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

To thus posit ‘lateness’ about a particular body of work is to say more than the
bare fact that it was created toward the end of the composer’s life, but to invoke a very
rich set of associations: ‘Concepts by their very nature come preformed, hence less
than completely customized to the particulars they map (and less than unmarked by the
ideology of their previous applications).’ 57 This is from David Clarke’s exploration of
‘lateness’ in relation to the music of Michael Tippett. The ‘preformation’ he refers to,
‘less than unmarked by the ideology of their previous applications’, is of course
precisely the reason he and others have used this particular concept.
T. S. Eliot was clearly seeking to access this mystique when he entitled his last
major cycle Four Quartets, 58 as perhaps was Richard Strauss when he pointed out to
the listener that his op.296 consisted of his ‘Vier letzte Gesänge’. Hans Pfitzner
(probably unknowingly) reordered the events of Palestrina’s life in his eponymous
opera, shifting the Missa Papae Marcelli to after his wife’s death and presenting him as
a spent old man at the end of his career. Tippett’s own third symphony is a troubled
response to Beethoven’s ninth; and he spoke of his Piano Sonata no.3 as his ‘late
Beethoven sonata’.
At one point David Clarke asks if Tippett’s later music could be described as
post-modern. Is there any sense in which the same question could be asked of
Beethoven? With Tippett, of course, (as with Boulez, Messiaen, Ligeti, Penderecki,
(accessed 26 October 2006); G. Simmel, ‘Das Abendmahl Leonardo da Vincis’, Zur Philosophie der
Kunst. Philosophische und Kunstphilosopische Aufsätze (Potsdam, 1922). See also H. de La Motte-
Haber, ‘Abstraktion und Archaik: Die Kategorie des Spätwerks’, ‘In rebus musicis’: Zur Musik in
Geschichte, Erziehung und Kulturpolitik. Richard Jakoby zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. A. Eckhardt and
R. Stephan (Mainz: Schott, 1990), pp. 39-44.
57 ‘The meaning of “lateness”: mediations of work, self and society in Tippett’s “Triple concerto”’,
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125/1 (2000), 62.
58 According to Michael Tippett: ‘When I asked T. S. Eliot once why he had called his late poems Four
Quartets, he told me the title arose from his passionate love and admiration for Beethoven’s late
quartets’ (programme note to ‘Water out of Sunlight’; http://www.michaeltippett.com/iocwatereng.htm;
accessed 26 October 06). In a lecture in 1933, Eliot said that he
sought ‘to get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music’ (quoted
in R. Nicolosi, T. S. Eliot and music: an introduction’, Musical Quarterly 66/2 (Apr 1980), 203).
See also D. Barndollar, ‘Movements in time: “Four quartets” and the late string quartets of
Beethoven’, T. S. Eliot’s orchestra: Critical essays on poetry and music (New York: General Music
Publishing Co., 2000), pp. 179-194; and K. Alldritt, Eliot’s ‘Four quartets’: poetry as chamber
music (London; Totowa, N.J.: Woburn Press, 1978).
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