EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (Edward Said)
Automatically transcribed from the episode audio. Some words and names may be inaccurate.
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Usually when we look at the trajectory of like a great life or a great career, we're totally conditioned to expect this beautiful sunset. Right. A peaceful ending. Yeah, exactly. We expect the artist, the thinker, the creator to reach a certain age, look back on their wild youth and just, you know, mellow out. We want them to hand down this serene, perfectly wrapped package of wisdom. Tying up all their life's contradictions with a neat little bow. Right. But when you actually look closely at certain artists facing the end of their lives, that beautiful, calming sunset looks more like a terrifying, jagged lightning storm. It really does. You see a creative landscape that isn't serene at all. It's violently fractured.
It's difficult. It's frankly an absolute refusal to comfort the audience. It is the definition of an unresolved catastrophe. And that refusal, that deliberate shattering of expectations, is actually one of the most profound phenomena in all of human creativity. So today we are immersing ourselves in a really deeply moving and intellectually rigorous concept. It's known as late style. Yes, late style. And we are exploring this deep dive for you through the lens of the legendary cultural critic Edward W. Said and his final posthumously published book. It's called On Late Style, Music and Literature Against the Grain. Right. And we're going to ask a question that gets right to the core of what it means to create something while knowing you are... Well, running out of time. What happens to the mind right before the end? Exactly. Because for some of history's greatest geniuses, the end of life brings this furious rebellion. And to really grasp the gravity of this work, you have to understand the deeply poignant context of its creation. Say it's on life. Right. Edward Say didn't just study lateness as some, you know, dry academic exercise. He was literally living it. He was writing this manuscript. While battling leukemia. Diagnosed in 1991. So he lived with this shadow for over a decade until he passed away in 2003. He was acutely physically aware of his own shortage of time. His wife, Miriam C. said, detailed this in the foreword of the book, which is just heartbreaking.
Yeah, she recounted how they were in Europe in, I think, August of 2003. And he fell terribly ill. They rushed back to New York. And after weeks of this high fever, he had a brief window where he actually felt a bit better. And he sat at breakfast. and meticulously detailed to her exactly what he planned to write the following week so he could finish the book by december he literally left notes for his family and then three days later he was gone yeah so the book we're analyzing today is itself an unfinished late work about unfinished late works. But here is the really critical distinction for you to keep in mind. Sid wasn't writing this as a self -pitying memoir. No, not at all. He wasn't using it to say a gentle goodbye. He was utterly fascinated by artists who, facing their own mortality, became like... more untamed. He was drawn to the creators who pushed back against the dying of the light with a really highly structured, almost agonizingly complex roar. Right. He was looking at how the approaching death of the artist infects the works themselves. Now, as Saad points out, a piece of music or a novel doesn't have an organic life to lose. A book doesn't catch a virus. The symphony doesn't get old. Exactly. But the shadow of mortality enters the style. It bends the light. Let me jump in here, though, because my natural instinct is to push back on this a little bit. Sure, go ahead. When I think of late works, the first things that pop into my head are the ultimate examples of peace and resolution. Like what?
I think of Shakespeare's The Tempest, right? Where Profero literally breaks his magical staff, gives up his power, and forgives his enemies. The classic example. Or Sophocles writing Oedipus at Colonus, where this... Blind, suffering, exiled king finally finds miraculous transfiguration and unearthly serenity. It's beautiful. Isn't ripeness is all the standard template? I mean, look at Rembrandt's warm, glowing late self -portraits. That is the accepted historical narrative, and Sedd completely acknowledges that. Okay, so he's not denying it exists. No, he admits that anyone could readily supply a massive list of evidence showing how late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor with harmony. Right. But said is exclusively interested in the exceptions. The outliers. Yes.
He wants to study the artists whose late works are defined by intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradictions. He wants to look at artists who use their final style as a form of exile from their own era. Right. What if age and ill health. don't produce the serenity of ripeness? What if they produce an angry, disturbed artist who tampers irrevocably with the very possibility of closure? So we are looking at style as a deliberate act of sabotage against neat endings. Sabotage is a great word for it.
And to understand this rebellious late style, we have to start with the timeline of human life itself. SED draws on the great founders of the science of history here, like Ibn Khaldun and Gian Battista Vico. Breaking down how we understand our own stories. Because we aren't just talking about biological decay here. We're talking about human history, the secular constructed world we make for ourselves. And SED breaks this self -making into three distinct phases, right? Yes. Phase one is beginnings. This is about locating origins. Think of a birth. Or in literary terms, think of the invention of the novel form with something like Robinson Crusoe. Oh, like orphanhood, finding roots, building a totally new world from scratch. Exactly. Which leads to phase two, continuity or maturity. The middle of the story. This is the exfoliation from birth. In literature, it's the buildings Roman, you know, the novel of education and growth. Like George Eliot's Middlemarch.
Yes. Driven by Darwinian plots of generation, community building, and social integration, the artist is building their grand, cohesive worldview. And then we hit phase three, lateness. The decay of the body, the realization that the road ahead is shorter than the road behind. And society assumes a certain timeliness to all of this. There is a season for everything. Right. What is appropriate for a young rebel is not appropriate for an aging master. Sedd points out that the entire genre of comedy is built around restoring this timeliness. Yes, the humor in a classic comedy comes from someone acting out of their proper time, an old man trying to act like a young lover, or a philosopher throwing an infantile temper tantrum. And how does comedy usually end?
