(This review originally appeared here, Charles Rosen's latest volume of collected essays being named Book of the Week in Times Higher Education.)
I regularly recommend Charles Rosen's various writings to
undergraduates reading music and have often done so to history
undergraduates too. They certainly seem to appreciate him, even to the
extent that an essay I recently marked furnished a fabricated Rosen
citation to confirm a startling thesis of Mozart having time-travelled
to crib some of his sacred arias from operas by Donizetti. Books such as
The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Sonata Forms
and Rosen's pregnant, slim volume on Schoenberg are staples not just of
reading lists but, perhaps more importantly, of encounters by that
elusive species, the educated general reader, with the fruits of
musicology.
Rosen's breadth of interest and sympathy is one
factor; another is that he is a writer who can write. This collection of
essays, most but not all originating in The New York Review of Books,
underlines and furthers appreciation of those and other virtues.
Moreover, one is reminded that Rosen is more than a musicologist. Not
only is he a pianist, having recorded works from Bach to Boulez, but he
also surveys with enthusiastic erudition a number of literary topics.
One
might expect a musicologist to be interested in writers with close
relationships to music, such as Stephane Mallarme, Hugo von Hofmannsthal
and even W. H. Auden, but Rosen's literary interests venture further.
Thus we encounter Michel de Montaigne, Jean de La Fontaine, Bettina von
Arnim and Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy is a
reminder of a time, and not just that of its writing, for 48 editions
were published during the 19th century, when "reading a lengthy,
serious, and technical book was considered an agreeable and even
entertaining way of passing the time". Rosen reminds us that Samuel
Taylor Coleridge commented specifically upon its value as entertainment.
Bookishness,
in the best sense, rears its head, Rosen evidently admiring Burton's
ambition "to present everything that had ever been thought or written
about melancholy". This short essay ranges from Horace and Seneca, via
theologians Thomas Adams and Richard Hooker, to Alfred de Musset and
Geoffrey Hill, finally pointing us to Jean Starobinski and his account
of the theoretical foundations of psychosomatic medicine. It whets
rather than sates the appetite as, not so incidentally, does a
discussion of a new Pleiade volume devoted to the Marquis de Sade's Justine:
"Lack of literary talent is largely irrelevant. I think it would be out
of place to demand a stylistically engaging description of the joys of
raping a small child or of pulling out all the teeth of a beautiful
woman...Sade's work proposes urgently...the delight of naked cruelty
independent of any aesthetic cover or charm."
However, it is with
music, not merely "as music" but as one of the arts, that Rosen's
concerns most often lie. The distinction between text and performance
lies at the heart of many essays. This may be historical, in terms of
changing images of Mozart, an old-fashioned 1920s editor worrying that
an article by Hermann Abert darkened the composer's image, making him
sound closer to Michelangelo than to Raphael. All the better, we
Post-Expressionists might say; at any rate, a picture, or in this case
an artist, is often worth a thousand analytical words. Or it may be a
distinction more performative in emphasis, Rosen citing Richard Strauss'
telling admonition to Arturo Toscanini: "My music has bad notes and
good notes, and when I conduct it one hears only the good notes, but
when you conduct it, I hear all the notes." That is a relationship
between the book title's "freedom and the arts" worth pondering.
We
may enjoy good-humoured puncturing of many of the more absurd claims of
the "historically informed performance" school. I could not help but
smile knowingly at the likening of revival of interest in opera seria
to "that new conservative movement that hopes to revive French
nineteenth-century academic painting", the former revival attributed to a
"strange alliance of two comic figures, the antiquarian" more
interested in "ancient instruments and obsolete styles of performance"
than in music, and the "opera buff...more interested in sopranos". There
is a good deal more to it than that and, as ever, Rosen gravely
underestimates Mozart's almost Neo-Classical La Clemenza di Tito,
yet he provokes in the best sense. Even when comparisons, intentionally
defying simplistic historical categorisation, verge upon the tenuous -
"Rousseau's subordination of everything in music...to the simplest form
of melody was an interesting early version of dogmatic reaction to
modernist complexity displayed by recent proponents of minimalism" -
they stubbornly lodge themselves in the memory. What might we do on a
rainy day with Rousseau and minimalism?
It is, moreover, surely
exaggerated to claim that no one ever writes for posterity, even in the
strong sense Rosen outlines. Liszt, for instance, did just that, not
only in declaring his intention to "hurl a lance into the boundless
realms of the future" - one might conceivably, if misguidedly, argue
here for hyperbole and/or ideological avant-gardism - but in actively
discouraging his pupils from performing his late, sometimes well-nigh
atonal, piano works, lest their careers be harmed. Past readers of Rosen
will recall that he does not much care for "interesting" but "minor"
late Liszt, preferring the earlier works for their expansion of the
frontiers of piano technique. It is no failing, however, if one ends up
arguing with an essayist; Rosen's learning and generosity are signalled
by the generally friendly nature of such argument.
Rosen's extended 2006 review of Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music
stands among others as a necessary, indeed model, supplement to
Taruskin's monumental, pugnacious, highly polemical six volumes. He
expounds and criticises Taruskin's purpose, not so that one would recoil
from reading him, but so that one feels compelled to do so. Moreover,
Rosen hits the nail squarely on the head when he writes, "Taruskin
writes much better about music he likes than about music to which he is
indifferent", let alone, one might add, that to which he is hostile.
Indeed, "you cannot make sense of music without advocacy, and not to
make sense of it is to condemn". One may, of course, wish to condemn;
one may even have good reason to do so. "Taruskin's claim neither to
advocate nor to denigrate the music he discusses" remains, however, "a
hollow one". Part of his project, rightly or wrongly, is to de-centre,
indeed actively to undermine European and above all Germanic tradition,
whether by discerning (some might say obsessively) alleged
anti-Semitism, by presenting an avowedly American "outsider" -
neo-conservative? - perspective on 20th-century music, or by replacing
Schoenberg with Shostakovich as an object of veneration. Rosen, not at
all hostile to Beethoven, Schoenberg and European culture in general,
gently furthers the innocent reader's awareness concerning Taruskin's
ideological premises.
There are a few oddities in Harvard
University Press' production values, none more glaring than "Richard
Burton" for the aforementioned Robert. The musicologist Arnold Whittall
loses his final "l"; we encounter "Karl-Heinz" rather than "Karlheinz"
Stockhausen. Sir Harrison Birtwistle, as so often, becomes
"Birtwhistle"; England's greatest composer since Purcell is surely the
most frequently misspelled of all. If, however, I must resort to such
pedantry to voice the obligatory cavil, the reader may rest assured of
recommendation. If you know Rosen's work, you will doubtless require no
urging; if not, then this is a good place to start. Thereafter, and
whatever your feelings, if any, concerning the composer in question, you
may proceed surely to Rosen's advocacy in Arnold Schoenberg.
