Late Style(s ): The Ageism of the Singular

1. Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular Michael and Linda Hutcheon

2. Order of Discussion: • “late style” and its history • creativity in later life • individual vs. generalized concepts of “late style”

3. Early History of “Late Style”: Plato, Republic, 329c Cicero, Cato maior de senectute, 9.28 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piùeccelentipittori, scultori, edarchitettori(1568) Roger de Piles, Abrégé de la vie des peintres (1699).

4. Later History of “Late Style”: 20th century (Simmel, Brinckmann, Adorno) deriving from 18th and 19th century (Goethe, Schelling, Fichte) -------------------------------------------------------------- (cultural analogy) Winckelmann, Geschichte derKunst des Altertums (1756–62)

5. From: Anthony Edward Barone, “Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and the Hermeneutics of Late Style” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996) • Organicist, teleological narrative • peak and decline (i.e., dynamism of youth vs. obsolescence of age) • Redemptivist narrative • apotheosis • transcendence with age Two contrasting narratives develop over time:

6. 19th to 20th centuries: Romantic view: -youth as time of growth, creativity -age as time of decline, obsolescence  -1950s gerontology: -social disengagement theory -stigmatizing “script of decline”

7. 19th to 20th centuries: Romantic: -youth as time of growth, creativity -age as time of decline, obsolescence  -1950s gerontology: -social disengagement theory -stigmatizing “script of decline”

8. The composers we are studying: • Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Parsifal (1882) • Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) Falstaff (1893) • Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Capriccio (1943); Vierletzte Lieder (1948-9) • Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Death in Venice (1973) • Olivier Messiaen(1908-1992) Saint François d’Assise (1983)

9. “Late Style” (in English) Spätstil + (late style) Altersstil (old age style)

10. One definition of what comes with age: “…[a] sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into…..transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.” Kenneth Clark, The Artist Grows Older (Rede Lecture 1970)

11. “…[a] sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into…..transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.” Kenneth Clark, The Artist Grows Older (Rede Lecture 1970) THE CONTRASTING VIEW: with age come -serenity, resignation, contemplation, enhanced powers of intellect and understanding, accumulated knowledge and experience

12. MODELS OF LATE STYLE CONTINUITY (with previous work) +ve = mastery, summation, constant aesthetic -ve = incapable of innovation RUPTURE (with previous work) +ve = liberating renewal -ve = past one’s prime

13. Or, both continuity and rupture: “ … a logical extension and development of the career and a supplementary breaking out into a new style.” Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death

14. Critics’ aesthetic values determine what is valued: e.g., Georg Simmel -wholeness, coherence, synthesis  -time of reappraisal, summary, consolidation e.g., Theodor Adorno -fragmentation, dissonance  -lack (impossibility) of reconciliation

15. Late style as a critical construct: “ … a construct, ideological, rhetorical and heuristic, a function not of life or of art but of the practice of reading or appreciating certain texts within a set of predetermined parameters.” Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death