With a festive marriage of young lovers, which essentially restores the proper, timely, biological order of the universe. But the artist said is interested in completely violate that timely compact. Which brings us to a philosopher named Theodore Adorno. Yes. And his absolute obsession with a deaf, isolated, aging Ludwig von Beethoven. Adorno was a towering, notoriously difficult German philosopher from the Frankfurt School. And in 1937, he wrote an essay fragment on Beethoven's third and final period. We're talking about the last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missus Lemnis, and those famously baffling late string quartets. Right. To set the stage, Beethoven is completely deaf at this point. He is isolated, misanthropic, and suffering physically.
The easy, conventional historical tate is to listen to these bizarre late works and say, well, poor Beethoven. Yeah, he couldn't hear what he was doing. He was dying. So his music got strange and fragmented. It's just a tragic diary of a sick man. But Adorno rejects that completely, doesn't he? He violently rejects it. Adorno warns that if you treat the music merely as a psychological diary of a dying man, You strip the art of its aesthetic rights. You reduce a masterpiece to a medical chart. Exactly. Adorno argues these works are an alienated aesthetic event. He actually calls Beethoven's late style a catastrophe in the history of art. Catastrophe is a brutal word to use for music that is universally revered today. What does he mean by that? He means it structurally. Think about Beethoven's middle period. Think of the Eroica Symphony or the famous Fifth Symphony, the dun -dun -dun -dun. Oh yeah, the classic. That music is incredibly integrated.
It is driven, relentless, and organically whole. Every single note feels like it organically propels the next note forward. Right. In this grand, heroic narrative of synthesis, the music conquers its own themes. But in the late period, that heroic drive vanishes. The music suddenly becomes episodic. It feels distracted. It is full of what Adorno calls shishuras, sudden, shocking discontinuities, dead stops, and silences. Okay, let's use a visual analogy here. It's like Beethoven spent his middle period building a beautifully cohesive, gleaming suspension bridge. A real marvel of engineering. I like this. But in his late period, he decides to build a bridge, but leaves huge, terrifying gaps in the middle of the roadway. Yes. He just leaves the naked structural steel beams exposed over a plunging drop and expects you to walk across it. That is an incredibly precise analogy because Adorno explicitly says that Beethoven leaves behind unmastered material.
Exposing the steel beams. Exactly. Let's look at the musical mechanics of this. Beethoven takes conventional musical rhetorical devices, things that were standard toolkit items for composers of his era, like a trill, an appoggiatura, or standard cadence. And he splinters them off. Yes. Stop right there, though, because we need to translate that for those of us who aren't classically trained musicians. What exactly is an appoggiatura? Okay, so an appoggiatura is basically a musical sigh or a lean. A lean. It's a note that... It clashes slightly with the underlying chord to create a moment of emotional tension, but it immediately resolves down to a comfortable, harmonious note. Oh, it builds a tiny bit of tension and instantly releases it. Yes. It's the sound of yearning followed by satisfaction.
So what does late Beethoven do with it? He gives you the leaning, clashing note, and then he just leaves it there. What? He doesn't resolve it. He refuses to resolve it. Or he isolates a trill, which is usually just a pretty decorative fluttering between two notes at the end of a phrase, and he turns it into a harsh mechanical grating vibration that goes on for pages. Completely disconnected from any melody. Exactly. He doesn't integrate these elements into a beautiful emotional flow. They just sit there feeling almost primitive or student -like. Right next to massive, incredibly complex polyphonic writing where multiple different melodies are warring with each other simultaneously.
So he is deliberately refusing to synthesize the extremes. He's taking the opposite ends of the musical spectrum and refusing to introduce them to one another. Adorno writes that the late work is furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. Wow. Beethoven realized that in a fractured world, no grand heroic synthesis is actually honest anymore. To write a perfect, cohesive symphony would be a lie. Adorno says it's as if Beethoven's subjectivity, his very self, forcibly brings these musical extremes together, shatters them against each other, and then physically disengages from the music. Leaving only the naked tones and the wreckage behind.
The work falls silent the instant the creator abandons it. turning its emptiness outward toward the listener. It's a chilling concept. But what's equally fascinating to me is how much Adorno clearly identifies with this. Oh, absolutely. The way he describes Beethoven is exactly how Adorno writes his own philosophy. Adorno himself is the ultimate embodiment of late style. He really is. I mean, trying to read Adorno is notoriously punishing. He is entirely unskimmable. You can't just breeze through it. No. He refuses to offer his readers any summaries, any bullet points, or any false optimism. Think about how we consume content today. Everything has a TLDR, a quick summary, a neat takeaway. Adorno is actively hostile to that. He's the anti -TikTok. He demands you suffer through the fragments. Adorno was writing from a place of profound philosophical exile. He was a wealthy, highly educated bourgeois figure, a man raised in extreme privilege and high European culture. Who defected from his class to become a Marxist. But as Said points out, Adorno didn't become a revolutionary throwing Molotov cocktails. Right. He injected Marxism with a vaccine that dissolved its agitational, crowd -pleasing force. He looked at the world of the 1950s and 60s, what he called the totally administered society, and he loathed it. What did he mean by the totally administered society?
