The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking

Conversations about Art & Performance

CHARLES ROSEN
CATHERINE TEMERSON
Translated by Catherine Zerner

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2020
 Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
First published as Plaisir de jouer, plaisir de penser; Préface d’Israel Rosenfield,
Copyright © Manuella éditions, Paris, 2016
ISBN original: 978-2-917217-78-8

Cover design: Tim Jones

Cover image: Getty Images

978-0-674-98846-0 (cloth)
978-0-674-24978-3 (EPUB)
978-0-674-24979-0 (MOBI)
978-0-674-24980-6 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Rosen, Charles, 1927–2012, author. | Temerson, Catherine, interviewer. | Zerner, Catherine,
translator.
Title: The joy of playing, the joy of thinking : conversations about art and performance / Charles Rosen,
Catherine Temerson ; translated by Catherine Zerner.
Other titles: Plaisir de jouer, plaisir de penser. English
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. | First
published as Plaisir de jouer, plaisir de penser. Paris : Editions Xanadu-Manuella Vaney, © 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016347
Subjects: LCSH: Rosen, Charles, 1927–2012—Interviews. | Pianists—United States—Interviews. |
Musicologists— United States—Interviews. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics.
Classification: LCC ML417.R733 A5 2020 | DDC 780.92 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016347
 Contents

Foreword by Israel Rosenfield

Translator’s Preface
Biographies of the Authors

1 Musical Analysis
2 The Uses of Musical Analysis
3 Styles
4 Performance
5 Physical Pleasure, Intellectual Pleasure
6 The Role of the Performer

Bibliography and Discography

 Foreword by Israel Rosenfield

Almost all the best-known works of Johann Sebastian Bach, for example—The Well-Tempered
Keyboard, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, the Italian Concerto, the Art of Fugue—are
educational, models of composition to be studied and played at home: the kind of public concert at
which they could be played did not exist during Bach’s lifetime, and he could never have envisaged a
concert performance of any of them. In fact, public performance of most of these works is largely an
invention of the twentieth century.
—Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments

IF MUSIC WAS composed for “private” concerts—“Bach played for himself,” as

Charles has written—Catherine and Charles played for themselves and their own
duo. They gave a series of private concerts, of private discussions and private
dinners on literature, architecture, science, and, of course, music. They both
enjoyed writing. And Catherine enjoyed translating as well. Catherine suggested
to Charles that they do a book together, and Charles said he would love to do the
book but only with Catherine. Catherine knew Charles and the circle of musicians
that were close friends of her family—Elliott Carter, Arthur Berger, Dimitri
Mitropoulos, among others—since her childhood. Her mother was a painter and
her father a violinist. Her mother prepared superb dinners, and her father played
sonatas with Charles. They lived for music.
But music was not their only bond. Catherine had a doctorate in comparative
literature from New York University and Charles a doctorate in French literature
from Princeton University. Catherine’s father was French, and she was raised in
France and had a bilingual education. Her mother was Russian, and she spoke
Russian and studied Russian literature at Sarah Lawrence College and Harvard
University. Charles had visited France on a Fulbright.
Their private concerts were a pleasure in themselves, the preparation of another
kind of representation—a public one. There was no better public than Catherine.
She was not passive. She discussed things with Charles and helped his ideas take
shape. One could make an analogy with the music of Elliott Carter and Cubist
paintings. They both depend on multiple points of view. It was these multiple
points of view that created the pleasure of discussions, writing and playing.
As in Schubert’s and Schumann’s lieder or the sonata “Les Adieux” of
Beethoven, where the past and present are represented simultaneously, there was
in the dialogues of Catherine and Charles the presence of musicians and artists
they had known and who came to life in their discussions. These dialogues are a
work unto themselves and they resonate with an enlarged conception of music;
they give two pleasures: one muscular and the other intellectual.
Charles has written on the Double Concerto of Elliott Carter: “When the work
was written, players—at least in private—were taken aback by the lack of a
central rhythm that would have made ensemble playing easier, just as painters felt
a curious anxiety with the loss of central point of view in Cubist paintings. A
multiplicity of points of view has become central to the artistic imagination of the
twentieth century.” It is the multiple points of view, the wonderful synthesis of
literature, science, painting, and, of course, music that makes the book of
Catherine and Charles a joy, a pleasure to read and think about.
 Translator’s Preface

THIS LITTLE BOOK is a conversation about music between two good friends
intended for an audience of interested non-professionals like myself. I agreed to
undertake its translation into English because Charles Rosen was a dear friend,
and I was accustomed to listening to him talk about ideas that also appear in this
book. Charles habitually wrote in his head and often spoke whole paragraphs of
his current project over tea or at the dinner table. I wanted to convey something of
his voice while remaining faithful to his and Catherine’s text. Charles always
meant what he said in the way he said it, and he could be quite fierce. Luckily, I
had Henri Zerner’s guidance throughout and am deeply grateful. The task would
have been impossible without him.
The two French editions had summary bibliographies and a brief discography
of Charles’s recordings then available in France. Both have been expanded to
include as much existing material as possible so that readers can find their way to
Charles’s other writings and recordings.
I wish to thank Harvard University Press for their support and careful editing.
—Catherine Zerner
 Biographies of the Authors

CHARLES ROSEN

Pianist Charles Rosen (1927–2012) was a child prodigy, entering the Juilliard
School of Music when he was six years old. At eleven, he became a pupil of the
celebrated pianist Moriz Rosenthal, himself a former student of Franz Liszt, and
began his international career.
A well-known musicologist and lecturer at Harvard (the Norton Lectures), he
also taught at Oxford University and the University of Chicago. He is the author
of numerous books and articles on music including The Frontiers of Meaning:
Three Informal Lectures on Music and The Romantic Generation (the Charles
Eliot Norton Lectures). The Classical Style received the National Book Award
and was awarded the Edison Prize for his body of work. He held honorary
doctorates from the universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Durham, Bristol, and
Trinity College, Dublin. President Obama awarded him the National Humanities
Medal on February 13, 2012.

CATHERINE TEMERSON

Catherine Temerson (1944–2015) was the literary director of the Ubu Repertory
Theater of New York. She held a master’s degree in Russian literature from
Harvard University and a PhD in comparative literature from New York
University. Completely bilingual in English and French, she published
Hollywood, petite histoire d’un grand empire and translations into English of a
number of works, including books by Elie Wiesel, Amin Maalouf, and André
Comte-Sponville. Her father, Léon Temerson, was one of the first violins of the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the concertmaster of the New York
Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble.
 1
Musical Analysis

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Charles Rosen, you are both a concert pianist with a career
that takes you all over the world, and an author whose four books have been
received with great praise by critics in many countries.1 Few performers take
such pleasure in analyzing works and exploring their properties. Yet I’ve no doubt
that musicians talk about music among themselves …

CHARLES ROSEN: Certainly, it’s a need most musicians feel. To begin with, they
exchange technical know-how. It is common knowledge that you must never
invite two oboists to the same party! They’ll talk about nothing but reeds all night
—how they should be dried, how to cut them … Should a bassoonist join them,
the conversation will heat up further, as he will also have views on the subject!
Pianists tend to recommend particular fingerings; or, conversely, take perverse
delight in concealing them from one another.

But musicians’ talk is by no means limited to such “technical” subjects; most of

the time, conversation revolves around the notion of pleasure. Often, they will
show one another passages that feature especially interesting melodies or
harmonies with, for example, an instance of inner voices that are imperceptible to
the ear. At these times they are, despite themselves, critics. Words are a way of
bringing to the foreground the most interesting and original properties of a work.
This may appear superficial or paradoxical: one might imagine that the
performance of a piece would suffice to make heard what is most beautiful and
striking about it. Things are not quite so simple, however: someone executing a
favorite work will indeed tend to highlight the passages that give the performer
the greatest pleasure, slowing down and emphasizing them. Yet in some cases
these passages are better served by an interpretation that eschews ostentation.
Some of the most magical moments in works by Mozart, Chopin, or even
Beethoven are only beautiful if played with discretion and tact. These hidden
qualities are worth pointing out, and doing so is already an act of criticism or
musical analysis, a means of accessing the pleasure of music.

It’s rare for musicians to speak of what they dislike about a work, although they
will complain at times about dull stretches, and the problem of holding the
audience’s attention. Of course, they also readily grumble about conductors or
about the instruments they have had to play. On the whole, however, they tend to
discuss what they found enjoyable about this or that piece. Which is precisely
what the “good” critic does!

To say that art is made for pleasure must be as old a cliché as there is, and yet it
remains true! It’s said that literature is useful in addition to being agreeable, and
efforts have been made to show that the same is true for music. I don’t think
anyone really believes it. Music is a way of instructing the soul, making it more
sensitive, but it is useful only insofar as it is pleasurable. This pleasure is manifest
to anyone who experiences music as an inexorable need of body as well as the
mind.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So, all of artistic expression, its singular importance, can
thus be entirely contained in the two words: pleasure and use …

CHARLES ROSEN: The utility of art is a notion with roots in antiquity, especially the
great Roman tradition. Horace speaks of art as “sweet and useful.” The Greeks
believed that music gives the soul greater sensibility, instilling a capacity for
appreciating sensory refinement and understanding sentiment. It is therefore of
the greatest utility, including for the state, because it produces good citizens. But
it can be of use only if it offers pleasure; the sensibility of one’s soul is hardly
going to be increased by music one loathes.

Greek drama depicts all sorts of terrifying subject matter, such as murder and
incest. Its object is to elevate the soul, and it is to this end that the dramaturge
labors: in the oldest philosophical tradition, the noble representation of horrifying
actions sharpens the mind and grants us a better understanding of logic and
human nature. These are not my ideas; I am simply summarizing classical
thought.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: But these are ideas you share?

CHARLES ROSEN: I’ve never asked myself that question, any more than I ask myself
whether to use the crosswalk or wait for a green light before charging across the
street. It’s not a matter of opinion. I adhere to them to the extent that it is
necessary to accept the aesthetic tenets of classical art in order to appreciate it.
What is interesting is that, today, the balance between the useful and the pleasant
has been upset. During the nineteenth century, and even before, playwrights
began to treat subjects that could not be elevated to the sublime. Friedrich
Schlegel declared that in order to represent reality, the novel must depict every
aspect of human life, including the most mundane and unworthy actions. This
idea was taken as a guiding principle by the Romantics.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Before we go into the defining features of each era’s style in
greater detail, I would like to hear you tell us about your training. At what age
did your talent and interest in music become clear, and under what
circumstances?

CHARLES ROSEN: Like everyone who has had a career as a pianist, almost without
exception, I began playing very young, at three or four years old. We had a piano
at home, and my mother would practice every day from five to six o’clock in the
evening, except when guests were expected for dinner. I was told that, as an
infant, I would start howling on nights when she didn’t play. I doubt, however,
that this was indicative of any precocious musical talent on my part. Probably, I
learned to associate the sound of the piano with my mother being available, and
silence with the presence of unwanted company. Perhaps I began playing myself
as a means of banishing the intruders … Why not? It’s as good a theory as any!

Like many children, I began by fiddling around with the keys and composing my
own melodies. By four years old, I was clamoring for lessons. One of our
neighbors was a piano teacher, and I was constantly harassing her. To stop me
from bothering her, my parents found me a different teacher, much farther away.
She was an old and rather absentminded German lady. After a few months, my
mother realized that I couldn’t read music and was learning entirely by ear. She
told my teacher to stop playing the new pieces she assigned me. It’s something
that happens often with gifted children. At seven, I enrolled at the Juilliard
School. I was already certain I wanted to be a pianist. At eleven, I began studying
with Moriz Rosenthal, who had been a student of Liszt and a friend of Brahms. I
wound up there because we had the same dentist! His wife, Hedwig Kanner, was
a well-respected piano teacher. She had studied with Leschetizky, who had taught
Schnabel and all the great Viennese virtuosos. In principle, I was to have one
lesson a week with Mrs. Rosenthal, and one lesson a month with her husband.
Very soon, however, I was having two lessons a week with the two of them.
Rosenthal was seventy-five years old; he no longer played in public, or hardly
ever, and he was bored. I would go over to their house twice a week, and when
I’d finished my lesson with Mrs. Rosenthal, she would say, “go amuse the old
man!” I studied technique with her; with him, we mostly talked about phrasing.

He was always incredibly courteous. I remember one time when he stopped me as

I was playing the Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel to ask why
I had speeded up. I answered that the score indicated “poco piu moto.” With some
difficulty, due to his age, he got to his feet to look at the score. “You are
absolutely right,” he said. “You know, Brahms let me play however I wanted.
Unfortunately, I went too far.” He never told me I was wrong or that what I had
done was incorrect. “I have a different idea of the piece,” he would say, and he
would play it for me. It was a wonderful experience … I asked him to tell me
about training with Liszt, but all he would tell me was that it was difficult to haul
Liszt out of the café and into the studio. Unfortunately, Rosenthal recorded very
little. When he was at the height of his career, in the twenties, no one made
recordings of the major works he was known for, like Schumann’s Fantasie in C
major or Variations on a Theme by Paganini by Brahms …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How did he come to be friends with Brahms?

CHARLES ROSEN: He once told me how they met. Rosenthal must have been around
twenty-five at the time. He was playing in one of those Viennese concert halls
where the audience is seated at round tables and drinks were served during
concerts. Rosenthal was about to play Reminiscences of Don Juan by Liszt, and
Brahms was sitting at a table with his back to the stage. Being young and
ambitious, he told himself he must at all costs ensure that Brahms turned around.
Two minutes into the piece, the right hand must play a scale in chromatic thirds
that is particularly difficult: it needs to be played very quickly and forcefully. So,
Rosenthal played two chromatic scales in thirds together, with both hands! Of
course, Brahms turned around to look at him: it must have been astonishing to
see.

Very few pianists today practice the technique of chromatic thirds with the left
hand. Even in Rosenthal’s time it was very rare! After the concert, Brahms came
to see him and asked him to play his Variations on a Theme by Paganini, the most
technically challenging work by Brahms.

He could not have failed to impress Brahms … There are a few records from the
twenties that give an idea of Rosenthal’s prodigious technical skill. In Chopin’s
Black Key Étude (Étude, op. 10, no 5), he could play the octaves glissando. This
is difficult enough on the white keys, but on the black, it’s incredible! My fingers
ache just thinking about it … When I was fourteen he taught me to play the
glissandi by octave on the white keys in the Variations on a Theme by Paganini,
and especially, how not to play them too fast. A moderate tempo is more difficult.
But what an effect!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Did he encourage you to further your studies? Would you
say his influence went beyond technical advice?

CHARLES ROSEN: Certainly, he required all his students to study counterpoint,

harmony, and composition … I took private lessons with the composer Karl
Weigl, who had been Mahler’s assistant in Vienna. He also encouraged me to
continue my university education. He himself read Greek fluently and held a
degree in law from the University of Vienna. So, I went to Princeton, an hour-
and-a-half journey from New York.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Where you studied … French literature!

CHARLES ROSEN: It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but it seemed to me a bit too easy
to take a degree in music, although at that time, Princeton’s music department
may well have been the best in the world. I was on very good terms with a
number of professors, notably Oliver Strunk, Milton Babbitt, and Bohuslav
Martinů, and I would attend their lectures from time to time. The chair of the
French Department, Ira Wade, a Voltaire specialist, was one of the most amusing
and brilliant professors in the entire school. There was no resisting the
tremendous attraction of this man, nor of his colleagues in French literature, all
extremely erudite, like Gilbert Chinard. I spent seven years there, studying
straight through my PhD. After that, I spent two years in France, thanks to a
Fulbright fellowship. University life was a good match, because it allowed me to
continue my career as a pianist, to say nothing of practicing four hours a day …
When I returned to the States, I taught French literature for a year at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before signing a contract that
allowed me to earn a living playing concerts.

