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Acknowledging both the general aging of music that Adorno heard in Brahms and observations that most of his oeuvre sounds “twilit”, this chapter asserts “late style” as nonetheless meaningful. Rejecting cause and effect, it draws on Freud's concept of overdetermination to address the emergence of late-style features and proposes an addendum to late-style dialectics: late works are at once an expression of their time and alienated from the contemporary context. The significance of German nationalism to works from the mid-1880s and others from the 1890s is explored, as is the politicization of “late style”. Rather than simplifying late style, the chapter uses diverse manifestations — e.g., mannerism, blending of technical and expressive features — as hermeneutic points of entry. Special emphasis is placed on Brahms's mastery of ways and degrees of asserting a key in tonality's late period, and on moments of expressive complexity that model psychological process, evoking Freud's Vienna.

By the late 19th century, the adagio had become a genre marked by the technical attributes and lofty connotations of “unending melody”. Because of Beethoven's achievements, composers found adagios difficult to write. This chapter asserts that the treatment of transitions was crucial for the effect required by genre aesthetics of the adagio. In the 1860s, Brahms used short constructive units but lengthy transitions based on picturesque figuration to foster the illusion of continuous melody. Although critics in the 1880s considered recent adagios to fall short of Beethoven's standards, they saw renewal in Bruckner's String Quintet. Possibly in response to Bruckner's success, Brahms composed an adagio for cello and piano, avoiding closure through his mastery of degrees of tonal stability. In his most acclaimed adagios, however, he extended transitional passages by using Gypsy style's extemporized sound and other signifiers of “raw emotion”, creating a semblance of renewed expressive and formal freedom.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of a chamber movement by Brahms, which introduces the book's themes, one of which concerns genre aesthetics and in particular cultural significance assigned to chamber music and slow movements. Focusing on the inwardness expressed in the excerpt, it then elucidates a second theme, the historicity of his music: the passage, with its clearly implied reflecting subject, sounds of its time and place, late 19th-century Vienna. Further discussion of the excerpt exposes other themes: of lateness within Brahms's oeuvre and in music-historical narratives that encompass him and his time. The chapter establishes the book's historical perspectives and critical sources, such as ideas about late Liberalism taken from Adorno and Lukács. It also introduces the eclectic analytical methodology and music-analytic questions to be addressed, which concern late style and historical lateness.

The “late style” is a longstanding aesthetic category in all of the arts. Late-style music is presumed to have certain internal qualities (such as fragmentation, intimacy, nostalgia, or concision) and to be associated with certain external factors (such as the age of the composer and his or her proximity to or foreknowledge of death). However, late style is better correlated with the bodily or mental condition of the composer: Most composers who write in what is recognized as a late style have shared experiences of non-normative bodily or mental function, that is, of impairment and disability. Composers (including Beethoven, Schoenberg, Bartók, Copland, and Stravinsky) inscribe their disabilities in their music, and the result is often correlated with what is generally called late style.

This chapter resumes discussion begun in the first chapter, focusing on the changed outlooks of Brahms and his Viennese colleagues in the 1890s. Prominent citizens who had earlier objected to signs of Czech nationalism now recognized consequences of German nationalism. Hanslick, who had grown up in Prague, exemplified contradictions of Liberalism in his simultaneous admiration for and unwitting condescension toward Dvořák. Discussion of reception of Dvořák's music by Hanslick and Theodor Helm highlights differences between the older and newer German nationalism. Brahms's library and an overlooked archival collection afford insights into his views. An orthodox Liberal, he rejected the cultural despair of German tribalism but voiced discouragement about the future of music. Liberal economics were being unmasked as second nature, as would absolute tonal music slightly later. Yet Brahms's late music is beautiful because it responds to demands of music-historical lateness while conveying the peculiar expressiveness of a late style.

The title and content of this chapter are by way of tribute to John Daverio's striking sense of Robert Schumann's various “late styles,” but should function also as an invitation to consider the phenomenon of artistic lateness as a broad plurality rather than a marked singularity. And yet, following Edward Said's last thoughts on late style, the chapter situates the myriad ways we construct late works within the penumbra of the “untimely.” Aesthetic symptoms of the untimely include overt negotiations with death, aging, and loss; withdrawal from the present (entailing fascination with the past or with some other culture); preoccupation with abstraction; paring down of material; mixing of genres; a distancing emphasis on convention; and the deployment of paratactic structures. After a survey of some of these notions through examples from a range of creative artists and media (including Beethoven, Hölderlin, J. W. M. Turner, Rilke, and even some contemporary figures), Schumann is placed into the mosaic. The theme of death and renewal is traced through several of the composer's late styles, including passages in his late vocal music that make overt reference to death and the opening movement of the Gesänge der Frühe for piano, listening in this latter case for the untimely way Schumann conjures a sunrise with a sunset sensibility. The chapter closes with brief speculation on the nature of our investment in late styles.

