On Edward Said and Late Style

On Sunday, 9 March, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will be collaborating on an evening of music and readings inspired by Edward Said’s last, posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.

The book was assembled from notes and lectures by Said’s friend and former neighbour Michael Wood, and followed a piece, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, that appeared in the London Review of Books in 2004:

Each of us can supply evidence of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?

Reviewing the book in 2006, Frank Kermode wrote:

As he remarks at the outset, Said had a personal interest in ‘the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health’, and his own experience induced him to ask whether great artists, near the end of their lives, could develop a ‘late style’. The expression ‘late style’, or Spätstil, is usually attributed to Adorno, who was probably the strongest single intellectual influence on Said. Adorno’s prime example of late style was late Beethoven. Said offers a modified version of his views. Adorno had attended closely to the late works: the last five piano sonatas, the last six string quartets, the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. In these works, which still remember, but with extraordinary distortions, the usual musical forms, Beethoven established an alienated relationship with the contemporary social order. Adorno remarks the presence in this music of ‘unmastered material’, unmotivated rhetorical devices, carelessness, inept decoration and repetitiveness. Some of these works seem to be unfinished, or in other ways defiant of informed expectation. They are intended to be, sometimes grotesquely, out of touch not only with the public but with the work of the composer’s own middle period, so forceful, so structured, so consistent with his humane politics, as in the ‘Eroica’, the Fifth Symphony and Fidelio. By comparison with these masterpieces the late works are disorderly and even ‘catastrophic’. ‘For Adorno, lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.’ Said calls this music ‘a form of exile’.

Next Sunday at 6 p.m., the City of London Sinfonia will play Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, along with late works by Richard Strauss, Purcell and Britten, interspersed with readings by Khalid Abdalla, Juliet Stevenson, Will Keen and Aliyah Odoffin from texts read by, written by and written about Said.

To book tickets, click here.