Robert Marshall

Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s three greatest Italian operas, was born a Jew, a fact rumored about during his lifetime but not definitively established until 1900. The treatment (or not) of Da Ponte’s Jewish origins as documented from his time to the present constitutes a history of concealment, rumor, discovery, denigration, and exploitation. Its nadir was reached during the Nazi period, its zenith most recently, as the poet, hitherto a secondary player in the Mozart biographies, has emerged as the colorful protagonist in substantial biographies of his own.

Theories about old age and the presumed manifestations ofa distinctive late style in the works of great creative artists often take the form of abstractions. As proposed by such formidable thinkers past and present as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erik Erikson, André Malraux, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said, they are frequently expressed as binary opposites or as endpoints on a spectrum: organic Decline (fragmentation and disintegration) vs. metaphysical Transcendence (integration and coherence); Withdrawal vs. Rejuvenation; a Rupture with the past vs. natural Evolution or perhaps a Relapse to an earlier phase of development. Other polarities include Retrospection vs. Innovation and Objective Demonstration vs. Subjective Expression. This essay seeks to determine the relevance of such concepts to Johann Sebastian Bach. It also considers the pertinence of other proposed Late Style attributes to his later life and works: Generativity, Archaization, Asceticism, Death Obsession, and Goethe's cryptic and influential maxim: "Old Age: the Gradual Withdrawal from Appearance." The article suggests that, despite their many undeniable mutual contradictions, these attributes all help illuminate one or the other facet of Bach's extraordinarily multifarious career-not only in his final decades but from the beginning.