I used to play often in Chicago, where I was engaged by Harry Zelzer, the
impresario who oversaw all the city’s concerts, excepting those of the Chicago
Symphony. Each year, he would organize a series of recitals featuring fourteen
pianists: the leading virtuoso performers appeared, but also a few younger
players. According to him, this event was the only one in all the United States to
turn a profit without subventions. Everyone was willing to play there for lower
fees, even Rudolf Serkin. The concerts took place at Orchestra Hall, which holds
2,000 people. 1,400 seats were reserved for season ticket holders for all fourteen
recitals, the rest were sold separately for each concert. After I had played four
seasons in a row, Zelzer surprised me by increasing my commission: for the first
time, I had attracted an audience of nonsubscribers!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Would you say this was the golden age of American music
performance?

CHARLES ROSEN: When I started, in the fifties, economic conditions were already
more difficult. In the forties and fifties, you could play for an audience of 500 and
the concert would be profitable. A performer would even earn enough to pay for
travel. Today, with airfare and hotel costs, that’s impossible without support.
There’s a tendency to complain that the public has shrunk. That’s simply not true:
audiences are larger than ever, but costs increase much faster!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Do you recall your childhood idols, the composers you most
admired?

CHARLES ROSEN: From seven to thirteen my favorite composer was Wagner. I

would listen to the radio and drink in his music. The first opera I ever went to was
Siegfried. I was eight years old. I had been given the piano score for voice, with a
reduced orchestra. I deciphered it and used to play it every day. In the end, I knew
it by heart. The performance amazed me; I was stunned by the soprano. She
allowed me to hear, with perfect precision, every one of the notes I had played on
the piano. For a long time afterward, I assumed I had idealized this memory
because it was my first opera. Not at all. I recently purchased the record and
realized that the soprano I had heard was Frida Leider, during the one season she
sang in New York. I’ve heard many great singers since then, but she was
exceptional.

Anyway, I loved Wagner. I still do, but I don’t worship him. As a child, I would
go listen to Parsifal every Easter, religiously, standing in the cheap seats.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Did you often go to hear pianists?

CHARLES ROSEN: Oh yes, quite often. Thankfully, I was often disappointed, and I
would emerge from such concerts with a determination to do better. Even though
I was quite young, I already had a strong grasp of the repertoire; I’d frequently
amuse myself by deciphering pieces. I had very strong ideas about style; I wanted
it to be as austere as possible. I’ve changed a bit since then …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Moriz Rosenthal had been a student of Liszt and a friend of
Brahms. Did he show a particular affinity for Romantic music?

CHARLES ROSEN: Certainly! His interpretation of Chopin’s mazurkas was

extraordinary. What most impressed me when I was eleven or twelve was the way
he could keep his hand almost still on the keyboard, while bringing out any
particular note of a chord. I was determined to learn how to do as much! It’s odd,
but he never told me one should bring out the polyphonic qualities of a work; he
taught me to do so by his playing. Actually, it’s a feature that defines the playing
style of pianists from this era, especially those from the eastern European
tradition. The French tradition placed a greater focus on evening out the voices. In
Vienna, there was even a tendency to push the practice too far and bring out only
the melody, reducing everything else to a somewhat hazy background. But
Rosenthal, like Josef Hofmann and Rachmaninov, was most interested in bringing
out subordinate voices. Pianists of the twenties were even known to entertain
themselves on occasion by slightly changing their interpretation of a work by
making a subordinate voice the principal. Josef Hofmann, who was an
incomparable master of tone, excelled at this. It’s a tendency that is disappearing
today …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Are you sorry that’s the case?

CHARLES ROSEN: Of course. The piano is above all a polyphonic instrument.

Personally, I like to bring out the bass and the details of the subordinate voices.
When the cellist with whom I recorded the Chopin Sonata op. 65, David James,
told me that I sounded every note of the piece, I was very pleased. As I just told
you, the Viennese tradition of executing and interpreting piano music foregrounds
the principal melodic line, even to the point of excess, whereas the French
tradition emphasizes balance and tends to embed the melodic line within the
overall mass of sound. Indeed, in his scores, Schoenberg often distinguishes the
principal voice and subordinate voices with the notation H or N (Hauptstimme
and Nebenstimme).

CATHERINE TEMERSON: If you think back to your formative years, do you feel that
Rosenthal knew better than others might have how to make use of your talents?

CHARLES ROSEN: Absolutely—he immediately understood that I had a taste for

difficulty and intellectual effort. That’s why he asked me to learn the Beethoven
Sonata op. 106 (the Hammerklavier), the fugue, when I was just thirteen years
old. Generally speaking, it is a piece you would only approach at twenty or
twenty-five. What’s more, he wanted me to analyze it before playing it. I owe him
a debt for encouraging me to see the relationship between the execution—the
realization of a work in audible sounds—and the idea or structure of a score,
something that continues to fascinate me. As a matter of fact, he was the one who
pointed out to me that in Schumann’s Fantasie op. 17, the first full cadence on the
tonic, C major, comes only at the end of the first movement and provides the sole
moment of rest in the entire movement; therefore, it was necessary, in his view, to
maintain an “anxiety” in one’s playing until that last page. I alluded to this
observation in The Classical Style but deliberately omitted the name of its source.
It would have appeared boastful to insist on the fact that he had taught me this
when I was fifteen!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What were the specialties of the Music Department at

Princeton University during the time you were there?

CHARLES ROSEN: It was particularly strong in musical analysis. Composers Roger

Sessions and Milton Babbitt taught music theory and were especially interested in
the relationship between composition and the history of music. In France, musical
analysis has always been considered something of an unwanted stepchild by
musicologists, but in the United States it was very fashionable among composers
in the forties and fifties. Its popularity was due to the influence of Schoenberg,
and a large number of intellectual musicians from central Europe who fled to the
United States during the war. This passion for musical analysis has its roots in the
twenties and the Second Viennese School … After all, it is simply a matter of
using words to describe what the best musicians know by instinct.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Are musical analysis and musicology necessary training for
a performer?

CHARLES ROSEN: I don’t know, though it’s a question I ask myself often. I can tell
you a story, though, which is both disconcerting and revelatory. At a friend’s
house one evening, I happened to play with Pierre Fournier, who was without a
doubt the greatest French cellist. After we played the Beethoven Sonata op. 69, I
told him that in Beethoven’s sketches, which had just been published by Lewis
Lockwood, it appeared that the composer had developed the second theme note
by note below the first one, which he used as a model. Fournier confessed to me
that he had been playing the sonata for fifty years without ever noticing that the
themes were almost identical! And yet, I can assure you that he played it
magnificently, better than anyone, in fact! I thus infer that a certain type of
analysis is not essential for a performer. It may be a source of pleasure, but there
are great performers who have never looked at music from this perspective.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: As someone who developed a taste for it very early, do you
think musical analysis has influenced the way you play?

CHARLES ROSEN: For me, the two activities are quite distinct, which does not, of
course, necessarily mean that they are entirely separate. There is doubtless a
relationship between analysis and interpretation, but it is an unconscious one, and
I am only intermittently aware of it. In any event, it is certainly not as simple a
relationship as is commonly thought. When I recorded Beethoven’s Sonata op.
106, the Hammerklavier, I analyzed it in order to explain that it was built on
chains of thirds. My commentary was printed on the record sleeve. A critic seized
on this, maintaining that my playing sought to establish the veracity of this
analysis. It was absurd! I’ve been playing the Hammerklavier since I was thirteen,
well before I noticed the pattern of thirds, and the only thing that has changed
about the way I play it is a suppleness of the phrasing. Critics love to make this
kind of idiotic statement! The thirds cannot be avoided—they are part of the
score. The analysis holds for any performance of the piece, even the most
wretched! As a matter of fact, it’s important to avoid emphasizing the thirds; you
conceal it a bit to avoid monotony.
But I may well be unconsciously influenced by analysis, actually; the chains of
thirds succeed each other extremely quickly throughout the sonata. At the most
significant moments, structurally speaking, you always find descending thirds.
Yet, at these moments, the tempo of the thirds slows, and instead of coming in
rapid succession the last set of descending thirds is maintained for several
measures. In all likelihood I was influenced when I observed that the slowing
thirds were a structurally significant moment. However, I rather doubt that this
distinguishes me much from other pianists, as the slower thirds herald a change of
key, that is to say, a fundamental change in the harmony. That is, in fact, what the
slowing thirds is there for: to foreground this fundamental change in harmony.
Am I more aware of this than other pianists? I can’t say. Is my playing modified
by this awareness? I don’t believe so.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Does that mean it is possible to “understand” a work

without analyzing it? Would you say that the analysis takes place without the
performer’s being conscious of it? Does reading a work and deciphering it come
to the same thing as analysis at some basic level? When you approach a new
work, do you begin by analyzing it?

CHARLES ROSEN: No, I start by sight-reading it at the piano, and, like all pianists,
exploring the fingering. There are some pieces I play without ever analyzing
them. Actually, I was a bit embarrassed when asked to give lectures on the music
of Elliott Carter, although I consider him the greatest composer alive today and
have performed every one of his works for piano. He writes rather complex music
which has already been extensively analyzed. In the work for piano Night
Fantasies, which I play often, I know there is a relationship between two
rhythmic series, and that it is 24 to 25. But while I am aware of the principle, I
have never probed the work to figure out which notes belonged to the 24 series
and which to the 25.

When the rhythmic relationship appears at the surface, I render it as clearly as

possible. I know, basically, that the left hand plays quadruplets that are accented
every six notes. Analysis has nothing to do with it; I am only following the
composer’s instructions, which are written on the page. One begins by rendering
what is written before moving on to seeking color, expression, and so on.

Of course, everyone always analyzes to some extent … Performing is a way of

presenting one’s thoughts about music. It is self-evident that an interpreter
deepens his knowledge of a work by playing it, arriving at a synthetic
understanding that enables him to present it before an audience. I believe,
however, that no vast generalization is possible; the exact relationship between
analysis and execution will be different for each musician, and even for each
work.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Can analysis be detrimental?

CHARLES ROSEN: Sometimes. Personally, nothing annoys me more than a

performer who bases his playing on an inaccurate analysis. I would much prefer
to hear one who trusts only to intuition and tradition.

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the influence of analysis on a performer’s

playing. Analysis featured prominently in the remarkable playing of Schnabel, for
instance. He is sometimes mocked for having faulty technique. In fact, it was
faulty only when he played a very dramatic forte. When he played pianissimo, he
fully mastered even the fastest of passages, playing them with perfect precision.
Horowitz himself maintained that no one played the last presto et pianissimo
movement of Chopin’s Sonata no. 2 in B-flat Minor better than Schnabel. But
many things influence the way a performer plays. There is a clear difference
between the playing of someone like Rudolf Serkin, who practiced eight hours a
day, and that of a Robert Casadesus, who would play for only two. I don’t believe
that Serkin analyzed; he got results by practicing. His performances appear to be
forged at the keyboard …

What I can say for certain is that I find it easier to analyze a work that I have
played for years. To some extent, analyzing a work amounts to imagining its ideal
execution. Except that, as I already mentioned earlier, a sound analysis ought to
be valid for any execution.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Certainly, but a mediocre performer may render certain

aspects of a work imperceptible …

CHARLES ROSEN: That’s true, but this could be due to negligence as much as a
desire to make the music conform to the strictures of a theory.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: You said that analysis often consists of setting out in writing
what comes instinctively to the best performers. I would like you to expand on
this.
CHARLES ROSEN: There is a portion of analysis which is useless to the performer,
because the mere fact of playing constitutes an analysis. The one who plays is
always aware of modulations, tonality, and, usually, the way the voices develop.
When you listen to performances of the greatest pianists, Hofmann,
Rachmaninov, Solomon, Richter, you can hear perfectly how one note leads to the
next and in which voice. The fabric of the music becomes transparent, revealing
its structure in every detail. We hear the voices as they separate, merge, and
achieve their balance. In fact, vocal music is the model for the piano: a work for
piano can be transcribed on several staves as if it had been written for several
singers. So, there it is: playing is an exercise in analysis. It is through analysis that
the pianist chooses the fortissimo that will be the culmination of a piece or, on the
contrary, the pianissimo that he will execute with the sostenuto pedal.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: There are, however, some aspects of a work that can only be
understood through analysis …

CHARLES ROSEN: The critic engaging in musical analysis is often obliged to

demonstrate the obvious, otherwise, as the literary critic William Empson
remarked, there will always be someone who says, “Ha! He didn’t even see that!”
All the same, certain aspects of a work that are obvious to critics are actually very
difficult to execute and balance in a subtle fashion. I am thinking of the complete
permutations of the four themes at the conclusion of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony,
K. 551. So, after several repeats, only the beginning of each theme should be
made audible by highlighting its first two notes. Our memory is then able to
compensate for the lack of transparency. The same needs to be done with Bach’s
Art of Fugue and Well-Tempered Clavier in order to allow the listener to become
oriented and hear the progression of the voices.

In any case, analysis and execution intersect, but they also exist as independent
activities. The critic and the performer often draw our attention to different
aspects of the same work.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So, what is the actual function of the critic?

CHARLES ROSEN: My view on this subject is actually fairly radical. For my part, the
purpose of criticism is to analyze the composer’s technique. I am not speaking of
journalistic criticism; this assesses the execution of a work above all, and its
economic role is essential: without it, there would be no public! Neither am I
talking about the notes in a concert program. These are designed (and a good
thing, too!) to soothe the average listener’s feelings of insecurity and to warn
about the length of an unfamiliar work.

Fresh out of university, I published an article in Perspectives of New Music in

which I explained that the composer’s point of view should always be at the
center of music criticism and that the opinions of performers and historians were
strictly subordinate. I wanted to show that musicologists were mistaken in
distancing themselves from the point of view of the composer. I was answered by
an entirely justifiable observation: in spite of what I affirmed, I had written a
musicological essay! Undeniable: from the moment you write about music, you
are doing musicology! An entire branch of musicology, perhaps its most
important, is devoted to ferreting scores out of library holdings and deciphering
them; but criticism is also part of musicology. And if criticism is not capable of
producing a technical analysis, if there is no profound and intimate knowledge of
the processes of composition, then everything it says will be hollow.

Actually, I began to write about music after reading a quotation by James

Huneker, a well-known American music critic in the early twentieth century, that
was on the record jacket of one of my first recordings: Chopin’s Nocturne
“staggers, drunk on the scent of flowers.” It seemed to me that I should be
capable of saying something more penetrating about a nocturne that is one of the
masterpieces of polyphonic music of the nineteenth century!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: You gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard University on

Romantic music. Did you analyze the works of Chopin there?

CHARLES ROSEN: The first thing I did was to explain the importance of the four-
measure phrase used by almost every composer of the nineteenth century. The
grouping by four was so widespread that if a composer decided to abandon this
rigid and somewhat artificial system in favor of phrases of five or seven
measures, he was acclaimed for his originality. In fact, I believe, it was the
composers who knew how to use the phrase of four measures with suppleness and
imagination that are worthy of admiration.

It is usual to say that Chopin showed his originality by beginning a small number
of pieces with five-measure phrases, which was unexpected at the time. No
commentator seems to have noticed that these five measures are always followed
by a second phrase of three measures! One critic analyzed a mazurka by Chopin
to show that it is made up of a series of irregular phrases of five, seven, and four
measures, but he neglected to add them up and so notice that in total there are
thirty-two measures, which conforms to the rhythm of the dance! It is important
to know that melodic systems conformed to the grouping of four measures, but
that this did not always coincide with the expressive phrasing indicated by
Chopin.

Although Chopin almost always observed the grouping by four, there are
exceptions, works in which groups of three measures systematically dominate for
a sustained duration. In spite of their spontaneous, improvised effect, mazurkas
maintain the regular rhythm of the dance provided by the groups of four
measures. Chopin’s rubato is precisely a rubato in detail which adapts itself to a
very regular large-scale rhythm. Chopin himself wanted his students to work with
a metronome, but between the slow beats of the pendulum there is free space for
fantasy.

