Book Review: Charles Rosen, Freedom and the Arts

(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.

Charles Rosen - Chopin, 15 May 2011

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Nocturne in B major, op.62 no.1
Nocturne in E major, op.62 no.2
Barcarolle in F-sharp major, op.60
Mazurka in A-flat major, op.50 no.2
Mazurka in C-sharp minor, op.63 no.3
Waltz in C-sharp minor, op.64 no.2
Ballade no.4 in F minor, op.52
Sonata in B minor, op.58 no.3


I expected to enjoy this recital; I wanted to enjoy this recital… Unfortunately, I gained the impression that it came a good few years too late. Charles Rosen is a great musicologist and, more than that, a great public intellectual. Moreover, as one can readily forget, he was a pupil of Moritz Rosenthal, and thus a grand-pupil of Liszt, and has forged a distinguished career as a pianist. I had never heard him before in concert, so jumped at the opportunity. On the basis of the present recital, at least, his technique has in good part deserted him.

The two op.62 Nocturnes are far from easy, but ought to have presented a relatively safe way in. The B major Nocturne, however, proved heavy-handed, distended, and at times strikingly uncertain of direction: all the more surprising from a pianist who, as we know from his writings, understands this music so well. There was perhaps more direction to its E major companion, but it opened in casual fashion, quite charmless, and, despite a few instances of interesting voice-leading, sounded as unlike a Nocturne as any recent performance I can recall. Fioritura not only failed to hint at the vocal – one might, I suppose, claim that as an interpretative choice – but sometimes failed to materialise at all. The Barcarolle had its moments, but quite lacked charm and also suffered from considerable uncertainty. A couple of Mazurkas and the C-sharp minor Waltz replaced the advertised three op.59 Mazurkas. The A-flat Mazurka, op.50 no.2, failed to dance, though that in C-sharp minor, op.63 no.3 replaced liveliness – it is marked Vivace – with true poignancy. The waltz charmed in parts but, alas, there was more than one occasion when the right hand ran away from the left, and these were not occasions on which one could ascribe that to old-fashioned, purposive asynchonicity. Again, despite some telling instances of voice-leading, there were a few ornamental passages that did not properly run their course.

Perhaps surprisingly, it was the F minor Ballade, replacing the Fantasy-Polonaise, which, heard immediately prior to the interval, came off best. Here, despite the slips, was a true sense of purpose. Rubinstein it was not; there was little to beguile. There remained, however, a sense of almost Lisztian struggle, such as had also characterised the stronger passages of the Barcarolle. The Third Sonata had the second half to itself. There was something of that Beethovenian purpose to the first movement, married moreover to a properly neo-Bachian sense of polyphony. Light and shade, however, were for the most part absent and pauses sometimes seemed inserted to gather breath rather than to serve rhetorical ends. The Scherzo came and went, hardly scintillating, but steady and dogged. Much the same, unfortunately, could be said of the slow movement – and the finale. It was, I am afraid, a relief to reach the end, though two encores ensued: Liszt’s transcription of the song Moja pieszczotka (‘Meine Freuden’) and the first published mazurka.