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J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

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of a sort that has if anything tended to inhibit performance and remove them from the<br />

public sphere.<br />

This consecration of Beethoven’s later music—and of ‘late-style’ in general—<br />

was a paradoxical consequence of the organic model of artistic development that<br />

emerged from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums<br />

(1756-62). For Winckelmann, ‘as every action or event has five parts, as it were stages<br />

—namely, beginning, progress, state of rest, decrease, and end, in which lies the<br />

foundation of the five scenes or acts in dramatic pieces—so it is with the succession of<br />

time in art; but since the close of art is beyond art’s bounds, so there are properly only<br />

four periods in it for consideration here.’ Winckelmann’s Geschichte ushered in an<br />

age where virtually every German thinker of consequence, from Herder to Spengler,<br />

conceived the narrative trajectories of cultural history in terms of organic development,<br />

seeking to bring each and every artistic phenomenon—particular works, artist<br />

biographies, historical periods and styles, the cultural history of humanity itself, under<br />

the tyranny of the bell-curve. For Winckelmann this meant an inflexible conflation of<br />

lateness with decadence.<br />

With the potent example of Goethe and Beethoven, however, it became<br />

possible to interpret the final phase of certain artists’ careers in a new way,<br />

transcendent spiritual resonance and authority emerging precisely as a result of this<br />

organic decline: ‘In artists of the highest calibre, old age sometimes manifests a<br />

development permitted to emerge most purely and essentially precisely on account of<br />

ageing’s natural process of decay: in light of a decline in the formative powers, the<br />

appeal of sensation, the self-abandonment to the world as it is, there remain, so to<br />

speak, only the broad outlines, the most profoundly characteristic of one’s creativity.’ 53<br />

The writer in question, Georg Simmel, was writing about Da Vinci, but in his<br />

53 G. Simmel, ‘Das Abendmahl Leonardo da Vincis’, Zur Philosophie der Kunst. Philosophische und<br />

Kunstphilosopische Aufsätze (Potsdam, 1922), 55, quoted in A. E. Barone, ‘Richard Wagner’s<br />

Parsifal and the theory of late style’, Cambridge Opera Journal 7/1 (Mar 1995), 44.<br />

336

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