1. The first edition of Plaisir de jouer, plaisir de penser appeared in 1993. Three other books followed; see
the Bibliography and Discography.
 2
The Uses of Musical Analysis

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Why is it impossible to speak of music otherwise than in

technical terms?

CHARLES ROSEN: Because music produces effects that are not really designed to be
expressed in words. Music has no goals, intentions, desires, or expressivity
beyond its own processes. There is a total identity between the technical means a
composer employs and what a work signifies. The task of the critic is therefore to
make explicit the processes that constitute the expressive content of a work.

That said, I am against the excess of analysis some critics engage in. I can recall
once reading dozens of pages about a work, of which only three sentences were
actually interesting. In the remainder, the author had merely stated the obvious. A
critic is under no obligation to explain every single note of a piece. On the
contrary, he wants to convey the essence of a work and must highlight what is
original in the devices used by the composer.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So, what, exactly, does analysis consist of?

CHARLES ROSEN: It’s important to focus on the particular devices each composer
uses and show precisely how his music differs from that of his contemporaries, or
that of composers before and after him. It is essential to situate him in relation to
the style of his era, whose characteristics have often lost all their intensity and
freshness. The dominant idea of a work and the feelings it expresses must be
understood through the technical means deployed.

Nothing compels us to describe the impression that listening to a particular work

gives us; we may enjoy the impression without bothering to describe it. If we
wish to understand it, however, description is essential, and some recourse to
technical terms unavoidable. To understand the finale of Beethoven’s Piano
Sonata, no. 31, op. 110, one must show that the poetry of the adagio is
reintroduced and integrated with the grandeur of the fugue; the relation of tempos
must be analyzed, as must the relation of tonalities in the first and second fugues;
one must furthermore explain that the adagio returns in a key very far from that of
the beginning, giving the impression of a distant harmony, and that little by little
the initial harmony is reestablished.

We might also take the case of Schumann. It is not enough to say that he is the
composer par excellence of pathological moods. A listener may perceive this in a
vague and fleeting manner, but any demonstration must be based on the technical
means that Schumann invented to conjure these states of mind in music. In certain
passages of his works for piano, the two hands are staggered, and our sense of
rhythm is constantly offended. At times, he uses effects that seem totally illogical
on first hearing and only become logical as the piece develops. In this respect, he
very much belongs to his era, a period in which the collapse of religious feeling
led to a glorification of madness.

Many writers, from Gérard de Nerval and Hölderlin to Charles Lamb, sought to
replace logical reasoning and rationalism with a new form of comprehension.
Schumann represents this current in the realm of music.

Anyone who listens attentively to his music will feel this illogical, irrational,
almost unbalanced quality. We shall, however, remain on the level of hazy small
talk if we do not proceed to specify exactly how he manages to convey this
impression. We might experience the effects of the mechanisms he deploys;
perhaps these would strike a deep chord of emotion within us, but we won’t be
able to say we understand.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Could you give us examples of the techniques invented by

Schumann?

CHARLES ROSEN: I could cite the bird’s message in the third stanza of the lied on a
poem by Heine, “Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen” (“I wandered among the
trees”; Liederkreis, no. 3, op. 24, 1840). The message is in fact an illusion, and
Schumann makes this clear to us by employing a key that is never established and
thus remains unconvincing, unreal even. Also, it must be added, this key
comprises a single chord, repeated almost without variation. It is interesting to see
how Schumann successfully integrates this third stanza to the structure of the lied:
the first stanza ends on the most important note, melodically speaking, whereas
the second ends on a lower note, and it is on this last that the unreal chord of the
third stanza is built, a chord he strikes repeatedly without development or change.
Introduced as a violent intrusion, the chord is repeated as though it is an
obsession. Schumann then shifts abruptly back to the key of the first stanza, as
though it had never been interrupted. Using these mechanisms, he manages to
evoke the musical equivalent of a hallucination.

The works of Schumann, like those of many Romantic—and even classical—

composers, are often the bearers of content beyond the music itself. Pastoral
works (symphonies, sonatas, quartets, or movements) always incorporate
iconographic sounds that recall the countryside, but in a strictly fictional manner.
The sound effect produced by two hunting horns playing hollow-sounding fifths
evokes distance and woodlands. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the sound of horns was associated with distance and, at times, absence.
Beethoven begins his sonata “Les Adieux” with the strains of a hunting horn to
conjure, not the hunt, but rather distance, separation, and absence.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: The mechanisms you’ve just described are readily

accessible, but is it always possible to write about music for a lay audience?

CHARLES ROSEN: That is a question broached by the remarkable writer E. T. A.

Hoffmann in an essay responding to a minor composer who had proclaimed that
Mozart’s modulations were too complex to be appreciated by the broader public.
The example Hoffmann picks is the cemetery scene from Don Giovanni, where
the statue nods to accept Don Giovanni’s invitation to dine. This scene is set to
music in the form of a duet in E major, but the nod is followed by a surprising C
natural, played by the orchestra’s bass section. A professional musician, observes
Hoffmann, recognizes the naturalized submediant and applauds Mozart’s mastery,
while the average listener trembles without wondering what the harmonic effect
represents—he feels full well how surprising and weird it is. Only the half-
knowledgeable musician is distracted by the chromatic shift he is incapable of
explaining. The learned musician and lay public are thus united in comprehension
and admiration; only the mediocre musician is excluded. Hoffmann’s commentary
is edifying for showing that to explain music it is necessary to possess profound
technical knowledge, while at the same time, for a certain level of understanding
and appreciation, such explanations are not necessary.

But regardless, no one writes only for the uninformed; we all hope to be read by
specialists as well. The same goes for scientists who write books popularizing
their research. They presumably hope that other scientists will also find them
interesting. The stumbling block for music is that we are at times obliged to quote
excerpts from the score. Consequently, a reader must know how to read music,
which is actually the only prerequisite for reading my writings on music.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Doesn’t the reader need to understand the tonal system?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, but this is often poorly explained in books and encyclopedic
dictionaries of music. I laid out the basics in the first pages of The Classical Style.
People often think that eighteenth-century tonality is based on a series of scales.
In reality, it consists of a hierarchy of perfect chords. Each chord, one has to
know, is situated in a hierarchical relationship to the central chord, the tonic.

It is always said that musical language is complex and that tonality is difficult to
explain. A short while ago, I was invited to an event to celebrate the centenary of
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and discussion revolved around this difficulty.
I decided to explain the tonal system then and there for an audience with no
technical knowledge of music. I knew I could do it: you just have to play the
chords and say, “there, that’s how you recognize it!”

The basic elements of music are not difficult: you can learn to read music in a
quarter of an hour and understand the basics of tonality in half an hour. Music
theory is less complex than the basics of grammar, than concepts of subject, verb,
or adjective.

The study of language poses historical difficulties but no theoretical ones. In fact,
the foundational principles of language are of such a primitive logic that it seems
to me very probable that they are innate, not only in humans as Chomsky has
argued but also in some other animals.

That said, and to get back to music, the basic principles of tonality are neither
complicated nor profound. Only the examples of it are complex: the symphonies
of Beethoven, or the minuets of Mozart. You find the same duality in literary
texts. To understand Shakespeare, you need to understand the grammatical
structure of every sentence, even if you don’t tell yourself, there is the subject, the
adjective. Analysis, however, is useful to clarify the complexity of the text and to
bring out its unexpected, misunderstood, or implied meanings.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is there a difference between literary and musical

criticism?

CHARLES ROSEN: Criticism has been recognized as an independent activity since

the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel explained
that great works of art interpret and judge themselves; criticism is thus of no
interest unless it is itself a work of art. A work of art is independent of the world
it describes; criticism should also be independent of the work it refers to. But,
adds Schlegel, when a work is expressed in an esoteric language, criticism is
obliged to decipher that language for the uninitiated. There are, therefore, two
kinds of criticism: one that is itself a work of art and one that serves an
explanatory function. The best critics do both. One can take pleasure in reading
the essay on King Lear by the English critic William Empson without having read
Shakespeare’s play. It is not necessary to have seen Niagara Falls to appreciate
Chateaubriand’s description!

Although literary criticism can distance itself from the text, music criticism must
keep itself very close to the score, or it will float in a void and lead nowhere. The
close reading of a text, such as it used to be taught in French high schools, is not
absolutely essential to literary criticism, but it is vital to music criticism. Music
criticism in fact boils down to what used to be called music appreciation. And,
since the critic cannot discuss every detail of a piece of music, he must reveal his
ideas in the details he chooses to comment upon.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: In the preface to your book on Schoenberg you say:

“Evaluation is more cogent and convincing as a by-product than as a goal or
even a starting point of criticism.”

CHARLES ROSEN: In principle, criticism puts itself in the position of the composer,
and for the composer the work is always good! Ever since Romanticism, the role
of criticism has been to explain the work not to bring judgments as to its value.
Novalis declared that there is no bad poem because each work must be analyzed
on the basis of its own criteria. Every poem has its god, as Novalis says: it is a
good poem for someone, somewhere, at some time or other. It may be that its
scope is very limited. The new role assigned to criticism by the Romantics was a
consequence of a great historical upheaval: in the eighteenth century people
became aware of the existence of other civilizations besides the European that
have their own values; thus, one arrived at the idea that neither progress nor
absolute criteria for judgment exists. In sum, we do not believe in a universal
system of values anymore; values become fragmented. Some people think,
wrongly, that this fragmentation leads to relativism. Actually, although it is not
the domain of criticism, nothing prevents us from comparing value systems and
making judgments as to their efficacy, their inevitability, and their appropriateness
in relation to modern civilization.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Literary criticism is fond of discovering meanings of which

the author was unaware. Does a similar situation exist in the criticism of music?

CHARLES ROSEN: Authors often say they are unconscious of certain meanings that
critics attach great importance to. In his analysis of E. M. Forster’s Howards End,
Lionel Trilling underscored the significance of the first names of the characters:
Margaret and Helen, two sisters of German descent, and Henry, the husband of
Margaret. For him, the fact that these first names are those of the characters in
Goethe’s Faust was no accident; he saw the novel as a Faustian search in which
the main actor is Margaret, the female character. Forster was indignant;
nevertheless the parallels are so close that the analysis seems very convincing.
But authors often lie when they deny the significance of certain influences,
certain meanings!

The American poet Wallace Stevens wrote a poem titled “The Emperor of Ice-
Cream.” The critic Richard Blackmur interpreted this as a metaphor for death.
Acknowledging that the interpretation was entirely convincing, Wallace Stevens
nevertheless insisted that he wrote the poem because his daughter was fond of ice
cream! Personally, I don’t think one should rely on what an author says about his
intentions.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is it enough for an interpretation to be pertinent and

convincing?

CHARLES ROSEN: No, because there are interpretations that are convincing simply
because they are new, spectacular, or scandalous. To be really convincing, an
analysis must be coherent and take into account all the details of a work.
I am thinking of Edmund Wilson’s analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the
Screw. He saw a story of sexual repression on the part of the governess who
terrified the children to the point of bringing about the death of one of them.
Wilson’s thesis is scandalous but it is convincing: it has the merit of explaining
the overall structure of the story and the smallest descriptive details. The text is
saturated with sexual details: the ghost makes its first appearance, for example, at
the moment by the lakeside when the little girl plunges a thin stick into a hole in
another stick! To my mind, James, who was trying to create a hallucinatory
impression, chose this detail consciously … It is the same for Flaubert: it is when
Charles Bovary sees Emma put her tongue in her liqueur glass that he thinks of
marrying her. This sensual detail gives coherence to the characters and the themes
of the novel.

I am giving you examples of convincing criticism. I could also give you examples
that stray so far from the text that in rereading the book you don’t recognize
anything! In a situation like that the only possible justification for the criticism is,
as Schlegel said, that it be beautiful.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What do you mean when you state that music criticism
should place itself in the position of the composer?

CHARLES ROSEN: When writing about music, one needs to put oneself in the place
of the composer, that is to say, come close to his personal experience of working.
This does not mean that it is necessary to know the details of his private life.
What is important is to understand the labor of composition. Maynard Solomon,
for example, has written an admirable biography of Beethoven, of unimpeachable
erudition. But, as one reviewer observed, the subject is the life of Beethoven
before eight o’clock in the morning and after two o’clock in the afternoon, that is,
outside those hours that he spent composing. When in fact, Beethoven’s entire life
(commissions, performances, concerts) was organized around his daily morning
occupation!

Musicologists tend to forget that the point of view of the composer occupies a
central place in the understanding of a piece of music. Manfred F. Bukofzer, one
of the most intelligent and knowledgeable musicologists of his generation, has
written a sixty-page essay on Handel without speaking about his rhythmic vitality.
Yet it is Handel’s rhythmic urge that is the most striking and most personal aspect
of his work, and what every composer tried to imitate. A shortcoming of
musicology, and it is often a serious defect, is to forget to put oneself in the place
of the composer looking for inspiration from the past. Handel’s rhythmic energy
allows us to understand his harmonic procedures, his way of constructing a
melody, and his conception of opera. Everything is ruled and guided by his sense
of rhythm: the drama, the structure of the acts, the choirs, the oratorios, the suites
of arias.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: When the composer himself explains his work, is he in a

privileged position or is there a truth about his work that escapes him? What can
one say, for example, of Stravinsky’s interpretations of his own works?

CHARLES ROSEN: I think that Walter Benjamin was right to observe that when an
author expresses himself about his work, we should first interpret what he says
through his biography before applying it to his work. When Goethe speaks of
Elective Affinities, you need to ask whom he is addressing and why. Once you
have done that you can try to see if his assertions have some pertinence.

About Stravinsky, I would say that his interpretations are privileged, but this
privilege is not absolute: nobody knows his own works better than the composer
himself, that’s obvious; but he is not necessarily the best judge of a performance.

The proof, in the case of Stravinsky, is that his approach was not invariable. Take
two recordings of L’Histoire du soldat that he conducted himself. The tempo of
the first is much slower than the second. One could conclude that Stravinsky
changed his mind. This is by no means certain. Some twenty years had passed
between the two recordings, twenty years during which L’Histoire du soldat
became a staple of the repertoire. Today, a whole generation of musicians has
played it several times and can give virtuoso performances. So, you cannot affirm
that Stravinsky changed his mind about the tempo: you might also suppose that he
conducted the piece at a faster tempo because he found himself conducting
musicians who were capable of doing it better. Times have changed as well as
musicians and the way they play. The composer writes for the musicians that
surround him. Ways of playing, experience, everything changes. As a result, the
work itself evolves: L’Histoire du soldat at the end of Stravinsky’s life was no
longer exactly the piece he had first composed. It would be a mistake to conclude
from this that the first recordings should be neglected in favor of listening only to
the most recent. It is not possible to erase the past, an entire tradition, in order to
produce something new, or else you risk producing something very old, or, more
likely, completely banal.
 3
Styles

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How do you see the development of style since the
eighteenth century?

CHARLES ROSEN: Every style has an ideological foundation. Eighteenth-century

neoclassicism wasn’t simply a return to Greek and Roman civilization but rather a
return to what was seen as their source, the real origin of ancient classicism:
nature. Neoclassicism was more dogmatic than the classicism of antiquity. In
neoclassical architecture, for example, columns often have no base; they rise from
the ground like trees because it was thought that any kind of decoration at ground
level interfered with the perception of their natural origin. In music, neoclassicism
sought to abolish national styles so as to make music intelligible to everyone.
Gluck and his contemporaries believed that one had to recover the voice of nature
in order to make music intelligible to everyone. With Romanticism, on the
contrary, fixed criteria disappear; the artist was encouraged instead to deepen his
personal experiments because the criteria of judgment develop from individual
works. Modernism proceeds from the same conviction. The radically new
paintings by Picasso, André Masson, Nicolas de Staël, or Jackson Pollock cannot
be judged by the same criteria as works from the past; you need to acquire a new
way of seeing to appreciate them. Well, it is just this belief that disappeared with
postmodernism.