Oh, well, he meant the post -WWII capitalist machine that turned absolutely everything, even art and rebellion, into a safe, consumable product. A society that manages your desires. Yes, it feeds you mass culture and gives you the illusion of freedom while perfectly controlling the parameters of your life. So if everything is a neatly packaged product, how does a philosopher fight back? By becoming impossibly, deliberately difficult to consume. He writes in Discontinuous Fragments. His most famous book, Minima Moralia, is literally subtitled Reflections from Damaged Life. It is not a cohesive philosophical treatise? No, it's a cascading series of dense, thorny fragments that assault the idea of fictitious unities.
He attacks the philosopher Hegel's idea of a grand historical synthesis. For Adorno, modern society is a fallen, unredeemed reality. To write smoothly and cohesively about a broken world would be to participate in the lie. So his writing style is a self -imposed exile. He uses his incredibly refined, elite background to critique everything from the perspective of an aging, disobliging former colleague who just won't let you enjoy your comforting illusions. He becomes a furious intellectual machine. decomposing itself into smaller and smaller parts. Yes. Now, if Beethoven's late style was about tearing the house down to expose the structural beams, our next artist decided to build an entirely different house, lock the heavy oak doors, and pretend the 20th century simply wasn't happening. I know exactly who you mean. I'm talking about the composer Richard Strauss. Richard Strauss presents a profound, almost infuriating dilemma for music historians.
Why is that? If you look at his early career, he was the alternate radical. In the first decade of the 1900s, he wrote the operas Salome and Electra. And those were wild. These pieces pushed what we call Wagnerian chromaticism to its absolute breaking point. Let's define that real quick. Wagnerian chromaticism. Sure. So in traditional Western music, you stay within a specific key, say C major, use the notes in that scale, and it sounds grounded and predictable. Like home base. Right. Chromaticism is when you start using all the notes between the keys, the accidentals.
Okay. It creates a feeling of wandering, of instability, of intense psychological yearning because the ear never gets the relief of returning to a home base. Richard Wagner pioneered this. But in Salome and Electra, Strauss pushed it so far that the music was practically screaming. It was violent, dissonant, and shockingly modern. But then, right after establishing himself as the terrifying vanguard of modern music, he does a massive U -turn. A complete 180. In 1911, he writes Der Rosenkavalier, and suddenly he slides backward into a sugary, safe, tonal... waltz -filled 18th century world. And for the rest of his life, he stays there. The standard historical critique is that he just gave up. He ignored the massive musical revolutions happening right next to him.
The total abandonment of keys by Arnold Schoenberg, the violent, jagged rhythms of Igor Stravinsky. People viewed Strauss as a dinosaur, a man who survived into the 20th century, but... refused to live in it. But Said brings in the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould to mount a brilliant defense of Strauss. Gould boldly claimed that Strauss was actually the greatest musical personality of the 20th century. Which is quite a claim. Gould argued that Strauss wasn't just a cowardly conservative. He was doing something much more subversive. He was defying the historical summation of collective chronology. He was taking the absolute fullest, most opulent riches of late romantic tonality and subjecting them to extreme, rigorous, formal disciplines. Okay, I want to unpack this with a very specific and honestly highly disturbing historical detail. Let's hear it. Strauss writes his final opera, Capriccio. He finishes it in 1941 and it premieres in Munich in 1942. Okay, right in the thick of it. Let's look at the plot.
It is set in a beautiful... opulent 18th century drawing room outside Paris. A wealthy countess is being courted by two men, Olivier, a poet, and Flamand, a composer. Sounds lovely. The entire opera is essentially a deeply refined, polite philosophical debate over a cup of hot chocolate about whether words or music are more important in art. A very safe topic. Right. Meanwhile, literally just outside the walls of the Munich Theater in 1942, Nazi Germany is executing the Holocaust. The world is quite literally tearing itself apart in blood and fire. It is a staggering, almost sociopathic disconnect between the art and the reality of the time. Exactly. And I have to push back hard here. How is this not just pure, unadulterated escapism? I see your point.
How on earth can we elevate this to the level of a profound late style? It feels like the ultimate grotesque example of fiddling while Rome burns. How is this not just moral cowardice dressed up in a powdered wig? That is a completely valid, visceral reaction, and it's one that Theodore Adorno entirely shared. He didn't like Strauss either. Adorno was merciless towards Strauss. He accused him of having a conciliatory innocence, comparing Strauss's late music to a bland official speaker placidly quoting classical poetry while atrocities happen in the streets. Ouch. Adorno called his late work a mix of senility and infantilism, a total failure of moral and aesthetic nerve.
So how does Edward Said rescue Strauss from that completely justified criticism? Said argues that this perfectly smooth, flawless, frictionless surface is the defiance. How so? Think about what Strauss's contemporaries were doing. Composers like Benjamin Britten with Peter Grimes or Kurt Weill with the Three Penny Opera were using their art to critique society. To show human suffering. Yes, to hold a harsh mirror up to the darkness of the 20th century. They were giving the 20th century exactly the anguish it demanded. Strauss flatly refuses to do that. He builds an impenetrable fortress of 18th century aristocratic privilege.
