Commentators have sometimes remarked on similarities between contemporaneous piano sonatas and quartets by Beethoven, as if the composer were developing ideas at the keyboard before transferring them to other genres. A particularly close connection can be seen, however, between two works in B♭♭ major that are separated by a greater distance in time: the Piano Sonata in B♭♭, op. 106 (Hammerklavier) and the String Quartet in B♭♭, op. 130. Correspondences between the respective first movements are particularly strong, and they suggest that the sonata may have served as something of model for the quartet. Yet the same elements that contribute to a highly integrated structure in the sonata seem to serve quite different purposes in a quartet characterized by a pointed disintegration of normative procedures. A comparison of the two works shows not only how Beethoven's style underwent significant change in the intervening time, but also how the quartet may serve as a critique of the sonata in an act of deliberate stylistic distancing. This brings into question the well established concept of a unified ““late”” or ““third-period”” style.

The sea, in its seemingly limitless expanse, symbolized the concept of eternity to a number of important artists of the early 19th century, including Coleridge, Friedrich, and Goethe, who struggled to come to terms with this difficult concept through revision of their initial thoughts and ideas. Goethe's poem Meerestille was set by both Beethoven and Schubert within weeks of one another, and Schubert's two settings, written in the space of only two days, demonstrate the young composer's increasing ability to grasp the existential notion of timelessness as he grappled with Goethe's text. Schubert's musical reading and subsequent re-reading of the poem show how his use of the tritone as a musical symbol of the infinite underwent significant refinement in his second setting.

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Benjamin Britten, gravely ill at the time of its composition, was surely aware that Death in Venice would be his last opera, and it is not surprising that the work should make reference to his first opera, Peter Grimes, as if to bookend his entire operatic career, and survey the enormous distance he had travelled, as a hallmark of what might be considered the composer's late style. Even so, the dramatic and musical relationships between the two works are unusually extensive. Both operas concern an outsider at odds with the society around him, in a strange reflection of the composer's particular situation as he wrote each work. Each is set in a place particularly special to the composer, where land borders sea in a metaphor for the boundary between life and death. Finally, the protagonist's interactions with a mysterious silent boy in each case hints at a part of Britten's character that dared not speak its name. These dramatic correspondences are paralleled in important musical connections between the operas, despite their ostensibly very different musical languages. Britten's final opera could therefore be understood to exemplify the famous words borrowed by T.S. Eliot from Mary, Queen of Scots: ‘In my end is my beginning’, an appropriate concept given the degree to which Britten was occupied with Eliot's verse at this time.

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