Postmodernism was a return to the classicism of fixed values, established criteria,

the classicism of tradition, but a return stripped of its ideological foundation:
revival of the past is its only ideological foundation. Contrary to neoclassicism,
postmodernism is not a return to nature; it is a return to the stylistic solutions of
the past. Thus, when neoclassicism broke with the past and, in order to revive the
spirit of the ancients, refused to perform any strict imitation of Greek or Roman
art, postmodernism seeks precisely to resurrect the past in the present.
Paradoxically, this displacement is incoherent, but today this incoherence is
intentional and sought out, as we see the old modernist shock techniques of the
surrealists are far from obsolete.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: It is obvious that you have more affinity with modernism …

CHARLES ROSEN: I was raised on modernism, in literature, in painting, in music.

Modernism gave me the idea that there were worlds to explore. One said there
was no progress in art, that the plays of Shakespeare are not better than those of
Sophocles, but modernism also contains its own conception of progress: the
conviction that in creating something new, you can arrive at a deeper knowledge
of art and the world. The great modernist artists, writers, and composers attribute
a function of scientific investigation to art. The fundamental principle of
modernism that painting and music introduce us to a discovery of new aspects of
reality issued from Romanticism and already existed at the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Isn’t postmodernism interested in exploration and

discovery?

CHARLES ROSEN: Very little. Postmodernism denies that the world is apt for infinite
exploration and affirms that one must repeat what has already been done. My
friend the art historian Henri Zerner explained this evolution in painting in the
following way: before modernism, one believed that by representing the world,
one explained nature and history. Art was made of symbols and forms that had
meaning; the painter gave meaning to the world by representing it. Modernism
abandoned these forms and references; art became more and more abstract but it
kept its meaning. Only the references to the real world were disrupted, or at least
so loosened, that meaning was released through the painting itself.
Postmodernism proceeds inversely: it keeps the references and discards their
meaning. In classical architecture, columns, capitals, frontispieces not only have
their function but a very precise ideological significance. Modernism no longer
saw the point in preserving the language and forms of classicism, but it retained
signification and its function by creating new forms. Postmodernism preserves
classical forms and language but strips them of meaning: frontispieces are no
longer placed above entryways but lower down, columns don’t hold anything up
… you can see all this in Bofill’s Quartier Antigone in Montpellier. The architect
proclaims that here is a classical work in a rejuvenated version; it is a willfully
frivolous statement. And so, we discover at the center of a courtyard, two
columns supporting nothing, with no building attached!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Postmodernism uses quotations; in painting or in

architecture, it has recourse to collages. Composers of postmodern music do the
same thing. Do you fault them for that?

CHARLES ROSEN: No, composers have always quoted other works, the device is not
new. It is a tradition that goes back to the fifteenth century: a composer would
quote an entire song by another composer and add voices to make it into a mass.
What interests me particularly are quotations that announce themselves as such,
conscious quotations of which we are made aware. From Schumann onward,
quotations are used to convey something from the past, a distant or foreign
element. For example, I am thinking of “Florestan” in Carnaval where Schumann
quotes a phrase from one of his own works, Papillons. The quotation is a totally
irrational irruption and the listener is confused: a little scale has come brusquely
to disturb the surface of a rather passionate piece of music. This returns but is
again interrupted by the same citation, extended this time, and we recognize the
melody of Papillons. Schumann later wrote on the score, “Papillion?” The
question mark is neither a personal note nor a simple indication; it is a directive to
the pianist. The quotation should be played with a certain perplexity, as if asking
where it came from; one should bring out its slightly troubling aspect. This
quotation is then integrated into the work, and the procedure is very modern on
Schumann’s part: in the contemporary period, with Stravinsky, with the use of
collage, this type of quotation plays a highly significant role. In Jeu de cartes, a
very important work whose style is unusual in Stravinsky’s oeuvre, the quotations
of Rossini, La valse by Ravel, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are plainly
emphasized as such, but each one is cut up, adapted in an interesting way to the
style of Jeu de cartes.

With postmodernism, quotations take on a deeper and more disturbing

significance. The ideology of modernism was that art joined the great tradition
through its novelty and originality. As Proust said, the artist maintains tradition in
destroying the previous style, in accomplishing a work of destruction. This belief
has disappeared. Artists and composers try to attach themselves to the past in
another way. In the works of Berio, for example, the quotations appear like ghosts
from the past; they integrate themselves into the music but remain pale and
denuded of their original vitality. These ghosts are nevertheless evoked to affirm
the connection between postmodern music and the grand classical tradition. Like
Bofill’s columns! This is typical of postmodernism: citing the classical and
draining it of meaning. Modern architecture did the reverse: replacing columns
with new forms that had the same structural and decorative function. It thus
extended the classical tradition in a different fashion. Today, architecture claims
its attachment to tradition only by references to the past.

It may sound as if I am condemning the entire postmodern movement! In fact,

postmodernism is interesting when it becomes playful and mixes several
languages, ancient, modern, and the postmodern, in order to modify their
meaning. Then the style opens up and becomes fun. I am thinking of the splendid
buildings by the Californian architect Frank Gehry: they are very witty.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So, according to you, Gehry escapes the traps of

postmodernism?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, because he exploits the tension between different styles with
elegance and humor. His own house in California is an old house whose
traditional style contrasts brutally with the new wings that he added. And yet, the
old and the new are imbricated: it is difficult to tell where the recent parts begin.
It is very clever; one enjoys the play of contrasts. Gehry does not evoke the
elements of classicism in an empty way: he creates a provocative tension between
different styles in order to create something new.

One might say, then, that postmodernism is a more or less harmful movement (as
perhaps all movements are), but an exceptional talent can escape its traps.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: You are saying that all movements are unhealthy. There’s a
hypothesis that calls for some evidence!

CHARLES ROSEN: No, I take back what I said! They are not all harmful. One
movement is not the same as another; they can be evaluated. You cannot say that
impressionism and neoclassicism are equivalent movements. No, on the contrary,
some movements are more idealistic than others; they don’t aspire to change art
but society as well. It is still necessary to separate the great creators from the
imitators and epigones. Some movements rest on a doubtful ideology, but an
exceptional practitioner can still draw a creative force from them.
CATHERINE TEMERSON: The difference between modernism and postmodernism is
clear in painting and architecture. But what is it in music?

CHARLES ROSEN: The composers who identified themselves as modernists were

convinced that by creating new languages, they were creating new types of
meaning. This was the conviction of Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky. It is that of
Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez. Lately that conviction has disappeared.
Postmodern minimalist composers believe that there cannot be any new
meanings. Rather, since the old meanings have lost almost all their power, these
composers repeat the forms and empty them of their significance. In Stimmung by
Stockhausen, a ninth chord, always the same, is sung for an hour and a half, two
hours, until we are no longer conscious of the precise meaning of that chord in the
tonal system. The chord itself has been kept, but without retaining its earlier
signification. The hypnotic effect prevents the genesis of new meanings; only the
repetition of the same chord in the end gives the impression that some meaning
must exist, imprecise and diffused. In this respect, postmodernism actually
resembles Romanticism, which makes meanings diffuse and centrifugal.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How do you explain the appearance of postmodernism in

music?

CHARLES ROSEN: It has the advantage of simplifying music when it had become
very complex. The compositions of John Cage or Philip Glass create a sort of
neutral musical “surface” and place on it, at intervals, some classical formulas
stripped of their original meaning and of the function which they had in the tonal
system. That is interesting momentarily, but one quickly perceives that this is an
impoverished music.

Movements that have aimed to simplify are not lacking in the history of music.
The works of Satie, for example, represent a protest against the complexity of
music in his time. Those of Debussy also. As he said during a performance of a
Beethoven symphony: “Ah, the development is starting, I can go out and smoke a
cigarette!” But Debussy replaced the complexity of motivic development with a
complex hierarchy of sonorities.

Satie, a little like John Cage, is exemplary. The persona is more interesting than
the work, even though there are, all the same, some very good things in Satie, like
his Trois morceaux en forme de poire. In Socrate, the first parts bore you to death,
but the last part, the death of Socrates, is very moving. Nevertheless, the structure
is the same as in the first parts: the groups of four measures follow each other in
an absolutely rigid fashion through the entire piece, an ostinato that lasts four
measures, followed by another ostinato that lasts four measures, and so forth; but
with the words of Socrates, it is very moving.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What composers and works interest you most?

CHARLES ROSEN: What interests me most (not at all the same thing as what I like
best) are the works which are, according to the definition of composer Brian
Ferneyhough, at the hinge between two styles. The composer writes always in the
old style but in a way that already indicates the arrival of a new style. I find these
moments of rupture and transformation interesting. Composers always bring
something new to a given style, to the point that the style begins to fall apart, the
structure collapses, and the earlier style ceases to exist. It is a little like the theory
of catastrophes in mathematics: when one brings an excess of new elements to a
style, it becomes disorganized, it won’t function anymore. This is the moment
when a “catastrophe” occurs, to use the term of René Thom: a new style
constitutes itself. This can happen during the life of a composer, or at certain
periods. Around 1850, for instance, what one calls the first Romantic period
reached its apogee. That was when Brahms found a way to reestablish the grand
classical forms. For the composers who preceded him, Schumann or Chopin,
sonata form presented difficulties; for those who succeeded him, it became again
a source of inspiration. Brahms succeeded in incorporating imitations of Haydn
and Mozart into a completely modern music. He introduced a clear change of
style.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is there a composer during the classical era who played a
role comparable to that of Brahms?

CHARLES ROSEN: It’s Haydn, because he established, with Johann Christian Bach,
the forms that Mozart will use. The modifications by Mozart are of a different
nature. From the age of nineteen, with his Piano Concerto in E-flat Major, K. 271,
he transformed the classical concerto. He creates a new conception of the
concerto. The opposition between the orchestra (the tutti) and the solo is much
more marked by him than by other composers. But in this concerto of 1775, he
scrambles the contrast between orchestra and piano: instead of having the
orchestra play for one or two minutes before the entry of the soloist, he has it play
for two seconds. After the sudden and unexpected entry of the soloist, the
orchestra returns for two seconds, and the soloist makes a second entrance. Then
he retires and the orchestra continues. Mozart upsets our expectations, he
surprises by momentarily abolishing the contrast between orchestra and soloist,
which eventually reinforces it with brilliant effect. And this is inevitable, because
from the moment a distinction is established, there will always be someone to
abolish it! What is interesting in Mozart’s concerto is that each entry of the pianist
is a surprise: he always enters in the middle of what we believe is the orchestra’s
part. When the orchestra finishes the second ritornello, the pianist enters in the
middle of the chords of the final cadence, and interrupts them with a trill. Every
entrance of the piano is an intrusion! In fact, Mozart wants to underline the
difference between piano and orchestra, but he starts by scrambling the contrast
between the two so as to stress to what extent this is an artifice which he willfully
imposes. This is something that he will not repeat until much later, in the Piano
Concerto in C Minor no. 24, K. 491. At the end of the first movement, after the
piano cadenza, when we are expecting the orchestra’s, the piano interrupts the
final section of the orchestra and begins a kind of coda with the soloists of the
orchestra: a string quartet with woodwinds. This ends on a very unusual and very
striking sonority.

Beethoven imitated Mozart in his third, fourth, and fifth concertos for piano. In
the third, the piano does not leave the last word to the orchestra as tradition
required; in the fourth, it is the piano which plays first, before the orchestra; in the
fifth, the first chord of the orchestra is interrupted by the piano. In this way, in his
greatest concertos, Beethoven, too, reinforces the contrast between the orchestra
and the soloist by disrupting it.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Did writers who were contemporaries of Mozart and

Beethoven also manipulate forms and genres?

CHARLES ROSEN: I can think of three striking examples. In Jacques le Fataliste,

Diderot, Mozart’s contemporary, intervenes already on the first page to announce
that it’s up to him whether we (the reader) have to wait one, two, or three years
for the story of Jacques’s love affairs! Ludwig Tieck’s play, The Land of Upside
Down, written at the same time as the first works of Beethoven, begins with the
epilogue: one of the characters comes on stage and asks the public whether they
enjoyed the play. Finally, in Puss in Boots, also by Tieck, the author comes on to
argue with a stagehand, complaining that his text has been altered. Another truly
remarkable scene shows us the Cat, his master, the king, the princess, and the
entire court; they are getting ready to play in front of the Palace of the Fairy
Carabosse when the Cat says, “Damn! They put up the sets for The Magic Flute!”
The orchestra attacks the trial by fire and water, and the Cat and his master start
playing Tamino and Pamina.

Another example: in the second volume of the novel by Clemens Brentano,

Godivi, written in 1801, the hero is walking along with the narrator; suddenly he
exclaims: “Ah! there’s the pond you fell in on page 146 of the first volume.” Then
the narrator dies, and the characters in the novel finish the story, to which they
add some poems in memory of the narrator.

Such practices, in literature as in music, herald a change in style, the coming of

Romanticism. The writers begin by liberating themselves from established
literary conventions and mixing up the genres: the dramatic genre, the narrative
genre, essay, poetry, travel account.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Twentieth-century literature also breaks with the

conventions …

CHARLES ROSEN: Proust, for example, breaks with the conventions of the novel. In
letting the reader assume that his narrator might be named Marcel, he invites us to
ask what, in his work, relates to the novel and what to his own life. Among recent
works, one might mention the plays of the dramatist Alan Ayckbourn. In one of
his plays, two households are represented simultaneously on stage; the furniture
of the two living rooms is placed in the same stage space, but it is easy to tell the
difference because one household is much more prosperous than the other. The
second act of the play is a real tour de force. The same couple of guests eat at
both households, and the two dinners, on two successive days, are played on stage
simultaneously; at the end of each meal, the same character is completely soaked
(in one, soup is thrown in his face; in the other, the plumbing fails).

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Hasn’t this kind of joke been used forever?

CHARLES ROSEN: Of course, but during the periods called classical one limited
oneself to modifying established forms; there, it is often the actual foundations of
dramatic art, music, or painting that are exploited, stripped, and questioned.
Mozart can well play with musical forms, but he doesn’t attack music itself. That,
on the other hand, is exactly what Schumann does: in the cycle Dichterliebe,
Schumann wrote willfully mediocre music to accompany a cynical poem. A
young man is madly in love with a girl, she loves another, he is brokenhearted,
it’s the most banal kind of story … Mahler doesn’t do anything different: he
introduced vulgar melodies into his works at the most serious moments.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Was there some satirical point in this?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, but the composers who preceded them would never have
introduced this type of satire into a serious work. Mozart did indeed write his
Musical Joke, but it is a separate work. The music is bad but it is still pretty. In
the fugue, he introduces stops at each entrance, just what you must not do in a
fugue! At the end of the slow movement, during the cadenza, the violin plays
wrong notes. The section finishes in a frightful cacophony, but it must have
pleased, at least the composer! What is curious is that one always finds this kind
of precedent: Mozart is joking; later, one writes the same dissonances, but now
they are taken seriously. This is a stylistic revolution. Writing a cacophony
because it’s funny is no big deal; writing one because it’s beautiful is to change
the course of music!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: You have just explained that, in one of his works, Schumann
unmasks and calls into question the foundations themselves of music. Is this
typical of the Romantic movement? What do you think are its most interesting
characteristics?

