Charles Rosen

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Charles Welles Rosen was born on the 5th of May, 1927, in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant architect and a semiprofessional actress who also played piano. He began musical studies at age four. By age six he was enrolled at Juilliard. By his early teens he had left Juilliard to study privately with a man who had himself studied under Franz Liszt. That chain of transmission is worth pausing on: Rosen absorbed playing habits and memories that stretched back to the nineteenth century, through a teacher born in 1862. What kind of musician does that lineage produce? What happens when you also hand that same musician a Princeton PhD in French literature, a post at MIT, and the conviction that writing about music should never invite the listener to simply drift away into reverie? Rosen would spend the better part of six decades answering those questions, as a concert pianist, a recording artist, and one of the most demanding writers on music in the English language. His first book did not appear until he was past forty. The trigger was a record sleeve note he found embarrassing.

• 2. A Liszt Lineage

  ›

  Moriz Rosenthal, born in 1862, had studied directly under Franz Liszt, and when eleven-year-old Charles Rosen left Juilliard to work with him, he also came under the tutelage of Rosenthal's wife, Hedwig Kanner. Rosenthal carried living memory of how nineteenth-century performers actually played, and those memories passed to his young student. In Critical Entertainments, Rosen would later recount a specific recollection Rosenthal shared about Johannes Brahms at the keyboard: that Brahms "rolled" chords upward, starting with the bass note. That single detail, the physical gesture of a composer's own hands, is the kind of information that disappears from history unless someone who witnessed it speaks it aloud to someone who writes it down.

  Rosen later credited another performer, Josef Hofmann, with an influence he considered even larger than Rosenthal's. Every year from the ages of three to twelve, Rosen heard Hofmann play. He described Hofmann as the greater formative force, a judgment that places his artistic formation in two streams at once: the private pedagogy of a Liszt student, and the public experience of witnessing a concert virtuoso year after year throughout childhood.

  The financial arrangements surrounding Rosen's lessons are themselves a window into how precarious this training was. His father lost his job during the Depression and the family relocated from Washington Heights to what was then an unfashionable stretch of the Upper West Side. Because money was so short, Rosen's parents struck a contract with the Rosenthals: no tuition fees in exchange for fifteen percent of Charles's future earnings as a pianist until he turned twenty-one. As Rosen later recalled, because he did not make his New York debut until he was twenty-three, the arrangement turned out to be a poor deal for the Rosenthals. When he made his first recording, he brought some money to Hedwig Kanner Rosenthal. She was, he said, very surprised, having taught him for thirteen or fourteen years at that point.

• 3. Princeton and the French Degree

  ›

  At seventeen, Rosen enrolled at Princeton University, choosing French as his primary field and also taking courses in mathematics and philosophy. When he graduated in 1947, he was offered a fellowship of two thousand dollars to continue in the French graduate program. He completed a doctorate in 1951, with a dissertation on the poetry of Jean de La Fontaine supervised by E.B.O. Borgerhoff. His graduate school roommate was Michael Steinberg, who would also go on to a distinguished career as a classical-music critic and scholar.

  What is striking about this academic chapter is what Rosen chose not to study. Though the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians would later describe him as a student of the musicologist Oliver Strunk, Rosen never formally studied musicology with Strunk or with anyone else. His musical knowledge, by his own account, grew from a culturally rich home environment and from reading widely on his own. He told Nicholas Wroe of The Guardian that by the time he arrived at Princeton, he already knew the music department socially, and that this familiarity made him too proud to pursue a formal music degree. He suggested he knew more music as an undergraduate than the postgraduate students around him. Whether that was entirely fair to those students, it signals something real about how Rosen operated: he trusted his own preparation and moved sideways through institutions rather than through their prescribed channels.

  A Fulbright fellowship then took him to Paris to examine the relationship between poetry and music in sixteenth-century France. The intellectual territory that interested him was never music alone; it was always music in relation to language, form, and history.

• 4. Pianist, Severe and Intellectual

  ›

  In 1951, the same year Rosen finished his PhD, he gave his first piano recital and made his first recordings, which included works by Martinu and Haydn. Progress came slowly at first. He taught French at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1953, and described those years with characteristic directness: he taught Monday through Wednesday and spent Thursday through Sunday as a pianist. In 1955, after two years at MIT, an offer from Columbia Artists Management prompted him to resign and commit fully to performance.

  The Columbia offer opened a career of recitals and orchestral engagements around the world. Musicologist Stanley Sadie reviewed Rosen's pianism in terms that are revealing precisely because they do not flinch: intense, severe, and intellectual. His Brahms and Schumann playing drew criticism for lack of expressive warmth, while his performances of earlier and later music earned consistent praise. His Bach, specifically the Goldberg Variations and The Art of Fugue, was commended for clarity, vitality, and structural understanding. His Beethoven, especially the late sonatas and the Hammerklavier, was noted for powerful rhythms and what Sadie called unremitting intellectual force. In Debussy, Rosen focused on structural detail rather than sensuous beauty.

