A Form of Exile

This second collaboration between the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books presents dazzling works of music and literature created at the end of great careers. Join us to discover the connections between them, as traced by Palestinian-American postcolonial theorist and political activist Edward Said in his own final book.

Best known for his 1978 book Orientalism, Said was a regular contributor to the LRB. The last piece he contributed, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, became the first chapter of his final book, On Late Style, which was posthumously published in 2006. Ranging from Beethoven to Britten, from Genet’s Prisoner of Love to Lampedusa’s The Leopard, the book posits a theory of late style as a separate, strange, and vital aesthetic category.

CLS and the LRB animate these daring interdisciplinary connections with a programme that takes in the greatest of all late works, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – ‘a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications’ (Alex Ross) – as well as Richard Strauss’s last orchestral piece and Britten’s String Quartet No. 3, which references Death in Venice, his final opera. Readings from texts read by, written by (sometimes addressing the music directly), or written about Said are interspersed throughout.

Together, these musical and literary works tell a story of courageous perseverance, startling originality, and lateness as ‘a form of exile’, as Said wrote: a moving account of artistic, human, and political truths, which has never been told quite like this before.