CHARLES ROSEN: Romanticism is not a style but a project. The Romantics

abandoned the idea of the center in art: they brought out the value of what had
been considered marginal. They overturned the hierarchy of genres. In music, the
genres considered secondary replace monumental works: cycles of melodies
(Schubert’s Winterreise or Schumann’s Dichterliebe) are just as much
masterpieces as the St. Matthew Passion. The development of the lied as a major
art form is incontestably one of the most important outcomes of Romanticism: the
song has always existed, but never before had it attained this status and this
degree of depth. One could say the same thing about dance music—the polonaises
and mazurkas of Chopin. His last work, the Polonaise-fantaisie, is magnificent;
before he existed, such a work was inconceivable. The same upheaval occurs in
painting: Constable and Caspar David Friedrich turn away from traditional
subjects to paint landscapes with no historical or religious context, landscapes
that speak directly to the viewer. The impressionists also attached themselves to
landscape, urban scenes, daily life. The cycles of paintings by Monet, Haystacks,
for example, are a kind of epic, comparable to a cycle of songs …

The relation between musical conception and its realization in sound began to
change at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When, in the eighteenth
century, Mozart transformed his Octet for Wind Instruments into a string quintet,
he didn’t change a note. The fact that the piece is interpreted by stringed
instruments has no impact. In his work or in that of Scarlatti, the sonority of
instruments is interpreted within conventional structures. Sonority itself as a
predominant structural element is a later development. Beginning with Schumann
and Liszt we begin to see a new conception of music based on issues of register
and on the valorization of various instruments. It is a rather modern idea: to
overturn conventional structures in order to focus on instrumental sonority.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is there any equivalent to this new exploitation of sonority

in painting?

CHARLES ROSEN: Very slowly, over the course of the century, painting loosens its
tie to reality. Figurative painters paid more and more attention to the facture of
painting, to the material; this is already evident in the canvases of Delacroix and
Courbet. Abstract painting is born, in part, from this emancipation of facture.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Let’s go back, if you don’t mind, to Romanticism. In your

Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1980, you made a connection between the lied and
representations of landscape in literature and painting.

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, because almost all the cycles of melodies, those of Schubert,
Schumann, Beethoven, are cycles of landscapes. And, if you analyze the
descriptions of landscape written toward the end of the eighteenth century, in
poems, tourist guides, or scientific works, you perceive that they evoke two levels
of time. Poets and writers chose a precise moment in the present in order to reveal
the traces of the past, the memory of private feelings, or the description of
geological traces always visible in landscape. Beethoven and Schubert are the
first composers to find a way to represent these two levels of time in music. At
the beginning of Schubert’s Winterreise, you have a poem about memories: the
poet leaves the city carrying the bitter memory of an unhappy love affair. The
rhythm is that of the walk (the present), while the stinging emotions (the past) are
marked by accents and dissonances on weak beats. Past and present are
represented simultaneously. Schubert’s lieder often owes its quality to this double
evocation. At the same time, quite precisely, landscape painters attached
themselves to capturing the present moment and the passage of time—a fleeting
luminosity, the effects of erosion, old trees … Constable, for example, chose a
moment of unstable illumination to represent the cathedral of Salisbury, at the end
of a rainstorm and a few seconds before the return of full sunshine.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Do you see other connections between music, painting, and
literature in the Romantic period?

CHARLES ROSEN: The fragment is a typical Romantic form that we find first in
literary works, which makes its appearance in music by 1825. It also exists in
painting. In music, these are works that seem to begin in the middle of a
development and do not have a real cadenza at the end. Thus, the melody of “Im
wunderschönen Monat Mai” from Schumann’s Dichterliebe ends without
resolution, on a dominant seventh chord. There are many examples of fragments
in German literature, in the works of Schlegel or Novalis. I could also mention
Hölderlin, Hyperion, which ends with the phrase “Mehr nächstens” (“to be
continued in the next letter”). Between 1780 and 1820, all of Europe started to
write fragments. The same tendency is found in art, especially in the work of
Caspar David Friedrich. We discuss this in detail in the book that I wrote with
Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is the impact of Romanticism still felt today?

CHARLES ROSEN: Oh yes, to the extent that critics continue to overturn established
hierarchies and reevaluate what was previously thought marginal. A playwright of
farces like Feydeau was considered a minor writer; he is now recognized as the
greatest dramatist of his time. Cinema at the beginning was considered a marginal
amusement: today, it is considered one of the most important art forms.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Might then our own times be Romantic?

CHARLES ROSEN: It lasted as long as artists believed that it was possible to create
something entirely new and original, more exciting and more stimulating. It isn’t
here anymore because the belief has disappeared. Of course, it might always
come back.
 4
Performance

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Criticism should adopt the point of view of the composer.
Shouldn’t the performer do the same?

CHARLES ROSEN: You raise a problem there that greatly preoccupies me, that of
fidelity to the score. The answer is not obvious: the interpreter can show himself
perfectly faithful, play all the notes exactly, and give a bad performance.
Inversely, he can introduce a few changes to the score and produce an
interpretation that is entirely faithful to the composer’s ideas. My ideal is
performers who show imagination while rigorously respecting the score.
Musicians who change the tempos, the dynamics, the accents, the phrasing, may
get interesting results sometimes, but all too easily. It is much more difficult to
keep, as Schnabel and Solomon do, to the composer’s tempos, dynamics, and
phrasing, while giving the impression that you are improvising, creating the work
as you play.

In any case, as Schnabel said, there is no definitive performance: a Beethoven

sonata will always be superior to any performance of it. There are several ways to
adhere to the score: they lead to completely different interpretations.

It is, in fact, the tension that exists between text and execution that is interesting;
it disappears when the performer strays too far from the score. The whole
difficulty is there: how to manage to play in a very personal, very inventive way,
but adhere completely to the text.

The notion of fidelity is related to the myth of authenticity: Should the performer
envisage a piece of music as an independent structure, outside of any historical
context, or should he attempt to recreate the interpretation of the period when the
music was written? This is a dilemma that animates a lively polemic today.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Where do you stand in this polemic?

CHARLES ROSEN: Unfortunately, I fall between the two opposing camps. I think it is
important to have historical knowledge, to be able to situate the composer in his
epoch, to know the instruments of his time, and the performer ought to draw on
that knowledge in his playing. Music has always been made for diverse
interpretations. In the eighteenth century, there were French ways and German
ways of playing. That is no reason to find a French performance of a work by
Bach unacceptable! Later, we know that Brahms was perfectly content to hear his
symphonies conducted by French conductors. It has been said that this or that aria
in an opera by Handel was composed for this soprano or that tenor, but there were
always replacement singers who made it possible to hear the same aria, sung
differently. It completely falsifies the function of music to pretend that only a
single historical interpretation exists, immutable and definitive.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is it possible to know exactly how pieces were played in the
past?

CHARLES ROSEN: We know more or less precisely how they were played in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have recordings beginning in the
twentieth century. But recordings don’t change anything. When we listen to
recordings of modern music made in the nineteen twenties, it is clear that the
performers did not always understand how to play the music of the time. It takes
ten or twenty years to learn to play music written in a completely new style. A
work that revolutionizes an entire musical tradition requires the musician to
question his ingrained ways of playing.

Often the composers themselves did not grasp all the implications of their own
works and did not know exactly how they should be played. Béla Bartók was a
revolutionary composer and a very great pianist; he played with a relaxed grace
that was very lovely. But in performing his own works, he did not bring out
certain details that other pianists were able to render better than he. When you
play Bartók, you need to recover his grace and add precision, realize a sort of
synthesis … This is what is being done more and more today with all the works
from the twenties, thirties, and forties.
CATHERINE TEMERSON: So the musician would be wrong to try to reproduce a
period interpretation?

CHARLES ROSEN: He would be mistaken to attach himself blindly to the current and
sometimes doubtful state of our knowledge. You are more often mistaken by
adhering to the score precisely than by using common sense. For example, in all
the editions of Beethoven’s “Appassionata,” op. 57, including the first, there was
a mistake in the printing: a ritardando (rit.) instead of a rinforzando (rin.). It was a
mistake by the first engraver. You should therefore play more loudly, not more
slowly. A number of pianists, very serious and very respectful, have followed the
printed instruction. Those who were less humble understood right away that the
ritardando was nonsensical. Regarding the Sonatas op. 31, Beethoven complains
in a letter, with nothing more specific, that the dynamic indications were badly
placed in the printed score. The pianist has three possible options: he can play as
he wants and ignore Beethoven’s intentions; he can commit errors by blindly
following the printed indications; finally, he can interpret the sense of the music
and try to reconstitute the proper dynamics.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: If there are imprecisions in a contemporary work, can’t the

performer settle the matter by consulting the composer?

CHARLES ROSEN: Not always. I went to consult Stravinsky once when I was
preparing to record the Serenade and Sonate because I was convinced there were
printer’s errors in the score. So I showed him the text of the score to find out if, at
a certain place, it was actually an F sharp and not an F natural. He studied the
score for a long time, unable to give me an answer! It was obvious he didn’t
know. And who knows if the answer that he finally gave me was the right one? I
later learned that before my arrival he had called his friend Alexei Haieff, a
Russian American composer born in China, to admit his concern at the prospect
of being questioned by a young American about a work he could no longer
remember! Alexei must have calmed him by assuring him that I was not that
formidable a person …

It is clear, furthermore, that the autograph scores by some composers, above all
those by Debussy and Schoenberg, are teeming with slips of the pen.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Let’s go back to this notion of authenticity. If I understand

you correctly, for the performer, historical truth is not a desirable objective?
CHARLES ROSEN: Let us take the case of Bach. Some of his works, like The Well-
Tempered Clavier, were not conceived to be played in public. Now, we play them
in front of audiences for whom we should make them interesting and intelligible.
In The Well-Tempered Clavier, the theme is very often hidden, but if you play it
without trying to make it heard, as Bach surely did, the audience is going to be
lost. It was difficult to bring out a hidden voice with the instruments of Bach’s
time, the harpsichord and the organ. On the contrary, on a modern piano, if you
privilege each entrance of the theme at the expense of all the other voices, you
deform the fugue, because the whole point of a fugue is not the theme, which one
has already heard, but the combination of the theme with the other voices. You
need to find a proper balance between making the theme heard clearly but not too
clearly, in order to transmit the sense of the work to today’s audiences without
being pedantic.

The same problem arises with literary works. Knowing who the model was for
cousin Bette will not make your interpretation of Balzac’s novel more interesting,
because its significance does not depend on these kinds of details. You can even
say that the fact of knowing that Balzac’s mother was the model for his heroine,
the archetype of the old maid, can in the end distract us from the meaning of the
novel. That said, a satisfactory interpretation will neglect entirely neither Balzac’s
personal life, nor the influences of his time, nor the sense that his work had for
him and his contemporaries. But the good reader will give his own personal,
contemporary interpretation—that is what the author would have wanted. The
writer expects the reader to appropriate his work and expand upon the necessarily
limited meaning he might himself have given to it; he writes to enrich the life of
his contemporaries and those of future generations. What I am saying here is
banal, but, strangely, often forgotten …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How much latitude should the stage director of opera allow
himself? Some, like Peter Sellars, Patrice Chéreau, or Jonathan Miller, take a lot
of liberty with traditional staging.

CHARLES ROSEN: I find productions that exactly reproduce the staging of the times
tiresome. But those which depart completely are often perverse. I am thinking of
the first staging by Peter Sellars of an Orlando by Handel where the characters
wore somewhat dirty camping shorts: baroque opera tends to imply instead great
elegance in the costumes and settings.
Chéreau has the rare talent of knowing how to direct his singers and actors to
perfection. It is completely stunning and the effect is sublime. In his stagings,
however, certain choices are inexplicable to me and divert my attention: the little
mechanical bird in a cage in Siegfried adds nothing to Wagner; the second act of
Lulu is supposed to take place in a small, closed, opulent, and confined sitting
room, but Chéreau puts it on a huge staircase between the coatroom on the ground
floor and the festival hall above, with an embarrassing result—when Dr Schön is
murdered, I saw policemen coming down the staircase. I wondered if they were
among the guests at the party!

I thought Jonathan Miller’s Rigoletto was very successful: he transposes it to the

fifties, in a mafia neighborhood of Brooklyn. In an inspired invention, the tenor
puts a coin into a jukebox and out comes “La donna è mobile.” This is completely
in the spirit of Verdi; he knew this aria would immediately become very popular.
People said at the first performance that it gave them the impression of having
always known it.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: In certain cases, it seems to me that the stage directors take
liberties in order to refresh works that have become too familiar. In a general
way, doesn’t the fact that music lovers have recordings affect their relation to
music?

CHARLES ROSEN: In the nineteenth century and even at the beginning of the
twentieth, music lovers in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States
amused themselves playing symphonies with four hands on a piano. They formed
a more enlightened public than today because the practice required the active
participation of amateurs, familiarized them with the details of a work, and, above
all, made them aware of the difference between the text of the score and its
realization in sound. Unfortunately, the consequence of recorded music is that the
listener assimilates the composition to its particular realization in sound.
Although recordings have enlarged the musical horizon of our contemporaries,
this identification is frankly detrimental. And in the case of the cult of “authentic”
music and performances using period instruments, we arrive at a paradoxical
“authenticity”: in concert the instruments go out of tune after a quarter of an hour,
which means that all the chords are false; they are only correct in the recordings
because the players stop constantly during the recording session to retune their
instruments! Eighteenth-century authenticity thus exists only in recordings!
Actually, the seventeenth-century public was already complaining about tuning
problems. We find Saint-Évremond making the following observation: “Opera is
very beautiful for the first ten minutes; afterwards, it’s horrible!”

CATHERINE TEMERSON: This fashion for authentic music is still causing

contradictory debates.

CHARLES ROSEN: The fanatics of authenticity have a tendency to forget that even
the greatest composers did not know exactly how their work would sound when
played. Handel, for instance, knew that singers would add ornaments (trills,
mordents) to his composition. But he could not know exactly which ornaments
would be added to his melodic structure; he could only have a vague idea because
the singers had a choice among several conventions. When he composed the arias
of an opera or an oratorio, he was above all conscious of its musical structure—
that seems obvious to me. One can go so far as to justify a performance without
any ornamentation (or with few improvised ornaments), providing it is beautiful.

I like to compare Handel’s arias to Turner’s mezzotints. He executed preliminary

etchings which were meant to be completed in mezzotint. Before giving over the
copper plates to the mezzotinter, Turner pulled several impressions of his etchings
and gave them to his friends. He must therefore have found them beautiful.
Nevertheless, they are unfinished works, lacking the “ornaments” or the tonal
gradations that the craftsman would add based upon the watercolors that Turner
would send to him along with the copper plates.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So you are saying we can sing Handel’s arias without
ornaments even though this was never done in the eighteenth century?

CHARLES ROSEN: If we find it beautiful, we should not deny ourselves the pleasure!
But I would not advise it. On the whole, it is best to be prudent: in certain
passages, convention required a specific ornament and no other, without any
ambiguity; the melodic profile there is so thin that the composer would be very
vexed to hear it without ornaments. At the time, the singers were directed not to
mask the original structure, not to deform the contours, but I can assure you that,
when composers themselves added ornaments, they hardly paid any attention to
these precepts. Because the moment you add ornaments, it is the ornaments that
become interesting and not the structure!

In sum, when we perform the works of Handel, we need to think about what he
wanted to be heard and what interests us today. But again, there is no irrefutable
and definitive interpretation as recordings lead us to think. The problem of
ornaments aside, we need to remember that Handel changed his arias according to
the singers involved and their vocal capacities. Today, it is usual to be content
with two or three appropriate singers.

It often seems to me that the fanatics of authenticity are passionate about rules
and suspicious of musical inspiration. Instead of reflecting on the music, they
apply their knowledge of conventions and old instruments. Their performances
are pretentious and modest at the same time: they are confident of their
knowledge but too humble to interpret the music themselves. I know pianists who
play Mozart adding two or three little ornaments to show that they know this was
done in the eighteenth century. Adding a few little trills and arpeggios isn’t even
authentic; at the time, one added lots of ornaments or almost none. If you want to
be admired for your ornamentation, you will want to deploy as many as possible:
the music will tolerate a lot of them, as in an adagio by Handel, or none, as in an
allegro by Mozart. In fact, it is just when a piece already has enough ornaments,
that you can feel free to add some more …
 5
Physical Pleasure, Intellectual Pleasure

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What is it that distinguishes the pleasure of analyzing from

the pleasure of playing?

