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

historical development; 61 all these are characteristics that might be called ‘post-
modern’.
The emergence of Beethoven’s late style was for Adorno perhaps the single
most important event in his cultural schema: ‘in the geography of Adorno’s music
history, the essential discontinuity [between the present and the past] is located not in
the twentieth century but somewhere between Beethoven’s second and third periods.’ 62
Subotnik continues: ‘the whole history of music from Beethoven’s late period to
Schoenberg’s represents at once the winding down of human history and a
prolegomenon to the music of a post-historical world, which since it continues to exist
physically, Adorno considers to have entered into a meaningless, ahistorical stasis.
Such post-historical music, the music of our own time, must be considered essentially
the art of a post-human species.’ 63
One does not need to subscribe to Adorno’s apocalyptic despair about the
situation of Western culture to agree that a very significant transition was taking place.
‘A NEW KIND OF FAILURE’
The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit.
They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and
spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the
classicist esthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of
history than of growth. 64
61 At this point much better repesented by (e.g.) Hummel, Weber, Kalkbrenner and Spohr. See C.
Rosen, The Classical style, 2 nd ed. (London: Faber, 1976), pp.379-387; L. Plantinga, Clementi
(London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.312-13.
62 R. Subotnik, ‘Adorno’s diagnosis of Beethoven’s late style: early symptom of a fatal condition’,
Journal of the American Musicological Society 29/2 (Summer 1976), 246.
63 Ibid.; quoting Adorno, ‘Cultural criticism and society,’ Prisms, p.34.
64 Adorno, ‘Late style’.
340