Is there a more cultivated man alive than the pianist and polymath Charles Rosen? Years ago, at Cornell, I heard him play Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” to a packed audience. In 1972, “The Classical Style,” his incisive study of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, deservedly won the National Book Award. In 1995 “The Romantic Generation” — originally presented as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard — applied the same precision of thought and analysis to the work of such concert-hall mainstays as Schubert, Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz.
But Rosen isn’t just a music man. With Henri Zerner, he brought out “Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art,” its chapters ranging
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(Harvard Univ.) - “Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature” by Charles Rosen.
from “Caspar David Friedrich and the Language of Landscape” to reflections on the influence of academic art. Whether he scrutinizes a painting, a piece of music or a work of scholarship, Rosen nearly always uses his findings to build a larger argument or critique a flawed enterprise. He is particularly drawn to questions of canon, reception and audience — which isn’t surprising given his long tenure as professor of music and social thought at the University of Chicago. The pianist, after all, does have a PhD — in French literature.
As if recording, scholarship and teaching weren’t enough to occupy him, Rosen also regularly appears in the New York Review of Books. There he writes not just about music and art, but also about literature, reflecting on new editions of Rousseau and Sade, the genius of Montaigne,
the poetry of La Fontaine and Mallarme, the career of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the American years of W.H. Auden.
All these last named literary essays appear in “Freedom and the Arts,” which brings together Rosen’s journalism from the past dozen years, along with a few pieces reaching back into the 1990s and even one to 1979 (“Resuscitating Opera: Alessandro Scarlatti”). The book also includes a half-dozen pieces about Mozart; long biographical appreciations of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann and Elliott Carter(whom Rosen justly reveres); judicious yet devastating reviews of “The New Grove Dictionary of Music” and Richard Taruskin’s six-volume “Oxford History of Western Music”; an examination of Theodor Adorno’s sociological music criticism; and several articles about opera.
However, Rosen opens and closes this essay collection with reflections on the artist and tradition, reminding us that revolutionaries are often far more deeply engaged with the canon than those who simply pastiche, in watered-down ways, its more obvious elements. Wagner, Debussy and Stravinsky, he writes, “gave new life to the Western tradition while seeming to undermine its very foundations.” More surprisingly, Rosen worries that our current rage for rediscovering obscure composers and authors might swamp the canon with minor figures. “The history of music begins to collapse under the strain of too many works.” We simply “cannot look at every picture, read every book; critical evaluation is not so much ideological as practical. . . . Some of the past has to be suppressed for the rest to become visible.” He also points out, however, that to appreciate new music and literature, one usually needs to be exposed to it regularly: Much that initially sounds rebarbative or is read with difficulty will release its beauty and pleasure only over time.
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