Charles Rosen: Trending quotes (page 3)

“In almost every edition (and consequently most performances) of Chopin's Sonata in B flat Minor, Op. 35, there is a serious error that makes awkward nonsense of an important moment in the first movement. The repeat of the exposition begins in the wrong place.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 5 : Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

Error

“Here, in the last pages of the "Abegg" Variations, Schumann plays the motto theme A-B-E-G-G (B in German notation is the English Bb) not by sounding the last four notes but by taking them away, one by one, from, the chord of Bb-E-G. This is the first time in history that a melody is signified not by the attack but by the release of a series of notes. The motto, however, ends with a repeated final G. If the motto is played by releasing each successive note, we are faced with a paradox: when the G is released once on the piano, it is no longer there to be released again-the motto is not only unplayable as conceived but unimaginable. Schumann signifies as much by another paradox: he adds accents to the sustained notes.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

History , Time , Success

“When I was a small child, The New York Times received every new creation of Igor Stravinsky with hostility, but even then I knew, like everybody else, that he was the greatest living composer-and I knew it even without having heard much Stravinsky or even any of the more recent works at all. It is a mistake of music historians to rely too much on journalists and music critics to assess a composer's reputation, as we generally find a certain delay in their transmission of the more influential professional judgments.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Hostility , Music , Time

“Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Sense , Memory , Loss , Past

“Meyerbeer's approach to opera may seem cynical. His music is not, like Donizetti's, an immediate expression of the sentiments of his characters but a calculated manipulation of the audience.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 11 : Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art

Music

“None of Chopin's contemporaries could rival him for the variety and effectiveness of his treatment of the return.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

“Visual delight, sentiment, and exploration become one in the new appreciation of landscape and Nature.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Nature

“In the piano writing of the Romantic generation of the 1830s, in fact, a fully pedalled sonority becomes the norm: the piano is expected to vibrate fairly constantly, and an unpedalled sonority is an exception, almost a special effect. Furthermore, the phrase is now shaped at least partially by changes in this full vibration. The change of pedal is crucial to the conception of rhythmic movement and to the sustaining of the melodic line over the bass.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Change

“I do not think that any composer has ever asked for octave glissandi on the black keys, but there is a recording by Moriz Rosenthal of Chopin's Black-Key Etude in which he plays the short octave passage in both hands glissando: it hurts my hands just to think about it.”

Charles Rosen

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 3 The Instrument and Its Discontents

Thinking , Hurt

“Only once in Chopin's music is there a direct reference to Bach, and that is, appropriately, at the beginning of his only educational work, the two sets of Etudes, Op. 10 and 25, and the three Nouvelles Etudes for Moscheles. In the first Etude, Op. 10, in C major, we find a modernized version of the Prelude no. 1 of the Well-Tempered Keyboard…”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Education , Music

“Inaudible music may seem an odd notion, even a foolishly Romantic one—although it is partly the Romantic prejudice in favor of sensuous experience that makes it seem odd. Still, there are details of music which cannot be heard but only imagined, and even certain aspects of musical form which cannot be realized in sound even by the imagination.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Music , Imagination

“The absolutely inaudible is rejected from music during the period of Viennese Classicism in which every musical line is potentially or imaginatively audible, but it makes a dramatic reappearance in the music of Schumann. The most striking of many examples is one of the episodes in the Humoresk, the last of the great piano works of Schumann's early years. … There are three staves: the uppermost for the right hand; the lowest for the left; the middle, which contains the melody, is not to be played. Note that the melody is no more to be imagined as a specific sound than it is to be played: nothing tells us that the melody is to be heard as vocal or instrumental. This melody, however, is embodied in the upper and lower parts as a kind of after-resonance-out of phase, delicate, and shadowy.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

Music , Imagination , Parting

“Technical display in Chopin, after the early works, is transmuted into tone color or dramatic gesture-we may say, to accept the prejudices of Chopin's own generation, that it has been ennobled. This is the source of much of the poetry in Chopin's music: it comes from the transformation of the vulgar into something aristocratic.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Music , Color

“In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music
LORENZO: The reason is, your spirits are attentiveThe opening of the finale of Beethoven' s 'Emperor' Concerto provides a splendid example of the kind of theme that is the inspiration for this book. A completely unified theme that hangs together beautifully, it nevertheless portrays vividly a series of contrasting sentiments in a succession that amounts to a small narrative …”

Charles Rosen

Prologue
Music and Sentiment (2010)

Books , Music , Lovers , Success

“We can see that canonic status is accorded to the works of a composer not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought; nor does it depend very much on whether the works are frequently performed for the public in every important musical center. To a certain extent, canonic status is actually built into some new works, partly by the way they impose themselves on an already substantial musical tradition. This may explain why it is so difficult to alter a firmly installed canon in any radical way, or to dislodge works that have been an integral part of it for some time.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 2 : How to Become Immortal

Music , Way , Distant , Time

“The musical language which made the classical style possible is that of tonality, which was not a massive, immobile system but a living, gradually changing language from its beginning. It had reached a new and important turning point just before the style of Haydn and Mozart took shape.”

Charles Rosen

Part I. Introduction. 1. The Musical Language of the Late Eighteenth Century
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

Music , Change

“Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be "real" folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a communal personality, expressive of the soil.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Music , Communication , Personality

“Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form—a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Music , Sense

“Our sensuous appreciation of the world and of the works created by man has, no doubt, a biological foundation, one shared by all human beings, but that is no use to us when we try to evaluate a Bach fugue or a Dostoevsky novel-or even the simple experience of a landscape, as our delight in the view of a mountain or a waterfall is also determined by the traditions of our culture. The coexistence of different criteria of judgment is, in any case, by now a fact of life. Beethoven cannot be judged or even understood by the standards of Mozart, however much he may have continued them, nor Berg by the standards of Wagner or Richard Strauss, nor Elliott Carter by the values of Ives and Stravinsky.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Life , World , Mountain

“This is the true paradox of Chopin: he is most original in his use of the most fundamental and traditional technique. That is what made him at the same time the most conservative and the most radical composer of his generation.”

Charles Rosen

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Time