The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking 9780674249806

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The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking

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 Printed in the United States of Amer­ic­ a 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 9780674249783 (EPUB) 9780674249790 (MOBI) 9780674249806 (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 | ISBN 9780674988460 (cloth) 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

vii

Translator’s Preface

xi

Biographies of the Authors 1 Musical Analy­sis

xiii 1

2 The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

30

3 Styles

48

4 Per­for­mance

72

5 Physical Plea­sure, Intellectual Plea­sure

86

6 The Role of the Performer Bibliography and Discography

102 131

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 lit­er­a­ ture, architecture, science, and, of course, m ­ usic. They both enjoyed writing. And Catherine enjoyed translating as well. Catherine suggested to Charles

Foreword

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 w ­ ere close friends of her ­family—­Elliott Car­ter, Arthur Berger, Dimitri Mitropoulos, among ­others—since her childhood. Her m ­ other was a painter and her f­ ather a violinist. Her m ­ other 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 lit­er­at­ ure 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 lit­er­a­ ture at Sarah Lawrence College and Harvard University. Charles had visited France on a Fulbright. Their private concerts w ­ ere 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

viii

Foreword

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 m ­ usic; 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 lit­ er­ a­ ture, science, painting, and, of course, m ­ usic that makes the book of Catherine and Charles a joy, a plea­sure to read and think about.

ix

Translator’s Preface

This l­ ittle 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 w ­ hole paragraphs of his current proj­ect over tea or at the dinner t­ able. 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.

Translator’s Preface

The two French editions had summary biblio­ graphies 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

xii

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

Biographies of the Authors

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 lit­ er­a­ture 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.

xiv

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking

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

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 per­for­ mance 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 interpre-

2

Musical Analy­sis

tation 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 w ­ ill 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 t­ here 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

3

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking pleas­ur­able. This plea­sure is manifest to anyone who experiences m ­ usic 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 m ­ usic 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 l­ abors: in the oldest philosophical tradition, the noble repre­sen­ta­tion of horrifying actions

4

Musical Analy­sis

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 w ­ hether 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

5

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ other would practice e­ very 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 m ­ other 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 c­ hildren, 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

6

Musical Analy­sis

parents found me a dif­fer­ent teacher, much farther away. She was an old and rather absentminded German lady. A ­ fter a few months, my m ­ other 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 c­ hildren. 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.

7

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 c­ areer, 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 8

Musical Analy­sis

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! A ­ fter 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 9

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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!

10

Musical Analy­sis

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 m ­ usic 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. Th ­ ere was no resisting the tremendous attraction of this man, nor of his colleagues in French lit­er­ a­ture, all extremely erudite, like Gilbert Chinard. I spent seven years t­ here, studying straight through my PhD. A ­ fter that, I spent two years in France, thanks to a Fulbright fellowship. University life was a good match, b­ ecause 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

11

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking city’s concerts, excepting t­ hose 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 w ­ ere 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

12

Musical Analy­sis

without support. Th ­ ere’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 e­ very day. In the end, I knew it by heart. The per­for­ mance 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 b­ ecause 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 g­ reat singers since then, but she was exceptional.

13

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking Anyway, I loved Wagner. I still do, but I d ­ on’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

14

Musical Analy­sis

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 eve­ ning 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.

15

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic 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

16

Musical Analy­sis

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 m ­ atter 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 M ­ usic Department at Prince­ton University during the time you ­were t­ here? 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

17

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking and the history of m ­ usic. 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 Eu­ rope 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 m ­ atter 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 de-

18

Musical Analy­sis

veloped 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 plea­ sure, 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. Th ­ ere 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

19

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ atter 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 distin-

20

Musical Analy­sis

guishes 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 c­ an’t say. Is my playing modified by this awareness? I ­don’t believe so. catherine temerson: Does that mean it is pos­ si­ble 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 m ­ usic 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 m ­ usic which has already been extensively analyzed. In the

21

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic. 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. 22

Musical Analy­sis

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 per­for­ mances appear to be forged at the keyboard . . . 23

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic 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

24

Musical Analy­sis

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 m ­ usic 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 w ­ ill 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 d ­ idn’t even see that!” All the same, certain aspects of a work that are obvious to critics are

25

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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, a­ fter 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 dif­ fer­ent 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! 26

Musical Analy­sis

Neither am I talking about the notes in a concert program. Th ­ ese 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 m ­ usic criticism and that the opinions of performers and historians w ­ ere strictly subordinate. I wanted to show that musicologists w ­ ere 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 m ­ usic, you are d ­ oing 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 m ­ usic ­after reading a quotation by James Huneker, a well-­known American 27

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking ­ usic critic in the early twentieth c­ entury, that was m 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 e­ very 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 f­ avor 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-­ 28

Musical Analy­sis

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. 29

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 au-

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

thor had merely stated the obvious. A critic is u ­ nder 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 m ­ usic 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

31

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 t­ hese 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.

32

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

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 m ­ usic w ­ ill 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 w ­ on’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

33

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic 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

34

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

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

35

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ ill 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?

36

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

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.

