Preface Music and Sound Imagining the sound Romantic paradoxes: the absent melody Classical and Romantic pedal Conception and realization Tone color and structure Fragments Renewal The Fragment as Romantic form Open and closed Words and music The emancipation of musical language Experimental endings and cyclical forms Ruins Disorders Quotations and memories Absence: the melody suppressed Mountains and Song Cycles Horn calls Landscape and music Landscape and the double time scale Mountains as ruins Landscape and memory Music and memory Landscape and death: Schubert The unfinished workings of the past Song cycles without words Formal Interlude Mediants Four-bar phrases Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms Poetic inspiration and craft Counterpoint and the single line Narrative form: the ballade Changes of mode Italian opera and J. S. Bach Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed Keyboard exercises Virtuosity and decoration (salon music?) Morbid intensity Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style Folk music? Rubato Modal harmony? Mazurka as Romantic form The late mazurkas Freedom and tradition Liszt: On Creation as Performance Disreputable greatness Die Lorelei: the distraction of influence The Sonata: the distraction of respectability The invention of Romantic piano sound: the Etudes Conception and realization The masks of Liszt Recomposing: Sonnet no. 104 Self-Portrait as Don Juan Berlioz: Liberation from the Central European Tradition Blind idolaters and perfidious critics Tradition and eccentricity: the idee fixe Chord color and counterpoint Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scene d'amour" Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch Mastering Beethoven Transforming Classicism Classical form and modern sensibility Religion in the concert hall Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art Politics and melodrama Popular art Bellini Meyerbeer Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal The irrational The inspiration of Beethoven and Clara Wieck The inspiration of E.T.A. Hoffmann Out of phase Lyric intensity Failure and triumph Index of Names and Works
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).
Author/teacher/concert pianist Rosen delivers a monumental
follow-up to his award-winning The Classical Style, here
concentrating on the generation of European composers who "came of
age" in the 1820s and 1830s: Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Mendelssohn,
Bellini, and, first and foremost, Chopin...The thrust of [these]
discussions is to illuminate some of the more startling and
masterful changes in musical form that occurred as "Classical" gave
way to "Romantic"...A valuable and important book.
*Kirkus Reviews*
This logical and long-awaited sequel to Rosen's award-winning The
Classical Style once again demonstrates the author's extraordinary
insights. Rosen explains and describes the first half of the 19th
century in conjunction with literature, art, and social
changes...[He] also examines the lives of the composers and pursues
some detailed analysis of numerous compositions to make his points.
The result is a fresh, challenging, and stimulating view of the
society in which Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Schumann flourished.
Highly recommended.
*Library Journal*
Pianist and professor Rosen helps us understand the harmonic and
rhythmic variety and the virtuosity required of performers that
make romantic music appeal to so many...Long on analysis of
significant musical examples (728 accompany the text) and short on
summary comments on the nature of romantic music, this is a worthy
fellow to Rosen's prizewinning The Classical Style (1980).
*Booklist*
The publisher has treated this book royally. The just-mentioned
CD--seventy-five minutes of piano music in which Rosen provides
sixteen audible illustrations, mostly complete pieces or
movements--is one proof of this. Another appears in the literally
hundreds of musical excerpts or short works printed at precisely
the right point in the text. All told, the project reflects Rosen's
standing as a writer whose wide readership wants to follow even his
musical-technical arguments...So in both form and content Charles
Rosen's latest book deserves attention from anyone who is drawn to
music written in the years 1825-50 and who, more especially, wishes
to explore the inner workings of masterpieces by Chopin, Schumann,
and Liszt.
*Opera Quarterly*
The Romantic Generation is handsomely produced and is greatly
enhanced by the inclusion of a compact disc attached to the inside
of the back cover containing Rosen performances of several of the
works he discusses. Anyone who listens to this disc will recognize
not only how sensitively and thoughtfully Rosen plays this music
but also how his pianistic knowledge informs his writing about
it...[This is a book of] many riches, which treats a complex,
seemingly unmanageable topic in a consistently provocative,
engaging, and stimulating manner. There is probably no one other
than Rosen who could bring to this task such a range and depth of
musical and cultural knowledge.
*Journal of Modern History*
Although Rosen's criticism is rooted in musical detail, in his
technical commentary on literally hundreds of moments and passages
of music and of many complete compositions, this Ursatz (as music
analysts would say) generates a foreground that is consistently
brilliant--a brilliant compound of interpretation, opinion,
enthusiasm, potted musicology, homily and polemic, wit, wisdom, and
learning...His analytical genius extends to both music and
language, so that again and again he finds just the right words to
describe a musical effect simply, clearly, and to perfection...A
compact disc comes with the book, containing piano music by the
author to illustrate the discussion. University presses are not
known for bargains, but this is an unusual buy from Harvard...[An]
important book.
