Don Satz wrote: >Seriously, I love Beethoven's late works where we find him at his most >creative and profound. Also, his early and middle period music isn't >shabby either. Did he write any "clunkers"? Perhaps, but I don't see >any point in dwelling on a minute percentage of his compositions. > If I could write just one piece like Beethoven did - even the least little snippet - I would feel wonderful. So I agree, who cares about "clunkers" when there is so much else to marvel about. Of Beethoven's late style, the late Edward Said wrote a moving essay in the London Review of Books. (August 2004) He himself was in his "last phase" and thought about Beethoven's situation. It's such a lyrically written, profound essay I'll quote a bit: "The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality......But what if artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don't produce serenity at all? " "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. There is an insistence in late style not on mere ageing, but on an increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism". "This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power exactly to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile." Said, of course, was a musician as well as a philospoher. Anne [log in to unmask]