Late style: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms

This is a modified version of my pre-concert talk for a Canberra recital by Piotr Anderszewski on 21 November 2025, presented by Musica Viva Australia.

This evening’s recital features the inspiring pianism of one of today’s most thoughtful solo artists, Piotr Anderszewski. I remember hearing Mr. Anderszewski in this same venue back when I was a student and he was performing a classical concerto (or possibly two classical concerti?)—either Mozart or Haydn—with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. I couldn’t remember the exact program and tried and failed to find it online. He did make a recording of two Mozart concerti around the same time with his own original cadenzas. It was nothing like I remembered; in the live performance he literally improvised the cadenzas on stage, and it was so much more vivid and wild and free than the polished version on disc. It made quite an impression on me as a young student!

Hard to believe that this happened more than 20 years ago... Last year I turned 40, an age that hits musicians a little differently. By the time Mozart, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Gershwin were our age, they were already pushing up the daisies. Similar thoughts would have likely occurred to the composers on this evening’s program: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, or the “3 B’s” as they are popularly known. Tonight's program consists of “late period” works, written in the last decade of each composer’s life. These works reflect both a lifetime of experience and the circumstances of one whose best years are already behind them.

Beethoven's Sonata

In contemporary culture, we keep a special place for these final creative works. Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas are widely acclaimed as his more mature and profound statement for the piano. But that has not been a universal view. According to Edward Said, the great Palestinian writer and intellectual, “If we compare a middle-period work, such as [Beethoven’s] Eroica Symphony, with the opus 110 sonata, we will be struck by the totally cogent and integrative logic of the former and the somewhat distracted, often extremely careless and repetitive character of the latter.” Mr. Said wrote these words as part of his book on “Late Style”, which was left incomplete when he died in 2003. You might think from this quote that he didn’t much care for the Beethoven’s Op. 110 sonata, but in context it’s clear that he had great respect for late Beethoven. At the same time, he argued that at the time of its composition, Beethoven’s reduced circumstances, his mental decline, and his deafness had impacted his music.

During his last few years, Beethoven became increasingly reclusive and composed less and less. He steadily lost friends and patrons as they died or became estranged. While his middle period works were extremely popular with the Vienna public and were frequently performed, toward the end of his life he found it more and more difficult to reproduce the same success. Grillparzer, one of his close friends, commented on “the sad condition of the master during the latter years of his life, which prevented him from always distinguishing clearly between what had actually happened and what had been merely imagined.” As Beethoven depended on the support of a small group of musical connoisseurs, his compositions became more experimental but also increasingly misunderstood by the general public and out of step with the reactionary vibe of Vienna in the post-Napoleonic years.

When we talk about a creator’s “late style”, Beethoven is the quintessential example of someone who removed themselves from current fashions, and whose art became more personal and inward looking. In addition, “late style” can mean looking back to the past, for example to the great Johann Sebastian Bach and his fugues. All five of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas use fugues, and in the Op. 110 sonata we will hear this in the final movement, which is really two movements rolled into one: a slow movement, which is like an Aria, and then a finale, in the form of a fugue. He begins with the aria, and then the fugue, then returns to the aria, and then the fugue once more. I would like to play you the two versions of the aria, so you can hear how the melody almost disintegrates the second time. The first statement is beautiful and sad, but the second one barely has the energy to keep going. Beethoven writes hesitations and breaks into the melodic line, and he writes the descriptive term “Ermattet”, which means “weary” or “exhausted”.

There is an influential paper by the theorist Josef Straus from the early 2000s called “Disability and Late Style in Music” in which he discusses the intersection of these two areas of musicological discourse: how disability shapes musical experience, and late style. These are really interesting and emerging topics in music theory, and it’s useful for understanding late style as more than just age—Schubert’s late style comes from a 29-year-old, whereas late period Bach is from the age of 55, but also I think it brings new perspectives to the circumstances of these composers and their struggles.

Bach's Late Fugues

Beethoven suffered from profound hearing loss; Bach suffered from failing eyesight. Both composers became much less prolific. Like Beethoven, Bach was increasingly writing for the musical elite. In his earlier keyboard works, he engaged with the fashionable galant style and trends from France and Italy, but he increasingly became outmoded. His two oldest sons, Carl Philipp Emmanuel and Wilhelm Friedmann, were already far more successful and popular composers, and so the “Old Bach” turned toward the past, just as Beethoven had. Bach was copying out early Baroque music from the previous century, as well as a Palestrina mass. His polyphonic style became more austere and complex. Here are some examples from the G sharp minor fugue from the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In this double fugue, the first subject is austere and modal, and the second is plaintive—the sudden shift of character at the second subject's entry (3:01) is a really powerful moment! At the end, the two themes combine (at 4:39). Piotr Anderszewski’s album of selected preludes and fugues really shows both the intellectual side of Mr. Anderszewski and also the warmth of his melodic tone.