*New York Review of Books*
Charles Rosen's new book is that rarity: a work of detailed musical
analysis that combines profound scholarship with artistic
intuition. The combination is appropriate, for, while the author is
a professor of music at the University of Chicago, he is also an
eminent concert pianist, to whom music is a living substance. Mr.
Rosen writes thoughtfully without becoming pedantic; he engages
himself personally without becoming radically subjective. When he
traces connections between a composer's work, life and environment,
he remains reasonable in his conclusions and does not try to be an
amateur psychologist. His insights derive from the music itself.
Readers who are weary of the psychosexual babble of much modern
musicology will find solace...The best thing about his writing is
that it leads one to want to hear the music: to listen anew to the
well-known works and to acquaint oneself with the lesser known. A
book like this places a responsibility on the reader, and it could
serve no better purpose than to stimulate performers to think
further and deeper about any music they re-create...Accompanying
the book is a compact disc containing Mr. Rosen's own performance
of 16 excerpts from works he discusses. The scholarship is not on
show; the sensitive music making flows ebulliently, in a natural
way.
*New York Times Book Review*
A vast expansion on the Norton Lectures Mr. Rosen gave at Harvard
15 years ago, the book reveals how the arts influenced one another:
how literature, especially the literary fragment, affected Romantic
composers like Schumann and Chopin; how landscape painting related
to song cycles like Beethoven's "An die Ferne Geliebte," and how
music shaped contemporaneous attitudes toward art and writing.
Above all, the book underscores that Romantic composers elevated,
as did Romantic poets, once trivial genres to the level of the
sublime and, in so doing, defined a revolutionary approach to
culture.
*New York Times*
Rosen is a fluent writer, having at his command both informality
and rhetorical force. He is a musicologist and theoretician whose
authority extends from Bach to Boulez. The rigor of his technical
demonstration is, to a singular degree, grounded in a vivid
knowledge of cultural history, of the social and intellectual
background to Western music; it is this rich sense of background
that made Rosen's The Classical Style a masterpiece. But, first and
foremost, he is a pianist of penetrating originality...A magnum
opus.
*New Yorker*
The Romantic Generation will certainly be recognized as one of the
decade's most important books about music...Rosen is a master of
the sweeping generalization--more or less true, with exceptions and
careful definition of terms--that will attract casual readers who
seek a generalized knowledge of these composers. After a certain
amount of random immersion in the music, one's disorganized
perceptions can be usefully crystallized by short, pithy statements
that put an experience into focus...Almost equally useful to the
general reader are the pages where Rosen--often brilliantly--brings
the findings of another discipline such as history or psychology
into the discussion of music.
*Washington Post*
The crowning glory of The Romantic Generation, of course, is its
discussion of some of the greatest literature for the piano, a
discussion that is historically informed, intellectually brilliant,
profoundly intuitive and thoroughly practical--every pianist who
wants to play Chopin, Schumann and Liszt will need to read it.
*Boston Sunday Globe*
One can say with confidence that The Romantic Generation, Charles
Rosen's sequel to his The Classical Style is the music book not
only of 1995 but also of many years to come. The author's ability
to communicate his musical insights and immense learning has
developed even beyond the capacities displayed in the earlier
volume. No one else, certainly no other music historian, could have
written any of the chapters in the new study, partly for the reason
that its subject is the literature of the Golden Age of the
keyboard, chiefly the 1830s, and Rosen himself is a world-class
pianist. With incomparable lucidity and intelligence he analyzes
the song cycles of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, the piano
music of the latter and of Chopin and Liszt, in which he also
instructs the performer in the subtlest particulars of playing it,
and selected compositions of Mendelssohn, and Berlioz...Although no
pianist can afford to be without the book, musicians of every kind
should partake of both its wisdom and its practical lessons...Among
non-musicians, anyone interested in the cultural and literary
history of the period can feast on Rosen's introductory and
incidental essays about the Romantic movement as a whole...For many
musicians and all pianists, the 200 pages allotted to Chopin will
prove to be the richest in discovery in the book.
*Chicago Tribune*
A curious, startling, brilliant, infuriating, revelatory,
occasionally objectionable book that also comes bundled with a CD
of a terrific pianist we hear too seldom these days...Mr. Rosen's
book is a very personal one in a way that few such music books are,
and that is its greatest strength. Given his various talents (an
eloquent, interesting and sometimes pugnacious prose style is
another one), Mr. Rosen is able to see music in a fluid way, as a
subtle play of processes that cannot always be precisely pinned
down...The Romantic Generation is clearly a book that anyone
interested in this music will gratefully turn to over and over
again.
