Charles Rosen

Charles Rosen, 1973 on concert tour of Southern Africa. Photo dedicated to organiser Hans Adler.^[1]

Charles Welles Rosen (May 5, 1927 – December 9, 2012) was an American pianist and writer on music.^[2] He is remembered for his career as a concert pianist, for his recordings, and for his many writings, notably the book The Classical Style.

Life and career

Youth and education

He was born in New York City. His father Irwin Rosen worked as an architect; his mother, née Anita Gerber, was a semiprofessional actress and amateur pianist.^[2]

Rosen began his musical studies at age 4 and at age 6 enrolled in the Juilliard School.^[3] At age 11 he left Juilliard to study piano with Moriz Rosenthal.^[4] and with Rosenthal's wife Hedwig Kanner.^[5] Rosenthal, born in 1862, had been a student of Franz Liszt. Rosenthal's memories of the 19th century in classical music were communicated to his pupil and appear frequently in Rosen's later writings.^[6] Every year from the ages of three to twelve, Rosen heard Josef Hofmann play, and he later suggested that Hofmann had a greater influence on him than Rosenthal.^[7]

Rosen's family background was not wealthy. The Guardian editor Nicholas Wroe interviewed him in old age and reported:

His father had lost his job during the depression and "things were pretty tough for a while". The family moved from Washington Heights to a ho[me] in the then less fashionable Upper West Side, where Rosen still lives. Because money was so short Rosen's parents arranged a contract with the Rosenthals not to pay them for Charles's tuition, but instead to give them 15% of his earnings as a pianist until the age of 21. "As I didn't make my debut in New York until I was 23, it was not a very satisfactory deal. But when I made my first recording I took some money to Hedwig [Kanner] Rosenthal, who was very surprised because she had been teaching me for 13 or 14 years at that stage."^[8]

At age 17, Rosen enrolled in Princeton University, where he studied French, also taking courses in mathematics and philosophy.^[9] When he graduated in 1947, he was offered a fellowship of $2,000 to continue at Princeton in the French graduate program.^[9] While in graduate school he roomed with his fellow student Michael Steinberg, who also went on to become a classical music critic and scholar of renown.

Rosen attained his status as a musical scholar with very little classroom training. Although Rosen in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is referred as one of the musicologist Oliver Strunk's students,^[10] he never formally studied musicology with Strunk or anyone else.^[11] Rosen's very extensive knowledge of music appears to have arisen partly from a culturally rich family background and partly from reading. Nicholas Wroe reported:

Through the Rosenthals, Rosen was connected to the New York musical scene. He had played at a welcome concert for Bohuslav Martinu when he arrived in America in 1941, and says that by the time he went to Princeton, he knew all the music department socially. "So that made me too proud to take a degree in music, which I thought would be too easy. I sound like a snotty bastard, which I might have been, but I really did know more music as an undergraduate than the postgraduate students."^[8]

Ivan Hewett suggests that a major temptation of Rosen's 1947 fellowship offer was that it offered him time to practice and to read extensively in the Princeton library.^[9]

Launching his musical career

The year 1951 was a busy one for Rosen: he completed his French Literature Ph.D., gave his first piano recital, and made his first recordings, of works by Martinu and Haydn.^[5] His career as a pianist made progress only slowly at first, and he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study the relationship between poetry and music in 16th-century France.^[12] In 1953 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach French.^[9] He described this period to Nicholas Wroe:

I suppose I could have stayed on as an academic, but I never intended to do anything but play the piano. The only time I taught was when my playing would only support me for half a year, but I could only get a full-time job. So I taught French at MIT Monday to Wednesday, but Thursday through Sunday I was a pianist. In 1955, after two years there, I got an offer from Columbia Artists Management and so I resigned.^[8]

The Columbia offer initiated his successful career as a concert pianist: Rosen appeared in numerous recitals and orchestral engagements around the world. Musicologist Stanley Sadie reviewed his pianism as follows:

As a pianist, Rosen is intense, severe and intellectual. His playing of Brahms and Schumann has been criticized for lack of expressive warmth; in music earlier and later he has won consistent praise. His performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations is remarkable for its clarity, its vitality and its structural grasp; he has also recorded The Art of Fugue in performances of exceptional lucidity of texture. His Beethoven playing (he specializes in the late sonatas, particularly the Hammerklavier) is notable for its powerful rhythms and its unremitting intellectual force. In Debussy his attention is focussed rather on structural detail than on sensuous beauty. He is a distinguished interpreter of Schoenberg and Webern.^[13]

Rosen made a large number of recordings, including recording various 20th century works at the invitation of their composers:^[4]

• Igor Stravinsky: Movements for Piano and Orchestra
• Elliott Carter: Double Concerto
• Pierre Boulez: complete works for piano

In 1955, he recorded six Scarlatti's sonatas and Mozart's sonata K. 333 on the historical Siena piano.^[5]

His recordings include earlier literature such as Debussy's Études (1958),^[4] Schumann's works for solo piano, Beethoven's late sonatas and Diabelli Variations, and Bach's Art of Fugue and Goldberg Variations.^[14]

Career as a writer and teacher

Rosen's career as an author and scholar began only when he had passed the age of 40. Nicholas Wroe narrates how he started writing:

Rosen released his first Chopin recording in 1960. It included one of the late nocturnes, opus 62 no 1 ... Rosen says he wasn't entirely happy with the recording, but he was even more disappointed with the sleeve note, which described the nocturne as "staggering drunken with the odour of flowers". "I had many thoughts about the piece," he says. "That was not one of them. So I started writing the sleeve notes myself. People liked them and after a while a publisher took me to lunch. Before he even offered me a drink he said he would publish whatever I'd like to write. Eventually it led to many books and articles. But to begin with I wrote just to keep nonsense off my record sleeves."^[15]

In 1970 Rosen wrote his first column for New York Review of Books, a scathing review of the then-current edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music.^[16] His association with this journal continued for the rest of his life (his last column was published posthumously).^[2]

In 1971, Rosen published his first and most famous book, The Classical Style. This work was highly successful, winning a National Book Award; and initiated a long series of books (see list below).

At various points in his career Rosen took positions as a university professor. His early stint teaching French at MIT is mentioned above. His later teaching was in music, in part-time or visiting positions offered to Rosen after he had achieved fame in his scholarly work. At Harvard University he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetics in 1980/1981; the public lectures he gave there served as the basis of The Romantic Generation.^[5] He taught one academic quarter per year at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1996.^[3] He taught at Stony Brook University starting 1971,^[5] the University of Oxford (1988)^[5] and the Royal Northern College of Music.

Even after the scholarly phase of his career had set in, Rosen continued to perform as a pianist for the rest of his life.

He gave his last lecture on April 18, 2012 in the series Music in 21st-Century Society, at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation of the CUNY Graduate Center.^[17]

Rosen died of cancer on December 9, 2012, in New York City, aged 85.^[18] His collection of scores and manuscripts was posthumously donated to the Music Department of the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Books and other writings

Rosen was the author of many acclaimed books about music, among them the following.

• His most famous work is The Classical Style (1971), which analyzes the nature and evolution of the style of the Classical period as it was developed by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Rosen revised the work in 1997, leaving most of the text intact but adding a second chapter on Beethoven and a preface addressing comments on the first edition.
• Sonata Forms (1980) is in some ways a follow-up on The Classical Style; it is an intensive analysis of the primary musical form used in the classical era. Rosen wrote the work when his intended contribution to the New Grove on sonata form was rejected by the editors; he amplified the article he had written into book form.
• The Romantic Generation (1995) is centered on the early generation of Romantic composers, including Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, and Berlioz.
• Beethoven's Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion (2001) gives general background on these famous works as well as sonata-by-sonata advice for performers.
• Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New (2001) is a compilation of essays originally published in magazines and scholarly journals, mostly the New York Review of Books. It covers a variety of topics, including Oliver Strunk, the work of various composers, the status of contemporary music, and the New Musicology.
• Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002) is an account of the concert pianist's world, addressed to the general reader. It covers piano technique, the instrument itself, the culture of piano performance, and the repertoire for the instrument.

