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

eflections upon lateness he roams freely, making comparisons with many other artists:
Rembrandt, Hals, Titian, Michaelangelo, Wagner, and of course Beethoven himself—
in Simmel’s transcendent metaphysic the concept of ‘lateness’ is cut adrift from any
kind of biographical particularity: ‘The subject, indifferent to all that is determined and
fixed in time or space, has, so to speak, stripped himself of his subjectivity—the
gradual withdrawal from appearances, Goethe’s definition of old age.’ 54 ‘The close of
art’ was indeed ‘beyond art’s bounds’, but in a sense entirely different from
Winckelmann’s.
Not every work written toward the end of a composer’s life counts as a ‘late’
work, of course. Significant as they are, it is hard to see the sonatas of Domenico
Scarlatti qualifying, for example (although most of them appear to have been written
in his sixties and seventies), or Rossini’s ‘Péchés de vieillesse’. 55 Likewise (while
such a designation has been attempted) it is a little counter-intuitive to see the final
works of Mozart or Schubert as ‘late’. On the other hand—besides Beethoven—the
category seems to have been made for composers such as J. S. Bach (Dahlhaus, Zenck)
and Liszt (Strabolski, Gruber), Wagner (Barone), Schoenberg (Adorno), and Busoni
(Ficarella), as well as authors like Goethe (Llewellyn), and Tomasi and Cavafy (Said),
and artists like Da Vinci (Simmel). 56
54 G. Simmel, Goethe (Leipzig, 1913), pp.252-3; in Barone, ‘Parsifal’, 45-6.
55 Or could they? With their reflective, often satirical attitude towards Rossini’s earlier music, the
difficulty with which we can place them in relation to contemporary musical trends, and their
anticipation of certain characterisitics in twentieth-century French music, perhaps a case could be
made for these pieces, too. This sort of category is highly negotiable.
56 C. Dahlhaus, ‘Bei die Popularität der Spätwerke Bachs, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 131/1 (January
1970), 20-21; M. Zenck, ‘1740-1750 und das asthetische Bewusstsein einer Epochenschwelle? Zum
Text und Kontext von Bachs Spätwerk’, Johann Sebastian Bachs Spätwerk und dessen Umfeld:
Perspektiven und Probleme (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1988), pp.109-16; B. Szabolcsi, The twilight of F.
Liszt, (New York: Crescendo, 1973); G. Gruber, ‘Franz Liszts letzte Symphonische Dichtung “Von
der Wiege bis zum Grabe”’, Bruckner, Liszt, Mahler und die Moderne: Im Rahmen des
Internationalen Brucknerfestes Linz 1986, 73-78; A. E. Barone, ‘Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and the
theory of late style’, Cambridge opera journal 7/1 (March 1995), 37-54; T. Adorno, Philosophy of
modern music, tr. A. Mitchell and W. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973); ‘Arnold
Schoenberg: 1874-1951’, Prisms, tr. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 147-
172; A. Ficarella, ‘Die Kategorie des Spätstils in der Klaviermusik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts:
Studien zur “Klavierübung” von Ferruccio Busoni’, (PhD diss.: Hochschule für Musik, Köln. 1999);
R. T. Llewellyn, ‘Parallel attitudes to form in late Beethoven and late Goethe: throwing aside the
appearance of art’, Modern Language Review 63 (April 1968), 407-16; E. Said, ‘Thoughts on late
style’, London Review of Books 26/15 (5 Aug 2004); at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n15/said01_.html
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