Customer Reviews

The Romantic Generation

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While I was studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music, it sometimes seemed that the professors chose only the most abstruse works of scholarship as their classroom texts. The worst example was a required text for a 20th Century analysis course, in which the author clearly had nothing to say, and merely strung along interminable chapters of the most irritating technical jargon. To add insult to injury, the campus bookstore stuck me for fifty or sixty dollars for this piece of academic trash. This text, and hordes of others like it, represents the poorest sort of scholarship. I often wonder what these writers hope to accomplish. I imagine their work must have some snob appeal, but education is too important, and life is far too short to waste time on this sort of foolishness. Imagine my elation than, upon discovering the work of Charles Rosen. I first read "Sonata Forms" in preparation for an analysis class I was teaching, and a little while later I read "The Classical Style," one of the very finest books ever written about music. Mr. Rosen has a lot to say, and his style has an engaging quality that would be the despair of many a young novelist. In fact he writes so well, that I frequently had difficulty in putting these books down. His points are well presented and amply supported with musical examples (a great challenge for the "inner ear" although I sometimes cheat and take them to the keyboard). I also enjoy Mr. Rosen's humor, which emerges at all the right moments. On the strength of these works, I devoured "The Romantic Generation" as soon as I could get a copy of it. This is a remarkable book. It maintains and even surpasses the depth of understanding achieved in "The Classical Style." Particularly with the inclusion of a breathtaking study of Romantic literature and painting, which does a very good job of showing the music in its context without going overboard into historical trivia. Mr. Rosen is (as always) very thorough. A special highlight of the book is its study of Chopin. Indeed, the Chopin section is so extensive that the other chapters seem a little cursory at first glance- especially the discussion of Mendelssohn. However, I'm sure this is just a reflection of my personal bias. So many great things are said, with such grace and wit about Liszt, Berlioz and Schumann, that I am reluctant to reiterate it in my own clumsy style, and can only commend to you the original. The only real criticism I have is that the enclosed CD is far too short. Mr. Rosen's performances have a clarity reminiscent of his prose, which is a real joy to hear. For all the penetrating analysis of the Chopin Ballades and the comprehensive study of the Mazurkas, it was odd to find him represented by only two Nocturnes. I was also sorry not to find more examples of the Schumann works: particularly the "Davidsbundlertanze." The Liszt examples though, were very well chosen. There was a time in my life when I felt as though there might be a book in me, I saw myself in the somewhat grandiose armor of a Crusader for Clarity in academic writing. It is a great relief for me, and fortunate for future generations, that Mr. Rosen has already accomplished this and henceforth I'll stick with playing the cello.

Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" is really written for people with a thorough grounding in music theory, but even with a limited understanding of harmony, counterpoint, and structure, I was able to derive much enjoyment from these essays.

Rosen's first love is obviously Chopin, and his three chapters on the Polish master are essential reading, I think, for anyone trying to master the subject. Rosen effectively explodes any lingering remnants of the charge that Chopin was incapable of handling large forms, or was an "untrained genius." He makes a convincing case for Chopin as the most assiduously trained and capable musician of his generation -- and it was not a generation of lightweights. The structural analyses of the Ballades (particularly the 4th) are excellent, but where Rosen really shines is in his examination of the Etudes and Mazurkas. In the former, he elucidates the Etudes' pivotal place in the history of concert music, and the interplay of theoretical composition and physical execution that they embody. In the latter, Rosen explores the Mazurkas as the receptacles of Chopin's most subtle, and personal, artistic accomplishments.

Other chapters are not always as convincing, but Rosen's examinations of Liszt, Mendellsohn, Berlioz, and Schumann all have their merits. After Chopin, Schumann is probably closest to Rosen's heart, and is given the most compelling treatment.

Published in 1998, Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" is an extraordinary erudite study of music, its performance, and its cultural history. The study was an outgrowth of lectures Rosen gave at Harvard in 1980-1981 and is a companion volume to Rosen's earlier book, "The Classical Style". The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded Edition) Rosen combines deep scholarship and love for music with his gifts as a concert pianist. He is Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

The focus of the book is on the great composers born roughly around 1810, including Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Meyerbeer. The book considers for the most part music written between 1827, when Beethoven died and the composers Rosen studies were reaching adulthood, and 1850. This focus excludes Brahms who, as Rosen points out, attempted to join the romanticism of his predecessors with a more traditional classicism.
Romanticism, as Rosen develops it, resists easy definition. But the following statement, in the Preface, suggests the scope of Rosen's analysis:

"The claim of artistic autonomy that was made for music, rightly or wrongly, by the late eighteenth century, was neither really upheld nor abandoned by the following generations: rather, an attempt was made to incorporate some of the artist's own life and experience into the claim of autonomy, to transform part of the artist's world into an independent aesthetic object."

