Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature [Hardcover]

Charles Rosen (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 23, 2012

Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work.

Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand.

Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity-for pleasure-is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.

Editorial Reviews

Review

You can get lost in the world of Charles Rosen. He's quite possibly the richest cultural critic writing today in the vastness of what he offers...As a formidable pianist and a professor emeritus of music at the University of Chicago, his principal jumping off point is, of course, music. But once he jumps, he lands into psychology, literature, science, philosophy, art---everything that's in the primordial humanities brew...He deals in mountains of knowledge, and he covers more ground with that knowledge than anyone writing today. The title of this collection does not lie: the power he imparts on you the reader will set you free. (Jimmy So Daily Beast 20120508)

Even those of us who admire Charles Rosen as the most remarkable critic writing today must be startled by the polymathy in his new collection, Freedom and the Arts...Just to see the spectrum provided by [his essays'] titles is to marvel: "Structural Dissonance and the Classical Sonata," "Theodore Adorno: Criticism as Cultural Nostalgia," "Lost Chords and the Golden Age of Pianism," "La Fontaine: The Ethical Power of Style," "Hofmannsthal and Radical Modernism." To read them is to marvel further: Rosen's communicative power is as prodigious as his versatility. Each essay includes so much more than its specific topic. Large-mindedness matters more here than scholarship; cleverness is simply incidental...No other living critic has produced a corpus that so fully exemplifies the virtues and achievements of civilization. It's easy to believe that we will need to keep revisiting Freedom and the Arts. As I turn in these pages from bygone traditions of dislocation (also known as asynchronization or limping) in piano playing to the connections between cruelty and eroticism in the Marquis de Sade, and from the sound patterns in La Fontaine's poetry to the skill of Niccolò Jommelli's setting of recitative secco in his opera Olimpiade, I can't help laughing in amazement. Who else in the world could make all these things lucid, sensuous, and important? ...We return to Rosen not to remind ourselves of his greatness but to come to a better understanding of Mozart's and Mallarmé's, to enrich our appetites for classicism, Romanticism, and modernism, and to deepen our love of music, literature, and civilization. Despite the casual disdain he often expresses for fools, his primary task is always to write about the art in which he takes pleasure. (Alastair Macaulay New York Review of Books 20120524)

[Rosen] is a writer who can write...One is reminded that Rosen is more than a musicologist. Not only is he a pianist, having recorded works from Bach to Boulez, but he also surveys with enthusiastic erudition a number of literary topics...The reader may rest assured of recommendation. If you know Rosen's work, you will doubtless require no urging; if not, then this is a good place to start. (Mark Berry Times Higher Education 20120531)

[An] astute new collection of essays. (Eric Herschthal Jewish Week 20120522)

Freedom and the Arts serves to enrich our appreciation, understanding, and passions of music, literature, and art...Freedom and the Arts embodies a corpus of creativity and achievement. Rosen leads readers through these pieces and eras and poignantly demonstrates the delicate features and everlasting joys we share when discussing and consuming art. (Elisabeth Woronzoff PopMatters 20120711)

Its scope, which touches on literature as well as music, is not only broad but invariably arresting. (Conrad Wilson Glasgow Herald 20120721)

An evident polymath, [Rosen] writes with equal grace and intelligence about the music of Mozart, the poetry of Mallarmé, and Adorno's aesthetic framework. The overlap of critical observation and playfulness is evident throughout...Rosen has plenty to offer disciplined readers and students of the arts. (Publishers Weekly 20120727)

Which critic could offer a witty defense of the Marquis de Sade's sadomasochistic writings, muse on why gays love Maria Callas and give a subtle analysis of 'Structural Dissonance and the Classical Sonata,' complete with generous musical examples? Only one: Charles Rosen. All these topics and many more appear in this brilliant, amusing and often moving volume of essays. The word polymath is overused, but Rosen is one writer who surely deserves the epithet. The whole of Western culture seems to lie stored behind his domed forehead, allied to a penetrating intelligence that makes critical adversaries quail… The thread running through [the essays] is the liberating power of great art and literature… [One] can simply enjoy this wonderful book, both for its glittering surface and its hidden depths. (Ivan Hewett Daily Telegraph 20120811)

