said’s literary credentials might be scared off from
challenging his sweeping assertion. Do we have the evidence at our finger tips, say, in the
lower left hand drawer of our desk or over there in the filing cabinet, that lets us “readily”
identify valorous late works? Do these works inevitably “crown” a career and lifetime of
making art? And how is that we know (intuitively?) why late works crown a creative career,
or vice versa? For the time being, I’ll take Said at his word on this matter. However, I for
one became increasingly dubious, once he launched into his topic, as to whether he and I
were on the same page.
Let’s cut to the quick. Said’s working definition of late style is that it’s a form of exile. He
gets this notion from Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven” (everything about late style begins
with Beethoven) and says this:
Beethoven’s last works…constitute an event in the history of modern culture: a moment
when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons
29
See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16rothstein.html, fo e a ple, Ed a d ‘othstei s
review in the New York Times. Subotnik, ibid. p. 242, notes that as late as 1975 American musicologists were
largely unfamiliar with the Frankfort School and did not immediately show much interest in Adorno.
30
Said, On Late Style, p. 7

communication with established social order of which he is a part and achieves a
contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works constitute a form of exile.31
With this in hand, Said turns his attention to several artists in varying degrees of detail; some
are treated in general and in passing; others get more time. His most detailed discussions
focus on Richard Strauss, Mozart, and Glenn Gould. (I will ignore his chapter on Jean
Genet and his remarks on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.)
In all things related to late style, “exile” is an elastic term. More important, it seems only
coincidentally linked with chronological age or not at all. Mozart died when he was thirty-
five and Gould died from a stroke when he was fifty. Each had last works but were they
“late works?’ Moreover, despite Mozart’s difficulties prior to his death, it is unlikely he
anticipated his death, much less its proximity.32
Gould’s stroke was completely unexpected.
Strauss lived to be an old man, dying of kidney failure when he was eighty-five.
How does exile figure into these stories? The burden of Said’s argument is that Mozart’s
opera, Cosi fan tutte, portrayed “an amoral Lucretian world in which power has its own
logic,” a plot line at variance with Mozart’s other operas and that challenged the social
expectations of Vienna’s opera goers. Gould withdrew from the world of live concert
performances when he was thirty-two and retreated to studios to record his interpretations of
Bach and other classic composers. With regard to Strauss, Said paraphrases and quotes
Gould’s comments on the composer:
Gould [said] that the really interesting thing about Strauss was that his career and his
unequaled musical competence threw out of whack any simple chronological and
development scheme….”[H]opeless confusion…arises when we attempt to contain the
inscrutable pressures of self guiding artistic destiny within the neat, historical
summation of collective chronology….In [Strauss] we have one of those rare, intense
figures in whom the process of historical evolution is defied.”33
Exile then is literally timeless or at least not bound to biological time or the human life
cycle. It refers instead to the personal, professional, aesthetic withdrawal of an artist to
work on something that may be new (Mozart) or perhaps against the grain (Gould) or like
Strauss in his late operas reach back and mimic the style and social setting of his earlier
opera, Der Rosenkavalier. In this instance, anachronism becomes a synonym for exile.
31
Ibid., p. 8. Said further uddled ti e s elatio ship to late style when he wrote: The masterpieces of
Beetho e ’s fi al de ade a e late to the e te t that the a e e o d thei o ti e, ahead of it i te s of da i g
and startling newness, later than it in that they describe a return or homecoming to realms forgotten or left behind
by the relentless advancement of history. Got that? On Late Style, p. 135
32
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12534101 fo o e o Moza t s health.
33
Ibid, p. 26. For the heck of it, I a t to add he e Gould s austi crack that Moza t as a ad o pose ho
died too late athe tha too ea l .

The hitch with all of this is that when late style slides across the life spans of artists or slips
away from them it becomes unmoored and the theoretical heft of the idea gets washed away.
The promise of late style to make art criticism incisive quickly goes poof, and what seemed
at first glance to be solid melts into air. Without a link between age and style (unless
creative personalities have distinctive life cycles compared to the rest of us), explanations of
style become ad hoc as everything depends on what the critics find in the biographies of
artists. Late style becomes nothing more than the latest in universal, all-purpose can
openers.
Before I go on I should point out the obvious. Most discussions of late style focus on
particular works and use them as examples to prove a point or two. It’s hard to build a
sound understanding of a concept with this practice. A single work may or may not be
typical of what preceded it and with what followed it. Mozart’s The Magic Flute and La
clemenza di Tito hit the boards of Vienna’s Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden and the Estates
Theatre respectively in 1791, roughly one year after the premiere of Cost fan tutte and
roughly three months before he died. Are they similar or not? Do they share a late style? If
exile is a stylistic turn and not a psychological state (did Mozart’s exile end when he
finished Cosi?), are we forced to conclude Cosi was just one-time fling with late style?
Where does all this leave us? It’s critically important that I am not aware of a single study
by a humanities scholar (but there may be one out there) that compares the “formal law,” as
Adorno might put it, of work done later in life with work from an artist’s earlier years. Late
style argues an artist’s style changes but this is taken as an assumption and apparently not a
hunch requiring confirmation.34
At times, I damn late style as being no more than bunkum. Baloney and poppycock. Kaput!
A dead end. A waste of time. For Pete’s sake, there must be other conceptual options in art
history and aesthetics!35
There’s no there here. Look elsewhere if you want to make your
mark. It’s easy to get baffled, perplexed, and bewildered by this stuff because, when you get
right down to it, late style is a protean, amoebic conceptual blob.
So, when scholars apply it, because the idea is so malleable, the chances of not finding
something that looks like late style, walks like late style, or quacks like late style are slim to
nil. Late Style and its Discontents is an exception to this rule as the book’s title suggests.
And, yet, even in this skeptical milieu, the authors of case studies of particular artists are in
no rush to give the idea a decent burial and seem reluctant to recognize what their own
34
I also want to quibble with “aid s dis ussio of Moza t. He edits the o t i utio of Lo e zo da Po te, the
li ettist, ho olla o ated o Moza t s g eatest ope as eside Cosi, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.
Little in the way of documentation exists on this collaboratio ut it does ot st et h the poi t to sa that “aid s
discussion of Cosi, which is largely textual and not musical, may give Mozart more credit than he deserves. If this is
the case, is Cosi a e a ple of da Po te s late st le? Mo eo e , da Po te as a genuine exile. See Wolfgang
Hildesheimer, Mozart. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982.
35
A tuall , the e is. You a ig o e late st le altogethe . “olo o s Late Beehoven does t othe ith Ado o at
all e ept fo itatio s to Ado o s o ents on the Ninth Symphony and the Sonata in C minor.

