On Late Style
Music and Literature Against the Grain
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- €21.99
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- €21.99
Publisher Description
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'A series of dazzling case studies exploring the idea of lateness in a range of composers, writers and artists' - London Review of Books
'Gracefully unquiet, probing and wise ... Said's own elegiac masterpiece of late style' - Financial Times
'What Said stands for - critical intelligence, high art and the preservation of the language - must be at the centre of our lives. This book is a fine monument to his life and work' - Hanif Kureishi
'His own late style, if it is acceptable to call it that, mixes an easy mastery of material with an unquenched desire to preserve difficulties' - Guardian
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On Late Style examines the work produced by great artists -Beethoven, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet among them - at the end of their lives. Said makes it clear that, rather than the resolution of a lifetime's artistic endeavour, most of the late works discussed are rife with contradiction and almost impenetrable complexity. He helps us see how, though these works often stood in direct contrast to the tastes of society, they were, just as often, announcements of what was to come in the artist's discipline - works of true artistic genius.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the book culture critic Said was completing when he died in 2003. The critical survey had its genesis in a popular course Said taught at Columbia University, "Late Works/Late Style," examining "artists... whose work expresses lateness through the peculiarities of its style." Writing with insight and meticulous phrasing, Said studies the output of creative talents during their final years. The passing parade of artists, writers and composers includes Beethoven, Mozart, Jean Genet, Glenn Gould, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. In one piece, Said details dramatic contrasts between Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Luchino Visconti's film adaptation of that novel; in another, he compares Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1911) with Benjamin Britten's 1973 opera of Mann's novella, composed near the end of Britten's career. While "late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor," Said concludes there also is "artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction." As Said examined the effect of impending death on artists, leukemia led him to his own final pages, resulting in this erudite collection.
