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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.
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:
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:
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]
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:
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:
Rosen made a large number of recordings, including recording various 20th century works at the invitation of their composers:[4]
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]
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:
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.
Rosen was the author of many acclaimed books about music, among them the following.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
The musicologist Mark DeVoto has written of Rosen:
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