  Composers sought him out personally. He recorded Igor Stravinsky's Movements for Piano and Orchestra, Elliott Carter's Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, and the complete piano works of Pierre Boulez. That last project earned him the Edison Prize in the Netherlands. His recordings of the late Beethoven piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations received Grammy Award nominations. In 1955, he recorded six Scarlatti sonatas and Mozart's Sonata K. 333 on the historical Siena Piano.

• 5. A Sleeve Note and a Career

  ›

  Rosen released a Chopin recording in 1960 that included one of the late nocturnes, opus 62 number 1. He was not entirely satisfied with the recording itself, but what truly bothered him was the sleeve note. It described the nocturne as "staggering drunken with the odour of flowers." As he recalled, that was not one of his thoughts about the piece. So he started writing the sleeve notes himself.

  Readers responded warmly. A publisher eventually took him to lunch and offered, before he had even ordered a drink, to publish whatever Rosen cared to write. In the introduction to Critical Entertainments, Rosen quoted that same florid line and explained what he found wrong with it. Writing in that style, he argued, invites the listener to dream, to let attention drift into private reverie, with the music becoming a decorative and distant background. His own preference, both as a writer and as a performer, was the opposite: to fix and intensify the listener's attention, so that one loses oneself in the music rather than floating away from it.

  His first article for The New York Review of Books appeared in 1970, a pointed review of the then-current edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music. That association continued for the rest of his life. His first full book, The Classical Style, appeared in 1971. The pianist Jeremy Denk, writing in a New Yorker blog post, described the book's passages on Mozart's Piano Concerto in E-flat, K. 271 as life-changing, comparing the experience of reading Rosen's analysis to reading a thriller. Denk wrote that Rosen insisted on addressing the notes, but showed how behind the notes lay felt needs, requirements, and laws of judgment, taste, and meaning. The book won the National Book Award in Arts and Letters.

• 6. The Books and Their Arguments

  ›

  The Classical Style examined how Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven developed and inhabited the musical language of the Classical period. Rosen revised the work in 1997, keeping most of the original text but adding a second chapter on Beethoven and a preface that addressed criticism of the first edition. One of the book's sustained arguments concerns how to situate Beethoven historically. Rosen saw him primarily within the Classical tradition from which he emerged, not as a forerunner of Romanticism. His position was stronger than that: Rosen argued that the Romantic movement in music grew from a rejection of the very principles on which Beethoven composed, and that the Romantics' veneration for Beethoven was in some ways an obstacle to their finest work.

  Sonata Forms appeared in 1980. It began as an article Rosen had agreed to contribute to the New Grove Dictionary on sonata form. When the editors rejected the piece, he expanded it into a full book. The Romantic Generation came out in 1995 and centered on the early Romantic composers: Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Berlioz. It grew from the lectures Rosen delivered as holder of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetics at Harvard in 1980-1981. Beethoven's Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion followed in 2001, offering sonata-by-sonata guidance for performers. Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist, also published in 2002, addressed the general reader and covered technique, the instrument itself, and the culture of concert performance.

  Rosen was not shy about sweeping generalizations. He asserted as near-universal laws things like: the first section of a sonata exposition always has an increasingly animated texture; or that the opening of a Mozart work is always solidly grounded in the tonic key while an opening Haydn quartet movement is more tonally unstable. He also wielded criticism with precision. His comment on the historian Richard Taruskin's contribution to a volume on historically informed performance praised Taruskin's brilliance while noting that his most crushing arguments were often aimed at positions no one really held, comparing Taruskin's polemical energy to someone beating dead horses with infectious enthusiasm while some of those horses still had occasional twitches of life.

• 7. Teacher, Honoree, Final Years

  ›

  Rosen joined the faculty at Stony Brook University in 1971, the same year The Classical Style appeared. He taught one academic quarter per year at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1996. He held positions at the University of Oxford in 1988 and at the Royal Northern College of Music. Honorary doctorates came from the University of Cambridge and Durham University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. The Romantic Generation earned the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society in 1996.

  On the 13th of February, 2012, President Obama presented Rosen with a National Humanities Medal at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. Rosen gave his last public lecture on the 18th of April, 2012, in the series Music in 21st-Century Society, at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center. He died of cancer on the 9th of December, 2012, in New York City, aged eighty-five.

  His collection of scores and manuscripts was donated to the Music Department of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Two years after his death, in 2014, an opera titled The Classical Style was premiered in his honor at the Ojai Music Festival, with a libretto by Jeremy Denk, who had described Rosen's book in those terms of a life-changing thriller, and music by composer Steven Stucky.