The dying of the light  

The Guardian has a good sized excerpt of Edward Said's last essay, which will be in the next London Review of Books. Said writes about how artists change in their twilight years, with plenty of just contrasting examples, including this one:

Philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno uses the phrase 'late style' in his posthumously published book on Beethoven (1993). For Adorno, Beethoven's last works -- which include the last five piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis -- constitute an event in the history of modern culture: a moment when an artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.

It is the episodic character of Beethoven's late work, its apparent carelessness about its own continuity, that Adorno finds so gripping. He speaks of the late work as 'process, but not as development', as a 'catching fire between extremes which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony of spontaneity'. When he was a young composer, Beethoven's work had been vigorous and organically whole, whereas it has now become more wayward and eccentric; as an older man facing death, Beethoven realises that his work proclaims that 'no synthesis is conceivable'. Beethoven's late works, therefore, communicate a tragic sense in spite of their irascibility.