Brahms's Late Style: The circumstantial evidence

Instead of tackling Brahms's enigmatic and complex late piano music, let's examine music that would have been in Brahms’s mind when he was composing his last piano pieces in the 1890s. Like the other two B's, Brahms was also composing less and less, and he no longer had the stamina to compose grand symphonies and concertos. He had ambitions to turn some of these piano pieces into an orchestral suite, but that never happened. At the same time, he had to deal with the loss of some of those closest to him. The death of his sister Elise was a blow—he was close to her and supported her financially, and she kept him up to date on the latest news from his hometown of Hamburg. Also Elisabet von Herzogenberg, one of his finest students and an important patron of the arts in Vienna, succumbed to heart disease. Elisabet’s husband took it upon himself to publish eight of her piano pieces after her death, some of her only works to survive. The last of these pieces seems to have echoes of Brahms's own Rhapsody in B minor, Op. 76, No. 1, as well as looking forward to the second of the Op. 118 set.

Brahms’s late style is intertwined with the twilight of a Viennese era, and certain time of life that is hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it. There is a tradition of performing Brahms (and late Beethoven to some degree) that you need a mature soul. I remember when I was fourteen years old in America my teacher told me that I wouldn’t really understand late Brahms until I was much older. This is a tradition that (for better or worse) doesn’t really exist in Australia. These are all pieces that we’re used to hearing teenagers playing for their AMEB exams.

Through his surviving correspondence, we also know that Brahms had a falling out with Clara Schumann (widow of Robert Schumann), over the publication of certain works by her husband. Clara Schumann had worked for years publishing a complete edition of his works, and Brahms had worked diligently alongside her. But certain differences of opinion caused a major rift between the two (particularly regarding editorial decisions in the symphonies). Brahms had a particular soft spot for Robert Schumann’s “Ghost” Variations—his last piano work, written on a theme that he believed was transmitted to him by angels’ voices as he was suffering a mental breakdown. Shortly after, he threw himself off a bridge into the freezing Rhine River, and was institutionalised and died a few months later. Nearly forty years after Robert’s death, Brahms took his mentor Schumann’s variations out and as he wrote to Clara, “I again sat down at my piano and without any particular object in mind played them over to myself quite naturally and with profound emotion. I felt as though I were walking on a beautiful soft spring morning, in a grove of alders, birches and lovely flowers, with a babbling brook at my feet.”

But Clara Schumann had refused to allow the variations to be published, because it was too closely connected to Robert’s mental illness. Her reaction has been dismissed—perhaps too easily?—as a superstition about how mental illness “contaminated” Robert’s late music. On the other hand, she could not easily separate her own personal experience from these works, as she was left as a single mother of seven children, one of whom would also suffer from debilitating mental illness and was “buried alive” in an institution (in her words). Another son, Ferdinand, had succumbed to his demons one year earlier, in 1891, and died after a long battle with morphine addiction.

Clara herself was too ill to continue her performing career and could not sit at the piano for more than a few minutes at a time. But when she received some of Brahms’s new piano pieces, she wrote in her journal about “[their] poetry, passion, sentiment, emotion, and with the most wonderful effects of tone…In these pieces I at last feel musical life stir again in my soul…How they make one forget much of the suffering he has caused one.”

One more little story: as Brahms was composing these pieces, one of his greatest champions, the conductor Hans von Bülow was also in the final stages of cancer. Von Bülow was in fact the first to speak of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as “the 3 B’s”, putting Brahms on the same level as the great past masters. Brahms wrote to his wife Marie, “I feel a most powerful and earnest desire to hear about your husband. I feel it twice as strongly when I observe the warmth with which all his acquaintances and friends here think of him.” Marie reported back that von Bülow was moved to tears by Brahms’s letter, but his condition deteriorated steadily and he died a few months later.

I didn’t really set out to write such a depressing pre-concert talk, but I felt it was actually fine because the music you are about to hear is so uplifting, and so life-affirming that I know your hearts will be full when you leave the hall this evening. All the better, then, to put it in context and ask, what is it about late style, and composing in the face of these difficulties, that bring us back again and again to these works?