Yes, by setting capriccio. or composing his late instrumental works like The Metamorphosis for 23 solo strings, in this highly abstract, technically fiendish pre -revolutionary world, Strauss is staging a retreat that is actually an assertion of supreme individual power. It is a world entirely free from the brutal pressures of the 1940s. It's a world of limitless capacity for luxury and debate. Said sees this as a distinctly 20th century manifestation of late style. Here's an aging artist who is an absolute master technician, creating music of glorious, infallible harmonic beauty and using that mastery to simply stand aside. He completely renounces the metaphysical political claims of his era. It's a minimalist aesthetic hiding inside an opulent one. The music doesn't complain. It doesn't cry out. It is completely unthreatening. And that total lack of real tension is deeply unsettling when you know the historical context. It's like Strauss is saying, your modern reality is so barbaric, so devoid of culture, that I refuse to even grant it the dignity of reflecting it in my music. I will not let your war touch my chords. I will only reflect an idealized past. Precisely. It is an unregimented, uncooptable assertion of the individual will. Even Adorno grudgingly called it a will to style. Strauss takes the 18th century and turns it into a supple, resourceful symbol of his own art, completely divorced from the horrors of his present. Strauss retreated into this stylized 18th century world largely because he absolutely idolized Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He actually dedicated his late wind sonatas to the immortal spirit of the divine Mozart. But if we look closely at Mozart's own late work, we find that the 18th century wasn't just a safe haven of powdered wigs and polite hot chocolate debates. We find a drawing room comedy that is deeply terrifying in its own right.
Let's look at Mozart's Cosi Fantute. Cosi Fantute is Mozart's third and final collaboration with the brilliant librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Their first two operas together, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, are universally beloved. They are expansive, politically transparent, and bursting with rich character history. In Figaro, you intimately know who the characters are, you understand the social class struggle they represent, and you feel their genuine heartbeat. But Cozy is a completely different animal. It's incredibly different.
It is concentrated, internalized, and almost entirely opaque. Historically, it was despised. Even Beethoven, our hero of late style. hated Cosi Fantute. He thought the plot was trivial, cynical, and scandalous, and he felt Mozart had profoundly wasted his divine musical genius on a dirty joke. To give you all the quick setup of this dirty joke, Don Alfonso, an older cynical philosopher, makes a bet with two young military officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo. The young men are boasting about how perfectly faithful their fiancés are, two sisters named Fioradiligi and Dorabella. Alfonso basically laughs at them and bets that if put to the test, these women will be unfaithful within a day. So the men pretend to be called off to war, but they immediately return to the house disguised as heavily mustachioed Albanians. They then proceed to aggressively seduce each other's fiancés. And, spoiler alert, they succeed. The women cave. On the surface, it's a silly, misogynistic farce. But Sade's reading uncovers a geometry of absolute cruelty.
Unlike Figaro, the characters in Cozy have no real history. They are blank slates. They exist purely to be tested in this closed, airtight system. And Mozart's music reflects this perfectly. It's highly symmetrical, echoic, utilizing rigorous mathematical counterpoint. I used to think of it like a mad scientist running an experiment, but that's too chaotic. It's actually more like a computer algorithm or a cold mathematical proof. Human emotions are just swapped out like variables in an algebra equation to prove that the sum is always zero. You swap variable A for variable B, the men change costumes, the women change partners, and the math still works out perfectly.
That is exactly what it is. And the mathematician running the algorithm is Don Alfonso. Sed draws a brilliant, highly unsettling parallel here. He compares Don Alfonso to a contemporary of Mozart's. The Marquis de Sade. Wait, Don Alfonso, the comic opera baritone, is like the Marquis de Sade, the guy whose name literally gave us the word sadism. The very same. That's a massive leap. Let's trace the logic there. We have to look at it through the lens of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whom said sites. Foucault noted that Sade wasn't just a chaotic monster. Right.
He was a libertine who subjected the absolute messy chaos of human sexual desire to a strict, lucid, almost bureaucratic order of representation. Sade constructs rigid, suffocating scenes where bodies and desires are conjugated like verbs in a strict grammar lesson. Everything is cataloged and tested. Don Alfonso does the exact same thing in Così. He is an amorous virtuoso. He orchestrates this elaborate hoax, this strict sequence of scenes, to definitively prove a philosophical point. That human identity, love, and loyalty are entirely fluid and ultimately meaningless.
And the terrifying climax of this proof comes in Act II. Alfonso finally states his philosophy clearly. He sings this little motto, così fan tutte, which translates to, thus do all women. Though the opera makes it clear the men are just as malleable. Exactly. But the key is the music he sings it to. He sings it in C major, utilizing the most rudimentary, basic harmonic progression possible, the I -I -V -V -I progression. Yes, the I -I -V -V -I progression. For context, this is the absolute foundational bedrock of Western tonal music. It is the first thing you learn in a piano lesson. It is the essence of logic and resolution. Mote's art pairs the most fundamental, unquestionable law of musical harmony with the most devastating, cynical realization about human nature. He mathematically proves that we are infinitely fickle. Identities are swapped without memory or loyalty. And that is where the horror beneath the comedy lies. If our deepest identities and our most passionate loves are so easily swapped without consequence, what anchors human existence at all? The realization of Cosi is that we are entirely replaceable. We are just cogs in a machine of desire. It's a bottomless sea of existential dread wrapped in a pretty melody. And we must remember the context of Mozart's life. He wrote this in 1789 and 1790, very near the end of his tragically short life. In a famous letter to his father Leopold, Mozart spoke of death not as a terror, but as a best and truest friend.