This chapter suggests that the self facing its extinction may make particularly concerted, wild, mad reactions to the impending nothingness of its identity, in late work of a new, unbound creativity. There have, over the ages, been artists in all sorts of media who have had the capacity for self-reinvention late in their careers—often involving a whole new manner, a “late style” that is often their principal claim to greatness in the eyes of posterity. The chapter then assesses the relation of self-reinvention to self-dissolution. In the limiting circumstances of self-dissolution come such phenomena as Beethoven's late quartets—which, in his by then total deafness, he could not hear—or Matisse's late cutouts—these being a return to the art and techne of childhood at a point where he could no longer wield the paintbrush, in which one can find the brilliant invention of a new “period” in his work in response to necessity.

Yeats's experimentation with the ideas developed in Per Amica and A Vision took a startling turn in June 1935 when he met Dorothy Wellesley. His letters to Wellesley reflect beliefs that her role as Muse would be colored by her lesbianism, and that her Muse was located at the intersection of what he perceived as the masculine and feminine aspects of her personality. ‘What makes your work so good’, he wrote her, is its masculine element amid so much feminine charm. Your lines have the magnificent swing of your boyish body. I wish I could be a girl of nineteen for certain hours that I might feel it even more acutely. He had already suggested to Wellesley that his own creativity arose out of ‘the woman in me.’ ‘To Dorothy Wellesley’ suggests that Wellesley's Muses are Furies, primitive earth goddesses who, as Erich Neumann has shown, represent angry emotional forces that are opposite to those of the Muses but, because of the tendency of opposites to merge into each other, can be forerunners of inspiration. Yeats's own Muse was now a Fury as well. The beast of hatred had replaced concentration on Gonne as the besom that could clear his soul and open the way to inspiration. Chapter 8 explains how the manifestation of what Adorno called ‘late style,’ the lust and rage described in a poem (‘The Spur’) Yeats sent to Wellesley, threatened to dominate his relationship with his Muse.

Chapter Two brings together T. S. Eliot and Theodor W. Adorno as advocates of the autonomy of the artwork from its creator’s personality. Adorno’s important conception of “late style,” above all in the music of Beethoven, is a modernist theory of impersonality akin to the one Eliot made famous in his essays and thematized in his poems. Yet this version of autonomy is inextricable from Adorno’s and Eliot’s shared emphasis on lateness. Lateness is a stance available to modernists at any age, as the preternatural aging of Eliot’s early “impersonal” personae—from the marionettes of his undergraduate poems through Prufrock, Gerontion, and Tiresias—shows, yet it also ties the artwork to the physical and emotional history of the artist. Eliot and Adorno’s strikingly similar versions of impersonal lateness give new significance to the Beethoven allusions of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Drawing on Beethoven’s reception history, I show how the émigré German and the émigré American converge on the composer’s final period as a touchstone for their paradoxical insistence upon aged and belated subjectivity as the foundation for the autonomy of impersonality.

Finitude is a paradox: we cannot experience it without being outside it. When we talk about death, therefore, we talk about something impossible to understand. We can really only talk about dying, and literature allows us to do that. This book argues that the formalist resources of literature are used throughout the English Middle Ages to try to think about the impossibility of death—as dying, indeed, but also as forms of language that imaginatively resolve the problem. There are three modes, with stylistic and philosophical traits distinctive to each, that medieval English literature uses: ensoulment, cryptic writing, and the archive.

This chapter defines late style as an attribute assigned to last works by inference from the works themselves and from the biography of the artist facing old age. It historicizes late style as a matter of critical reception: it is the aesthetic values of the critic that determine what is deemed positive or negative in the last works of any artist. While late style is a descriptive discourse, it is evaluative too, and what is at stake is an artist’s posthumous reputation. From this perspective, the late lives of a series of canonical composers expose the contradictions inherent in the history of generalizations about late style. We argue that a universalizing concept of late style has led not only to elisions of distinctions and differences but also to denigrations of later-life creativity that are, in fact, ageist. There are as many late styles as there are late artists.

