The Production of Lateness. Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch
art and absolute music, since he argues that this image of the artist is provided in the form of the music itself. However, the essay’s “enigmatic tone” (Spitzer 58) and its “opaque, aphoristic and at times internally inconsistent brilliance” and fragmentarinessfragmentation (McMullan 14) may, at the very least, give rise to selective interpretations. As Susan SontagSontag, Susan argues in her essay “On Style,” when we speak about stylestyle, we refer to “the totality of a work of art,” and “[l]ike all discourse about totalities, talk of style must rely on metaphors. And metaphors mislead” (22). A little less pointedly, one could say that metaphors call for interpretation.
Most notable in interpreting Adorno’s work on Beethoven, especially in the field of Anglophone literary theory, are Edward Said’sSaid, Edward essays, which were posthumously published in the volume On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. McMullan and Smiles call them “[t]he most prominent recent intervention in the field” (Introduction 5). 10 Indeed, Said perceives the artist figure in Adorno quite clearly, and he does not hesitate to refer back to Adorno himself in a biographical approach of his own, stating that “the figure of the aging, deaf, and isolated composer [i.e. Beethoven]” was fully “convincing as a cultural symbol to Adorno” (8). Here, Said readily jumps from Adorno’s formal analysis of the late music to the composer of flesh and blood. Since Said’s volume only came out in 2006, one can hardly claim that he influenced the artist image of the works discussed in this study, some of which were written earlier. Nonetheless, Said’s take may be seen as an example of how easily one can move from Adorno’s form-focused late-style theory to an artist-centered biographical readingbiographical approach of late works.
There is a further, almost curious way in which Adorno’s late artist type was cemented: through the collaboration with his friend, the author Thomas MannMann, Thomas. Their combined philosophicalphilosophy and literary efforts resulted in a dramatic novelistic portrait of Beethoven in Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. The “frightful story […] of the sacred trials of […] the person of the afflicted artist” (Mann, Doctor Faustus 57) fictionalizes Beethoven’s composition of the Missa Solemnis: struggling with the fugue in the “Credo” (Beethoven was believed to be unable to write a fugue), old Beethoven forgets to have dinner until after midnight and then furiously drives his maidservants out of the house because they have meanwhile fallen asleep, and the food has dried up on the stove.11 The story continues in a manner that is both hilariously funny and deeply moving:
[Beethoven] worked in his room on the Credo, the Credo with the fugue – the young ones [i.e. two visitors] heard him through the closed door. The deaf man sang, he yelled and stamped above the Credo – it was so moving and terrifying that the blood froze in their veins as they listened. But as in their great concern they were about to retreat, the door was jerked open and Beethoven stood there – in what guise? The very most frightful! With clothing disheveled, his features so distorted as to strike terror to the beholders; the eyes dazed, absent, listening, all at once; he had stared at them, they got the impression that he had come out of a life-and-death struggle with all the opposing hosts of counterpoint. He had stammered something unintelligible and then burst out complaining at the fine kind of housekeeping he had, and how everybody had run away and left him to starve. […] Only three years later was the Mass finished. (58)
This fictional depiction of the late composer echoes several aspects of Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven,” especially when considering Adorno’s idea of non-late art as formal conventionconvention. Beethoven’s wild fury, his withdrawal to his room, and his disregard for social hours in Mann’s novel resemble the “irascible gesture with which [subjectivity] takes leave” of the work of art, as a result of which the conventions are “left to stand” (Adorno, “Late Style” 566) – the maidservants and visitors of the Beethoven household quite literally being ‘left to stand’ waiting, perplexed at the master’s behavior. Further, Adorno’s idea of late style “cast[ing] off the appearance of art” (566) is embodied in Beethoven’s disheveled clothing and his socially unacceptable appearance. In this way, the composer himself comes to stand for the late work, whereas his surroundings represent the conventions of non-late art. The passage thus conflates the ageing artist and his late work.
This preliminary conclusion, however, is complicated once we take a closer look at Mann’s language. Probably the most fascinating fact about this passage from Doctor Faustus is that it contains a compressed version of Adorno’s essay in one single phrase: that Beethoven seems to have “come out of a life-and-death struggle with all the opposing hosts of counterpoint” (Mann, Doctor Faustus 58). In this statement, the order of the noun phrases, “life-and-death struggle” / “opposing hosts” / “counterpoint,” substantially influences the reader’s perception. In a strictly sequential reading and understanding, the “life-and-death struggle” is first perceived literally as pointing to Beethoven’s approaching death, evoking an ageing or ill man who is trying to resist his demise. As the “opposing hosts” are added, the old man’s struggle is flavored with religious meaning, especially when considering the intertextualityintertextuality signaled by the novel’s title: in the Dr. Faustus legend, the dying genius has to confront the devilish force that contributed to his success in return for his soul. This chain of meaning suddenly collapses – not without comic relief, after such grave considerations – when the word “counterpoint” completes the picture: the struggle now turns into an artistic rather than a physical or spiritual one, in which the ageing composer attempts to master the musical conventions and rules. A historicalhistory component is added by the fact that counterpoint represents the classical tradition par excellence, which Beethoven is here struggling with. Hence, he becomes the epitome of a new artistic movement.
This process of reading and understanding Mann’s phrase reflects Adorno’s didactic aim towards his own readers, and the analyzed phrase thus reveals an entire philosophyphilosophy of musicmusic. Just like in Mann’s passage, Adorno’s readers in “Late Style in Beethoven” are guided from a (supposedly wrong) biographical understandingbiographical approach of late style towards the (supposedly correct) formal, abstract notion of lateness. In the former, the artist’s struggle with death is real, whereas, in the latter, the deathly struggle is an allegory for a historical development. In this sense, the reference to “counterpoint” represents quite literally a counter-point: it contains the structured sense of harmony of the classical period, which the late Beethoven supposedly strives against. Just as Mann connects the musical figure of counterpoint with the devilish “opposing hosts,” moreover, late style’s struggle against these forces is also assigned a notion of heavenly truthtruth. This recalls the passage where Adorno states that the subjectivitysubjectivity of the late artist “in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth” (“Late Style” 566). The English translation takes some interpretive license here. The original German version reads: “[Die Subjektivität], sterblich und im Namen des Todes, verschwindet in Wahrheit aus dem Kunstwerk” (Adorno, “Beethovens Spätstil” 17). Its last part could thus also be translated as subjectivity “truly” disappearing from the work of art (rather than disappearing “into truth”).12 The difference in meaning becomes apparent when Beethoven’s struggle with the “opposing hosts of counterpoint” is considered (Mann, Doctor Faustus 58): in line with Adorno’s original German essay, the “life-and-death struggle” (Mann, Doctor Faustus 58) of the late artist should not be aimed, as one could wrongly gather from Doctor Faustus, at mastering counterpoint, which would result in the inscription of the composer’s subjectivity into the conventional classical tradition. Rather, it is a struggle against being mastered by the tradition of counterpoint; that is, the struggle is aimed at making the sense-gathering subjectivity truly disappear from such art, thus leaving it fractured and broken. In this sense, the “landscape” of the classical tradition in music, represented by counterpoint, is left “deserted now, and alienated” (Adorno, “Late Style” 567), an image that extends to modernitymodernity in general.
When reading Mann’s passage alongside Adorno’s “Late Style” essay, what stands out clearly is that Adorno’s late-style project was in fact a way to legitimize his prioritization of a type of art that is enigmatic, fractured, and contradictory,13 and Adorno extended his focus to the artistic