*Wall Street Journal*
In his long-awaited new book, The Romantic Generation, Charles
Rosen opens the reader's ears and mind with his brilliant insights,
his enthusiasm for the music, and his elegance and wit. One wants
to spend time poring over the ideas and the music, both to
understand and confirm as well as occasionally to challenge Mr.
Rosen's points. Like the author's The Classical Style, this is a
book of ideas and opinions that shows off Mr. Rosen's awesome
command of the musical repertory and of much else besides.
*Washington Times*
The Romantic Generation is a work that answers resonantly to the
definition of Romantic style proposed by one of Rosen’s
touchstones, the boy-genius Novalis: It ‘makes the familiar
strange, and the strange familiar.’
*Wall Street Journal*
Author/teacher/concert pianist Rosen delivers a monumental
follow-up to his award-winning The Classical Style, here
concentrating on the generation of European composers who "came of
age" in the 1820s and 1830s: Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Mendelssohn,
Bellini, and, first and foremost, Chopin...The thrust of [these]
discussions is to illuminate some of the more startling and
masterful changes in musical form that occurred as "Classical" gave
way to "Romantic"...A valuable and important book. * Kirkus Reviews
*
This logical and long-awaited sequel to Rosen's award-winning
The Classical Style once again demonstrates the author's
extraordinary insights. Rosen explains and describes the first half
of the 19th century in conjunction with literature, art, and social
changes...[He] also examines the lives of the composers and pursues
some detailed analysis of numerous compositions to make his points.
The result is a fresh, challenging, and stimulating view of the
society in which Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Schumann flourished.
Highly recommended. * Library Journal *
Pianist and professor Rosen helps us understand the harmonic and
rhythmic variety and the virtuosity required of performers that
make romantic music appeal to so many...Long on analysis of
significant musical examples (728 accompany the text) and short on
summary comments on the nature of romantic music, this is a worthy
fellow to Rosen's prizewinning The Classical Style (1980).
-- Alan Hirsch * Booklist *
The publisher has treated this book royally. The just-mentioned
CD--seventy-five minutes of piano music in which Rosen provides
sixteen audible illustrations, mostly complete pieces or
movements--is one proof of this. Another appears in the literally
hundreds of musical excerpts or short works printed at precisely
the right point in the text. All told, the project reflects Rosen's
standing as a writer whose wide readership wants to follow even his
musical-technical arguments...So in both form and content Charles
Rosen's latest book deserves attention from anyone who is drawn to
music written in the years 1825-50 and who, more especially, wishes
to explore the inner workings of masterpieces by Chopin, Schumann,
and Liszt. -- Christopher Hatch * Opera Quarterly *
The Romantic Generation is handsomely produced and is
greatly enhanced by the inclusion of a compact disc attached to the
inside of the back cover containing Rosen performances of several
of the works he discusses. Anyone who listens to this disc will
recognize not only how sensitively and thoughtfully Rosen plays
this music but also how his pianistic knowledge informs his writing
about it...[This is a book of] many riches, which treats a complex,
seemingly unmanageable topic in a consistently provocative,
engaging, and stimulating manner. There is probably no one other
than Rosen who could bring to this task such a range and depth of
musical and cultural knowledge. -- Robert P. Morgan * Journal of
Modern History *
Although Rosen's criticism is rooted in musical detail, in his
technical commentary on literally hundreds of moments and passages
of music and of many complete compositions, this Ursatz (as
music analysts would say) generates a foreground that is
consistently brilliant--a brilliant compound of interpretation,
opinion, enthusiasm, potted musicology, homily and polemic, wit,
wisdom, and learning...His analytical genius extends to both music
and language, so that again and again he finds just the right words
to describe a musical effect simply, clearly, and to perfection...A
compact disc comes with the book, containing piano music by the
author to illustrate the discussion. University presses are not
known for bargains, but this is an unusual buy from Harvard...[An]
important book. -- Joseph Kerman * New York Review of Books *
Charles Rosen's new book is that rarity: a work of detailed musical
analysis that combines profound scholarship with artistic
intuition. The combination is appropriate, for, while the author is
a professor of music at the University of Chicago, he is also an
eminent concert pianist, to whom music is a living substance. Mr.
Rosen writes thoughtfully without becoming pedantic; he engages
himself personally without becoming radically subjective. When he
traces connections between a composer's work, life and environment,
he remains reasonable in his conclusions and does not try to be an
amateur psychologist. His insights derive from the music itself.