This chapter is a reflection on the ways in which critics, from the romantics to the present, have negotiated the evidence of the output of writers, artists, and composers late in life in order to establish an understanding of ‘late style’ as a transcendent, transhistorical concept and a marker of genius, and on the complicity of creative artists in developing this understanding of late-life creativity. Late style is a trope, a critical construct, one that became a genre that creative artists could choose to adopt. The chapter turns from a general assessment of late style to a specific instance, the poetry of George Oppen, and to an account of Oppen that raises questions about the relationship of ‘lateness’ to modernity, to style, and to dementia. The chapter reads lateness as a redemptive critical shaping of the latter stage of an artistic career, one which conflates ‘late style’ and ‘old-age style’.

Chapter 14 concentrates on arguably the most influential twentieth-century theorist of lateness: Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s views on lateness are characteristically subtle and sophisticated, and relate in complex ways to his views on modernity more broadly. If the relationship between the aesthetic and late modernity forms the defining focus of his thought, the relationship between the late aesthetic and modernity offers a microcosm of this thought. Beginning from his seminal four-page essay ‘On Beethoven’s Late Style’, the chapter proceeds to view lateness as a red thread running throughout Adorno’s thought, from the early work on late style in the 1930s to the reflections on the vexed status of culture after the Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the chapter also considers Adorno’s theorization of Kafka, Beckett, and Thomas Mann as exemplary writers of ‘late’ modernity, arguing that lateness ultimately emerges from this theorization as a ‘truly European language’.

Beethoven’s late style has been paradigmatic of late styles in general, at least in musicology. This chapter explains why and how this has come about. No writer has done more to define our concept of Beethoven’s late style than Theodor W. Adorno. While putting Adorno’s image of late Beethoven in historical and critical context, the chapter demonstrates that modern analytical tools have largely confirmed his theory. It identifies the basic fingerprints of the late style, including a recuperation of Baroque contrapuntal textures, a reification of early classical forms, syntactic fragmentation and discontinuity, and a naturalization of musical contour and gesture, giving specific musical examples. This is contextualized within musicology’s proclivity to theorize ‘style’ as an evolutionary category of musical language relative to the Viennese classical style, as well as the scholarly discourse of periodization in Beethoven’s career. The chapter concludes that ‘lateness’ in Beethoven is stylistic, evaluative, and ontological.

The “corpus” (or body of work, since Cicero) of an author is meant to be organic, integral--well connected--but also distinct and whole; it marks limits; it is the material complement to the author’s life. What does it mean to imagine writing as a body, something with a distinct shape/form, but also subject to vulnerability? How do we understand those moments when a writer opens herself or her corpus up to change, how radical or gradual are these movements, how permanent, fleeting, or even recurrent? Is there something called “late style,” a distinctive signature that characterizes the end of a career as contours of an aging body mapped onto the weave of writing? When and how do we intellectually/creatively exfoliate? While we have very successful ways of detecting “authors” or “style,” we have considerably fewer techniques for talking about change, the nature of the variability within an author’s corporal outline, the variety of measures to study the shape of a writer’s career. Working with a trilingual collection of roughly 30,000 poems in French, German and English, this chapter explores questions of local/global vulnerability and late style, concluding with a computationally informed reading of the work of Wanda Coleman.

The Introduction establishes the extent to which a shared model of lateness underpins the three conceptual categories of the title, namely the modern, the European, and the literary. Hans Blumenberg famously argued for the ‘legitimacy of the modern age’; is there a comparable argument to be made for the legitimacy of lateness? Understood as the opposite of progress—as the sense of an ending, rather than of a beginning—lateness emerges as a constituent element of European modernity as it struggles to demarcate itself from the past in order to define itself on its own terms. After considering the epistemology and etymology of lateness—and in particular how it relates to notions of ‘late style’—the Introduction proceeds to outline the ‘anxiety’ of lateness, and the ways in which it can be theorized as distinct from Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence.

This chapter outlines the development of late style as part of the critical lexicon of art history, looking especially at the early twentieth century when the concept was developed within the broader context of German traditions of scholarship. Examining the contributions by Georg Simmel and A. E. Brinckmann in particular, the chapter argues that the articulation of late style in the visual arts was closely associated with a notion of heightened subjectivity whose complex engagement with the world is mediated through a new order of representation. This approach differs markedly from Adorno’s better-known formulation of late style and also diverges from it in terms of the aesthetic features it identifies as significant indices of late style. The emergence of alternative theories of late style draws attention to the concept’s historical contingency and in so doing questions its coherence.

This chapter considers the relation of Henry James’ late style to his brother William’s radical empiricism. It looks at the friendship of William and Henri Bergson, and considers the relation of the James brothers to the “genteel tradition” and to cosmopolitanism.