‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case.
Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in strength or Schmerz; and more, the bloom of the young animal in its pride: things soon disappearing in the no doubt deeper, more characteristic achievements of maturity, which can’t in themselves be regretted but don’t stifle a sigh for what’s lost.
One composer notoriously never surpasses the tender brilliance of his early music: Mendelssohn. With two other romantics, Wagner and Verdi, the earliest phases are so variously uncouth that there’s no compunction about jettisoning them. These composers can only improve! But many masters touch early upon something unique that then has seemingly to be abandoned on the hard road to maturity.
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