CHARLES ROSEN: Playing an instrument is a physical, muscular pleasure. No one

becomes a pianist unless they feel an intense pleasure in moving their fingers,
above all in bringing them into contact with the keys.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: To produce sounds?

CHARLES ROSEN: No, you experience the sounds in an interior way. You imagine
them. This is one of the great difficulties in teaching piano: the student must learn
to listen to himself. One does not need to listen to oneself to play the piano! The
violinist cannot dispense with it: he needs to know if he is playing the right note.
But the pianist knows by touch if he has hit a false note. Curiously, he even
knows this a millisecond before he strikes the key. For the pianist, being able to
listen to oneself can be a constraint because the muscular pleasure of playing is
satisfying in itself! One knows the music but one translates it into gestures,
without listening to the sound. Obviously, imagining the sounds contributes to the
pleasure of playing, but the main pleasure is the physical contact with the
instrument.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So, it is when one experiences this pleasure that one
dedicates one’s life to it?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, when this pleasure becomes a physical need. Nobody says to
himself: I will become a pianist. One says: I couldn’t bear to do anything else!
This physical need is decisive, because the pianist’s profession is not particularly
agreeable: you are always traveling, but without seeing anything but hotel rooms
and the inside of concert halls. You can’t do any tourism or go to museums,
because it’s too tiring. You spend an inordinate amount of time with the tuners
and technicians in order to improve the sound of the pianos that you find on-site
… No, decidedly, if there were not this physical need, you would choose another
profession. As far as pleasure is concerned, however, the piano is a particularly
satisfying instrument: you can play alone, and you control everything.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Can you be more precise about the relation between
muscular pleasure, gesture, and music?

CHARLES ROSEN: Keyboard music has a kinesthetic side. The placement of the
arms and hands is eloquent in itself. The tension of the hands and the muscular
sensation evoke the expressive content of the music as much as the notes do.

In Chopin’s expressive passages, for example, the harmonies are such that the
hand of the pianist is stretched; the form that the hand takes stresses the emotion
expressed by the music. The pleasure of listening to Chopin cannot compare with
the pleasure of playing him, of feeling through the tension in your hand, that you
are experiencing the intensity of your own emotions as well as those of the
composer. In fact, the emotions of the composer seem to transfer themselves to
the body of the performer. Chopin taught students how to play the chromatic
scales pianissimo with the three last fingers of the hand, without the index finger
and thumb; this was a practice that guaranteed a very soft sound because it is
harder to play loudly with those fingers, but it also increased the delicacy of
execution because of the physical sensation experienced by the performer when
using his weakest fingers.

The pleasure of music can be independent of sound, but it is rarely independent of

musical meaning. In Schumann’s “Des Abends,” one passage is played with the
thumb of the left hand placed over the thumb of the right hand. Each hand obeys a
different rhythm marked by the thumb: the right hand plays in three-four time, the
left in two-four. The pleasure of crossing the thumbs is linked to the musical
meaning of the passage, because the thumb of the left hand encroaches on the
rhythm of the right hand: while it is placed over the thumb of the right hand, it
sometimes strikes the second note played by the right hand. The result is a rhythm
that resembles the continuous ringing of bells. This effect of encroachment, the
significance of which is communicated physically to the pianist, simply cannot be
appreciated in all its plenitude by the listener.

In Liszt’s “La Campanella,” the pianist must constantly fling his hand to the other
end of the keyboard in order to produce the sound of the bell. This quasi-acrobatic
gesture procures a visual pleasure, but also a muscular pleasure, that of always
hitting the right note. Assuming you don’t miss it, of course!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So, there is something athletic in the pleasure of conquering

a technical difficulty?

CHARLES ROSEN: The pleasure of succeeding is neither intellectual nor purely

musical. One shouldn’t underestimate the importance of this “athletic” pleasure,
nor the competitive aspect of the performance: to play faster or louder than others,
to master difficult rhythmic effects … This aspect of music develops beginning in
the eighteenth century, as soon as music becomes an art for the larger public.

I have been told that in Vienna three pianists, Emil von Sauer, Leopold
Godowsky, and Moriz Rosenthal, competed to surpass each other in playing
Chopin’s Black Key Étude: Sauer played it perfectly; Godowsky played it with
the famous passage of octaves glissando, which is both difficult and painful; and
Rosenthal played it glissando with each hand moving in the opposite direction!
One also knows of rivalries among pianists to play Schumann’s Toccata as fast as
possible. In the thirties, Simon Barere managed to record the Toccata on a disk of
25.4 centimeters: he slowed down only a little for the most difficult passages!
Pianists have also amused themselves adding technical difficulties to scores.
Godowsky arranged Chopin’s Études for the left hand, which triples the
difficulty; Brahms deliberately made one of Chopin’s etudes virtually impossible
to play by adding thirds and sixths.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, one began to compose pieces that
are painful to play: some of Chopin’s etudes work the muscles so hard that some
pianists have to transcend their pain when they play them. We also have the
reports of his students whom he advised to stop working as soon as playing
became too painful. It’s the length of his etudes that is the chief problem. The
difficulty is to sustain the effort after the first two phrases. That is the reason that
Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini, which requires just as much
virtuosity, is short.
When you teach piano, you must teach students to relax their muscles when they
play; it’s much more important than the position of the hands or how you sit at the
piano: these vary from one pianist to another. All the same, though, this muscular
tension contributes to the emotional expression of the music. The physical effort
gives pleasure to the performer: he is like an Olympic runner!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is there any way of sharing the physical component of

performance?

CHARLES ROSEN: I think the pianist should translate this quasi-athletic tension so
the public can be aware of it. I don’t mean by moving around on his bench or
mimicking the difficulty; on the contrary the difficulties should be overcome with
ease but remain perceptible. Some passages lose their effect if they look too easy
to play: a great leap in a melody, for example, when the pianist imitates vocal
music to pass from a very low note to a very high one. If the phrase is played too
rapidly, its expressivity is diminished; you need to give the impression that the
leap requires an effort.

Emotion is often linked to difficulty: Chopin’s most intense passages are

generally the most difficult to play. The performer should maintain the feeling of
difficulty to allow the public to identify themselves with his playing. Virtuosity is
always a matter of expression.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Are you saying that virtuosity should always be in the
service of expressivity?

CHARLES ROSEN: No, I want to say that virtuosity is expressive in itself. When a
composer like Chopin resorts to virtuosity, it is because it is expressive in a very
particular way. The performer needs to bring out the natural, intrinsic expressivity
of the music. Obviously, we sometimes hear virtuoso passages played in a flat,
blind manner that brings out nothing at all!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is this physical pleasure linked to the unique properties of

the piano?

CHARLES ROSEN: It is not surprising that the nineteenth century should have
become the great century of piano music. The piano permits the dynamics to be
communicated and establishes a direct tie between the body of the pianist and the
sonority of the music. Other keyboard instruments—the organ, the harpsichord—
can’t accomplish this: whether you strike the keys of a harpsichord hard or not,
the sound remains the same.

On the other hand, the violin or the cello provide the pleasure of sustaining notes
and of changing their sonority while they are sustained. At the piano, once you hit
the note, the sound dies more or less rapidly; you cannot do a crescendo on a note
that has already been played. You also do not have the pleasure of vibrato.

Violinists and cellists therefore enjoy an even greater intimacy than pianists with
their instrument, so much so that they only play their own instrument and are very
attached to it. A pianist, today, has to be content with the pianos that he finds on-
site. In the old days, in the nineteen twenties, pianists travelled with their own
piano, even for concert tours overseas. Today, that is simply too expensive.
Horowitz, who was a little afraid of playing an instrument that wasn’t his own,
was the last one with large enough fees to allow himself this luxury. From the
thirties on, even Rubinstein, when he played far from home, had to accept that he
could no longer travel with his piano. However, in the thirties, the technician
traveled with the pianist and completely adjusted the mechanics of the piano a
few minutes before every concert. Then we were still in the glorious age of the
piano! In principle, one should do as much today, but for economic reasons it is
no longer done.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Does music exist if it isn’t performed?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, one can take pleasure in interpreting it mentally, reading it
without hearing it, like poetry. It’s a pleasure of imagination, like that of reading a
play and imagining the spectacle.

You can even enjoy finding musical relationships without imagining the sound;
it’s a secondary musical pleasure, spiritual and intellectual, of pure reflection.
There are effects of counterpoint, for example, very difficult to hear or understand
as heard, but which are completely apparent and comprehensible when you study
the score. Musicologists are indignant at the idea that some aspects of music can
give pleasure without being audible. They are convinced that anything not audible
cannot be music.

Today we have trouble understanding that, before the twentieth century, music
was the fruit of mental work the sonority of which could be imagined in diverse
ways. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was written for organ, harpsichord, or
clavichord, and also for the new pianoforte that had just been built and which
Bach promoted for its principal German maker. Now, in fact, there is almost no
similarity in the sound of these four instruments: the organ sustains all the notes
like a wind instrument; on a harpsichord the strings are plucked; the clavichord
allows for a vibrato on the plucked string; while on a piano the notes are hit by
hammers and the initial sounds are much louder but short-lived. Nevertheless, it
is always the same fugue or the same prelude; this music exists independently of
the sonority in which it is invested.

In an essay that I wrote on period instruments, I said that it is false to believe that
the music of the Renaissance and the fifteenth century existed only in relation to
the instruments of the time. Music was always more abstract; it existed as a
system of pitches independently from the sonority and timbre. What is even
harder for us to understand is that written pitches were not absolutely fixed; not
only were they ornamented, but also subject to interpretation through the tuning
of the instruments. At the time, there was no universal A. A in Vienna was not the
same as A in Paris. These modifications led to extremely varied performances.
Nevertheless, we can’t say that the piece didn’t exist. It had been written down,
the thought had been established: it could bring pleasure beyond any execution.

I think it is time to enlarge our conception of music and recognize that it brings at
least two pleasures, one muscular and the other intellectual; neither is directly
linked to hearing!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: So much for the pleasure of interpretation. And what about
writing, analyzing?

CHARLES ROSEN: The pleasure of analysis is situated halfway between the pleasure
of playing and that of hearing. The critic shares with the performer the desire to
bring out certain aspects of a work; he doesn’t tell the performer how to play, he
suggests a way of listening. But listening and playing are reciprocal activities: to
understand the expressive value of a work, the listener needs to be able to place
himself in the place of the performer.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Can one love music without having any musical
knowledge?

CHARLES ROSEN: One can say that, in music, pleasure and understanding are almost
identical. In fact, what music analysis does serves only to account for the
pleasure. This reminds me of the eternal question: are language and thought
identical? It is the same thing in music. Schlegel said that they seem identical as
long as they function properly. As soon as they don’t, one realizes that they are
not.

I recall what Milton Babbitt always said when he didn’t care for a work: “I don’t
know what he’s up to.” There are pleasures that you refuse yourself. Myself, I do
not want to make the effort to understand the music of César Franck: I prefer to
find it incoherent; I refuse to abandon a judgment that prevents me from taking
pleasure in Franck’s music, or of understanding it as Franck himself must have
understood it. On the other hand, certain incoherencies are pleasing to me, those
of Schumann, for example, that I can justify logically. While I love the atonal
music of Schoenberg, so much do I strongly disapprove of the corrupted tonal
music of Franck, his chromatic rambling in a void without a tonal center. It may
also be because he was the organist at Sainte-Clotilde … I have a very secular
conception of music; I don’t like religious music of the second half of the
nineteenth century, with the exception of Verdi. I find the religious music that
Liszt composed at the end of his life difficult to bear; I don’t dislike the Brahms
Requiem as much, but it is not his best work. I do have a certain respect for
Fauré’s Requiem.

In any case, from the nineteenth century, the requiems are always more interesting
than all the other religious works. It would seem that only death could inspire the
composers. It is a subject that I talk a lot about in a book I wrote on Romantic
music. I have a whole chapter on Mendelssohn and the invention of religious
kitsch.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: I suppose that you don’t care for religious music of our own
time either. What do you think, for example, of Messiaen’s music?

CHARLES ROSEN: Well, his music has a self-righteous side that I really dislike. All
the same, Messiaen is certainly a very great composer, admired by musicians of
great sensibility. He is a revolutionary, the inventor of a new form of composition
based not on the development but on the juxtaposition of sonic blocks. Boulez
was much inspired by Messiaen’s music and appropriated his techniques.
However, I love Boulez’s music because he invents sonorities that are delicate,
sophisticated, and interesting, whereas Messiaen’s are too simple. Even when he
invents an entirely new sonority, he tends to immediately abuse it too much, so
that it becomes quickly banal through his repetitive way of using it. But, as I have
already said, there are musicians for whom I have the greatest respect who adore
Messiaen’s music. I tell myself that I am wrong, and they are surely right. My
lack of enthusiasm for the work of Messiaen is obviously a sign of ill will.

It was Goethe who is said to have declared, I don’t like anything Egyptian, and
I’m glad; one should not just love everything with moderation! They say that you
can’t argue with taste, but actually it is facts that you can’t argue with. People
only really fight over questions of taste!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Anyway, Messiaen is perhaps the only religious composer

of our times. Do you have an explanation for that?

CHARLES ROSEN: There is the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten. Always death.
It’s a work I hate.

No, I have no explanation. Anyway, I think I have said enough about this. It’s a
dangerous subject that easily gets people worked up.
 6
The Role of the Performer

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Do you think there is a modern way to interpret Chopin,

Brahms, or other composers?

CHARLES ROSEN: Of course. Interpretations change; our experience of Chopin is

affected by contemporary music, and our way of playing is clearly influenced by
this. What has been said of Glenn Gould’s interpretations of Bach is true: he was
very influenced by Stravinsky’s music and by the entire neoclassical style; this
was not necessarily a conscious influence, by the way. But it is inevitable: our
way of playing is always influenced by what surrounds us, by cultural changes,
and by the stresses of life …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Have some interpretations passed out of fashion?

CHARLES ROSEN: It is difficult to say, for example, if Paderewski’s way of playing,

with the left hand always preceding the right, is out of fashion. It was certainly
not unusual to do so, but it would be wrong to say that everybody did it. Only a
few pianists, like Paderewski and Harold Bauer, went about playing this way, but,
for example, Josef Hofmann did not (or very rarely), nor did Wilhelm Backhaus,
who played a great deal in the twenties. On the other hand, it is certain that
Mozart sometimes played this way. One cannot really use terms like “out of
fashion” and “modern.” Some ways of playing come back. The rubato is very
important in Mozart; this means for him that the left hand must play before the
right hand. Like a singer seized by emotion, one had to hesitate before making a
melodic note heard; that was the idea. Some pianists, like Paderewski, made it a
little mechanical. Others just stopped doing it altogether.
It is easier to say that the style of Mengelberg, his tendency to distort the tempos
for expressive effect, is outdated. To our ears, this incoherence in the tempo
sounds very exaggerated, but it already was for a large part of the public in the
thirties. Toscanini and his partisans contested this manner of conducting. You
have to be careful not to identify any practice too strictly with a given period.

One used to say that the Romantic pianists of 1830–1840 played most freely.
Actually, according to eyewitnesses, that was not completely true. Some played
with great liberty, others, on the contrary, were opposed to any liberty of tempo.
We have a review by Berlioz of a concert where Liszt played the Hammerklavier,
op. 106 by Beethoven; according to Berlioz, not a single note was missed, no
tempo was changed. Liszt brought out the challenge of this work and played it
keeping strictly to the rhythm. One knows from anecdotes that Liszt could play
with or without liberty according to the circumstances; everything depended on
the piece, the occasion, and the result sought by the performer. He explained it
himself: when he wanted to play Bach in an authentic way, he did it with
exactitude; when he played it for himself, he allowed himself more imagination
and rhythmic changes; when it was for the public, he played, as he said himself,
“like a charlatan.”

