On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain - Hardcover

Said, Edward W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037542105X ISBN 13: 9780375421051

Publisher: Pantheon, 2006

Synopsis

In his fascinating last book, Edward Said looks at a selection of essays, poems, novels, films, and operas to determine what late style may explain about the evolution of the creative life. He discusses how the approaching death of an artist can make its way “with anachronism and anomaly” into his work, as was the case in the late work of Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and C. P. Cavafy. Said examines Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Genet’s Le captif amoureux and Les paravents, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Visconti’s film of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, among other works.

He points out that one can also find an “unearthly serenity,” in last works, for example, in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, and Wagner, which, as Said puts it, “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor.” But in On Late Style he concentrates on artistic lateness as “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” He also writes about Theodor Adorno and about Glenn Gould, who chose to stop performing, thereby creating his own form of lateness. Said makes clear that most of the works discussed are rife with deep conflict and an almost impenetrable complexity. In fact, he feels that lateness is often “a form of exile.” These works frequently stood in direct contrast to what was popular at the time, but they were forerunners of what was to come in each artist’s particular discipline—works of true genius.

Eloquent and impassioned, brilliantly reasoned and revelatory, On Late Style is Edward Said’s own great last work.

About this title

Review:

`An exercise in late style itself, full of melancholy, insight and
humour' -- Hanif Kureishi, New Statesman Books of the Year

`He is one of those few critics who have a masterly intelligence
while never being obscure or baffling' -- Nicholas Lezard, Guardian paperback choice

`Said's last book is a series of dazzling case studies exploring
the idea of lateness in a range of composers, writers and artists' -- London Review of Books

`There is no better description of this gracefully unquiet,
probing and wise book: Said's own elegiac masterpiece of late style' -- Financial Times

`This is criticism of a high order, lucid and generous ... On Late
Style is a touching, fitfully enlightening book' -- Literary Review

About the Author:

Edward W. Said was the author of more than twenty books; a regular contributor to newspapers in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and music critic for The Nation. He was also an accomplished pianist who collaborated with Daniel Barenboim and Yo-Yo Ma. Born in Jerusalem, he lived most of his adult life in New York City. He died in 2003.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 037542105X
• ISBN 13: 9780375421051
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208