Late Beethoven : deux scènes symboliques chez Huxley et Spender

Beethoven ’s last Quartets, and among them the 15th (op. 132) including the most famous Heiliger Dankgesang in lydian mode, appear in the works of Proust, Romain Rolland, as well as in Thomas Mann ’s Doktor Faustus, as the archetypal symbol of «late » composing and writing : in Theodor Adorno ’s terms, a puzzling and ominous masterpiece, which leaves little room for common «music, » endowed with a unique «catastrophic » quality. Beethoven ’s deafness, as emphasized by Stephen Spender in his poem «Late Stravinski Listening to Late Beethoven, » makes the 15th Quartet a piece to be understood in abstracto : entangled and hermetic line, parabola, arabesque, pointing out to another world. As Huxley puts it rather ritually at the end «/Point Counter Point. «II proves all kinds of things — God, the soul, goodness — inescapably. It ’s the only real proof that exists ; the only one, because Beethoven was the only man who could get his knowledge over into expression. » We shall try to analyse, in Huxley and Spender’s depiction of two «artistic » minds approaching death, the blending of metaphysics and aesthetics which paves the way to a musical pattern for literature.Sounac Frédéric. Late Beethoven : deux scènes symboliques chez Huxley et Spender. In: Anglophonia/Caliban, n°11, 2002. Musique et littératures : Intertextualités. pp. 305-310