The following is another short summation of Rosen's approach, taken from his concluding chapter on Schumann (p. 702):

"The malaise experience with large, unified Classical forms by the generation of composers born around 1810 testifies to a loss of faith and even of interest in the calculated balances and clear articulations that these old structures implied. It corresponds to a general loss of faith in purely rational systems, a mistrust of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Kantian certainties. Perhaps it also accounts for the fascination with insanity and the irrational."

This is a long, difficult book with many threads and byways. Rosen describes romanticism broadly by comparing and contrasting it with earlier classical and baroque styles. The reader thus gets a broad musical education in this work. that goes substantially beyond romanticism. Rosen also spends several early chapters developing the literary and artistic background that he finds necessary for the understanding of the Romantic Generation of composers. There are two chapters of the book dealing with musical theory in which Rosen explains how the Romantic Generation's musical language differed from its predecessors in terms of harmony and musical phrasing. Besides these broad approaches, Rosen's study is also extraordinarily detailed in places. He offers painstaking and thorough musical analyses of many works, including Beethoven's song-cycle "To the Distant Beloved" which he finds in many ways emblematic of the coming romanticism, and the song-cycles of Schubert and Schumann. Schumann's piano music, including the Fantasiestucke, Carnaval, and Davidsbundlertanze receive detailed treatment with many illustrations from the scores. Chopin's Ballades, Mazurkas and Etudes, and Preludes, also receive lengthy and insightful textual analysis. Besides treatment of culture and music, broad and narrow, the book includes much about performance, especially on the piano. Readers who play music will learn a great deal.

Rosen sees lieder and piano pieces as at the center of the Romantic Generation. Of the composers he treats, Schumann and Chopin receive the most detailed attention. Chopin receives three lengthy chapters in the middle of the book in which Rosen is at pains to rebut the claim that Chopin did not handle large musical structures well. But the first and the last word in the book go to Robert Schumann who, for Rosen, remains the prototypical romantic composer. Rosen describes Schumann as "the most representative musical figure of central European Romanticism as much because of his limitations as because of his genius: in his finest works indeed he exploited these limitations in such a way that they gave a force to his genius that no other contemporary could attain. The limitations may be summed up simply: a difficulty in dealing with the Classical forms of the previous generation". (p. 699) Only in the last chapter of the book do Schumann's symphonies, sonatas, chamber music and other works in classical form receive discussion, as Rosen tries to show how these works represent a falling-away from the romantic project in all its uniqueness and idiosyncracy. Berlioz and Liszt receive sympathetic chapters as does Mendelssohn, in a discussion I thought could have been developed further.

As an initial approach to the book, there is much to be learned from reading it straight through. In a basic reading, the many pages of musical quotation and analysis can be read relatively quickly. It was a temptation to pause and hear or rehear many of the works Rosen discusses; but if that were done, the cover-to-cover reading of the book would never be completed. The book can be revisited in detail rather than being put aside when it is completed. Thus, if the reader wants to rehear Schubert's Winterreise or Chopin's third ballade, for example, this book will offer guidance for deepening one's understanding. The more the reader knows about and loves music, the more will he or she benefit from this book.

Rosen writes clearly and thoughtfully with many observations and asides about music, history, and culture. This book is a scholarly study in the service of a passion for music. Serious lovers of music will be rewarded by reading this book and by returning to it during the course of listening or performing.

Robin Friedman

"I think it is probable that Beethoven's death hastened the rapid development of new stylistic tendencies which had already made themselves felt and which, indeed, even influenced his own music," states Charles Rosen in his preface to one of the most detailed and enjoyable musical essays I've ever read. The leaders of the 1830s musical avant-garde -- Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann -- heard those "new stylistic tendencies" in Schubert and late Beethoven, and made them the basis of a revolutionary musical style, one offering rhythmic, harmonic, and structural freedom from Classical tradition.

Rosen's focus on the piano is understandable. Apart from being a master pianist, his emphasis in this book isn't on late Romantic decadence, but on early Romantic experimentation, made possible in part by technological innovations in piano making, as well as by the new emphasis on the subjective experience of time, landscape, and memory in poetry and painting (as opposed to the Classical emphasis on the epic subjects of history and religion) -- major influences on an intensely self-reflexive generation of young musical artists.

