[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
Edward Said, perhaps best known for “Orientalism,” one of the most-recognized and important contributions to post-colonial studies, wrote the essays in “On Late Style” shortly before his death. The sense of “lateness” – of mortality, of obsolescence – permeates them, and they cover everything from the music of Strauss, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the political activism of Jean Genet, to “Il Gattopardo” (as envisioned by both Lampedusa and Visconti). In many ways, this is Said’s last conversation with Theodor Adorno, whose presence deeply informs his criticism in many of these essays.
The book begins by reading around lateness as an aspect of chronological development – as synonymous with maturity – and opens the concept up as something that can realize “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,” instead of the facile harmony and resolution that seeks the end of all tension. Said claims that late style refuses to reconcile what is impossible to reconcile, and that this reconciliation is oftentimes just a refusal to accept difference. It “grasps the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then goes forth to try anyway.” Musicologist Rose Subotnik says of the late work of Beethoven, no doubt with his Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony in mind, “no synthesis is conceivable [but is in effect] the remains of a synthesis, the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of its wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever.” It is this idea of lateness – which is quite distinct from, but not completely unrelated to, mortality and death – which Said puts to critical use in these wonderful essays.
While I think that everything in the book is worth reading, a few essays especially jumped out as being worthy of attention. In “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” Said sets out to carve a middle path between two radically different opinions on the late operas of Richard Strauss. Adorno’s rejection and derision of them is total, saying that he “intended to master music without submitting to its discipline” and that “his ego ideal is now fully identified with the Freudian genital-character who is uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure.” Compare this with Glenn Gould’s hagiographic characterization of Strauss as “more than the greatest man of music of our times.” In one of the most convincing arguments made in the book, Said argues against Adorno’s accusation of Strauss being a Beidermeier relic, and that he went a long way in countering Wagner’s theatrical idiom of “history as a grand system to which everyone and every small narrative is subject,” becoming the “keeper of the art of our fathers.”
The most compelling and readable essay in the collection is “On Jean Genet,” an autobiographical account of Said’s two encounters with Genet during the early 1970s. The second of these, which took place in Beirut, allowed Said to learn about Genet’s role in Palestinian activism, which was passionate and total. Through a reading of “Les Paravents,” Said argues that because of Genet’s lifelong marginality as a thief, prisoner, and homosexual, that he was able to sympathize with Palestinians without the Western rose-colored glasses of Orientalism.
I recommend this for anyone, especially those seriously interested in classical music. For Said admirers who have only known him as a literary critic, these essays open up whole new vistas by displaying the full panoply of his concerns and academic interests. While I have the suspicion that many musicologists would disagree with his characterizations of, for example, Mozart and late Beethoven and perhaps Strauss, these are nevertheless well-wrought essays constructed with lapidary reasoning. These essays are all the more poignant because Said knew that he was in the last stages of his fight with leukemia as they were being written. Readers who admire Said for his clear presentation of sometimes very opaque ideas will not be disappointed with this collection.
The book begins by reading around lateness as an aspect of chronological development – as synonymous with maturity – and opens the concept up as something that can realize “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,” instead of the facile harmony and resolution that seeks the end of all tension. Said claims that late style refuses to reconcile what is impossible to reconcile, and that this reconciliation is oftentimes just a refusal to accept difference. It “grasps the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then goes forth to try anyway.” Musicologist Rose Subotnik says of the late work of Beethoven, no doubt with his Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony in mind, “no synthesis is conceivable [but is in effect] the remains of a synthesis, the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of its wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever.” It is this idea of lateness – which is quite distinct from, but not completely unrelated to, mortality and death – which Said puts to critical use in these wonderful essays.
While I think that everything in the book is worth reading, a few essays especially jumped out as being worthy of attention. In “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” Said sets out to carve a middle path between two radically different opinions on the late operas of Richard Strauss. Adorno’s rejection and derision of them is total, saying that he “intended to master music without submitting to its discipline” and that “his ego ideal is now fully identified with the Freudian genital-character who is uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure.” Compare this with Glenn Gould’s hagiographic characterization of Strauss as “more than the greatest man of music of our times.” In one of the most convincing arguments made in the book, Said argues against Adorno’s accusation of Strauss being a Beidermeier relic, and that he went a long way in countering Wagner’s theatrical idiom of “history as a grand system to which everyone and every small narrative is subject,” becoming the “keeper of the art of our fathers.”
The most compelling and readable essay in the collection is “On Jean Genet,” an autobiographical account of Said’s two encounters with Genet during the early 1970s. The second of these, which took place in Beirut, allowed Said to learn about Genet’s role in Palestinian activism, which was passionate and total. Through a reading of “Les Paravents,” Said argues that because of Genet’s lifelong marginality as a thief, prisoner, and homosexual, that he was able to sympathize with Palestinians without the Western rose-colored glasses of Orientalism.
I recommend this for anyone, especially those seriously interested in classical music. For Said admirers who have only known him as a literary critic, these essays open up whole new vistas by displaying the full panoply of his concerns and academic interests. While I have the suspicion that many musicologists would disagree with his characterizations of, for example, Mozart and late Beethoven and perhaps Strauss, these are nevertheless well-wrought essays constructed with lapidary reasoning. These essays are all the more poignant because Said knew that he was in the last stages of his fight with leukemia as they were being written. Readers who admire Said for his clear presentation of sometimes very opaque ideas will not be disappointed with this collection.
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