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Charles Rosen

69 quotes

“The eventual survival of the tradition is ultimately not at stake.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Future of Music", The New York Review of Books (December 20, 2001)
“Our freedom is hemmed in on every side. We must be grateful for what remains.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Freedom and Art", The New York Review of Books (May 10, 2012)
“Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympathy with other listeners' enjoyment ...”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Normally, misprints are either easily corrected or else so trivial that it makes no difference whether we play the correct or the faulty version. ... Nevertheless, on rare occasions, a misprint or slip of the pen may challenge our view of the musical language. These extreme cases may help us understand a little more about the way music acquires meaning, or what it means to say that the music makes sense.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By this time Mozart had been dead for almost fourteen years and Haydn was too weak to compose. Beethoven was unchallenged throughout Europe as the greatest living composer of instrumental music. Even more, he was generally recognized as having surpassed his famous predecessors. This, of course, did not prevent critics from greeting each new work as a disappointment after his by then acceptable achievements of the previous years.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a revealing sardonic comment by Leopold Godowsky on a well-known statement of Paderewski, who once boasted, "When I don't practice for one day, my fingers know it; for two days, and my friends know it; for three days and the whole world knows it." Godowsky added: "On the fourth day, the critics hear about it." In any case, poets and novelists are generally better reporters of the general state of musical opinion than music journalists, who most often have an ax to grind, or, quite reasonably and justifiably, a more limited set of prejudices to broadcast.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have never believed that the historian should seek to perpetuate the misapprehensions of the past, and it is true that we understand Beethoven today better than his contemporaries did, better, above all, than the generation that immediately followed him, including his own most important pupil, Karl Czerny.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point—even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nevertheless, music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself—social, cultural, or biographical—to which it is conveniently subservient. To paraphrase Goethe's grandiose warning to the scientist: do not look behind the notes, they themselves are the doctrine.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Schumann's humor is rarely either witty or light: the unrealizable musical structure, the musical motto hidden and partly inaudible, must have stirred his musical fantasy.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is typical of Schumann's musical thinking to construct this complex network of references outside his music-to quote Beethoven, and then to have Beethoven's distant beloved refer to Clara. But this should give a clue to the nature of Schumann's achievement. It is not Schumann's music that, refers to Clara but Beethoven's melody, the "secret tone.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is above all through landscape that music joins Romantic art and literature.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Visual delight, sentiment, and exploration become one in the new appreciation of landscape and Nature.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The relation of tonic to dominant is the foundation of Western triadic tonality. The attempt of the early nineteenth century to substitute third or mediant relationships for the classical dominant amounted to a frontal attack on the principles of tonality, and it eventually contributed to the ruin of triadic tonality. This ruin was accomplished from within the system, however, as mediant relationships were essential to tonality as conceived in the eighteenth century.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The secret of avoiding monotony with the four-bar module was to vary the accent and the weight of the bars to avoid giving a similar emphatic accent on the first bar of every group, as if one were accenting a downbeat. After Beethoven and before Brahms, perhaps the greatest master of the technique was Chopin, as one can see from the opening of the Nocturne in D flat Major, Op. 27, no. 2, of 1836 ...”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all, Chopin was the greatest master of counterpoint since Mozart. This will appear paradoxical only if we equate counterpoint with strict fugue, and Chopin wrote no formal fugues except as an academic exercise. His chief training, in both composition and keyboard playing, however, came from a study of Bach, and it was a study that engaged him all his life and which he always recommended to his pupils.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a paradox at the heart of Chopin's style, in its unlikely combination of a rich chromatic web of polyphony, based on a profound experience of J. S. Bach, with a sense of melody and a way of sustaining the melodic line derived directly from Italian opera. The paradox is only apparent, and it is never felt as such when one hears the music. The two influences are perfectly synthesized, and they give each other a new kind of power.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The etude is a Romantic idea. It appeared in the early nineteenth century as a new genre: a short piece in which the musical interest is derived almost entirely from a single technical problem. A mechanical difficulty directly produces the music, its charm, and its pathos. Beauty and technique are united, but the creative stimulus is the hand, with its arrangement of muscles and tendons, its idiosyncratic shape.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revealed in all its power and subtlety. Later works are sometimes more ambitious and, in a few cases, more audacious, but there were no radical changes of style, nothing to compare to the later revolutions we find in the careers of Haydn and Beethoven, or even in the shorter lives of Mozart and Schubert. Chopin's mastery was proven with the twelve Etudes of opus 10.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chopin's exquisite ear saved him from the ugly repetition of thick chords in the bass that frequently disfigure the work of Mendelssohn, Weber, and Hummel—and even of Field.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“None of Chopin's contemporaries could rival him for the variety and effectiveness of his treatment of the return.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Liszt has never needed revival; his music has always been an important part of the concert repertoire. Nevertheless, he has appeared to need rehabilitation.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mendelssohn is the inventor of religious kitsch in music. His first essay in this genre is a masterpiece, the Fugue in E Minor, published in 1837 but written ten years earlier, when the composer was eighteen ...”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charles Rosen (1927–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source