investigations reveal: the evidence for late style is feeble, wobbly, a slender reed, or at best
inconclusive or even worse misleading.
I can do no better than to quote an on-line definition of protean and list its synonyms to
highlight the problem.
Def: tending or able to change frequently or easily.
Ex: "It is difficult to comprehend the whole of this protean subject"
synonyms:
ever-changing, variable, changeable, mutable,
kaleidoscopic, inconstant, inconsistent, unstable,
shifting, unsettled, fluctuating, fluid, wavering,
vacillating, mercurial, volatile
This problem must be laid at Adorno’s feet. Said says, “The crux, as always in Adorno, is
the problem of trying to say what holds the works together, gives them unity, makes them
more than just a collection of fragments.”36
Adorno “solves” the problem through paradox.
Said, again: “Here [Adorno] is at his most paradoxical: one cannot say what connects the
parts other than by invoking ‘the figure they create together.’” Said then unhelpfully adds,
“[It] would appear that actually naming the unity, or giving it a specific identity, would then
reduce its catastrophic force [emphasis in original].”
Well, we wouldn’t want that to happen! Nevertheless, I’ll ignore Said’s cautions.37
On Late Style suggests, albeit without much elaboration, that late style ranges from
reconciliation with old age and death, a kind of harmony and acceptance, to intransigence,
anger, and “nonserene tension.” At this end of the continuum, the end Said found most
interesting, elderly artists nearing the end of their days rave at the approaching night and, as
Dylan Thomas wrote, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Other scholars with different notions of late style, sensing, perhaps, the concept is not quite
as simple as Said intimates, try out varying interpretations of what they think Adorno was
writing about. This free-for-all has produced a veritable algae bloom of analogies,
metaphors, similes, and re-phrasings that obscure more than they reveal. Or, to put it
another way, like The Shadow, a mythical crime-fighter on the radio during its heyday, this
multifocal, polyphonal idea has the "mysterious power to cloud men's minds.”38
Even Said,
as I mentioned earlier, plucked “exile” out the congeries of late style’s meanings so he could
narrow his inquiries, although it is not clear if exile has the emotional edge one associates
with “nonserene tension.” Said also does not claim exile is the sine qua non of late style,
36
On Late Style, p. 12.
37
‘osali d K auss f a es the issue f o the sta dpoi t of ode is this a : We had thought to use a
universal category to authenticate a group of particulars, but the category has now been forced to cover such
hete oge eit that it is, itself, i da ge of ollapsi g. ‘osali d K auss, , The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernity Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 179.
38
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow

leaving his position undefended; it seems likely it was a matter of convenience; something
that emerged from the exigencies of writing down his thoughts.39
Well, now where are we? Surely we don’t want to default to “The Humpty Dumpty
Solution.”40
So, before we throw in our cards, let’s see if a study by Straus of four
composers that itemizes some of the ways late style has been operationalized or defined can
help us. Straus condenses the definitions and categorizes them into the following table
which I have reproduced here.41
Said’s emphasis on
exile fits in the
“introspective”
cluster while
Adorno’s definition
(with a bit of shoe-
horning) slides into
the “fragmentary”
cluster. This
suggests they’re
studying different
aspects of the same
concept. Late style,
if we accept Straus’s
clusters, has at least
six dimensions that scholars have tapped into in their efforts to understand the term. This
makes sense. Burnham in 2011 concluded, “[T]here are late styles, not a late style.”42
More
39
The o d, e ile, does ot appea i the E glish t a slatio s of Ado o s ur-essa s Late “t le i Beetho e o
Alie ated Maste pie e: The Missa Solemnis. “aid a a t e ile to se e as a s o fo alie atio ut
thei ea i gs a e uite diffe e t a d the e s little o e lap et ee the s o s fo ea h o d. Ado o, of
course, was in exile for fifteen years, leaving Germany for Britain in 1934, with the rise of the Nazis. Was Adorno,
pe haps, i the a k of “aid s i d as a odel of the e iled a tist st uggli g ith the o se e e te sio of his
times? Perhaps, however, Said took himself as his model. He was a Palestinian-American, born in Palestine,
educated in Egypt and later in the U ited “tates. I his e oi , he ote I was an uncomfortably anomalous
student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American
passport, and no certain identity at all. The title of his 002 memoir is Between Worlds, Reflections on Exile and
Other Essays.
40
The default goes this way: When I use a o d, Humpty Dumpty said, i athe a s o ful to e, it means just
what I choose it to mean — eithe o e o less The uestio is ' said Ali e, whether you can make words
ea so a diffe e t thi gs. 'The uestio is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master — that's all.
41
Straus, 2008, Disa ilit a d Late “t le i Musi , p. .
42
Bu ha , Late “t les, i ‘oe-Min and Tunbridge, Rethinking Schumann

