Always in Style and Never Too Late For Said

It is telling that John Updike's review of On Late Style focuses on the applicability of Edward Said's analyses to a broader array of fiction. The contemporary educated American has probably read a fair share of novels. Very few can claim the same when it comes to operas. In this lies the problem, purpose, and-I hope-appeal of Said's collection of essays on late style. Said treats with breadth and some depth a subject matter-music-which the fans of his other critical writings will most likely find alien. At the same time however, his treatment of "late style" in works of great composers is an opportunity rarely afforded to discover in music a level of intellectual argumentation too often confined to literature, history, and philosophy.

This review is, therefore, both a warning and an invitation. Despite the image of a massive tome on the book's cover and its appealing subtitle-Music and Literature Against the Grain-On Late Style is not primarily about literature. There is a chapter on Jean Genet, a chapter on Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo, and some final, scattered reflections on Euripides, Thomas Mann, and the Greek-Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy. The rest of the book is about Britten, Bach, Strauss, Beethoven, and Mozart-familiar names certainly, but not from the accustomed domain of English majors. And, despite the attractiveness of a short book of 20-page essays, this would certainly be the wrong place to start for those inexperienced with Said's thought in general-turn to Representations of the Intellectual to fill that slot.

Yet, Said's audience is not confined to the doctoral candidate in historical musicology. While his own mastery of the technical aspects of music is always obvious, the essays themselves are not very much different from those analyzing politics or literature. Thus, the reflections fall into an uneasy category-thorough and rigorous, yet not explicitly technical. The ability to read music is not demanded per se-nothing on the level of score analysis occurs between these covers, but readers will be confronted with the sort of musical jargon which will appear ominous, or perhaps just vague to the uninitiated. This is, in many senses, a blessing. What Said gives the lay reader is work that promises a great reward. Stopping a chapter halfway to dig up a few albums or struggling to apply to symphonies the sort of thought reserved for novels means slow going at times, but careful, deliberate reading is sure to yield at least one or two "Eureka!" moments. Nothing here is beyond the reader's means.

But what of "late style" itself? Theodore Adorno is Said's Virgil, our explicator of late style, and therefore our guide in Said's readings of a whole gamut of composers. It is no secret that Adorno is not beach reading, and even Said's interpretations require some back-tracking and rereading from time to time. Said is concerned with "great artists and how near the end of their lives their work and thought acquires a new idiom"-late style. The "late style" Said is interested in is not any style associated with an artist's twilight years, however-especially not wise, serene resignations, or tying-ups of loose ends. What fascinates Said is the gnarled and fragmentary-the "angry and disturbed" artists who avoid closure, stand at a distance from their times, and produce works capable of holding two contradictory strains of thought without any attempts at resolving them. It is this sort of late style which is indicated by the incompleteness and disregard for continuity found in the final works of Beethoven, in the defiance and purposeful backwardness of Strauss' late operas, and in the surface frivolity of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, which can barely hold its amoral, "ominous vision" back.

However, the most accessible but nonetheless fascinating portion of the book will probably be Said's treatment of collaboration. Juxtaposing Thomas Mann's Death in Venice with Britten's operatic adaptation, he produces a comparative study of lateness which is unfortunately not more prominent throughout the rest of the book. For the literarily inclined, this is a useful bridge to Said's musical analyses.

"The Virtuoso as Intellectual" is also particularly striking. Here he examines Glenn Gould's famous interpretations of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Said finds in Bach's ability to create "a new aesthetic structure out of a preexisting set of notes ... a composer whose thinking compositions provided an occasion for the thinking, intellectual virtuoso to try to interpret and invent." Glenn Gould's odd choice of Bach, coupled with Gould's off-putting mannerisms, was a challenge to the pianist's typically Romantic repertoire, served up easily to a mindless audience. Gould as both intellectual and virtuoso, then, aligns himself with the composer rather than the consuming public, "which is impelled by the performer's virtuosity to pay attention not so much to the performance, as a passively looked at and heard representation, as to a rational activity being intellectually as well as aurally and visually transmitted to others."

Said's unconventional book on music ought to do the same.