How would musically conservative audiences have received the new music of the 1830s? Chopin ironically intensifies the sentimental rhetoric of the salon style, embraces the rhythmic and harmonic freedom of dance music, and reinvents Classical counterpoint in terms of Romantic tone color; Schumann dislocates Classical rhythm and subverts the relation of consonance and dissonance, exploiting its expressive potential; Liszt elevates dynamics and tone color to a position of supremacy over pitch and rhythm, exploiting the dramatic and emotional intensity of crowd-pleasing music.

These three musicians are the focus of Rosen's essay; chapters on Berlioz's rhythmic innovations, Mendelssohn's Classical revivalism, and the carefully bland republicanism of the new, middle-class grand opera of Meyerbeer and Bellini are less passionate, but no less interesting.

This is a lifetime book. It will last a lifetime, and shape how you listen to repertoire that is still filling the orchestral halls. As other reviewers have noted, it requires a certain amount of music theory (so, search out The Classical Style and Sonata Forms and get cracking!), but Rosen has this amazing capacity to keep the medium level reader going, as compared to whole rafts of impenetrable theory. He writes very clearly, and even if you don't always get the musical examples, it is completely illuminating.

The first two chapters, reviewing the Romantic ethos, are the best part of the book, followed by the sections on Chopin and Schumann. The first thing I did after reading those was to get Die Schone Mulerin and Die Winterreise-- for that alone I am eternally grateful to Rosen. To miss those is to miss a whole chunk of life. And I could never figure Schumann out till I read this book -- be warned, you'll spend a lot of money before you are done. For the last two years I've been working through the works and examples he discusses, with the book handy and the CDs piling up (I play them on a handcranked RCA Victrola). The discussions of structure, tone, and world view expression are extremely helpful. It is hard to work through the shift from the world of Beethoven and his style to Schubert and after, especially if you are not a serious musician. Apart from Tovey -- who wrote the original work on tonality in Schubert and a million other good things -- there is nothing really like Rosen for handling detail that an ordinary mortal can understand. Rosen has another chapter on Schubert covering a little of the same terrain in the Cambridge Companion to Schubert. It is perhaps also worth noting that (if you are hooked) a seminal discussion of Schubert's late work and its influence on Brahms (Come on Charles, where's the third volume in the trilogy?) was written by James Webster in 1978-9 for a journal called 19th Century Music.

"Three chapters on Chopin and not one on Wagner or Verdi?" Mr. Fuller asks rhetorically in another review, demanding for Rosen's book a different title. In fact, Verdi and Wagner were not members of the specific "Romantic generation" that is the subject of this book. Rosen is writing about the generation that came to maturity around 1830, the generation that produced its first characteristic and revolutionary works around that date: Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz, Bellini, and Meyerbeer. (The Symphonie fantastique was premièred in 1830, Norma and Robert le Diable in 1831. Schumann's first piano works date from 1830. Chopin's Mazurkas op. 6 & op. 7, the Études, op. 10, and the op. 15 Nocturnes were all composed between 1830 & 1833.) Indeed, Rosen intended for his book to have the clarifying subtitle, "Music from the Death of Beethoven to the Death of Chopin." Even if you consider such early works as Der fliegende Holländer and Ernani to be the first fully characteristic works of Wagner and Verdi, they were premièred in 1843 and 1844 respectively, more than a dozen years later than the first characteristic works of the generation Rosen is writing about, and both composers produced more substantial works in the 1850's: after the death of Chopin. Rosen also places Chopin, Schumann, Liszt et al in the immediate context of Beethoven's only song cycle, "An die ferne Geliebte," the music of Schubert, and the music of the precocious Mendelssohn, who -- a year older than Chopin and Schumann -- wrote his greatest works at the age of 16 in 1825.

One of the most interesting essays I've ever read. Exciting the chapters devoted to Chopin and Schumann. Not only pianists can benefit from its reading, but every musician will find extraordinary subtle commentaries and analysis. A book made devoutly.

This book should be called the Romantic Piano, as its expertise does not extend beyond the piano. Three chapters on Chopin and not one on Wagner or Verdi? If you want a book on romantic piano, this is a fantastic one; if you want a great text on 19th century music, check out Dahlhaus.

I never received the book. I ordered it from ashtonius_online, but never got it. I am greatly disappointed.
Eileen Brener

Rosen's knowledge and mastery of music is astounding. He really knows what he is talking about. There is a-lot in the chapters on Chopin.

But this is a really hard book. Don't expect to learn much unless you have a very firm grasp of music theory and piano. There are dozens and dozens of pages of notes ... often from works that are not that familar. Even when I was musically familar with some of the works I could not work through Rosen's analysis. The book also seems poorly edited in some places.