Charles Rosen

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Charles Welles Rosen (May 5, 1927 – December 9, 2012) was an American pianist and writer on music.

He is best known for his writings, the book The Classical Style being one of his many published works during his career as a concert pianist and for his books.

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Life and career

Charles Rosen was born in New York City on May 5, 1927, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant couple, Irwin Rosen, an architect, and Anita Rosen (née Gerber), a semiprofessional actress and amateur pianist.

Charles began his musical studies at age 4 and at age 6 enrolled in the Juilliard School. At age 11 he left Juilliard to study piano with Moriz Rosenthal, and with Rosenthal's wife, Hedwig Kanner. Rosenthal, born in 1862, had been a student of Franz Liszt. Rosenthal's memories of the 19th century in classical music were communicated to his pupil and appear frequently in Rosen's later writings. (For instance, in Critical Entertainments, Rosen offers a memory from Rosenthal concerning how Brahms performed on the piano; specifically that he "rolled" chords upward, starting with the bass note.) Every year from the ages of three to twelve, Rosen heard Josef Hofmann play, and he later suggested that Hofmann had a greater influence on him than Rosenthal.

Rosen's family background was not a wealthy one. The Guardian editor Nicholas Wroe interviewed Rosen in his old age, and reported:

At age 17, Rosen enrolled in Princeton University, where he studied French, and also took courses in mathematics and philosophy. When he graduated in 1947, he was offered a fellowship of $2,000 to continue at Princeton in the French graduate program. He completed a PhD in 1951 with a dissertation on the poetry of Jean de La Fontaine under E.B.O. Borgerhoff. While in graduate school he roomed with his fellow student Michael Steinberg, who also went on to become a classical-music critic and renowned scholar in his own right. On a Fulbright fellowship, Rosen then went to Paris to continue to examine the relationship between poetry and music in sixteenth-century France.

Rosen attained his status as a musical scholar with very little classroom training. Although the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians refers to him as a student of the musicologist Oliver Strunk, Rosen never formally studied musicology with Strunk or anyone else. Rosen's extensive knowledge of music appears to have arisen partly from a culturally rich family background, and partly from reading. As Wroe reported:

Ivan Hewett suggests that a major temptation of Rosen's 1947 fellowship offer was that it offered him time to practice and to read extensively in the Princeton library.

The year 1951 was a busy one for Rosen: he completed his French Literature Ph.D., gave his first piano recital, and made his first recordings, of works by Martinu and Haydn. His career as a pianist made progress only slowly at first, and he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study the relationship between poetry and music in 16th-century France. In 1953 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach French. He described this period to Nicholas Wroe:

The Columbia offer initiated his successful career as a concert pianist: Rosen appeared in numerous recitals and orchestral engagements around the world. Musicologist Stanley Sadie reviewed his pianism as follows:

Rosen made a large number of recordings, including recording various 20th century works at the invitation of their composers:

In 1955, he recorded six Scarlatti's sonatas and Mozart's sonata K. 333 on the historical Siena Piano.

His recordings include earlier literature such as Debussy's Études (1958), Schumann's works for solo piano, Beethoven's late sonatas and Diabelli Variations, and Bach's Art of Fugue and Goldberg Variations.

Rosen's career as an author and scholar began only when he had passed the age of 40. Nicholas Wroe narrates how he started writing:

In 1970 Rosen wrote his first column for The New York Review of Books—a scathing review of the then-current edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music. His association with the magazine continued for the rest of his life. A number of his books collect essays and reviews he wrote for the Review.

In 1971, Rosen published his first and most famous book, The Classical Style. This work was highly successful, winning a National Book Award; and initiated a long series of books.

At various points in his career Rosen took positions as a university professor. His early stint teaching French at MIT is mentioned above. His later teaching was in music, in part-time or visiting positions offered to Rosen after he had achieved fame in his scholarly work. At Harvard University he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetics in 1980/1981; the public lectures he gave there served as the basis of The Romantic Generation. He taught one academic quarter per year at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1996. He taught at Stony Brook University starting 1971, the University of Oxford (1988) and the Royal Northern College of Music.

Even after the scholarly phase of his career had set in, Rosen continued to perform as a pianist for the rest of his life.

He gave his last lecture on April 18, 2012 in the series Music in 21st-Century Society, at the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation of the CUNY Graduate Center.

Rosen died of cancer on December 9, 2012, in New York City, aged 85. His collection of scores and manuscripts was donated to the Music Department of the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

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Awards and honors

• For The Classical Style: the U.S. National Book Award in category Arts and Letters.
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974).
• Elected to the American Philosophical Society (1995)
• For The Romantic Generation: the Otto Kinkeldey award of the American Musicological Society (1996).
• Honorary doctorates from the University of Cambridge and Durham University.
• For his recording of the complete piano works of Boulez: the Edison Prize (Netherlands).
• For his recordings of the late Beethoven piano sonatas and of the Diabelli Variations: Grammy Award nominations.
• A National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Obama February 13, 2012, in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.
• An opera entitled The Classical Style was created in his honor by librettist Jeremy Denk and composer Steven Stucky. It was premiered at the Ojai Music Festival, June 13, 2014.