He viewed his own mortality with a deeply soothing, illusionless fatalism. He accepted that death is the true, inescapable goal of existence. Cozy Fantude reflects this late -style fatalism. It pushes ordinary experiences of love and identity to their absolute limits, and it offers the audience zero moral comfort. Don Alfonso doesn't preach a better way. He just cheerfully reveals the dark truth that constancy is a biological illusion. It's a late -style realization that holds its ominous vision just barely in abeyance beneath the surface of candid fun. So Mokart playfully dissolve human identity and loyalty on the theater stage. But what happens when an artist takes that exact same dissolution of identity and weaponizes it in the real world? In the middle of a bloody anti -colonial war? Exactly. That is what the French writer Jean Genet did. Jean Genet is one of the most remarkable boundary crossing and controversial figures of the 20th century. Said vividly recall seeing Jeanne speak in the spring of 1970 at Columbia University. During a massive rally in support of the Black Panthers. Yes.
I just want to pause here for a second and remind you, the listener, of our mission. When we discuss Jean Jeanne, we are stepping into highly charged, real -world political territory. The Algerian War of Independence, the Palestinian Liberation Movement, the Black Panthers. Very intense history. And per the rules of this deep dive. We are impartially reporting Genet's and Said's viewpoints here without taking any political sides ourselves. We are not endorsing a political platform. We are strictly analyzing Genet's artistic and personal philosophy of late style. Absolutely. And to understand Genet's late style, you really have to understand where he came from. He was not a bourgeois intellectual like Adorno. Not at all. Genet was an illegitimate child, a gay man, a thief, a vagabond, and an ex -convict who spent years in the brutal matri -penal colony. He wrote his first masterpieces, like Our Lady of the Flowers, while sitting in a prison cell. He was the ultimate outsider. But later in his life, he completely abandoned the metropolitan literary center of France. He allied himself passionately with the oppressed. Specifically, the Algerians fighting French colonialism in his massive play Les Pérevons, The Screams. And later, the Palestinians in his final posthumously published memoir, Le Captif Amoureux, Prisoner of Love. But the crucial thing is how he allied himself. He didn't approach these groups as a benevolent liberal white savior studying exoticism. He didn't write policy papers for them. Right. He entered their space out of a radical, almost erotic sense of solidarity.
He lived with them. Yes. But this brings up a massive defining contradiction in his late style. If Genet loved these revolutionary causes so much. Why is his late style defined by the concept of betraying them? Right. He seems to support the revolution, but actively roots against the revolutionaries actually winning. Why? That is the core of Genet's genius, what Said calls his antithetical imagination. Genet supported these revolutions out of love for the marginalized and a burning desire to disrupt the establishment. But he had absolutely zero interest in what happens after the revolution wins. He believed, with total fatalism, that the moment a revolution succeeds, it inevitably hardens into a new authority.
It writes new laws, builds new prisons, creates its own bureaucracy, and deploys its own police forces. The oppressed become the oppressors. To Genet, a successful revolution becomes the very establishment he despises. So to remain truly free, he believes he has to keep betraying whatever becomes the new status quo. He has to stay in a state of perpetual exile. Look deeply at Le Paravent, his play about the Algerian War. The protagonist of the play is a wretched, cowardly outcast named Sed, a coincidence of name that Edward Sed surely noted with some irony. In the play, this character, Sed, becomes a traitor to the Algerian revolutionary cause. But Genet doesn't condemn him for it. The ultimate moral center of the play is actually Sed's mother.
She tells her son not to be co -opted by the revolutionaries. Tu ne vas pas flancher, she says. Do not yield. Do not become a domesticated symbol or a noble martyr for the new revolutionary state. When her son dies, she actively refuses to let his revolutionary comrades turn him into a commemorative song or a statue. He celebrates the traitor because the traitor is the only one who guarantees the prerogative of freedom and beauty for an individual. It's an exhausting, relentless position to hold. You can never rest. You can never build a home. There's a quote highlighted in the text that perfectly sums this up. Genet defines genius as rigueur in despair. La rigueur dans le désespoir. It's a beautiful, terrible phrase. Genet is akin to Adorno in that both are ultimate dissolvers of identity and grand narratives. But their physical manifestations of late style are completely opposite. Where Adorno works in microscopic, highly intellectual, dry fragments, Genet is a poet of massive Dionysiac, carnivalesque theatrical forms. He writes huge, swirling ceremonies of death and subversion.
