NYT: How Biden Is Like Beethoven

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic complains that the prestige press just don’t get no respect for how they handled the President’s mental competence issue over the last four years.

You have to sympathize. There was just so much more important news to cover — like the Central Park Karen and all those late-breaking Emmett Till headlines — than the President’s mental degeneration.

And, as Thompson points out, the media did bring up Biden’s age now and then. For example, from the New York Times:

For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style

In this respect, the president has something in common with Beethoven, Wagner and Martin Scorsese.

By A.O. Scott
March 8, 2024

Joe Biden, you might have heard, is old. I’m sure you have thoughts about that: about his mental agility and physical stamina, about his chances for surviving a second term that is scheduled to end two months after his 86th birthday. But presidential age isn’t only a medical or actuarial matter. It has a symbolic weight, a range of cultural meanings that have so far been overlooked.

Biden is 81. Donald Trump is 77. Biden’s age has become an issue in a way that Trump’s has not, because we are being asked, as citizen-critics, to judge the president’s late style. This is what we saw at the State of the Union on Thursday night.

In criticism, to speak of a late style is to highlight the way certain artists, at the end of their careers, enter a new and distinctive phase of creativity. Sometimes they produce a succession of masterpieces that both fulfill and transcend the promise of the earlier work: Richard Wagner’s final run of operas;

Wagner, one of the greatest artists in European history, died at 69, a dozen years younger than Biden is now.

the three major novels Henry James published at the start of the 20th century;

James’ last novel, The Golden Bowl, was published when he was 61.

the movies Martin Scorsese is making now.

The enormously energetic Scorsese is almost exactly the same age as Biden. Still, I am not sure he’s made a movie that has exceeded expectations since The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. Since then he has made Silence (I haven’t seen it), The Irishman (saved by a wonderful performance by Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa), and Killers of the Flower Moon (I didn’t see the end, but what I did see was mostly enjoyable due to DiCaprio and De Niro’s star power, but the characters seemed kind of obtuse).

In other cases, an older artist will revisit familiar themes with a new sense of playfulness and freedom, like Henri Matisse making cutouts,

Matisse took up making cutouts while recovering from cancer surgery in his 70s, so this is a better example than most.

Shakespeare bending the rules of genre in “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest”

Shakespeare died at 52.

or Bob Dylan reshuffling the pages of his own songbook.

Dylan has made a number of comebacks, with even a well-received album of new material in his late 70s.

And then there are those artists who swerve in a more radical, dissonant direction. “The maturity of the late works,” the German theorist Theodor Adorno wrote of Ludwig van Beethoven, “does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.” Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and last string quartets often unsettle listeners with their dissonances and their unexpected harmonies.

Beethoven died at 56. It’s common to lament the works that Mozart (who died at 35) didn’t have a chance to compose, but with modern medicine, who knows what Beethoven might have done after what we call his Late Period?

… What does any of this have to do with Joe Biden?

Good question.