Readers who are weary of the psychosexual babble of much modern
musicology will find solace...The best thing about his writing is
that it leads one to want to hear the music: to listen anew to the
well-known works and to acquaint oneself with the lesser known. A
book like this places a responsibility on the reader, and it could
serve no better purpose than to stimulate performers to think
further and deeper about any music they re-create...Accompanying
the book is a compact disc containing Mr. Rosen's own performance
of 16 excerpts from works he discusses. The scholarship is not on
show; the sensitive music making flows ebulliently, in a natural
way. -- David Blum * New York Times Book Review *
A vast expansion on the Norton Lectures Mr. Rosen gave at Harvard
15 years ago, the book reveals how the arts influenced one another:
how literature, especially the literary fragment, affected Romantic
composers like Schumann and Chopin; how landscape painting related
to song cycles like Beethoven's "An die Ferne Geliebte," and how
music shaped contemporaneous attitudes toward art and writing.
Above all, the book underscores that Romantic composers elevated,
as did Romantic poets, once trivial genres to the level of the
sublime and, in so doing, defined a revolutionary approach to
culture. -- Michael Kimmelman * New York Times *
Rosen is a fluent writer, having at his command both informality
and rhetorical force. He is a musicologist and theoretician whose
authority extends from Bach to Boulez. The rigor of his technical
demonstration is, to a singular degree, grounded in a vivid
knowledge of cultural history, of the social and intellectual
background to Western music; it is this rich sense of background
that made Rosen's The Classical Style a masterpiece. But,
first and foremost, he is a pianist of penetrating originality...A
magnum opus. -- George Steiner * New Yorker *
The Romantic Generation will certainly be recognized as one
of the decade's most important books about music...Rosen is a
master of the sweeping generalization--more or less true, with
exceptions and careful definition of terms--that will attract
casual readers who seek a generalized knowledge of these composers.
After a certain amount of random immersion in the music, one's
disorganized perceptions can be usefully crystallized by short,
pithy statements that put an experience into focus...Almost equally
useful to the general reader are the pages where Rosen--often
brilliantly--brings the findings of another discipline such as
history or psychology into the discussion of music. -- Joseph
McLellan * Washington Post *
The crowning glory of The Romantic Generation, of course, is
its discussion of some of the greatest literature for the piano, a
discussion that is historically informed, intellectually brilliant,
profoundly intuitive and thoroughly practical--every pianist who
wants to play Chopin, Schumann and Liszt will need to read it. --
Richard Dyer * Boston Sunday Globe *
One can say with confidence that The Romantic Generation,
Charles Rosen's sequel to his The Classical Style is the
music book not only of 1995 but also of many years to come. The
author's ability to communicate his musical insights and immense
learning has developed even beyond the capacities displayed in the
earlier volume. No one else, certainly no other music historian,
could have written any of the chapters in the new study, partly for
the reason that its subject is the literature of the Golden Age of
the keyboard, chiefly the 1830s, and Rosen himself is a world-class
pianist. With incomparable lucidity and intelligence he analyzes
the song cycles of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, the piano
music of the latter and of Chopin and Liszt, in which he also
instructs the performer in the subtlest particulars of playing it,
and selected compositions of Mendelssohn, and Berlioz...Although no
pianist can afford to be without the book, musicians of every kind
should partake of both its wisdom and its practical lessons...Among
non-musicians, anyone interested in the cultural and literary
history of the period can feast on Rosen's introductory and
incidental essays about the Romantic movement as a whole...For many
musicians and all pianists, the 200 pages allotted to Chopin will
prove to be the richest in discovery in the book. -- Robert Craft *
Chicago Tribune *
A curious, startling, brilliant, infuriating, revelatory,
occasionally objectionable book that also comes bundled with a CD
of a terrific pianist we hear too seldom these days...Mr. Rosen's
book is a very personal one in a way that few such music books are,
and that is its greatest strength. Given his various talents (an
eloquent, interesting and sometimes pugnacious prose style is
another one), Mr. Rosen is able to see music in a fluid way, as a
subtle play of processes that cannot always be precisely pinned
down...The Romantic Generation is clearly a book that anyone
interested in this music will gratefully turn to over and over
again. -- Mark Swed * Wall Street Journal *
In his long-awaited new book, The Romantic Generation,
Charles Rosen opens the reader's ears and mind with his brilliant
insights, his enthusiasm for the music, and his elegance and wit.
One wants to spend time poring over the ideas and the music, both
to understand and confirm as well as occasionally to challenge Mr.
Rosen's points. Like the author's The Classical Style, this
is a book of ideas and opinions that shows off Mr. Rosen's awesome
command of the musical repertory and of much else besides. -- Rufus
Hallmark * Washington Times *
The Romantic Generation is a work that answers resonantly to
the definition of Romantic style proposed by one of Rosen's
touchstones, the boy-genius Novalis: It 'makes the familiar
strange, and the strange familiar.' -- Jonathan Bate * Wall Street
Journal *
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