He completely refuses bourgeois stability, finding beauty only in the eternal doomed revolt. His late style is a fierce unyielding identification with struggle, completely stripped of any romantic hope for a utopian future. So Genet rooted for the destruction of the establishment from the absolute bottom rung of society. But what does late style look like when you are sitting at the very top of a society that is slowly crumbling beneath your feet? What does it look like when you are the establishment and history is passing you by? That takes us to the world of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Lucchino Visconti. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was the Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa. He was quite literally the last descendant of an ancient... fabulously wealthy noble line in Sicily. And in 1954, he was in his late 50s. He knew his family line would end with him, and he was acutely aware that the aristocratic world of his ancestors was entirely irrevocably gone. So he sat down and wrote a single brilliant novel, The Leopard. Let's hit the scene for The Leopard. The novel takes place in the 1860s during the Italian Risorgimento, the bloody and complex unification of Italy. The protagonist is the Prince of Salina, a massive, physically imposing, patriarchal figure based on Lampedusa's own great -grandfather. Throughout the novel, the prince watches his aristocratic class become entirely obsolete. They are being replaced by a new, crude, opportunistic, money -grubbing middle class, represented in the book by a character named Don Collegero. And worst of all, the prince watches his own beloved... Dashing, calculating nephew Tancredi cynically ally himself with these new middle -class men to ensure his own political and financial survival. This brings in a major piece of political theory that Said uses to frame the book, Antonio Gramsci's concept of the Southern Question. Yes, Antonio Gramsci was a brilliant Marxist theorist who analyzed the massive disparities in Italy. The Southern Question was his analysis of how southern Italy, places like Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, was kept intentionally frozen in agrarian poverty, essentially functioning as an exploited colony for the wealthier industrial north. Gramsci believed the only solution to this massive social disintegration was a revolutionary union between the northern industrial factory workers and the southern peasant farmers. So does Lampedusa, seeing his beloved Sicily falling apart, write a manifesto to fix this? Does he offer a Gramscian solution to save his homeland? Exactly the opposite.
Lampedusa offers absolutely no Gramscian solution. He doesn't even offer hope. The novel is steeped in decay, decrepitude, and an overwhelming sensual sense of death. The prince has what Lampedusa calls an abstract energy. An elusive inwardness, an obsession with astronomy and the stars that refuses to engage in the petty, dirty scrabble for new power. The novel is a profound late -style negation. It's Tancredi, the opportunistic nephew, who delivers the most famous cynical line of the book. If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change. It's a devastating line. It means the aristocracy will just put on new democratic clothes, marry the daughters of the rich merchants, and continue exploiting the presence exactly as they always have. Nothing actually gets better. And the novel's ending is incredibly bleak. It jumps ahead several decades.
The prince has been dead for a long time. His daughter, Conchetta, who's lived a rigid, unforgiving, loveless life clinging to the past, suddenly realizes her entire existence has been empty. Lampedusa symbolizes this by having her finally throw out the taxidermied, moth -eaten skin of her father's favorite hunting dog, Bendico. As the stuffed dog is thrown out the window into the courtyard, it literally turns to dust in the air. It's the ultimate, uncompromising image of an inner emptiness and a completely irrecoverable past. But Sesed then transitions to a fascinating twist on this narrative. In 1963, The Leopard was adapted into a famous film by the legendary Italian director Lucchino Visconti. And Visconti was a walking contradiction himself. He was a devoted, card -carrying Marxist who was also a born aristocrat, the Count of Linnaeus Pizzolo.
And Visconti subtly but profoundly changes the focus of the leper. How does he change it? So while Lampedusa's book is like reading the private diary of a dying man in a dark, quiet room, what does Visconti do? Visconti drags that death out into the town square, puts a massive Hollywood spotlight on it, and sells tickets. He turns private grief into a blockbuster. Lampedusa's novel is highly internal. It focuses on the ungraspable isolation of the prince. Visconti, working with massive cinematic backing, turns this private decay into a gorgeous, sprawling, opulent visual spectacle. He casts Burt Lancaster as the prince.
Exactly. The ultimate Hollywood patriarch. And the climax of the film is a famous, almost hour -long ballroom scene. In the book, the ball's important, but it's filtered through the prince's tired, internal monologue. In the film, Visconti bathes you in it. The camera sweeps over the luxurious dresses, the sweating faces, the glorious architecture, the waltzing couples. Visconti uses the power of cinema, a modern mass -consumer art form, to luxuriate in the irrecoverable past, essentially obliterating the very pastness that Lampedusa was mourning. Visconti replaces the novel's private, silent death with a beautiful object for mass consumption. It's a very different kind of late style. It's one that plays dangerously with the society of the spectacle, turning decay into a commodity you can feast your eyes on.
It really is. Now let's pivot from the grand historical sweep of Sicilian aristocracy to an artist who waged his late -style rebellion purely in the realm of physical performance and technology. Let's talk about the virtuoso as intellectual. Glenn Gould. We mentioned Gould earlier when he was defending Richard Strauss. Gould himself was an absolute prodigy. A Canadian pianist who completely upended the classical music world when he boosted onto the scene in the mid -1950s. And he was wildly... notoriously eccentric in his physical reality. Let's paint the picture of this guy because it's essential to understanding his style. He refused to sit on a normal piano bench. He used this incredibly low, rickety, customized wooden chair that his father made for him, where his face was practically level with the keyboard. He wore heavy winter coats and gloves in the middle of summer. He soaked his hands in scalding hot water before playing.
And while he played, he hummed loudly you can hear it on the recordings, and he conducted the music with his free hand. He was a visual shock to the system. But more importantly, he completely rejected the standard repertoire that made pianists famous back then. If you wanted to be a superstar pianist, you played sweeping, emotional, romantic music. Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky used lots of rubato, stretching the time for emotional effect. Gould rejected all of that. He made his name with Johann Sebastian Bach, specifically the Goldberg Variations. Why was that so revolutionary?
