scholarly journals Beethoven's Mask and the Physiognomy of Late Style

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 143-169
Author(s):  
Abigail Fine

This article shows how discourse on Beethoven's late works has been underpinned by material fascination with the composer's body, most apparent in the cult veneration of his dying face, which was commodified in the form of his mask. From 1890 to 1920 in Germany and Austria, Beethoven's mask became a ubiquitous item of decor for the music room, a devotional object linked with the face of Christ in the popular imagination. This mislabeled “death” mask was cast during Beethoven's lifetime, a stoic visage that put a face to the legend: that is, to the legendary 1868 account by Anselm Hüttenbrenner that recounted Beethoven's death as a heroic battle with the storm clouds. Two conflicting physiognomies—the stubborn Napoleonic commander and the suffering Christ-like redeemer—led to a critical divide that saw late works as either transcendent of, or marred by, suffering. When we unmask a prehistory of late style, we see how modern discourse on lateness still orbits around this tension between the spiritual and material, between transcendence and decay, and how this critical tradition crystallized around Theodor W. Adorno's stark resistance to the transcendent deathbed that was epitomized by the writings of Ludwig Nohl. Lateness, then, has a hidden backbone in a popular fascination with the artist's body. This same fascination led many to imagine Beethoven's final compositions as almost tangible traces of his person, hearing his late Adagios as “grave-songs,” as the composer's dying voice.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo Canez Leite

Essential to the administration of justice, the lawyer plays a key role in postulating a decision favorable to his constituent and convincing the judge. However, it is common in nature to the formation and performance of bad professionals, who, due to their inconsistent actions or omissions, cause damage, whether material or moral, in the face of claims to be reached by their contractors, forming in the popular imagination a pejorative stereotype regarding the performance. from the lawyer. However, it is part of this area, a very small percentage that denigrate the image of valuable operators of the law. Thus, the Civil Liability of the Lawyer before the Theory of the Loss of a Chance becomes possible, because through misery, lack of knowledge, among others, according to the Brazilian Bar Association, lead the professional services contractor. attorneys to suffer direct or indirect damages, as they see the possibility of obtaining any economic advantage or avoid an injury, given the lost chance. Thus, even if the damage is uncertain, but if concrete probabilities are present, it should be compensated, not for the unwanted end result, but for the mere loss of the chance of achieving it.


2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds

Beethoven acknowledged the radical nature of his “Quartetto serioso” (1810) when he noted that it had been written for “a small circle of connoisseurs” and was “never to be performed in public.” The coda to the quartet's finale, with its sudden reversal of tone, has proven especially problematic, eliciting responses that include incomprehension (Marx) and outright dismissal (d'Indy). More recent accounts have pointed to irony as a strategy of negation, but Beethoven's contemporaries were inclined to embrace it as a constructive, liberating device. The Schlegel brothers, among others, championed it as the primary instrument of an epistemological framework that promoted the accommodation of multiple perspectives. The antifoundationalist nature of irony encourages a mode of understanding that precludes the possibility of any one “correct” perspective. Beethoven's use of “serioso” here and elsewhere, moreover, evokes a sense of the word that conveys pathos bordering on bathos. The “Quartetto serioso” is Beethoven's most extreme essay in irony, a device that would permeate his later works in more subtle but no less far-reaching ways. Opus 95 also reflects the growing prestige of artistic incomprehensibility, part of a broader shift from an aesthetics based on the principles of rhetoric, in which the artist bears the burden of intelligibility, to an aesthetics based on the principles of hermeneutics, in which the audience assumes responsibility for comprehending a given text. Beethoven's “late” works, often regarded as products of self-critique or turning inward, can thus be heard as part of a wider effort to engage audiences as active participants in a community dedicated to a dialectic of critique.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Tahrir Hamdi

This chapter critically engages with Edward W. Said’s conceptualization of ‘Late Style’ in light of continued catastrophic occurrences in Palestine. It argues that a ‘lateness of beginnings’ represents the Palestinian intellectual’s deepest resistance against catastrophe, impending death, dispossession, and colonization. In the face of continued catastrophe, resistance in post-millennial Palestine is currently being reinvigorated by the creativity of new Palestinian generations, who have attained a metaphorical lateness by the very means of the repetition of the catastrophic. The chapter explores the reconfiguration of Late Style resistance in the works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, arguing that these intellectuals’ works are important in foregrounding an oppositional criticism in the face of divisionist agendas at this most critical moment in the continuation of the Palestinian struggle.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Swinkin

