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For me, it's all about progression. You have to be constantly moving forward; the moment you let your music stagnate and harden into a 'style', you lose that forward developmental momentum.

I think it's difficult to generalize, though often the music becomes more complex and their style is more refined and distinctive as time goes on, and sometimes less compromising. If they live long enough, there's sometimes a decrease in intensity in later music. I think it partly mirrors life experiences...you know, you "think" differently at 50 than you do as a 20 year old. I think what composers are living through at the time can also have a profound effect on how/what they compose. For example, listen to Mozart's Salzburg works compared to his Vienna ones. He wrote some great works in Salzburg toward the end, but they are still quite different from the Vienna music, which is rather more theatrical. Some composers seem to be able to rise above their circumstances, though. There isn't always the guarantee that your later music will be "better" than your earlier music, however (which is somewhat of a debatable idea anyway). Some composers, especially ones who pushed the envelope in their youth, might lose their edge as time goes on and write increasingly bland music. I guess Richard Strauss would be the most obvious example of that, but you could say the same for Mendelssohn and maybe Berlioz (though Berlioz's later music is still great...it just isn't as revolutionary as his early stuff). Some modern composers who were at the fringes of the avant-garde in their youth became more mainstream as they aged. I think in other cases, you'll have people who, I suspect, just get bored with what they're writing and push forward into new territores, never (or very rarely) to return to what they had done previously. Think of Stravinsky or Schoenberg here....