Rosen frequently wrote on music for The New York Review of Books, and a number of his books are compilations of essays and reviews he wrote for this journal.

The polymathic Rosen published in other areas of the humanities: Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art and Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen.

Some aspects of Rosen's writing

In the introduction to Critical Entertainments, Rosen stated his main goal in writing about music: to increase the listener's engagement with the music. Alluding to the unhappy program note mentioned above, he wrote:

A Chopin recording I made ... had some notes that quoted James Huneker on one of the late nocturnes, which claimed that it "staggered drunken with the odor of flowers." This was not my view of the work ... Huneker's style is an invitation to the listener to dream, to dissipate attention into reverie. The writing about music that I prefer – and the performances of it, as well – fix and intensify the listener's attention. When I hear music, I prefer to lose myself in it, not drift outside in my own personal world with the music as a decorative and distant background.^[19]

In pursuing this goal Rosen often appealed to technical aspects of musical description, including the theories of harmony and musical form. In a New Yorker blog posting, Jeremy Denk rhapsodically describes this aspect of Rosen's work:

My favorite, life-changing parts of “The Classical Style” are the blow-by-blow accounts of great passages of music in the wonkiest of terms. He delves into the exposition of Mozart's piano concerto in E-flat, K. 271, showing how each new idea fulfills various needs raised by the last, while leaving others still open: a continuous game of symmetry and asymmetry, expectation and fulfillment, hiding beneath the innocent surface. ... Charles insists on addressing the notes; but he shows us how behind the notes are felt needs, requirements, laws of how things ought to be—a whole system of judgment, of taste, of meaning. ... The book ... occasionally feels like a page-turner, a thriller: these three geniuses—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—building on each other’s discoveries, like scientists almost, creating unprecedented inventions, invoking a golden era of form meeting content.^[20]

Another goal of the work is to set each composer's work in its historical and cultural background, describing the forms of composition that served as a musical background for a composer in his formative years and then illuminating his contributions. Thus, for example, Rosen largely sees Beethoven in the context of the Classical-period tradition from which he emerged, rather than anachronistically as a forerunner of the later Romantic movement.^[21]

Rosen was unafraid to make strong generalizations about the music he studied; i.e. he frequently pointed out aspects of the music claimed to be invariably or almost invariably present. Here are examples.

The first section of a sonata exposition always has an increasingly animated texture. (Sonata Forms, p. 238)

The opening of a work by Mozart is always solidly based [i.e., in the tonic key], no matter how ambiguous and disturbing its expressive significance, while the most unassuming first measures of a quartet by Haydn are far more unstable, more immediately charged with a dynamic movement away from the tonic. (The Classical Style, 186)

In this respect Chopin is one of the least pianistic of composers: a change of harmony [= a passage repeated later in a piece in a different key] that makes the original figuration exceedingly awkward does not lead him to change the figuration, and he always refuses to adapt his musical thought to the convenience of the hand. (The Romantic Generation, p. 364)

From time to time Rosen wielded his pen as a rapier, skewering other authors. He generally expressed his criticisms with a dose of wit, mixing damnation with faint praise,^[22] as in the following discussion of a contribution by Richard Taruskin to a volume on historically informed performance:

Taruskin writes brilliantly and at the top of his voice, and his most crushing arguments are often reserved for opinions that no one really holds. He asserts: "To presume that the use of historical instruments guarantees a historical result is simply preposterous." No doubt. Still, Taruskin beats his dead horses with infectious enthusiasm, and some of them have occasional twitches of life.^[23]

Such passages were balanced by a fair amount of praise and appreciation (if not systematic citation) of others' work.

