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MUSIC

Charles Rosen, Scholar-Musician Who

Untangled Classical Works, Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX

DEC. 10, 2012

Charles Rosen, the pianist, polymath and author whose National Book Awardwinning volume The Classical Style illuminated the enduring language of Haydn,
Mozart and Beethoven, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 85.
The death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was of cancer, said Henri Zerner, a friend
of many years.
Published in 1971, The Classical Style examines the nature of Classical music
through the lens of its three most exemplary practitioners. Given that these titans
were working with the same raw materials the 12 notes of the Western musical
scale as the Baroque composers who had preceded them, just what was it, Mr.
Rosens book asked, that gave their music its unmistakable character?
The answers, he concluded, could be gleaned from a penetrating analysis of
the structure of Classical compositions. It was precisely this structure that his
book, through a painstaking unraveling of Haydns string quartets, Mozarts comic
operas, Beethovens piano sonatas and other seminal works, sought to make plain.
Though some critics took the book to task for its heavy reliance on musical
notation (a work aimed at a general readership, they argued, should be accessible
even to those who could not read music), most praised it as a masterly work of
synthesis.
The Classical Style received the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1972.

As a renowned writer and lecturer on music who was also a concert pianist of
no small reputation, Mr. Rosen was among the last exemplars of a figure more
typically associated with the 19th century: the international scholar-musician. If as
a writer he was known for aqueous lucidity and the vast, ecumenical sweep of his
inquiry, then as a pianist he tended to rate a similar description.
The granddaddy of all these writer-musicians is the American pianist and
scholar Charles Rosen, The Guardian wrote in 2010, going on to describe him as
a performer of the utmost distinction whose writing exactly mirrors his playing:
subtle, precise, penetrating and, though by no means lacking in fun, intended to
challenge.
Mr. Rosen the pianist was known in particular as an interpreter of Beethoven,
but also of Bach, Chopin and the 20th-century composers Arnold Schoenberg and
Elliott Carter. He appeared often in recital (in the 1950s and 60s he was heard
regularly at Town Hall in New York) and with some of the worlds leading
orchestras.
Mr. Rosen the writer was additionally known for his book The Romantic
Generation (1995), which explores European music from the death of Beethoven
to the death of Chopin and is accompanied by a CD of musical examples played by
the author; Piano Notes (2002), a collection of essays on the craft of pianism that
includes a disquisition on the right thumb; a well-received monograph on
Schoenberg; and many decades worth of articles in The New York Review of
Books. His most recent article, in the Dec. 20 issue, is on the English Restoration
playwright and poet William Congreve.
Mr. Rosen the polymath was possessed of a lightning-fast, seemingly limitless
discursiveness that has been described variously as enchanting and intimidating.
A conversation with him, associates have said, typically ranged over a series of
enthusiasms that besides music could include philosophy; art history; architecture;
travel (Mr. Rosen had homes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Paris,
where he had first lived as a Fulbright fellow in the early 1950s); European
literature, usually read in the original (he had a Ph.D. in French from Princeton);
poetry (he held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship of poetry, an annual
lectureship at Harvard, from 1980 to 1981); food (he was an accomplished cook);

wine and the glassware it was served in; cognac and the wooden casks it was aged
in; and the television shows Absolutely Fabulous, Taxi and Cheers.
It was said of Mr. Rosen that when he practiced the piano, a discipline to
which he hewed daily well into old age, he might choose to read something not a
musical score but an actual work of literature at the same time.
Charles Welles Rosen was born in Manhattan on May 5, 1927. His father,
Irwin, was an architect; his mother, the former Anita Gerber, was a
semiprofessional actress and amateur pianist.
Young Charles took his first piano lessons at 4 and studied at the Juilliard
School from the ages of 7 to 11. At 11, he began private study with the distinguished
pianist Moriz Rosenthal, who had been a pupil of Liszt.
Attending Princeton, from which he earned bachelors, masters and doctoral
degrees in French literature, Mr. Rosen took few classes in the music department.
I was too proud to take courses in music, he told an interviewer in 2011, on
being awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. I dont mean
to sound snotty, but its true: I knew more about music than most of the music
graduate students.
Mr. Rosen earned his Ph.D. in 1951, a banner year for him in other respects.
That year, at 24, he also made his New York recital debut, at Town Hall, and
recorded his first solo album, of Debussy tudes. The success of that record and
other early recordings let him quit his academic career he had been teaching
French at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the life of a full-time
pianist.
Reviewing a 1953 Town Hall recital by Mr. Rosen in The New York Herald
Tribune, the composer Virgil Thomson wrote that he was, at 26, one of the great
piano technicians, adding, Under all the precocity lies a musical mind of great
strength and modesty.
But over time, Mr. Rosens writing career born, as he told it, of dire
necessity began competing for his attention. The necessity arose in 1960, when
his recording of Chopin nocturnes was released with liner notes describing one

nocturne as staggering drunken with the odor of flowers.

I had many thoughts about the piece, Mr. Rosen told The Guardian in 2011.
That was not one of them. So I started writing the sleeve notes myself. People
liked them, and after a while a publisher took me to lunch.
This led eventually to his first book, The Classical Style. In it, Mr. Rosen,
building on the work of Donald Tovey and other musicologists, set forth the
structural principles that lend the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven its
characteristic texture. (They include formal symmetry, a drive toward harmonic
resolution, and dramatic expressiveness combined with structural complexity.)
Mr. Rosens renown as a writer led him back into teaching. He had long
associations with the State University of New York at Stony Brook and later with
the University of Chicago, where he was at his death emeritus professor of music
and social thought.
His deep intellectualism, some music critics said, did not always serve his
pianism well. While some reviewers praised his probing vitality at the keyboard,
others called his playing percussive, overly cerebral and even cold.
Among Mr. Rosens recordings that have drawn nearly universal praise are
those of Beethovens Diabelli Variations and his last six piano sonatas, and of
Bachs Goldberg Variations and Art of the Fugue.
Mr. Rosens other books include Sonata Forms (1980), The Frontiers of
Meaning (1994), Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature (2012)
and, with Mr. Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of NineteenthCentury Art (1984).
He leaves no immediate survivors.
In interviews over many years Mr. Rosen often said that he considered himself
a pianist first and foremost. The scholarship, the teaching, the lecturing and
everything else were, he said, almost incidental pursuits.
Everyone needs a hobby, he told The Globe and Mail of Canada in 1981.
Some pianists collect Oriental vases. I write books.

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with
the headline: Charles Rosen, 85, Scholar-Musician Who Untangled Classical Works, Dies.

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