recently, in 2016, Hutchinson declaimed, “[T]here is no such thing as a late style, only
innumerable late styles.”43
Innumerable? Really?
Well, let’s hope Hutchinson’s being hyperbolic here; six dimensions makes for more than
enough work for the time being.
Perhaps there’s promise here. With some discipline, late style might be employed profitably
as long as scholars are sensitive to its various facets and proceed accordingly. For Straus’
classification or categorization to hold water, however, its compartments should be
reasonably watertight. Do the late styles of the four composers Straus studies have different
characteristics that produce different late styles?
He focuses first on Stavinsky’s Requiem Canticles, composed shortly before Stravinsky’s
death, and finds the work includes all six late style characteristics. Not a promising start.
He then shifts to Schoenberg’s String Trio, Op. 45, written just days after Schoenberg’s
nearly fatal heart attack, and concludes it has five of the six features of late style. That’s
better but not by much; the works lacks only “compression.” Moving on to Bartok’s Third
Piano Concerto, Straus concludes the composition reflects the aspects of just one late style
characteristic: the sixth or “retrospection.” Things are looking up. Copland wrote what
effectively was his last work, Night Thoughts, before he succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease
and his memory deteriorated. It exhibits five of the features of late style except for
“compression.” (Should we ignore this aspect on these grounds?).
Sigh….We’re not out of the woods; Straus has led us into an even denser thicket of
questions.
Is his classification scheme insufficiently discriminatory to distinguish the style of one
composition from another? The pieces by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Copland, all with
five or six of Straus’ characteristics, apparently qualify as having late styles; only Bartok’s
singularly retrospective piano concerto differs from these three. Does this mean that with
just one characteristic this composition has a late style? Alternatively, is the late style label
applicable only when several characteristics are present? If so, is it a mistake to classify
works with two or three characteristics as being in a late style? Or are they in a “middling
late style”? And what would that mean? Is work falling into just one category “tardy” or
“sort-of-late”? Did Said stumble into this shadowland, this twilight of late style by focusing
on just one characteristic, the one Straus labels “introspective” and that includes “exile”?
For it’s hard to believe there aren’t many musical compositions that are introspective but are
neither late nor last works.
Take, for instance, Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, published in Paris in 1888 when Satie was
twenty-two; he died thirty-seven years later in 1925.44
To my ear, these early brief
43
Hut hi so , Afte o d, i M Mulla a d “ iles, Late Style and its Discontents, p. 235.
44
When he composed these pieces, Satie was best known as a pianist at the Chat Noir and the Auberge de
Clou cabarets in Paris. He heralded the simplicity of his trio of pensive Gymnopédies for being ithout

(compressed?) pieces are both introspective but perhaps also retrospective; music has a way
of jumping around Straus’ typology. When a composition lacks the biographical
qualification for late style yet has one or more of its features, is it in the late style? Said’s
concentration on exile suggests late style has nothing to do with the calendar. The fault then
may not be with Straus’s typology per se but the all-encompassing sweep of late style.
Krauss’s remark about modernism warrants repeating: “[The] category has now been forced
to cover such heterogeneity that it is, itself, in danger of collapsing.”45
Music and other art forms, nevertheless, are commonly categorized; music’s genres readily
come to mind. Is there something about the idea of late style that defies categorization,
defeats efforts to specify its essential qualities? Let’s hope not. For, if that’s the case, we
will have to tolerate pluralities of late styles without ever knowing what specifically makes
late style “late” … except by fiat.
Maybe there’s a way around this problem. Perhaps Simonton, a social psychologist, can
lend us a hand. In his study of 172 composers to see if their work displayed the “swan-song
phenomenon,”46
Simonton developed seven quantitative indicators of late style. Three of
them, I feel, are extrinsic or exogenous factors – repertoire popularity, aesthetic significance,
and listener accessibility – as they have more to do how the compositions have been
received and evaluated by critics and audiences; they are not something composers create on
their own. Four factors are intrinsic or endogenous:
 Melodic originality: computerized content analysis of the two-note transition
frequencies for the first six notes after transposing each theme into a C tonic.47
 Melodic variation: the standard deviation of the melodic originality scores for all
themes in a work to gauge the predictability of the themes
 Performance duration: the approximate time in minutes to perform a
composition
 Thematic size: total number of themes in a work
saue k aut, a dig at Wag e . To hea the fi st of the th ee o positio s, a sentimental favorite of mine, click
on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Xm7s9eGxU
45
Op cit.
46
It s fas i ati g that afte o e tha t o ille ia a a iatio of the th of the s a so g su fa es as late st le.
According to this ancient Greek myth, swans, silent throughout their lifetimes, sing a beautiful song just before
they die; hence swan song or schwanengesang in German.
47
The sampled compositions numbered 1,919 works with a total of 8,992 themes. Using the first six notes of each
theme transposed into a C tonic, a computer analysis determined the two-note transition probabilities for all of
the themes. A highly original theme contained very rare two-note transitions. For more on how Simonton
o st u ted the fi st t o a ia les, see “i o to , , Melodi “t u tu e a d Note T a sition Probabilities: A
Co te t A al sis of , Classi al The es.

