End Notes.(Examining Late Style)(Concert review)

Whatever it is that allows artists to maintain their powers of invention as they grow older, composers possess it more richly than most. Musical figures from Monteverdi to Messiaen have had careers that can be plotted as steadily rising curves. In old age, certain composers reach a state of terminal grace, in which even throwaway ideas give off a glow of inevitability, like wisps of cloud illumined at dusk. It's hard to think of another art form in which so many peak achievements--Bach's "Art of Fugue," Beethoven's late string quartets, Verdi's "Otello" and "Falstaff," Wagner's "Parsifal," to name a few--arrive at, or near, the close of day. More than, say, poetry, which tends to thrive on youthful passion, composition seems a cumulative labor, a long process of trial and error, of possibilities rejected or exploited. And, perhaps because writing music is such a purely mental exercise, composers can go on working even after age takes its toll. Think of Handel writing "How Dark, O Lord, Are Thy Decrees" as his sight was failing, or Beethoven creating his most visionary pieces after deafness had set in, or Shostakovich carving final messages of flickering hope and deepening despair as Lou Gehrig's disease and other ailments immobilized him.

Every so often, a music theorist tries to determine what late works have in common, with interesting but murky results. In 1937, Theodor W. Adorno wrote an essay entitled "Late Style in Beethoven," in which he hazarded the idea that late works are "furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation." This is apt enough for Shostakovich's final pieces or Stravinsky's "Requiem Canticles," but it hardly accounts for the austere bliss of Handel's "Theodora," the radiance of Strauss's "Four Last Songs," the sonic waterfalls of Messiaen's "St. Francis." Some late works consolidate early gains; others spin off in fresh directions. Franz Liszt, around the age of seventy, began writing something like atonal music, to the consternation of Wagner, who thought that his friend had gone senile.

In the past few months, the Brentano String Quartet has presented three concerts under the Adornian heading "Examining Late Style." The performances took place at Weill Hall, the most intimate space in the Carnegie Hall complex. For the program book, the quartet commissioned various writers, from the novelist Richard Powers to the poet Mark Doty, to grapple with the concept of "lateness." Powers sounded a skeptical note, pointing out that Shakespeare continued writing after "The Tempest," spoiling our sense of that work as his grand farewell. "Perhaps half the meaning that we find in last wills and testaments lies not in late style but in ourselves," Powers wrote. But the composer Bruce Adolphe set out a late-style rule that rang true for a lot of the music under examination: "To say exactly what one means without complication but also without compromise." That idea, which is essentially a call to artistic honesty, does explain Shostakovich's existential desolation as well as Messiaen's religious delirium; in each case, the composer's technique has no purpose other than to express the underlying emotion.

In chronological terms, the Brentano's syllabus stretched from Carlo Gesualdo, an inspired eccentric of the Renaissance, to the living American master Elliott Carter, who remains creatively active in his hundredth year. (Mark Steinberg, the Brentano's first violinist, introduced a performance of Carter's 1997 Piano Quintet, with Thomas Sauer, by joking that the work might lose its "late" status if Carter keeps composing much longer.) The survey also included Contrapunctus XIV, from the "Art of Fugue," which eerily trails off after two hundred and thirty-nine bars; Beethoven's Quartet Opus 127; Brahms's Clarinet Quintet; Shostakovich's Fifteenth Quartet; and Bartok's Sixth Quartet. And there were three valedictions from composers who died young: Mozart's "Prussian" Quartet in B-Flat, Mendelssohn's Quartet in F Minor, and Schubert's Quintet in C.

In a way, "Examining Late Style" was simply an excuse ...