Because Gould represented a totally new stage in virtuosity. He had a staggering, almost terrifying technical ability, a clarity, independence of fingers, and sheer speed that was comparable only to someone like Vladimir Horowitz. But instead of using that technique to play flashy romantic showpieces, he applied it to massive polyphonic contrapuntal music. Let's define polyphony and counterpoint really clearly. Think of a standard pop song. You have one main melody that the singer sings, and underneath it, the band plays chords to support it. That's hominal. Polyphony, or counterpoint, is like having three or four completely independent melodies playing at the exact same time, weaving in and out of each other, and mathematically combining to make perfect sense. It is incredibly dense. Most people at the time considered Bach's contrapuntal music to be dry, academic, or just school exercises. Gould played it with such blazing clarity that he made the intellectual structure sound electric. But the biggest shock of his career didn't come from a performance. It came in 1964. Gould was at the absolute height of his international fame. He could have sold out any concert hall in the world, and he just quit.
He abandoned live performance entirely and never played a public concert again. Why? Was it just severe stage fright? Not at all. It was a deeply philosophical late style decision. Gould came to believe that the live concert was an institutionalized box office ideal. He felt that performing live forced the artist into a gladiator arena. You constantly have to worry about keeping the audience entertained. You have to play louder, faster or more dramatically to keep them from coughing or getting bored. Gould believed this dynamic was fundamentally hostile to the music itself.
It forced the performer to produce a momentary, sensuous thrill, which ruined the intellectual structure of the music. It made the performer a slave to chronological passing time. So he retreats entirely into the recording studio. Yes, and he didn't just use the studio to capture a live performance. He fully embraced the technology of the studio. He loved what he called take -two -ness. The ability to record multiple takes. to isolate variables, and to literally splice the magnetic tape together with razor blades and scotch tape. For him, the studio wasn't a way to fake a flawless performance. It was a compositional tool to achieve a higher intellectual truth. Sed connects this use of the studio to a classical rhetorical concept, doesn't he? Inventio.
Exactly. Inventio or invention. In the classical sense, going all the way back to Roman orators like Cicero and Quintilian invention doesn't mean creating something brand new out of thin air like Edison inventing the light bulb. It means rediscovering and elaborating on existing arguments. It's about finding the hidden potential in the topic. By moving into the studio, Gould's treated box fugues not as pretty songs, but as profound intellectual arguments. Through repeated takes and microscopic splices, he could infinitely elaborate and discover every possible nuance of those arguments. He transformed the piano.
It was no longer an instrument of momentary theatrical display for a paying crowd. It became an instrument of eternal, recorded intellectual debate. His late style was a deliberate, total withdrawal from the public gaze to create a pristine, technologically mediated space for pure thought. He exiled himself into the microphone. It is a perfect example of late style as a form of highly productive exile. He stopped playing for the crowd so he could finally play for the structure of the universe. Which brings us to our final exploration. Here, Sade looks at three artists who obsessively manipulated time, myth, and the ultimate geography of lateness.
Let's start by going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, specifically the playwright Euripides. Sed compares Euripides to his great predecessors, Aeschylus and Sophocles. Those earlier playwrights presented grand, cohesive myths. Their plays often end with a sense of profound reconciliation, a restoration of cosmic order, or the establishment of a just society. But Euripides is late. He's writing during the decline of Athens, during the Peloponnesian War. His work is decadent. Sedd leans heavily on Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Euripides here. Yes, Nietzsche had a fascinating, somewhat hostile view of Euripides. Nietzsche saw Euripides as the man who took a dying, exhausted myth and tried to force it into service one last time, digging it out in old finery. For Nietzsche, Euripides essentially killed the deep mystical power of tragedy by making it too intellectual, too focused on raw human psychology and debate rather than divine mystery. And Sedd looks specifically at Euripides' late masterpiece, the Bacchae.
In this play, the god Dionysus returns to the city of Thebes, and the young, rigid king Pentheus refuses to worship him. He tries to lock the god up. The climax of this play is one of the most horrific things ever written for the stage. Pentheus' own mother, Agave, is driven into an ecstatic, drug -like, Dionysian frenzy by the god. She literally tears her own son limb from limb with her bare hands, entirely deluded, thinking she has just hunted and killed a mountain lion. She walks back onto the stage carrying her son's severed head as a trophy, boasting about her hunt until the madness wears off and she realizes what she's holding. It is a scene of unimaginable psychological horror. Euripides is exposing the guile, the self -delusion, and the sheer brutal victimization inherent in myth. He doesn't offer the audience any comfortable reconciliation.
The god Dionysus doesn't offer comfort, he just destroys them to prove a point. As said notes, Euripides is openly playing with the configurations of characters and rhetoric. It's a deeply psychological, highly artificial performance that declares itself as an artifice. It's a late style that uses the hollowed out shells of old myths to expose the darkest, most terrifying realities of human nature. From the bloody, exhausted myths of ancient Greece, we move to a modern Greek poet living in Egypt who made an entire career out of looking at exhausted history. Constantine Cavafy. Cavafy lived his life in Alexandria, Egypt, working as a civil servant in the irrigation department and died in 1933. He is the ultimate poet. of historical exile. He largely ignored the bustling modern Arab world around him, choosing instead to write almost exclusively about the ancient Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine past. But his style isn't grandiose or epic. He doesn't write like Homer.