In this essay, I aim both to elucidate and to problematize Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s middle and late styles as essentially dichotomous. Specifically, Adorno holds that the middle-style works express the utter interdependency of the subjective and objective spheres in their emphasis upon organic wholeness and totality. By contrast, the late-style works express the alienation of subject from object in isolating and laying bare musical conventions. Yet middle Beethoven, as Adorno himself intimates, often calls organic unity into question, especially with respect to the recapitulation and coda in a sonata-form piece. Moreover, although Adorno does not seem to acknowledge it, the middle style exhibits fragmentation both in partitioning the sonata principle into subprinciples and, more concretely, in partitioning a theme into various subcomponents. Conversely, using Schenkerian techniques, one can expose sub-thematic unity underlying foreground fragmentation in the late works (as demonstrated by Daniel Chua and Kevin Korsyn). Drawing on Schenker’s reading, I use Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A, op. 101 as a case study. In the second half of the essay I confront the political connotations of Adorno’s argument, again problematizing particular stylistic binarisms with respect to issues of freedom, solidarity, and hope.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel G. B. Johnson

AbstractZero-sum thinking and aversion to trade pervade our society, yet fly in the face of everyday experience and the consensus of economists. Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary model invokes coalitional psychology to explain these puzzling intuitions. I raise several empirical challenges to this explanation, proposing two alternative mechanisms – intuitive mercantilism (assigning value to money rather than goods) and errors in perspective-taking.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias C. Owen

AbstractThe clear evidence of water erosion on the surface of Mars suggests an early climate much more clement than the present one. Using a model for the origin of inner planet atmospheres by icy planetesimal impact, it is possible to reconstruct the original volatile inventory on Mars, starting from the thin atmosphere we observe today. Evidence for cometary impact can be found in the present abundances and isotope ratios of gases in the atmosphere and in SNC meteorites. If we invoke impact erosion to account for the present excess of129Xe, we predict an early inventory equivalent to at least 7.5 bars of CO2. This reservoir of volatiles is adequate to produce a substantial greenhouse effect, provided there is some small addition of SO2(volcanoes) or reduced gases (cometary impact). Thus it seems likely that conditions on early Mars were suitable for the origin of life – biogenic elements and liquid water were present at favorable conditions of pressure and temperature. Whether life began on Mars remains an open question, receiving hints of a positive answer from recent work on one of the Martian meteorites. The implications for habitable zones around other stars include the need to have rocky planets with sufficient mass to preserve atmospheres in the face of intensive early bombardment.


Author(s):  
G.J.C. Carpenter

In zirconium-hydrogen alloys, rapid cooling from an elevated temperature causes precipitation of the face-centred tetragonal (fct) phase, γZrH, in the form of needles, parallel to the close-packed <1120>zr directions (1). With low hydrogen concentrations, the hydride solvus is sufficiently low that zirconium atom diffusion cannot occur. For example, with 6 μg/g hydrogen, the solvus temperature is approximately 370 K (2), at which only the hydrogen diffuses readily. Shears are therefore necessary to produce the crystallographic transformation from hexagonal close-packed (hep) zirconium to fct hydride.The simplest mechanism for the transformation is the passage of Shockley partial dislocations having Burgers vectors (b) of the type 1/3<0110> on every second (0001)Zr plane. If the partial dislocations are in the form of loops with the same b, the crosssection of a hydride precipitate will be as shown in fig.1. A consequence of this type of transformation is that a cumulative shear, S, is produced that leads to a strain field in the surrounding zirconium matrix, as illustrated in fig.2a.


Author(s):  
F. Monchoux ◽  
A. Rocher ◽  
J.L. Martin

Interphase sliding is an important phenomenon of high temperature plasticity. In order to study the microstructural changes associated with it, as well as its influence on the strain rate dependence on stress and temperature, plane boundaries were obtained by welding together two polycrystals of Cu-Zn alloys having the face centered cubic and body centered cubic structures respectively following the procedure described in (1). These specimens were then deformed in shear along the interface on a creep machine (2) at the same temperature as that of the diffusion treatment so as to avoid any precipitation. The present paper reports observations by conventional and high voltage electron microscopy of the microstructure of both phases, in the vicinity of the phase boundary, after different creep tests corresponding to various deformation conditions.Foils were cut by spark machining out of the bulk samples, 0.2 mm thick. They were then electropolished down to 0.1 mm, after which a hole with thin edges was made in an area including the boundary


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