The two melodic measures, I believe, most directly address the issue of late style and I’ll
concentrate on them when addressing the results of Simonton’s study summarized in the
following table which I’ve copied from his article.
The last works function, the independent variable, measures the proximity in years between
the year of the composition and the composer’s death. The exponential version of this
function, in my opinion, offers the best test of the late style hypothesis. According to
Simonton, “the exponential function postulates that most of the longitudinal shift [in
melodic originality or variation] occurs extremely rapidly toward the end.”48
In other words,
it’s the realization or dawning that death is near due to age or ill-health that leads to a late
style and not the artists’ understanding that they will eventually die. (In point of fact, “linear
age” which assumes the idea of death exerts a gradual pull on artists’ compositions has no
impact on the melodic variables.) Chronological age is a control variable as are “eminence,”
the reputations of composers, and their “productivity.”
The zero-order results in the first column of this table reflect the regression of each attribute
on only the exponential function. The key finding is that last or late effects occur only with
respect to melodic originality and this relationship persists even as the control variables are
added to the regression equation. (The effect on performance duration is significant in the
zero-order specification but it is washed away by the control variables.) Note the
relationship is negative; originality declines as death draws closer. This finding is consistent
with earlier 19th
century views of old age and creativity. It is not, however, what Simmel
and Adorno, his friend, had in mind.
48
“i o to , , The “ a -“o g Phe o e o , p. .

“There is Only One Beethoven”
And that’s the problem.49
Beethoven’s life and his work gave late style a
paradigm, an archetype, an exemplar of how a
composer evolves or changes. As citations to late style
and this paradigm accumulate year by year, the idea
grows in authority and seemingly gains further
credibility. Surely there must be good reasons for why
so many scholars attach the rubric to their work and
reference it with abandon, right?
Beethoven made it all look simple, indeed
captivatingly simple. It innocently began with
identifying episodes or periods in Beethoven’s life
corresponding to his compositions and eventually
became a cottage industry that for more than a century
beavered away divvying and dicing up Beethoven’s
life and his compositions into periods. (Late style obviously makes no sense if there isn’t a
preceding period with a different style as Adorno recognized in his scanty and scattered remarks
about Beethoven’s “middle period.”50
)
Before going on, a brief sketch of Beethoven’s life may be in order. Born in 1770, Beethoven
died fifty-seven years later in 1827.51
He moved to Vienna in 1791 from Bonn, where he was
born, to study composition with Haydn. His hearing began to deteriorate in 1797, he eventually
ceased performing in public, and within a few years he was completely deaf. In 1802, at one of
the low points of his life, in despair over his deafness and confessing thoughts of committing
suicide, he wrote his brothers what is now called “The Heiligenstadt Testament” in which he
announced that because of his deafness “I must live quite alone, like an outcast.”52
Between
49
The title fo this se tio o es f o Beetho e s espo se to a pat o , Prince Lichnowsky, after he refused his
request that Beethoven pla fo house guests, i hi h he poi ted out Prince, what you are, you are by accident
of birth; what I am, I am through my own efforts. There have been thousands of princes and will be thousands
more; there is only o e Beetho e .
50
“u ot ik, Ado o s Diag osis of Beetho e s Late “t le, p. .
51
It s o th oti g ho a e e t iog aphe des i ed Beetho e oughl fiftee o ths efo e his death: As the
end of 1825 approached, Beethoven seemed to have no awareness that his clock was running down, though it
would hardly have surprised him. He had said long before that he knew how to die. He had come close any
u e of ti es….“ta ti g i De e e , his attention was taken up by the new string quartet, in C-sharp minor
[No. 14, Op. 131]. Jan Swafford, 2014. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p.
888.
52
Ba Coope , The Heilige stadt Testa e t in Cooper, ed., The Beethoven Compendium.
One hoop at a ti e…playi g for ti e…

