Introduction I Performance and Musicology 1. The Aesthetics of Stage Fright 2. The Discipline of Philology: Oliver Strunk II The Eighteenth Century 3. Keyboard Music of Bach and Handel 4. The Rediscovering of Haydn 5. Describing Mozart 6. Beaumarchais: Inventor of Modern Opera 7. Radical, Conventional Mozart 8. Beethoven's Career III Brahms 9. Brahms: Influence, Plagiarism, and Inspiration 10. Brahms the Subversive 11. Brahms: Classicism and the Inspiration of Awkwardness IV Musical Studies: Contrasting Views 12. The Benefits of Authenticity 13. Dictionaries: the Old Harvard 14. Dictionaries: the New Grove's 15. The New Musicology V The Crisis of the Modern 16. Schoenberg: The Possibilities of Disquiet 17. The Performance of Contemporary Music: Carter's Double Concerto 18. The Irrelevance of Serious Music Credits Index
Charles Rosen was a concert pianist, Professor of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of numerous books, including The Classical Style, The Romantic Generation (Harvard), and Freedom and the Arts (Harvard).
[A] stimulating read...Over the course of 300 pages, Rosen
addresses such disparate subjects as stage fright, the keyboard
music of Bach and Handel, the libretto for "Le Nozze di Figaro,"
Brahms as classicist and subversive, the 1980 edition of the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and the "Double Concerto"
(1961) by the American composer Elliott Carter. Rosen casts a
skeptical eye on the politicized musicology that occasionally
passed for scholarship in the early 1990s, while admiring certain
practitioners of this dubious trade.
*Washington Post Book World*
Just beneath the playful surface textures of Rosen's writing,
another purpose is being served. He pleads on behalf of artistic
pleasure, and reminds his reader of the opportunistic scattering of
attention that achieving it may require, yet conducts, from one of
his own scattered occasions to the next, a bracing argument in
favour of difficulty.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Admirers of the through-composed studies Rosen has devoted to the
Viennese classical style, Schoenberg, sonata forms, and the
composers of the "Romantic generation" will find much to stimulate
and enrage them in these occasional pieces from the same workshop,
but the reach of these essays extends well beyond the profession of
music. They stake a bold claim for criticism itself, and spell out
its responsibilities.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Every virtue of Rosen's earlier work is instilled in the essays in
this collection. They are not only for musicologists and musicians,
they are written just as much for amateurs of music, in both senses
of 'lovers' and 'non-professionals'. They are a luxury of insight
and cultural allusion.
*Financial Times*
Fans of Rosen will be delighted with this collection of 18
articles, most of which appeared over the past two decades in the
New York Review of Books. A consummate pianist who embraces
Beethoven and Elliot Carter with equal fervor, Rosen writes with
impressive authority on topics as diverse as Bach's keyboard music
and feminist musicology. He is never shy about identifying and then
eviscerating adversaries, yet he does so in such a courtly way, and
with such lucid, persuasive prose, that they must feel a certain
awe and honor...While the lay reader can appreciate most of the
articles, the three pieces on Brahms are thick with musical
examples and references to music theory and, as such, are clearly
intended for the serious music student.
*Library Journal*
Like the virtues it extols, this is a "passionate" book. It is
about loving music...Critical Entertainments is that rare
combination, of both the critical and the entertaining--as one
would expect from a performer.
*Music and Letters*
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