moralistic) purpose anymore, they could increasingly be designed to express their producer’s biographical reality – their subjectivitysubjectivity. Indeed, as Jürgen Stolzenberg affirms, the leading theme of Adorno’s writing on Beethoven is subjectivity (58). In this, Adorno fell in line with earlier, German romanticromanticism concepts that established “style as the organic product not of an epoch but of the life and will of a given artist” (McMullan 2). Thus, even if Adorno’s project was declaredly based on an allegorical understanding of Beethoven’s late compositions, the works themselves standing in for modernitymodernity rather than the old age of their composer, the image of the artist as the originator of the works was always at its core.6
In “Late Style in Beethoven,” Adorno’s first, obvious purpose is to devalue traditional interpretations of the great composer’s late works, that is, those artist-centered approaches to his music that “make reference to biography and fate” (564). Beginning with a general characterization of late works as “not round, but furrowed, even ravaged,” and “[d]evoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny” (564), Adorno then goes on to state:
The usual view explains this with the argument that they are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, “personality,” which breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated. (564)
In such an approach, Adorno critically remarks, “late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document,” which supposedly makes it impossible to “fix […] one’s attention […] on the work itself” in order to reveal its “formal law” (564). The need to discover the “formal law,” in turn, arises from the “disdain […] to cross the line that separates art from document” (564). Otherwise, Adorno declares somewhat haughtily, “every notebook of Beethoven’s would possess greater significance than the Quartet in C-sharp Minor” (564).
These introductory remarks contain the premises on which Adorno’s subsequent argument operates, and they simultaneously reveal why these premises are so crucial to his agenda in pursuing Beethoven’s late style. Adorno uses Beethoven to exemplify and justify his view of modernitymodernity and especially modernismmodernism as a state of disruption. Beethoven’s music must thus fit this purpose. It must (prematurely) express the modernist Zeitgeist, or rather, it must critique a Zeitgeist that is opposed to it,7 one that still prefers harmony to fragmentationfragmentation and decay.8 Hence, for Adorno, late art cannot possibly consist of an artistic product in the biographical sense, one characterized by a unity which the artist masterfully conveys. The late work must be cleared of artistic sense-making, of subjectivitysubjectivity, so it can be truly historicalhistory, that is, contain “more traces of history than of growth” (Adorno, “Late Style” 564). Thus, a biographical approachbiographical approach would be unsuitable to reach the interpretations Adorno pursues, and he therefore denounces its presumed “inadequacy,” its inability to recognize true art (hence the comparison with Beethoven’s notebooks [564]), and dismisses psychological criticism as clichéd, flat (565) and sentimental (art as “touching relics” [566]).
Interestingly enough, Adorno here seems to be unaware that, in his desire for the artist’s lack of subjective involvement, he simply covers it up with the critical inquiry itself. Adorno’s criticism is thus not simply non-biographical, but pointedly anti-biographical, aiming to erase the connection between artist and work. His strategy resembles that of textualist critics who, according to BurkeBurke, Seán, “proceed as though life somehow pollutes the work” and “as though the possibility of work and life interpenetrating simply disappears on that account” (187–188, original italics). Admittedly, Adorno does not do away with subjectivity altogether; rather, he re-defines the relationship between subjectivity and conventionconvention (“Late Style” 566): whereas convention is still found in the late work in the guise of “formulas and phrases” that are “scattered about” in a “bald, undisguised, untransformed” manner (565), subjectivity does not join them into an organic whole anymore. Instead, “[t]he power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves,” Adorno states: “It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art” (566). Hence, subjectivitysubjectivity releases its grip over the work of art – at least in the anti-biographical critic’s approach.
Adorno does not entirely succeed in disposing of the artist’s influence over the late work. One is tempted to quote Paul Watzlawick’sWatzlawick, Paul famous first axiom of communication: “behaviour has no opposite. In other words, there is no such thing as non-behaviour or, to put it even more simply: one cannot not behave” (48, original italics). In the same way, one could say, subjectivitysubjectivity cannot be expressionless, and the artist’s work cannot just not be biographical, since artistic creation is behavior. Although this claim admittedly disregards the complexity of Adorno’s points to some extent, it becomes persuasive once we consider Watzlawick’s immediate consequence of the first axiom: “one cannot not communicate” (49, original italics). For, in his attempt to negate the artist’s influence, that is, to not use a biographical approach in his essay, Adorno in fact evokes it. As he dismisses biographical readingsbiographical approach and provides several examples of biographical interpretation ex negativo, the approaches he aims to discredit are actually made present to the reader. This does not invalidate Adorno’s point on non-biographical readings. However, it does leave the reader with an image of the artist.
The artist’s figure appears even more strongly when Adorno, “struggling for the exact calibration of the relationship between artistic subject and aesthetic object” (Hutchinson, Lateness 259), resorts to figurative language to endow his view of late art with additional expressiveness. The tropes by which the philosopher conveys his idiosyncratic catalogue of late-style characteristics consist of half terminology, half metaphor (Hinrichsen 226), and, surprisingly, these tropes reveal a conventional biographical image of the creative artist. Just after establishing that subjectivity “takes leave of the works themselves” (“Late Style” 566), Adorno writes:
Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with being, are its final work. […] No longer does he gather the landscape, deserted now, and alienatedalienation, into an image. He lights it with rays from the fire that is ignited by subjectivity […] Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which – alone – it glows into life. He does not bring about a harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. (566–567)
Despite Adorno’s claim that he is merely interested in the formal analysis of music, the image of the artist in the above quote has a strong physical presence (“the hand of the master”) as well as creative strength (“he tears them apart”) and might (“power”). His biographical presence is further shown in the intentionauthorial intention with which he composes the works, namely in order “to preserve” both the “fractured landscape” and the “light” of subjectivitysubjectivity. The artist thus possesses agency.9 In addition, and as if this reference to intention were not enough of a heretic stance, Adorno also calls the characteristics of the late work “witnesses” to the subject (although the subject, the mentioned “I confronted with Being,” may be a reference to the human conditionhuman condition rather than to the individual artist). Finally, in the “hand of the master,” the artist’s agency is linked to geniusgenius, even more so in the German original, in which “die meisterliche Hand” (“Spätstil Beethovens” 17) encompasses the sense of ‘the skillful hand’ as well.
As Andrew Goldstone rightly states, some of these passages “cohabit awkwardly with Adorno’s formal rules in his norm of late style” (74). However, even though one can view these inconsistencies in Adorno’s theory as “the true content of Adorno’s ideal of impersonality,” which is the idea of a subjectivitysubjectivity “striving to erase itself” (74, italics added), the impressive visual tropes leave the