According to the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, when some artists, musicians, and writers enter the last period of their lives, the sense of their own ending (whether from old age or ill health) occasions a change in their craft, a kind of ‘new idiom’ that he calls ‘late style’. While we might intuitively tend to think of old age bringing a sense of ‘reconciliation and serenity’, of ‘harmony and resolution’ to an artist’s portfolio, Said is more interested in those artists for whom the end actually marks a turning point, a shift towards ‘intransigence, difficulty and contradiction’. In this regard, Said writes of Ibsen and of Beethoven (as had Theodor Adorno before him) that their final works are characterised by a maturity that does not simply round out the career, but adds complexity to it, and seems out of step with the world in which it exists.