CATHERINE TEMERSON: With time and reflection, do you tend to change your way of
playing certain works?

CHARLES ROSEN: When I approach works that I have always played and the scores
of which I know by heart, I must sometimes rethink them and undo my old habits.
I am often more doctrinaire today. I play the first movement of Beethoven’s
Hammerklavier allegro and not allegro maestoso or allegro pomposo. I play it
faster and above all more lightly, because it is a true allegro, an expression of
energy. Just because it is a very great work is no reason to play it ponderously;
one should play it like most classical works, with a certain lightness of touch, but
also with suppleness, slowing a little at very expressive moments without actually
changing the tempo.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Have you become more conscious of the aesthetic norms of
each style?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, for example, the aesthetic at the end of the eighteenth
century required one to keep the same tempo throughout the movement of a
sonata. As long as there is no indicated rhythmic rupture, it is also good to keep to
this convention in playing Romantic works.

You can allow yourself greater flexibility with Beethoven than with Haydn, but
not so much as to deform radically the tempo in the course of a movement. In the
twenties, some orchestra conductors, Mengelberg among them, always slowed
down at the moment when the second theme of an allegro made an entrance in a
classical symphony. They were following a widespread tradition, but one not
shared by all musicians: not only did it go against the aesthetic of the period, but
also against Beethoven’s conception of the unity of his work.

In truth, the exigencies of tempo vary with each composer. The case of Schubert
is especially complex. You should give the impression of a unified tempo, all the
while changing it imperceptibly. You have to establish a reference point that
unifies the relationship between tempos that are slightly different. In his Piano
Sonata in A major, it is, in my opinion, impossible to play the development at the
same tempo as the exposition, which is very dynamic and should be played
energetically without making it emphatic; on the contrary, the development is
almost entirely pianissimo and nothing happens, except a kind of oscillation
between C minor and B minor. You must respect the spirit of the music itself and
even imperceptibly slow down in order to evoke an impression of wavering,
suspended time. It is the opposite of the exposition where the feeling of the
passage of time is clearly marked.

In the music of Schumann, the rubato, that is, a change of tempo in the middle of
a phrase, shouldn’t be prepared for as in Beethoven: it should surprise and bring
in an irrational element. On the other hand, in the works of Chopin, the rubato
should be integrated into the tempo and create a continuity. These are two
different conceptions of rhythm at the same period: Chopin and Schumann were
born the same year, in 1810, and they died seven years apart!

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Are students taught to take account of these different

exigencies?

CHARLES ROSEN: There is a current tendency to play Mozart the same way as
Chopin and Schumann. Mozart’s articulations are shorter than those of
Beethoven, and much shorter than Chopin’s. One of Mozart’s articulations rarely
lasts more than a measure while Chopin’s can be prolonged over sixteen, twenty,
thirty measures or more. Mozart is more chopped up than Beethoven and
Beethoven more articulated than Chopin. In conservatories, students learn to play
Mozart with an agonizing legato, as if it were Chopin. They even abuse the pedal,
forgetting that in the time of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the particular sound
of the right pedal was used to contrast with the somewhat dry sound without the
pedal and that, even on period instruments, Haydn’s indications for the pedal
produce a very blurry sound. The paradox is the following: in using the pedal
tactfully in Haydn’s music, you go against the spirit of his music. You need to use
the pedal excessively when you use it and alternate these passages of rich sonority
with others that are drier and more neutral.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How did these principles come to be badly taught?

CHARLES ROSEN: There is an ideal of what a beautiful sound should be that pianists
adhere to without discernment and use for all works, whether they are by Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schoenberg, or Stravinsky … Yet, certain works
demand a less beautiful sound, less melodious legatos. When Mozart said that he
wanted a passage to flow like oil, his conception of oil was not the same as that of
Chopin! With Mozart, continuity is managed through clearly marked
articulations; with Chopin, continuity affects all possible articulations except
when he wants specific effects. In Mozart, you bring out the articulations, while
the rhythm must remain fluent; the phrase is united in its totality while the
sonority is jerky. In Chopin, you must in general keep a flowing sonority from
beginning to end.

While you often hear a beautiful sonority applied indifferently, I have had to
suffer the consequences of the inverse prejudice during a recording session at the
ORTF (French National Radio). The previous day, I had recorded some
Schumann and that had gone very well. We started to record Schoenberg and, as a
test, I played a page; I listened to it. It was frightful! Perplexed, I asked for an
explanation and the sound engineer explained to me that he changed the
placement of the microphone for contemporary works in order the get a more
modern, dryer sound. I had to explain to him that I wanted to record the
Schoenberg with the same Romantic sonority that he had been able to get for the
Schumann, a preference that Schoenberg himself would have shared, perhaps in
opposition to Stravinsky. The engineer was very nice and gave me the Romantic
sonority that I hoped for.
CATHERINE TEMERSON: What, according to you, is the principal role of the
performer?

CHARLES ROSEN: He should make manifest the most interesting qualities of the
work. Remember what Montaigne said: “La ressemblance ne faict pas tant, un,
comme la difference faict, autre” (“Resemblance does not unite as much as
difference opposes”). One of my students once paid me a great compliment by
declaring he understood how I went about playing: I try to find the most bizarre,
the most radical, or the most personal element in a work in order to bring it into
relief right away. Perhaps I do tend to emphasize the originality of procedures too
much, although I also make every effort to integrate them into the whole. What
most pains me are musicians who glide over the strange aspects of a work.
Unfortunately, in conservatories, the teachers often seek to flatten the works, to
underline their conventional aspect rather than bring out their singularities.

Let’s take Schumann’s Carnaval: in “Paganini,” the left hand is syncopated and
should, according to the composer, play fortissimo, while the right hand plays in
time and should play piano. Now, ninety percent of pianists play the right hand as
loud as the left. The effect that Schumann asked for is spoiled: he wanted
precisely to trick the listener and surprise him at the moment when the two hands
are playing together pianissimo, so revealing the actual tempo of the piece. But, in
any case, alterations of Schumann’s texts by editors and pianists are notorious …

Look at the subito piano of which Beethoven was the great master, a crescendo
growing louder and louder that suddenly becomes very soft. It’s a very important
rhythmic effect, a negative accent one might say, that can be very theatrical and
expressive. What bothers me are pianists who play this effect correctly but
summarily, in a tepid way. It should be dramatized a little. We come back to
something I said before: a good musical interpretation should transmit the
meaning and expressivity of the procedures, render them audible and graspable.
In this respect performance can resemble a kind of analysis.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Can you cite some other examples of singular procedures?

CHARLES ROSEN: Between the ages of forty-two and forty-seven, Beethoven found
it difficult to compose. From this period, he left us only two sonatas for cello, two
sonatas for piano, one overture, a cycle of songs, and a quartet. That might be a
lot for another composer, but for Beethoven, who until then had written four or
five important works a year, it was not much. During this period, he created what
we may call the Romantic form, or cyclical form, a configuration in which the
theme of the first movement is taken up again near the middle or at the end of the
piece. This is the case of the Piano Sonata op. 101 and the Sonata for Cello and
Piano, op. 102, no. 1, in which the theme of the first movement comes back,
surprisingly, before the last movements.

But the two pieces share another characteristic. In the classic form of the sonata,
the form that ruled all the pieces in the eighteenth century, one began in the tonic
and moved to the dominant. In Sonata op. 101, instead of establishing the tonality
of A major, he begins the sonata right in the middle of the process of transition
from the tonic (A major) to the dominant (E major). In Sonata, op. 102, no. 1, he
has recourse to the same procedure in a more subtle fashion: the cello begins all
alone with a melody that seems to have started sometime before the beginning of
the sonata. The cellist should therefore be careful not to play this melody with too
much firmness: if it seems to establish the tonality, or a theme, everything is
spoiled. It should rather be played in a meditative fashion, like a tune from the
past that one is remembering. If he plays too slowly, in too expressive a fashion, it
becomes too emphatic, like the affirmation of a well-defined beginning. The
tempo is andante: you should not play six short beats but two long ones. Often the
performances I have heard do not bring out this aspect sufficiently. It isn’t
necessary to have analyzed it. It is enough to feel it or compare it to the
beginnings of other sonatas. One cannot but notice the ambiguous and unfocused
character of this one. It is essential not to erase this character but instead to bring
it out.

I get the impression that Beethoven is one of the composers

CATHERINE TEMERSON:
with whom you have the most affinity. Am I right? Who are your favorite
composers?

CHARLES ROSEN: Usually when people ask me that, I answer that in concert I get as
much pleasure playing Chopin, Mozart, or Bach as I do playing Beethoven, but
when I practice, it is Beethoven who gives me the greatest pleasure. For example,
the left hand, or the accompaniment, in Beethoven is more interesting than in
Mozart, although the two composers are equally interesting when you don’t have
to work on the accompaniment alone.
Actually, my preferences change. I have a tendency to concentrate on the work of
one composer: I have had Schumann periods, periods of Chopin, Debussy periods
… When I was recording The Art of Fugue and the Goldberg Variations I was
passionately attached to Bach; when I was preparing the recordings of the last
works of Beethoven, he was my favorite composer; then I became attached to
Chopin during the whole time I was recording his mazurkas and ballades. I like
giving concerts devoted to a single composer; but it isn’t always possible. Not all
audiences care for that …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is it difficult in concert to adapt to the exigencies of

different composers?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, and we touch here again on the very intimate relationship
that exists between musical meaning and physical effort. You become extremely
conscious of this when you have been playing the work of one particular
composer and, suddenly, you have to play a piece by a different composer from
another period. At the time when I was playing a lot of Beethoven, it was hard for
me to play Debussy: it’s a different physical approach to the piano; you have to
place your hand differently, deploy a completely different technique …

When you play Mozart, Debussy, or even Schoenberg (descended as he was from
the tradition of Brahms), you need to keep to the classic Romantic style and round
out the phrases, creating graceful curves; when you play Stravinsky, Boulez, or
Carter, the point is precisely to avoid this kind of well-rounded phrase and style of
execution that no longer makes any sense.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Do you feel a greater liberty when you play contemporary
works?

CHARLES ROSEN: You are obviously less tied to tradition. The passage of time
brings constraints. When you play Schumann or Chopin, you have to struggle to
make your own voice heard, your own interpretation. The public is expecting to
enjoy the music; you need to shake them up a little bit for them to perceive the
originality of Chopin or Schumann: you need to deny them their expectation and
show them that the music is more dramatic, more beautiful, but also may be less
pretty than they thought.

For contemporary works, you yourself are laying the foundations of a tradition;
you need to render the works understandable and invite the public to discover an
unexpected pleasure. But you are also sometimes influenced by the intentions of a
living composer, who might listen to your performance of his work.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: But you have already said that the composer is not always
sure of his intentions …

CHARLES ROSEN: He, too, needs some distance. But it is interesting all the same to
hear his reaction. It is also useful, because there are always aspects of a recent
work that are not obvious. Curiously, though, instead of reacting to the whole, the
composer is often preoccupied with tiny details that seem insignificant, little
passages that he has never heard played as he would have wanted.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Are there works right now that you would particularly like
to perform again or perform for the first time?

CHARLES ROSEN: I would have liked to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D major,
K. 537, which I have never performed. I used to undervalue it a little until now. I
hadn’t understood that it could be interpreted in a more intimate way, dispensing
with the drums and all the wind instruments.

There are works that I enjoy playing again because now I conceive of them
differently. Now, when I perform the Diabelli Variations, I follow the theme with
a long pause, to indicate clearly that it is not by Beethoven, and that the true
beginning of Beethoven’s work is the first variation. The theme itself is trivial,
while Beethoven’s variations are sublime, with humorous asides when he makes
fun of the theme.

It often happens that I discover new aspects of a work and change my

interpretation. For a long time, I followed tradition in playing the first page of
Beethoven’s Sonata op. 111 twice as slowly, that is, taking the maestoso four
times slower than the allegro which follows. But this maestoso, like most
introductions, should only be played at half of speed of the allegro because it ends
on a trill of thirty-second notes which, at the opening of the allegro, transforms
itself into a trill of sixteenth notes.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How do you explain that the wrong tempo became
traditional?
CHARLES ROSEN: Because this is a great tragic sonata, and this exaggeratedly slow
beginning set the tone. I am going to do a new recording where I will interpret it
correctly, and I expect some severe criticism for it.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What difference is there for you between a recording and a
concert?

CHARLES ROSEN: The great difference is stage fright. Even the greatest musicians
have it: I have seen Rubinstein’s hands trembling at the beginning of a recital, and
it is said that Rosa Ponselle, one of the greatest singers of all time, was so afraid
of stepping onstage that she had to be pushed forward. You always have stage
fright at the beginning of a performance but you learn to master it. This is what
distinguishes the amateur from the professional: they both have stage fright, but
the amateur shows it and the professional hides it. My teacher, Moriz Rosenthal,
used to say that it was the only enlightened moment in an artist’s life! The joke is
funnier in German because the word for stage fright is “Lampenfieber” and
“Lampen” are stage lights.

The playing of virtually all musicians gets better in the course of a concert as they
gradually get rid of their stage fright. The only striking exception was Heifetz: I
heard him start a recital at the Palais de Chaillot with Strauss’s Sonata and he
played it like a god in spite of the great difficulties of intonation this work
presents!

During a recording session, one is prey to the inverse evil. You begin with
complete calm and confidence. And then you play. You listen and you are not
happy with the result. So, you play it again. And disaster: you made the same
mistake at the same place! Little by little you become gripped by anxiety …

But I don’t play any differently. Maybe I am abnormal: I knew a pianist, Julius
Katchen, who claimed that as soon as he stepped onstage he looked for a
sympathetic face in the hall and he played the whole concert for that person. I
don’t do that. It may sound pretentious, but I believe that one doesn’t play for the
public or the applause but for the music. You play at your best and are very happy
when this pleases the public.

Although the performer must play expressively, it would be wrong to say that he
“expresses himself” through the music. In his performance he tries to create an
object. An ephemeral object if this is a concert, a more durable object if it is a
record. This object is marked by the personality of the performer and by the way
he thinks but you can’t read his secret thoughts or the events of his life in it.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: In The Classical Style you say: “ ‘Expression’ is a word

that tends to corrupt thought.”

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes, music is an independent creation, it does not express the
experience of its composer or performer. The only difference is that in concert,
you can dare to offer a more extreme interpretation than for a recording, an
interpretation good to hear once but which would not be interesting to repeat
several times. During a recording session, therefore, one tends to reject the takes
that present too radical, eccentric, surprising, or at least mannered an
interpretation. Maybe. Perhaps this is a mistake … I respected this precept for my
first recordings, but today, I would much rather put more radical interpretations
on a record.

The pleasure of a recital is that it offers an opportunity and you should seize it.
Recording a record is doing and redoing; it’s work! But this is made up for by the
joy of obtaining more or less perfectly the result you wanted.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: When you play in public are you always conscious of the
audience?

CHARLES ROSEN: When you play to the limit of your capacities, you forget the
existence of the public. When you record a disc, you don’t think about who will
buy the record or about the sound engineer behind the window in the studio. You
hope to create an object that will be valued, accepted, and even loved, but you do
not play for the larger public, for the critics, or for the connoisseurs. Well, maybe
for the connoisseurs …

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Don’t records permit the creation of a somewhat deceitful

perfection?

CHARLES ROSEN: You cannot make a good record with a bad musician. You can
correct false notes, that’s all. If you correct too much, the recording loses all
rhythmic coherence. I have had the experience of listening to a record and hearing
a splicing: I couldn’t tell you exactly on what note it was done, but the telltale
change in tempo or sonority tells me clearly that it happened between this and that
measure. Very good musicians can manage to get around this: their splicing is not
audible. I know from Columbia Records that Serkin recorded the Diabelli
Variations in several sessions in New York and others in Los Angeles, and in spite
of this the recording is excellent.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is analysis useful when you are playing with other
musicians?