1815 and 1817, Beethoven virtually stopped composing because of personal illness, the death of
one of his brothers, which led to a custody battle over the nephew, and romantic-related matters.
This table for convenience
focuses only on Beethoven’s
symphonies and his late
works. Eight of his nine
symphonies were composed
in the twelve to thirteen
years following the turn of
the century. He started work
on Missa Solemnis and the
Ninth Symphony, two
pieces often considered to be
in his late style, toward the
end of the second decade of
the 1800s but they took
several years to complete.
From this point on,
Beethoven concentrated on
his string quartets which,
like solo piano pieces, allow
for greater experimentation
and innovation than large
ensemble works like
symphonies.53
Can you see the glimmer of
opportunities for
“periodization” yet? Many
musicologists have, and as a result “The partitioning of Beethoven’s music into various
‘creative’ or ‘stylistic’ periods is as old as Beethoven’s music itself.” 54
Indeed, this enterprise got seriously under way just ten years after Beethoven’s death when
Francois-Joseph Fetis formalized previous divisions of Beethoven’s work into three stages or
stylistic periods. Fetis’ proposal was typical of the time as early 19th
century European historians
53
Beethoven composed his string quarters in spurts. He wrote his first six quartets from 1798 to 1800. The next
three, the so- alled ‘azu o sk ua tets e e o posed i . He follo ed these up ith the Ha p a d
“e ioso pie es i -11. These discrete clusters seem ripe for comparison with the late quartets. And, indeed,
Lo k ood s I side Beetho e ’s Qua tets does p e isel that as ell as Joseph Ke a s ea lie The Beethoven
Quartets, New York: Knopf, 1967.
54
Willia D a ki , A Co spe tus of Beetho e s Musi i Coope , The Beethoven Compendium, p. 198.
Beethoven’s Symphonies and Late Works or Quartets
Opus Title Date
21 Symphony No.1 1799–1800
36 Symphony No.2 1801–02
36 Symphony No.2 1805
55 Symphony No.3 ("Eroica") 1803
123 Missa solemnis 1819–23
125 Symphony No. 9 1817-24
127 String Quartet No.12 1822-25
130 String Quartet No.13 1825, 1st
version
130 String Quartet No.13 1826, 2nd
version
131 String Quartet No.14 1825–26
132 String Quartet No.15 1823–25
133 Große Fuge 1825–26
134 Große Fuge 1826
135 String Quartet No.16 1826
http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven

of music insisted on a three-part division roughly corresponding to youth, maturity, and
decadence.55
Many scholars put their shoulders to the wheel in the ensuing years as this table on
his “three styles” indicates.
Early Formulations of Beethoven’s Three Styles
Schlosser (1828) Op.1-[40] Op.40-60 Op.67-
Fetis (1837) Op.1-[55] Op.55-92 Op.93-135
Schindler (1840) Birth-1800 1800-Octo.1813 Nov.1813-death
Czerny (1840) Op.2-28
1795-1803
Op.[28]-90
1803-15
Op.101-111
To 1827
Scudo (1850) 1790-1800 1800—16 1816-death
Lenz (1852) Op.1-22 Op.26-90 Op.101-11
Czerny (1853) Op.1-28; or to
1802
1803-15 1816-26
Schindler (1860) Birth-1800 1801-14 1815-death
Seiffert (1843) symphonies Nos.1,2,4,7,8 Nos.3,6,9 No.5
Opus numbers refer to only those pieces specifically cited in the texts. Brackets have been used to
indicate that the author does not indicate the precise opus numbers where the line between styles
should be drawn.
Source: Knittel, 1995, “Imitation, Individuality, and Illness: Behind Beethoven’s ‘Three Styles’”
Periodization of Beethoven’s work or life into one form or another of this tripartite division has
had a remarkable shelf-life. For example, Solomon suggested in 1988 that the composer’s
patrons could be used as a basis for dividing up his works.56
I don’t want to reprise the many
cavils, complaints, and gripes scholars have about periodization, although few can live without
it. Rather I want to stress that these earlier efforts rested on the idea that Beethoven, being no
different than any other artist, went into decline as he grew older, and the evidence for this
decline could be found in the late quartets.
In other words, Vienna did not greet these late works with enthusiasm. They presented a
disappointing contrast with the symphonies, for instance, and this was cracked up to Beethoven’s
deafness and his advancing years. While Adorno a hundred years later praises the quartets for
being episodic, fragmented, filled with gaps, absences, and silences, Beethoven’s contemporaries
shook their heads in dismay and bewilderment, lamenting his deteriorating powers of
composition. It took a while for critics and audiences to appreciate the quartets. Richard
Wagner, one of the later boosters of the quartets, exercised his ample skills for self-promotion
and appropriated Beethoven, particularly in his 1840 novella “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven,” to
boost his own stature and conducted performances of Beethoven’s works to share in the
55
Solomon, The C eati e Pe iods of Beetho e i “olo o , Beethoven Essays, p. 116-117.
56
Ibid.