Rosen's prodigious memory for facts occasionally failed him, letting elementary factual errors creep into his work. Sometimes he would apologize for the errors in reprinted editions, retaining them in the text as a sort of self-reprimand. Thus Chapter 7 of Critical Entertainments, a reprinted essay, begins with an appended comment:

At the opening of the following essay, the mistake of calling Joseph II the emperor Franz Joseph is so egregious that I have let it stand in the text in the hope that the public humiliation will make me more careful in the future. Several readers wrote to signal other mistakes ...

Assessment

The musicologist Mark DeVoto has written of Rosen:

Charles Rosen was a comprehensive musician, an outstanding pianist and one of the best writers on music ever. The scope of his knowledge was immense, and its depth showed on every page of his many and various books and articles, from The Classical Style to The Romantic Generation to Sonata Forms, and even to books on Schoenberg and Elliott Carter. Today's students and knowledgeable music lovers return to Rosen's writings again and again, not only to read about the great composers and their works, but to comprehend them historically and as components of the literary and dramatic traditions, which Rosen knew thoroughly.^[24]

Honors

• For The Classical Style: the U.S. National Book Award in category Arts and Letters.^[25]
• For The Romantic Generation: the Otto Kinkeldey award of the American Musicological Society (1996).
• Honorary doctorates from the University of Cambridge and Durham University.^[4]
• For his recording of the complete piano works of Boulez: the Edison Prize (Netherlands ).^[4]
• For his recordings of the late Beethoven piano sonatas and of the Diabelli Variations: Grammy Award nominations.^[4]
• A National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Obama February 13, 2012 in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.
• An opera entitled The Classical Style was created in his honor by librettist Jeremy Denk and composer Steven Stucky. It was premiered at the Ojai Music Festival, June 13, 2014.^[26][27][28]

Literature

• The Classical Style (1971, 2nd expanded ed., 1997, New York: Norton): ISBN 0-393-31712-9
• Schoenberg (1976, Fontana Modern Masters)
• The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter (1984, Washington, D.C.: Music Division, Research Services, Library of Congress)
• Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (with Henri Zerner; 1985, New York: Norton): ISBN 0-393-30196-6
• Sonata Forms (2nd ed., 1988, New York: Norton): ISBN 0-393-30219-9
• The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994, New York: Hill and Wang): ISBN 1-871082-65-X
• Arnold Schoenberg (1996, Chicago: University of Chicago Press): ISBN 0-691-02706-4
• The Romantic Generation (1995, Cambridge: Harvard University Press): ISBN 0-674-77934-7
• Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen (2000, Cambridge: Harvard University Press): ISBN 0-674-77951-7
• Beethoven's Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion (2001, New Haven: Yale University Press): ISBN 0-300-09070-6
• Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New (2001, Cambridge: Harvard University Press): ISBN 0-674-00684-4
• Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002, Free Press): ISBN 0-7432-4312-9
• Variations on the Canon edited by Robert Curry et al. (2008, University of Rochester Press): a collection of essays by noted scholars and musicians, published on the occasion of Rosen's 80th birthday. It contains writings on Rosen's critical methods (and other topics), a previously unpublished essay by Rosen himself, and concludes with listings of all his recordings and published writings up to the date of publication.
• Music and Sentiment (2010, New Haven: Yale University Press): ISBN 0-300-12640-9
• Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature (2012, Cambridge: Harvard University Press)

Notes

External links

• Denis Dutton review of "Piano Notes" by Charles Rosen
• Biography, Naxos Records
• Biography of Charles Rosen at Library of Congress
• Biography of Charles Rosen at Bach Cantatas
• Charles Rosen at AllMusic
• Charles Rosen at Library of Congress Authorities – with 84 catalog records
• Interview with Charles Rosen (1 of 3) on YouTube, David Dubal, WNCN-FM, 17 October 1980
• Interview with Charles Rosen (2 of 3) on YouTube, David Dubal, WNCN-FM, 15 January 1982
• Interview with Charles Rosen (3 of 3) on YouTube, David Dubal, WNCN-FM, 24 June 1984