CHARLES ROSEN: No, not particularly. When you play with other musicians, you
need to find an equilibrium between two styles of execution and arrive at a fusion
of personalities. When you play with an orchestra, you have to adapt to a
preexisting situation, and that has an enormous impact on the soloist’s playing.
But you react instinctively, without analysis.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Have you ever found yourself in disagreement with the
conductor’s interpretation?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes. If that happens, though, the disagreement is rarely explicit.
You try to adapt. There are situations that sometimes require a good deal of tact to
surmount your desperation … You can’t impose your own will nor quarrel: that
would certainly result in a bad performance. It is better not to insist … It
happened that while I was playing a Mozart concerto, I asked the conductor if he
would be willing to ask the violins to match their phrasing to mine. His answer to
me was that these weren’t phrasings but bowing indications. I then asked him
why these “bowing indications” were in the piano score. Actually, I was wrong to
want to explain myself to him because he didn’t understand what I was talking
about.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: How did the recording of Webern’s L’Intégrale with Boulez
go?

CHARLES ROSEN: At the beginning, Boulez came to all the recording sessions. He
was there for the recording of the Three Songs when I accompanied Łukomska.
Later he gained some confidence in me and let me work alone with Isaac Stern
and Heather Harper. As for the bits for cello, with Piatigorsky, these were
recorded without him. In addition, at the session with Piatigorsky, the producer let
us down, and I had to edit the tracks all by myself. Never had I had such a thing
happen and never since …
CATHERINE TEMERSON: We have talked a lot about great German and Viennese
composers. Who are your favorite French composers?

CHARLES ROSEN: The French composers often occupy a somewhat marginal place,
but Debussy is the great exception, the great universal composer of the twentieth
century. I made the very first recording of his Études, and later I made a record of
his Estampes, Images, and other pieces. Berlioz, also, interests me a great deal.
But he didn’t have the technical mastery of Chopin, who knew Bach’s music
inside out, while Berlioz found it boring. In some of his works, like The
Childhood of Christ and Romeo and Juliet, there are sublime moments but also
dead passages. In spite of everything, he has left us some very great works.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What do you mean by a “marginal place”?

CHARLES ROSEN: I mean that in almost all the countries of the world, the larger
public has assimilated the great tradition, whether it is Italian opera or German or
Viennese eighteenth-century music, a tradition that was continued by Romantic
composers, many of them German. Of course, Liszt and Chopin were as much
French as German or Polish; Picasso is a similar case. Chopin is certainly not a
marginal composer! We can say that France played a preponderant role. But it is
undeniable that in the nineteenth century the German tradition maintained its
status in symphonic music, just as for opera the great tradition is Italian. It is only
from this point of view that French composers have a marginal status. Ravel, for
example, is a composer whom I admire enormously; I also have a profound
admiration for the last works of Fauré: his last quartet, the Sonata for Cello and
Piano in G minor … But outside of France, neither Ravel nor Fauré have the
same status as Schubert or Schumann, not to speak of Bach or Beethoven. The
great exceptions are Debussy, and Stravinsky, a very French composer at heart
and the greatest composer of our century after the death of Debussy. Well,
perhaps not greater than Schoenberg, but his music is certainly more fun; I
suppose one could say, more interesting.

These are the kind of judgments that I don’t like making. I don’t particularly like
measuring the prestige of creators. There are works that are not of the first
importance, according to the criteria that I just mentioned, and for which I have
more enthusiasm and passion than for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The greatness of the French tradition goes back to the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. It is inseparable from the Flemish tradition. Pierre de la Rue is almost
as great a composer as Josquin des Prez. There is a whole tradition that we are
rediscovering: Janequin, Lully (Italian, of course, but just as French as Picasso!),
Charpentier … It’s a shame, for example, that Méhul is so little appreciated today,
even in France. His first works are very original; all the same, the only opera of
his that is played is his Joseph, which is certainly the most tiresome. His great
work is Ariodant, but unfortunately we never have a chance to hear it.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: There is a great Viennese we haven’t spoken about: Mahler.

CHARLES ROSEN: His reputation has changed. In my youth, his music, which I like
a great deal, was not much appreciated; it was considered excessive and
overblown. He owes his popularity to the phenomenon of the virtuoso conductor.
His music makes the talents of conductors shine and some, about whom I have
mixed feelings, owe their career to him.

At the most sublime moments of Mahler’s music, the sound formed only by low
and very high notes, becomes a little hollow, expressing a bit of hysteria, a kind of
despair. It is somewhat embarrassing, and Mahler himself was aware of it: he
reworked the great moments of his symphonies. When he went to see Freud, he
told him that one day in his childhood, his parents were quarrelling; he ran out
into the street where he heard a little commonplace popular tune (“Ach, du lieber
Augustin”) which was being played on a street organ. He attributed to this pivotal
event his tendency to add a bit of vulgarity to the most sublime moments of his
music. But what is interesting is that this trivial and ironic element compensates
for the grandiloquent side of his compositions.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: What do you think of electronic music?

CHARLES ROSEN: It is perhaps no coincidence that today there are two parallel
movements that aim to fix once and for all the interpretation of works: on one
hand, the musicologists who struggle to impose a rigid performance on the music
of the past, and, on the other hand, electronic music which produces fixed works.
These are very interesting novelties, but perverse. By making the performer
disappear for the benefit of the listener, they distort the function of music. Music
has always been written, above all, to give pleasure to those who play it rather
than to a public. Until now the public has had a minimal role in the development
of music. One should add that at the present time the most successful electronic
works are those, like Milton Babbitt’s Philomel, that combine electronic
recordings with musicians on stage. The mix is interesting, but pure electronic is
much less so. Anyway, does the public really want to go into a hall to watch
someone manipulating buttons?

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Do you think music will evolve more and more into the
electronic?

CHARLES ROSEN: Yes! For economic reasons: we get rid of the worker … But in
this case, music will no longer be what it has been up to now. It will be a new
music that has nothing to do with what we know. Our music will survive as long
as there are musicians who experience physical pleasure in performing it.
 Bibliography and Discography

CHARLES ROSEN
Books
1971 The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: Viking.
1975 Arnold Schoenberg. New York: Viking.
1980 Sonata Forms. New York: W. W. Norton.
1984 The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
1984 with Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art.
New York: Viking.
1994 The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music. New York: Hill & Wang.
1995 The Romantic Generation. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
1998 Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2000 Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2002 Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
2002 Piano Notes. New York: Free Press.
2010 Music and Sentiment. New Haven: Yale University Press.
2012 Music and Sentiment. New Haven: Yale University Press.
2012 Freedom and the Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
In addition to these books, Charles Rosen published numerous articles in various journals, magazines,
dictionaries, and encyclopedias: The Dictionary of Contemporary Music, The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, High Fidelity, Keynote, Musical Times, New York Review of Books, New York Times,
New York Times Book Review, Nineteenth-Century Music, Stereo Review, and Times Literary Supplement.
Recordings

1950 Martinů, Bohuslav. Sonata for Piano and Flute. Charles Rosen with Rene Le Roy, George
Reeves. (LP, mono) EMS 2.
1950 Haydn, Franz Joseph. Partita in F Major (Notturno, no. 4); Sonata for Keyboard no. 61 in D
Major, H 16, No. 51; Sonata for Keyboard No. 35 in A-flat Major, H 16, No. 43. EMS series.
1951 Debussy, Claude. Douze Études. R. E. B. Editions 6.
1951 Poulenc, Francis. Sextet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Piano; Trio for Oboe,
Bassoon and Piano. Fairfield Chamber Group: Harry Shulman, oboe; David Weber, clarinet;
Leonard Sharrow, bassoon; Harold Bennett, flute; Fred Klein, horn. R. E. B. Editions 7.
1954(?) Brahms*, Johannes. Variations on a Theme by Paganini, op. 35 (Books I and II); Valses, op.
39. Decca FST 133083.
1955 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Domenico Scarlatti. The Siena Pianoforte. Esoteric
Records ESP-3000.
1960(?) Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Sonata No. 32 in B-flat Major for Violin and Piano, K. 454;
Sonata No. 33 in E-flat Major for Violin and Piano, K. 481. Reinhard Peters, violin. London
LL 674.
1960 Ravel, Maurice. Gaspard de la Nuit; Le Tombeau de Couperin. Epic LC 3589.
1960 Chopin, Frédéric. Ballade op. 52; Scherzo op. 39; Polonaise op. 53; Mazurka, op. 6, no. 2;
Mazurkas, op. 50, nos. 2 & 3; Nocturne, op. 27, no. 2; Nocturne, op. 15, no. 2; Nocturne, op.
62, no. 1. Epic LC 3709 / BC 1090.
1961 Stravinsky, Igor. Movements for Piano and Orchestra. Columbia ML 5672 / MS 7054.
1962 Debussy, Claude. 12 Études (Books I and II complete). Epic LC 3842 / BC 1242.
1962 Schubert, Franz, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Schubert: Sonata in A Major op. posth., D.
959; Mozart: Rondo in A minor, K. 511. Epic LC 3855 / BC 1255.
1962 Carter, Elliott. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras;
Concerto for Violin, Cello, Ten Winds and Percussion. Leon Kirchner, Ralph Kirkpatrick,
Gustav Meier, Tossy Spivakovsky, Aldo Parisot. Epic LC 3830 / BC 1157.
1962 Carter, Elliott. Suite from Pocahontas; Piano Sonata. Zurich Radio Orchestra, Jacques
Monod. Epic LC 3850 / BC 1250.
1963 Schumann, Robert. Davidsbündlertänze; Carnaval. Epic LC 3869 / BC 1269.
1964 Liszt, Franz. Réminiscences de Don Juan (I & II) for piano, after Mozart, S. 418; Années de
pèlerinage, deuxième année: Italie, no. 5: Sonetto 104 del Petrarca S. 161; Hungarian
Rhapsody for Piano no. 10 in E Major, S. 244. Epic LC 3878 / BC 1278.
1964 Bartók, Béla. Improvisations op. 20; Études op. 18. Epic LC 3878 / BC 1278.
1965 Beethoven, Ludwig van. Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, op. 106, “Hammerklavier”; Sonata
no. 31 in A-flat Major, op. 110. Epic LC 3900 / BC 1300.
1965 Carter, Elliott. Piano Sonata; Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two
Chamber Orchestras. Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsichord; Gustav Meier, conductor. His Master’s
Voice ASD 601.
1966 Liszt, Franz, and Frédéric Chopin. Liszt: Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major for Piano and
Orchestra. Chopin: Concerto no. 2 in F-minor for Piano and Orchestra op. 21. John Pritchard
conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Epic LC 3920 / BC 1320.
1966 Virtuoso! Electrifying Performances of the World’s Most Difficult Piano Showpieces. Epic
3912 / BC 1312.
1967 Debussy, Claude. Piano Music: La plus que lente, Images (Books I and II), Hommage à
Haydn, Berceuse héroïque, L’Isle joyeuse, Estampes. Epic LC 3945 / BC 1345.
1968 Carter, Elliott. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras.
Paul Jacobs, harpsichord; English Chamber Orchestra, Frederick Prausnitz, conductor.
Columbia MS 7181.
1969 Bach, Johann Sebastian. The Last Keyboard Works; A Musical Offering: Ricercar in 6
Voices, Ricercar in 2 Voices; The Art of Fugue; The Goldberg Variations. Odyssey 32 26
0020.
1969 Haydn, Franz Joseph. Three Piano Sonatas: Sonata for Keyboard No. 33 in C minor, H. 16,
no. 20; Sonata for Keyboard No, 31 in A-flat major, H. 16, No. 46; Sonata for Keyboard No.
 32 in G minor, H. 16, No. 44. Vanguard VCS 10131.
1971 Beethoven, Ludwig van. Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli. op. 120. Symphonica SYM 09.
1972 Boulez, Pierre. Piano Sonata No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 3: Trope, Constellation. CBS 72871.
1977 Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Concerto no. 5 in E-flat op. 73, “Emperor.” Symphonica of
London, Wyn Morris, conductor. Symphonica SYM 10.
1978 Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Concerto no. 4 in G, op. 58. Symphonica of London, Wyn
Morris, conductor. Symphonica SYM 12.
1978 Webern, Anton. The Complete Works of Anton Webern, vol. 1: Five songs op. 3; Five Songs
op. 4; Four Pieces for Violin and Piano op. 7; Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano op. 11;
Four Lieder op. 12; Quartet for Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, Piano and Violin op. 22; Three
Songs op. 23; Three Songs op. 25; Variations for Piano op. 27. Pierre Boulez, conductor;
Heather Harper, soprano; Halina Łukomska, soprano; Isaac Stern, violin; Gregor Piatigorsky,
cello; Daniel Majeske, violin; Robert Marcellus, clarinet; Abraham Weinstein, saxophone.
Columbia Masterworks M4 35193.
1981 Beethoven, Ludwig van. The Great Middle Period Sonatas. (3 × LP + Box) Nonesuch
78010.
1983 Carter, Elliott. Night Fantasies; Piano Sonata. Etcetera ETC 1008.
1984 Schumann, Robert. The Revolutionary Masterpieces: Impromptus über ein Thema von Clara
Wieck op. 5; Davidbündlertänze op. 6; Carnaval op. 9; Sonata in F-sharp Minor op. 11;
Kreisleriana, op. 16; Dichtungen für das Pianoforte: First Version of the Fantasy in C major.
(3 × LP + Box) Nonesuch 79062.
1986 Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Sonatas op. 26, “Funeral March”; op. 27, no. 1; op. 27, no. 2,
“Moonlight”; Bagatelles op. 119. Nonesuch 79122.
1990 Charles Rosen Plays Chopin: 24 Mazurkas. (CD) Globe GLO 5028.
1990 Chopin, Frédéric. Polonaise-fantaisie no 7 for Piano in A-flat Major, op. 61; Piano Sonata
no. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 35; Ballade for Piano no. 1 in G Minor, op. 23; Ballade for Piano
no. 3 in A-flat Major, op. 47; Barcarolle for Piano in F-sharp Major op. 60. Music and Arts
609.
1992 Bach, Johann Sebastian. The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. Sony Classical SBK 48 173.
1995 Bartók, Béla. Sonata no 1, op. 21; Sonata no. 2. Sony Classical 64535.
1997 Carter, Elliott. The Complete Music for Piano. Bridge 9090.
Date unknown:
Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Sonatas nos. 27 & 29 (LP Album) CBS S 61173.
Beethoven, Ludwig van. Sonata no. 30 in E Major, op. 109; Sonata no. 31 in A-flat Major, op. 110. (LP,
Album) CBS S 61172.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Arnold Schoenberg. Stravinsky: Serenade en la majeur pour piano; Sonate pour piano;
Schoenberg: Klavierstücke, Suite für Klavier, op. 25. (LP Album). Columbia 33 FCX 973.
See also: 2014. Charles Rosen, The Complete Columbia and Epic Album Collection. (21 × CD + Box) Sony
Classical 88843014762.

CATHERINE TEMERSON

1973 with Hélène Clément. Catching Up with America: Economy and Civilization. Paris: Librairie
Belin.
1982 “Sol Yurick: An Interview.” Shantih: A Quarterly of International Writings. New York.
1985 Review of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, by Robert A. Ray. New York Times
Book Review, July 28.
1987 “French Literature in Birnbaum’s France,” Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
1989 “Mstislav Rostropovich–Nina Berberova: Duo d’Exil.” Vogue. Paris, December 1989–
January 1990.
1990 with Nathalie Robatel, Hollywood: petite histoire d’un grand empire. Paris: Éditions Eshel.
1995 “Sturm und Drang and Enlightenment in Literature and Music: Conversation with Charles
Rosen.” Revue Germanique Internationale, no. 3. Paris, January.