Charles Rosen Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one.

Chopin's mazurkas stand apart from the rest of the considerable production inspired by folk music which reaches into all forms of Romantic music; they cannot conveniently be classified with any of the other manifestations. They are not arrangements of popular folk tunes, ... He uses only fragments of melody, Polish formulas, typical national rhythms, and he combines them in his own way with great originality. From early on, Chopin's mazurkas are much more elaborate than the few modest pieces employing mazurka rhythms by Chopin's Polish predecessors, and they soon became the occasion for some of the most complex and pretentious of Chopin's forms.

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.

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.

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.

The eventual survival of the tradition is ultimately not at stake.

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 ...

It was this indifference to the quality of his material that earned Liszt the contempt of his most distinguished contemporaries and of many of the most respectable critics and historians of posterity. It was, nevertheless, his greatest strength. It made it possible for him to manipulate the material ruthlessly, to concentrate on effects of realization with unprecedented intensity, and to integrate styles and techniques of performance into composition in a new way. His invention of novel keyboard effects and his mastery of musical gesture have always been undervalued, especially by pianists of the German school who prefer the kind of music that can be executed while soulfully regarding the ceiling. On the whole, the most genuine understanding of his music has been displayed by musicians of eastern Europe, and he may almost be considered as the founder of Russian pianism.

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...

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.

Liszt has never needed revival; his music has always been an important part of the concert repertoire. Nevertheless, he has appeared to need rehabilitation.

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.