limelight. In a nutshell, the late quartets were not destined to enter the canon of classical music;
it took some politics to get them there.57
Let’s return to Adorno now. Adorno, it must be stressed, worked within the tripartite trope that
has permeated the literature on Beethoven for 190 years. At the same time, his elastic, ever-
shifting definition of “late style” produced an “inveterate sorting of sheep and goats.” His
fragments, separate from the two short essays, reveal at one point he would not admit a single
sonata to his late style club. Elsewhere, he concluded “The Ninth Symphony is not a late work
but a reconstruction of the classical Beethoven” which I surmise was intended as faint praise. A
second fragment repeats that this symphony is definitely not in the club. And, then, in a
turnabout, Adorno flatly contradicts himself, offers a sophisticated, technical analysis of the
Ninth, and opens the door for it, noting “It has the character of alienation—of a subjective, but
violent, transition to objectivity.” (You need to know the handshake and own the decoder ring to
know what this means.)58
In the end, regrettably, it comes down to this: “Lateness,” for Adorno, “is everywhere and
nowhere. Perhaps, then, it can only be pinned down as a philosophical category: a ‘stepping
back from appearance,’ or retreat from ‘harmony [emphasis in original].’”59
Which, of course,
leaves us with the nagging question, “When exactly does lateness occur and does it entail a
change in style?”
What Adorno’s analysis of Beethoven did, I believe, was provide the gloss of Frankfort School
theorizing or philosophizing to a topic that until the translation and publication of Spätstil
Beethovens had been largely descriptive, ideographic, and pinned down by the quotidian and
sometimes not so quotidian events of Beethoven’s life. Labelling his “last works” as “late style”
offered a fresh perspective on these compositions and a new starting point without rehashing old
issues.
All this fuss about divvying up Beethoven into periods, applying labels to these periods,
interpreting his works according to these periods, and then suggesting the results apply to other
composers or artists may be unnecessary, misleading, and even wrong. What if we had a
summated quantitative measure of the quality of each of Beethoven’s compositions that I will
call “Q” and we mapped these measures or indicators on time or “T” corresponding to
Beethoven’s years as a composer. The result would be a continuous series of Q over time,
creating a curve or arc indicating the trend in Q over Beethoven’s life.
57
Especially useful to my understanding of this process are DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius,
K ittel s t o a ti les, Wag e , Deaf ess, a d the ‘e eptio of Beetho e s Late “t le a d Late, Last, a d
Least, a d Vazso i s Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand. My few words here do not do
justice to these studies.
58
Spitzer, Music as Philosophy, p. 62. Even Missa Solemnis gets the u s ush at o e poi t a d the t a e si g
o e ti e Ado o poi ts to so e ea l so atas as late st le i disguise.
59
Ibid, p. 63.

The 19th
century musicologists thought this trend line would dip for Beethoven as they felt the
quality of his compositions had declined with age and infirmities. Adorno’s late style hypothesis
would lead us to the contrary expectation: there should be an up-tick in Q during Beethoven’s
last decade. A third possibility is Beethoven’s creativity and originality grew continuously with
little variation over time.
This is a highly stylized rendering of the three
possibilities. As artists learn their art, the
quality of their work rapidly improves (if they
have talent) until they reach a plateau (I suppose
we could call it their “mature period”).
Beethoven’s Bonn years and time with Haydn
corresponds to this early time; his mature period
begins with his symphonies. As he got older,
Fetis and his 19th
century compatriots claimed, Beethoven’s creativity fell which is
indicated by the dashed line. Adorno argued the opposite case; Beethoven’s Q trend
turned upward, producing his late style compositions. Our third possibility is shown by
the shaded area; Beethoven’s Q neither dipped nor soared; it simply rose throughout his
life.
Simonton offers a test of these
three alternatives.60
With a
sample of 105 works by
Beethoven and a total of 593
themes, Simonton correlated his
measures of the themes’
“melodic originality” using the
two-note transition probabilities
we met earlier, with several
compositional and biographical
variables. (The “variation”
variable is the standard
deviation of the “originality”
mean for the themes in each
composition.) The results in
this table are the simple correlations between each compositional and biographical
variable and each melodic variable.61
Let’s begin with age. Simonton found Beethoven’s average level of melodic originality
increased more or less monotonically over his lifetime as a composer. No curvilinear
60
“i o to , , Musi al Aestheti s a d C eati it i Beetho e .
61
The e a e easo s h I thi k “i o to s odel ould e ette spe ified egi i g ith its o e sio i to a
multivariate form and questions about multicollinearity.
Beethoven’s Melodic Originality:
Compositional and Biographical Correlates
Compositional
Melodic
Originality
Melodic
Variation
Minor key .25** .08
Instrumental .33*** .11
Number of Movements .01 .39***
Biographical
Age .25** -.05
Year’s productivity - .20* .12
Biographical stress .22* .03
Physical illness .27** .01
* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001
Adapted from Simonton, 1987, “Musical Aesthetics and Creativity in
Beethoven: A Computer Analysis of 105 Compositions”