No, it's minimal, unrhymed, incredibly dry, almost prosaic. Cavafy writes about moments just before history closes in. He captures that exact agonizing instant before everything is lost forever or the moment of profound anticlimax. Look at his famous poem, Waiting for the Barbarians. The leaders and citizens of a city are gathered in the town square, dressed in their finest robes, paralyzed, waiting for a barbarian invasion that's supposed to happen that day. They have stopped passing laws. They are just waiting for the end. But the tragedy of the poem isn't that the barbarians arrive and burn the city down. The tragedy is that word comes from the borders, that the barbarians aren't coming at all. They might not even exist anymore. And the final line of the poem is devastating in its emptiness. And now what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. They needed the destruction to give their lives meaning. Without the catastrophe, they just have to go back to their boring, decaying lives. Exactly. Or take his other masterpiece, Ithaca. addressed to Odysseus journeying home.
The poem makes clear that the journey itself, the accumulation of knowledge, is all that matters because the destination, Ithaca, has absolutely nothing left to offer. It's empty. Ithaca won't have fooled you, he writes. Cavafy's basic poetic gesture is to deliver meaning to someone else while denying its rewards to himself. The novelist E .M. Forster beautifully described Cabify as a man standing motionless at a slight angle to the universe. He holds deep disenchantment and sensual pleasure in an equal, unbearable tension. And finally, we arrive at the ultimate geography of lateness, a city that embodies every single thing we've been talking about today, Venice.
Sad looks at Benjamin Britten's late -life operatic adaptation of Thomas Mann's famous 1911 novella Death in Venice. Venice is the quintessential late city. It is suspended perpetually between two irreconcilable extremes. Right. Gorgeous, unexampled artistic creativity and sordid, labyrinthine physical decay. It is literally sinking. It is rotting. The canals smell. But it is unbearably, heartbreakingly beautiful. In Mann's novella, the aging, highly disciplined, famous German author Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice to clear his writer's block. There, he descends into a silent, illicit, completely unconsummated obsession with a beautiful young Polish boy named Tadzio. And while Aschenbach stalks this boy through the alleys, a deadly outbreak of Asiatic cholera is secretly sweeping through the city, covered up by the authorities so they don't lose tourist money. Mann uses a highly controlled ironic narrator to distance himself from Aschenbach.
The reader reads Aschenbach's internal dissent from a safe intellectual distance. But Britten, writing an opera in 1973, near the end of his own life, has a different problem. He has to put Aschenbach's private, shameful thoughts out loud on the stage. He has to externalize the internal decay. And how does... Britten's music reflect this late -style collapse. We talked about Beethoven's fragments and Strauss's smooth tonality. What does Britten do? Britten uses polytonal music. Let's define polytonality. We talked earlier about being in one key, like C major. Polytonality is when the orchestra plays in two completely different keys at the exact same time. It creates a sickening, drifting, unmoored feeling. Britain uses this to create an orchestra that sounds both rigidly European and exoticized Asiatic, representing Venice as both a paradise of art and an inferno of disease.
The opera becomes a massive allegory of the artist coming to a much -escavated place, a city built on both art and garbage, and facing the total collapse of conscious, rational, artistic communication into bestial, diseased chaos. Aschenbach's ordered Apollonian soul is completely destroyed by the anti -language of the plague and his own irreconcilable desires. He dies on the beach, watching the boy while the disease takes him. So we have covered an immense amount of ground. We've traveled from Beethoven's fractured, terrifying sonatas to Strauss's defiant, escapist powdered wigs. We've seen Mozart's cruel mathematical geometry of love, Jeunet's absolute betrayals of the revelations he loved, Gould's sterile studio isolation, and Aschenbach dying on a plague -ridden beach. What is the ultimate takeaway? Late style. as Edward Said formulated it while facing his own death, is clearly not about going gently into that good night. It is about a deliberate, unproductive productiveness. It's about refusing to settle.
It is about the immense power of the unsaid. Said himself was always deeply interested in what gets left out, the agonizing tension between what we can articulate and what remains silent. Late style elucidates our delusions. It strips away our comforting narratives and makes it incredibly hard for us to go on with our comfortable fictions. It fully accepts the catastrophe of ending, and it forces us to look directly at the tears, the gaps, and the fissures of our own existence without offering a bandage. Think about your own life, your own projects, and your own eventual endings.
We were deeply conditioned by society to seek closure to tie a neat bow on our legacies, to apologize for our rough edges, and resolve all our contradictions so people will remember us fondly and peacefully. But what if your greatest, most authentic act isn't to reconcile with the world? What if your masterpiece is to leave your work jagged, unresolved, and proudly out of step with the times? What if true mastery means letting the silence and the fractures speak for themselves? Because sometimes the most honest sunset isn't a smooth, peaceful fade to black. Sometimes it's a jagged, terrifying lightning storm that forces you to see the world exactly as it is one last time. A fractured landscape glowing violently into life. We encourage you to seek out these massive, difficult, unapologetic works. Listen to late Beethoven, read Cavify, watch The Leopard, and explore them on your own terms. Let the difficulty change you.