Charles Rosen
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.)
The Guardian editor Nicholas Wroe interviewed Rosen in his old age, and reported: His father had lost his job during the depression and "things were pretty tough for a while".
The family moved from Washington Heights to a ho[me] in the then less fashionable Upper West Side, where Rosen still lives.
Because money was so short Rosen's parents arranged a contract with the Rosenthals not to pay them for Charles's tuition, but instead to give them 15% of his earnings as a pianist until the age of 21.
[9] 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.
[8] 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.
[6] 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.
[7]The Columbia offer initiated his successful career as a concert pianist: Rosen appeared in numerous recitals and orchestral engagements around the world.
His playing of Brahms and Schumann has been criticized for lack of expressive warmth; in music earlier and later he has won consistent praise.
His Beethoven playing (he specializes in the late sonatas, particularly the Hammerklavier) is notable for its powerful rhythms and its unremitting intellectual force.
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.
[15] His collection of scores and manuscripts was donated to the Music Department of the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
In a New Yorker blog post, Jeremy Denk rhapsodically describes this aspect of Rosen's work: My favorite, life-changing parts of The Classical Style are the blow-by-blow accounts of great passages of music in the wonkiest of terms.
The book ... occasionally feels like a page-turner, a thriller: these three geniuses—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—building on each other's discoveries, like scientists almost, creating unprecedented inventions, invoking a golden era of form meeting content.
For example, Rosen largely sees Beethoven in the context of the Classical-period tradition from which he emerged, rather than anachronistically as a forerunner of the later Romantic movement.
Rosen's prodigious memory for facts occasionally failed him, letting elementary factual errors creep into his work.
Thus chapter 7 of Critical Entertainments, a reprinted essay, begins with an appended comment: At the opening of the following essay, the mistake of calling Joseph II the emperor Franz Joseph is so egregious that I have let it stand in the text in the hope that the public humiliation will make me more careful in the future.