relationship was found which Fetis or Adorno might have predicted. In other words,
neither of them got it right with respect to Beethoven. To quote Simonton: “[As]
Beehoven’s career progressed his compositions expanded their mean level of melodic
originality. Beethoven…refused to stand still, choosing rather to advance forward with
ever more unpredictable, surprising musical ideas.”62
As biographers and musicologists have noted, Beethoven’s productivity declined as he
got older but this was because he spent more time on each composition, the originality of
which correspondingly increased. Granting for a moment late style’s polyphony, we
might give its supporters a couple of points since Beethoven’s creativity was positively
affected by the stressful events in his life and by his health problems. Adversity, then,
was the mother of Beethoven’s inventiveness, not his adversary, although these two
factors were also present when he was in his twenties and thirties, not just near his death.
Finally, Beethoven’s decision to compose in a minor key and his choice to concentrate on
instrumental as opposed to vocal works both improved their chances for originality. Last
but not least compositions involving multiple movements, as might be expected,
increased the complexity of the works.
One more comment. Simonton’s measures
have an advantage over Fetis, Adorno, and
many others: they are “objective” indicators;
they don’t depend on the personal or
professional judgments of observers.
Adorno was a friend and booster of
Schoenberg whose atonal, serial music,
Adorno felt, was the culmination of the
aesthetic autonomy that modernism
promised. What this means is that Adorno
heard Beethoven’s music in an acutely
different way than Beethoven’s
contemporaries. Indeed, the entire
periodization of Beethoven and its
accompanying interpretations was contingent on how scholars, critics, and audiences learned to
hear and listen to Beethoven.
DeNora puts it well:
While music scholarship too often is concerned with meaning and symbolic reality, the
absence, until fairly recently, of bridges between musicology and the human sciences has
meant the discourses of music analysis have often made use of naively positivist narrative
strategies. By the term naïve positivism, I mean modes of accounting that postulate
categories of analysis as historical transcendent….This is especially true of analyses that
62
Ibid, p. 99.
Waiti g for Late Style…or Godot?

“read” musical texts as if the referents of these texts were in the texts as opposed to
socially/culturally constructed through the interaction of text and recipient, as if the act
of writing about music were not part of the meaning construction process.63
What DeNora’s comments mean for this essay is that my highly stylized depictions of
Beethoven’s Q trends, whether they fell or rose, were social constructions by Fetis and
Adorno. The underlying rationale for these depictions came from how Beethoven was heard
by his listeners and what they thought…at the time…about him, and what they wrote about
his music…at the time…in light of how they thought about music and culture more
generally...at the time.64
Late style with its roots in the 19th
century periodization of Beethoven is a historical and
cultural artifact. Whether Beethoven actually ever had a “late style” is at best moot. And
since there was only one Beethoven, the applicability of the concept to other artists is also
moot.
A postscript –
Scattered throughout this essay are images of Edward Gorey’s character in his book, The
Unstrung Harp, Mr. Earbrass, plus a couple other of Gorey’s drawings; all of which I
“borrowed” from the internet. Mr. Earbrass, a reclusive well-to-do bachelor of middle years,
given his name seemed like the right figure for an essay dealing mostly with music. According
to Amazon from which I’ve purloined the rest of this postscript --
“On November 18th of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel.' Weeks ago he
chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time
of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply,
but his mind will keep reverting to the last biscuit on the plate." So begins what the Times
Literary Supplement called "a small masterpiece." TUH is a look at the literary life and its
"attendant woes: isolation, writer's block, professional jealousy, and plain boredom." But, as
with all of Edward Gorey's books, TUH is also about life in general, with its anguish, turnips,
conjunctions, illness, defeat, string, parties, no parties, urns, desuetude, disaffection, claws, loss,
trebizond, napkins, shame, stones, distance, fever, antipodes, mush, glaciers, incoherence,
labels, miasma, amputation, tides, deceit, mourning, elsewards.
Turnips, string, and trebizond, indeed! Sounds like the life of the occasional essayist.
63
DeNo a, De o st u ti g Pe iodizatio , p. .
64
Even our images of Beethoven and narratives of his life and works shift and move over time. See Comini, The
Changing Image of Beethoven, Rumph, Beethoven After Napoleon, and Burnham, Beethoven Hero. What we see is
what we get?

Late Style: Selected Readings
I am not a musicologist and lack training in the area. Nor am I especially familiar with the ins
and outs of aesthetics or critical theory. The following list represents stuff I came across that
helped me put this essay together by supplying me with major ideas as well as explanations of
these ideas so I could make sense of them. I think the readings are intellectually accessible and
sufficiently representative of an intriguing, certainly surprisingly large amount of writing on
“late style” that could be useful to any reader(s) wanting to pursue this concept farther than I
have. (Or cross-check what I’ve written.) Essays or chapters from books that provide overviews
and assessments of late style are broken out separately. (My footnotes in this essay include
citations to other books and articles; not all of which are not included in this list as they are
mostly unrelated to the concept of lateness or late style.)
Adorno, Theodor W. 1993. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts, ed. R.
Tiedemann, trans. E. Jephcott, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Anthony Barone. 1995. “On the Score of ‘Parsifal.’” Music & Letters,
Vol. 76, No. 3, pp. 384-397.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 Late Style in Beethoven
 Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis
Barone, Anthony. 1995. “Richard Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ and the Theory of Late Style.”
Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 37-54.
Bodley, Lorraine Byrne and Julian Horton. 2016. Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burnham, Scott. 1995. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chua, Daniel K.L. 2016. The Galtizin Quartets of Beethoven: Opp. 127, 132, 130. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Comini, Allessandra. 1987. The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking. New
York: Rizzoli.
Cook, Deborah, ed. 2014. Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts. London: Routledge.
Cooper, Barry, ed. 2010. The Beethoven Compendium: A Guide to Beethoven’s Life and Music.
London: Thames & Hudson.