For Rosen, greater knowledge always brings greater pleasure… When discussing pieces of music in Freedom and the Arts, he frequently illustrates his arguments by reproducing passages from their scores. He quotes poetry in French and German, but he does provide translations (often his own). In short, he expects his readership to be as cultivated as he is. It is a great compliment, as well as a shrewd pedagogical device. One finishes any book by Charles Rosen intellectually re-energized, eager to become a deeper reader, a more attentive museumgoer, a better listener. (Michael Dirda Washington Post 20120815)

Charles Rosen has always written from a height in the Earth's atmosphere at which the gas exchange is not the same as it is for most regular folk. That's the edification, fun, exasperation--and chill--of reading him. The latest collection of his writings, Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature, offers more communications from his particular beyond, yet collectively these pieces are not just bracing but pleasurable, revealing a personal, even affable side of Rosen...The scholarship and sheer range of knowledge in these essays are predictably dazzling. (Tim Pfaff Bay Area Reporter 20120830)

Offers clear evidence of Rosen's gifts as musical and cultural analyst...Many of the most compelling pages here reflect his profound understanding of, and insights into, writers as disparate as Diderot and Mallarmé, periods ranging from the reign of Louis XIV to the Second Empire, and digressions that include, say, tedium, boredom, and ennui as 'one of the great literary subjects after 1700, particularly in France.' ...Rosen packs more detail and insights into nine pages than most critics could manage in a study ten times that length. (Michael Morley Australian Book Review 20121217)

[A] brilliant collection of essays...Whenever I read Rosen's work, I think of all the dim space in my brain that is occupied irreparably by old 'Brady Bunch' episodes and the sexual politics of 'Three's Company'; in Rosen's brain these areas are occupied by Montaigne, the complete works of Congreve, rival translations of Rimbaud, etc. etc. He bestrides culture. (Jeremy Denk New Yorker 20121213)

About the Author

Charles Rosen was a pianist and Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 23, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674047524
• ISBN-13: 978-0674047525
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #419,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A new Rosen September 14, 2012

By F. J. Guijarro Pascual

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm fan of Rosen since the first time I came to read the spanish translation of "The Classic Style". Ever since them I have read whatever he has written, I have gone to his courses and conferences in Spain whenever he came... So probably this is not a very objetive review. "Freedom and the Arts" is a recopilation of Rosen's writings, mainly in The New York Review of Books. He speaks mainly about music, with some three or four chapters dedicated to Literature.
Of course, I'm more interested in the music chapters.
We find a lot of distint topics, all trated with great insight, as ever. Some ideas are reelaborations of old ideas by Rosen, some ideas are new. I find his style a bit more angry than other times, but maybe that's just an impression. Rosen has never been fan of the Early Music movement, but here his critics seem to me somehow bitter and not always justified (though I still think that he is very right when he deplores the fashion of the piano playing continuo in the introductions of Mozart's concertos).
One of the articles is dedicated to a polemic between Charles Rosen and James Hepokoski about the concept of "Structural disonance" in the Sonata Form. Since I love also Hepokoski's (and Darcy's) book on Sonata Theory, I was eager to read this article. I think that in it Rosen is more convincing defending his concept of structural disonance than when he speaks dislikingly of Hepokoski's method for analizing sonatas, and, for instance, he is quite unjust in his little apreciation of the concept of Maedial Caesura. Maybe that's becouse he speaks about another article by Hepokoski and not about his book with Darcy.
As ever, the anecdotes about himself or people he has met are very welcomed and most of the time very funny. I partuculary liked the one about Glenn Gould in the last article of the book.
(I apologize for my english... is easier to read than to write!)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Can you resist Charles Rosen? September 6, 2012

By Dobbs Franks

Format:Hardcover

Having had the joy and excitement of performing with Charles Rosen as the conductor with his playing Mozart and Beethoven (eight concerti) I always look forward to the next book that he spews out of that huge and extraordinary brain of his.

This book, which includes some old and some new, is truly wonderful to read. It is refreshing to read someone who is so honest and has no hesitation it saying exactly what he thinks.

It is one of those books which doesn't require you to agree with him, but in many ways dares you not to.

I loved every word, including those which I did not understand.

Do yourself a favor and read it NOW.

8 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another invaluable book from Dr. Rosen June 7, 2012

By Eric Wagner

Format:Hardcover

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I didn't want it to end. The chapters covered a wide variety of topics, mostly musical. I particularly liked the anecdotes about Josef Hofmann and other pianists Rosen has heard over his lifetime. I also really enjoyed the chapter on Mendelssohn which nicely complemented the chapter on Mendelssohn in Rosen's The Romantic Generation.