Charles Rosen quotes

Even Stravinsky does not evoke the same public affection as Verdi. (Charles Rosen)
The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed. View quote
Charles Rosen
A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art. View quote
Charles Rosen
When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered. View quote
Charles Rosen
It is not, however, the unfamiliarity or strangeness of a work or of a composer's manner that is a bar to understanding, but rather the disappearance of the familiar, the ongoing disappointment of the expectations and hopes fostered by the musical tradition in which we have grown up. View quote
Charles Rosen
The most signal triumphs of the Romantic portrayal of memory are not those which recall past happiness, but remembrances of those moments when future happiness still seemed possible, when hopes were not yet frustrated. View quote
Charles Rosen
Mathematicians tells us that it is easy to invent mathematical theorems which are true, but that it is hard to find interesting ones. In analyzing music or writing its history, we meet the same difficulty, and it is compounded by another. For whom is it interesting? To paraphrase a famous remark of Barnett Newman, musicology is for musicians what ornithology is for the birds. View quote
Charles Rosen
The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one. View quote
Charles Rosen
The world of Debussy is a seductive oasis, and it is hard to leave it after spending many days immersed in its atmosphere. Playing Debussy-or any other composer with a strong and idiosyncratic personality-affects not only one's cast of mind but the physical disposition as well, the way the muscles work and the fingers come into contact with the ivories. View quote
Charles Rosen
The opposition between structure and sonority in music is almost as misleading as that between line and color in the visual arts. Baudelaire insisted, correctly, that Delacroix was one of the three greatest draftsmen of the century, and emphasized his mastery of line. In the same way, a study of Chopin demonstrates the intimate relation between line and color in music. View quote
Charles Rosen
If getting used to music is the essential condition for understanding, it is hard to see just what purpose is served by writing about it. A few experiences of listening to a symphony or nocturne are worth more than any essay or analysis. The work of art itself teaches us how to understand it, and makes the critic not merely parasitical but strictly superfluous. (Charles Rosen)
The song cycle is the most original musical form created in the first half of the nineteenth century. It most clearly embodies the Romantic conception of experience as a gradual unfolding and illumination of reality in place of the Classical insistence on an initial clarity. The form of Schubert's song cycle is not less precise than that of a Classical sonata, but its precision is only gradually comprehended as it unfolds. View quote
Charles Rosen
Sonata form could not be defined until it was dead. Czerny claimed with pride around 1840 that he was the first to describe it, but then it was already part of history. View quote
Charles Rosen
For Beethoven, music was still shape, realized and inflected by instrumental sonority: other realizations may be as absurd as arrangements of the Hammerklavier, for example, always are, but the musical conception takes precedence over its realization in sound. The sonority serves the music. For Schumann, however, as for Chopin and Liszt, the conception was worked out directly within the sonority as a sculptor works directly in clay or marble. The instrumental sound is shaped into music. View quote
Charles Rosen
Our freedom is hemmed in on every side. We must be grateful for what remains. View quote
Charles Rosen
The creation of a classical style was not so much the achievement of an ideal as the reconciliation of conflicting ideals-the striking of an optimum balance between them. View quote
Charles Rosen
Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension. View quote
Charles Rosen
Mendelssohn was the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known. Not even Mozart or Chopin before the age of nineteen could equal the mastery that Mendelssohn already possessed when he was only sixteen. Most astonishing is the nature of Mendelssohn's precocious talent: not only a gift for lyrical melodic lines and delicate, transparent textures, but, above all, a control of large-scale structure unsurpassed by any composer of his generation. View quote
Charles Rosen
Schumann is the most representative musical figure of central European Romanticism as much because of his limitations as because of his genius: in his finest works, indeed, he exploited these limitations in such a way that they gave a force to his genius that no other contemporary could attain. View quote
Charles Rosen
It is above all through landscape that music joins Romantic art and literature. View quote
Charles Rosen
I do not mean that it is not worthwhile to attempt a revision of the canon or that no success is possible. A few valuable minor changes have been made to our sense of the basic material of the history of music, and other alterations are still waiting to take hold. Gesualdo has not displaced Monteverdi or Palestrina but has won a permanent place; on the other hand, the attempt to convince us that Telemann is a major composer appears to have been abandoned. Alkan has not had the breakthrough his admirers had hoped for. Attacks on Tchaikovsky have not had much success in removing his music from the repertory; his credit with performers has not changed a bit. (Charles Rosen)
For Mendelssohn, Beethoven was the new point of departure, and a German composer could not afford to ignore him, as Chopin and Verdi were able to do. View quote
Charles Rosen
The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways. View quote
Charles Rosen
Liszt has never needed revival; his music has always been an important part of the concert repertoire. Nevertheless, he has appeared to need rehabilitation. View quote
Charles Rosen
The extraordinary stylistic changes of late eighteenth-century music may have provided much of the inspiration for the literature of the turn of the century, but the literary forms that resulted were deeply eccentric. It was these works-paradoxical, anticlassical, often with startlingly unbalanced proportions-which in turn influenced the music of the generation of composers that followed. The most clearly affected by literature and art were Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, but neither Mendelssohn nor Chopin remained untouched by literary developments, like the revival of Celtic and medieval poetry, as the overtures of Mendelssohn and the Ballades of Chopin explicitly demonstrate. View quote
Charles Rosen