Davis, Andrew. 2010. Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
DeNora, Tia. 1995a. “Deconstructing Periodization: Sociological Methods and Historical
Ethnography.” Beethoven Forum. Vol. 4, pp. 1-15.
DeNora, Tia. 1995b. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna,
1792-1803. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gordon Peter E. 2008. "The Artwork Beyond Itself: Adorno, Beethoven, and Late Style" in The
Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin
Jay. New York: Berghahn Books.
Gourgouris, Stathis. 2005. “The Late Style of Edward Said.” Alif: Journal of Comparative
Poetics. No. 5, pp. 37-45.
Hammer, Espen. 2015. Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hutchinson, Ben. 2016. Lateness and Modern European Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Knittel, K.M. 1995. “Imitation, Individuality, and Illness: Behind Beethoven’s ‘Three Styles.’”
Beethoven Forum, Vol. 4, pp.17-36
Knittel, K.M. 1998. “Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style.” Journal
of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 49-82.
Knittel, K.M. 2006. “’Late,’ Last, and Least: On Being Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major, Op.
135.” Music & Letters, Vol. 87, No. 1, pp. 16-51.
Kok, Roe-Min and Laura Tunbridge, eds. 2011. Rethinking Schumann. New York: Oxford
University Press.
 Burnham, Scott. “Late Styles.”
Lockwood, Lewis. 2008. Inside Beethoven’s Quartets: History, Interpretation, Performance.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
McMullan, Gordon. 2007. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the
Proximity of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Ch. 1, “Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of
Death.”
McMullan, Gordon and Sam Smiles, eds. 2016. Late Style and its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
 Smiles, Sam. “From Titian to Impressionism: The Genealogy of Late Style.”

 Hutcheon, Linda and Michael Hutcheon. “Historicizing Late Style as a Discourse
of Reception.”
 Spencer, Robert. “Lateness and Modernity in Theodor Adorno.”
 Hutchinson, Ben. “Afterword.”
Muller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Notley, Margaret. 2007. Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese
Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Painter, Karen and Thomas Crow, eds. 2006. Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and
Composers at Work. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
 Painter, Karen. “On Creativity and Lateness.”
Rumph, Stephen. 2004. Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Said, Edward W. 2004. “Thoughts on Late Style,” The London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No.
15, pp. 3-7
Said, Edward W. 2006. Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1977. “Creative Productivity, Age, and Stress: A Biographical Time-
Series Analysis of 10 Classical Composers.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol.
35, No. 11, pp. 791-804.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1980. “Thematic Fame, Melodic Originality, and Musical Zeitgeist: A
Biographical and Transhistorical Content Analysis.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 6, pp. 932-983.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1984. “Melodic Structure and Note Transition Probabilities: A Content
Analysis of 15,618 Classical Themes.” Psychology of Music, Vol. 12, pp. 3-16.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1987. “Musical Aesthetics and Creativity in Beethoven: A Computer
Analysis of 105 Compositions.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol 15, pp. 87-104.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1989. The Swan-Song Phenomenon: Last-Works Effects for 172
Classical Composers.” Psychology and Aging, Vol. 4, March, pp. 42-47.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1991. “Emergence and Realization of Genius: The Lives and Works of
120 Classical Composers.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 61, No. 5, pp.
829-840.
Simonton, Dean Keith. 1994. “Computer Content Analysis of Melodic Structure: Classical
Composers and Their Compositions.” Psychology of Music, Vol. 22, pp. 31-43.
Solomon, Maynard. 1988. Beethoven Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Solomon, Maynard. 1998. Beethoven, 2nd
Edition, New York: Schirmer Trade Books.
Solomon, Maynard. 2003. Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Straus, Joseph N. 2001. Stravinsky’s Late Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Straus, Joseph N. 2008. “Disability and ‘Late Style’ in Music.” The Journal of Musicology, Vol.
25, No. 1, pp. 3-45.
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1976. “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early
Symptoms of a Fatal Condition.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 29, No.
2, pp. 242-275.
Swinkin, Jeffrey. 2013. “The Middle Style/Late Style Dialectic Problematizing Adorno’s Theory
of Beethoven.” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 287-329.
Tunbridge, Laura. 2007. Schumann’s Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vazsonyi, Nicholas. 2010. Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wikipedia Contributors, “Late Work of Franz Liszt.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Late_works_of_Franz_Liszt&oldid=787059036>
23 June 2017. Web. 7 July 2017.

The End
Written and edited at the facilities of
Essays on a Whim for a Lark
An unincorporated, fully liable, unprofitable but independently financed enterprise located for the
time being in College Station, Texas
Date of Publication: July 2017
Word Count: 12,245
I have a weakness for minor artists. But they must be genuinely minor, by which I mean that they
mustn’t lapse into minority through overreaching, want of energy, crudity, or any other kind of
ineptitude. They must not be failed major artists merely. The true minor artist eschews the noble
and the solemn. He fears tedium for his audience, but even more for himself. He sets out to be,
and is perfectly content to remain, less than great. The minor artist knows his limits and lives
comfortably within them. To delight, to charm, to entertain, such are the goals the minor artist
sets himself, and, when brought off with style and verve and elegant lucidity, they are—more than
sufficient—wholly admirable.
Joseph Epstein, “Pink Pigeons & Blue Mayonnaise,” 1998.

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