About the Author

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). Catherine Temerson was Literary Director of Ubu Repertory Theater in New York. She translated more than twenty books, including titles by Elie Wiesel and Amin Maalouf.

Reviews

Here one really finds oneself in Rosen’s presence, as he starts to spin a line of thought as elegant as any Bellini cantilena.
*New York Review of Books*

Rosen shares absorbing anecdotes relating to his studies with Moriz Rosenthal, who had been a student of Liszt, and the time that he inadvertently offended Stravinsky by asking about an assumed printer’s error in a score…It is just the thing for those missing the camaraderie of post-concert chat.
*BBC Music Magazine*

Charles Rosen was a rarity among musicians; he excelled equally at the highest levels of performance and scholarship. This book presents the best kind of intellectual conversation: elevated, wide-ranging, impossible to predict, and sometimes very funny indeed. You’ll wish you could have joined in.
*Tim Page, Professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism and Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, and winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism*

I devoured this scintillating little book with pleasure. What I most appreciate is Charles Rosen’s keen awareness of history—not just of music, but of concurrent literature and visual art. His capacity and readiness to apply the past to understandings of the present is a gift increasingly rare today.
*Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America and Conversations with Arrau*

Few could produce such lucid formulations as Charles Rosen, especially in the course of dialogue. A spellbinding conversationalist, he exemplifies the well-rounded humanist no longer common in public discourse. His colleague Catherine Temerson asks carefully crafted questions. No one else could have created this exquisite book.
*Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality and Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form*

A surprising treasure. Catherine Temerson’s perceptive questions reveal new insights from Charles Rosen. One comes away from reading the book with the same sense of intellectual excitement and energy that defined an evening’s conversation with the master pianist himself.
*Jeffrey Kallberg, author of Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre*