Top 15 Charles Rosen Quotes

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: <p>JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music
LORENZO: The reason is, your spirits are attentive<p>The opening of the finale of Beethoven' s 'Emperor' Concerto provides a splendid example of the kind of theme that is the inspiration for this book. A completely unified theme that hangs together beautifully, it nevertheless portrays vividly a series of contrasting sentiments in a succession that amounts to a small narrative ...

I do not think that any composer has ever asked for octave glissandi on the black keys, but there is a recording by Moriz Rosenthal of Chopin's Black-Key Etude in which he plays the short octave passage in both hands glissando: it hurts my hands just to think about it.

The world of Debussy is a seductive oasis, and it is hard to leave it after spending many days immersed in its atmosphere. Playing Debussy-or any other composer with a strong and idiosyncratic personality-affects not only one's cast of mind but the physical disposition as well, the way the muscles work and the fingers come into contact with the ivories.

One of the pupils of Artur Schnabel told me that he never heard his teacher practice a difficult passage slowly, but he was struck by the way Schnabel would play one chord of a slow movement over and over, measuring and remeasuring the different components of the harmony.

The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.

The relation of the performance of music to sound is complex and ambiguous: this is what makes possible Mark Twain's joke that Wagner is better than he sounds.

Everything depends, of course, on the shape of the hand, and it must be stressed that there is no type of hand which is more suited to the piano than another. One of the greatest pianists that I ever heard—certainly the most remarkable in his control of the widest possible range and variety of tone color—was Josef Hoffman, who had a hand so small that he could reach no more than an octave; Steinway built him a special piano in which the ivories were slightly narrower so that he could reach a ninth. His friend Sergei Rachmaninov had a very large hand, as did Rudolf Serkin, and Sviatoslav Richter could not only reach a twelfth but could play the last chord of the Schumann Toccata without arpeggiation—an effect which would certainly have astonished the composer. My teacher, Moriz Rosenthal, famous for his technique, had a small hand with stubby fingers; Vladimir Horowitz's fingers were exceptionally long, while Robert Casadesus had fingers so thick that he had trouble fitting them in between the black keys. There is no such thing as an ideal pianist's hand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.