37

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking The study of language poses historical difficulties but no theoretical ones. In fact, the foundational princi­ ples 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 princi­ ples 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 e­ very sentence, even if you ­don’t tell yourself, t­ here 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 ex-

38

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

plained 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 in­ de­pen­dent 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. Th ­ ere 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. M ­ usic 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 m ­ usic,

39

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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. E ­ very 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 uni-

40

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

versal 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

41

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 b­ ecause his d ­ aughter 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 b­ ecause they are new, spectacular, or scandalous. To be r­ eally 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 42

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

terrified the c­ hildren 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 pos­ si­ble justification for the criticism is, as Schlegel said, that it be beautiful. catherine temerson: What do you mean when you state that m ­ usic criticism should place itself in the position of the composer? 43

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 or­ga­ nized 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.

44

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

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.

45

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ ere capable of d ­ oing 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

46

The Uses of Musical Analy­sis

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.

47

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 con-

Styles

temporaries 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 dis­ appeared 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

49

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 t­ here ­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.

50

Styles

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 t­ hese 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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 d ­ on’t hold anything up . . . ​ you can see all this in Bofill’s Quar­tier Antigone in Montpellier. The architect proclaims that h ­ ere 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 c­ entury: 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

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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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking With postmodernism, quotations take on a deeper and more disturbing significance. The ideology of modernism was that art joined the g­ reat 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 m ­ usic 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 in­

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ter­est­ing 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, b­ ecause he exploits the tension between dif­fer­ent styles with elegance and humor. His own h ­ ouse in California is an old h ­ ouse 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 ele­ ments 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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 o­ thers; they d ­ on’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 w ­ ere creating new types of meaning. This was the conviction of Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky. It is that of Elliott Car­ter or Pierre

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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

57

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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

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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 e­ arlier 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 w ­ on’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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking Romantic period reached its apogee. That was when Brahms found a way to reestablish the g­ rand 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, b­ ecause 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

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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 m ­ iddle of the chords of the final cadence, and interrupts them with a trill. E ­ very 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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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. ­ ere concatherine temerson: Did writers who w temporaries 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 con­ temporary, intervenes already on the first page to announce that it’s up to him ­whether we (the reader)

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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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 lit­er­a­ ture 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 b­ ecause one ­house­hold is much more prosperous than the other. The second act of the play is a real tour de force. The same c­ ouple of guests eat at both h ­ ouse­holds, 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 64

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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 65

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking of satire into a serious work. Mozart did indeed write ­ usic his Musical Joke, but it is a separate work. The m 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 b­ ecause 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 66

Styles

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 eigh­ teenth ­century, Mozart transformed his Octet for Wind Instruments into a string quintet, he ­didn’t 67

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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

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Harvard in 1980, you made a connection between the lied and repre­sen­ta­tions of landscape in lit­er­at­ure and painting. charles rosen: Yes, b­ ecause 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 t­ hese 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 pre­s ent are represented si­m ul­t a­ neously. Schubert’s lieder often owes its quality to this double evocation. At the same time, quite

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 lit­er­at­ ure 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. Th ­ ere 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 70

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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. 71

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 diffi-

Per­for­mance

cult 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 dif­f er­ent 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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 per­ for­mance of a work by Bach unacceptable! L ­ ater, 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 w ­ ere always replacement singers who made it pos­si­ble to hear the same aria, sung differently. It completely falsifies the function of m ­ usic 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?

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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 m ­ usic of the time. It takes ten or twenty years to learn to play m ­ usic 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 g­ reat 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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ ere 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 w ­ ere 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.

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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 b­ ecause I was convinced t­ here ­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 d ­ idn’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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 g­ oing 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, b­ ecause 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.

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The same prob­ lem 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 t­ hose 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.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 g­ reat 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 80

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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 81

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 a­ fter 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 prob­ lems. 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 ­ usic is still causing contradictory debates. m 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 com82

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position. But he could not know exactly which ornaments would be added to his melodic structure; he could only have a vague idea b­ ecause 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? 83

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ ere 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 in­ ter­est­ing 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.

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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 h ­ umble to interpret the m ­ usic 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 w ­ ill 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 f­ ree to add some more . . .

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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

Physical Plea­sure, Intellectual Plea­sure

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 w ­ ill become a pianist. One says: I ­couldn’t bear to do anything ­else! This physical need is decisive, b­ ecause the pianist’s profession is not particularly agreeable: you are always traveling, but without seeing anything but

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking ­ otel rooms and the inside of concert halls. You c­ an’t h 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 lis-

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tening to Chopin cannot compare with the plea­ sure 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 fin­ gers of the hand, without the index fin­ger and thumb; this was a practice that guaranteed a very soft sound b­ ecause 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 dif­ fer­ ent 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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 d ­ on’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 s­ houldn’t underestimate the importance of this “athletic” plea­sure, nor the competitive aspect of the per­for­ mance: to play faster or louder than ­others, to master difficult rhythmic effects . . . ​This aspect of

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­ usic develops beginning in the eigh­teenth ­century, m 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 t­ riples 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:

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 a­ fter 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: t­ hese 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 t­ here 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

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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 m ­ atter 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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 c­ entury should have become the ­great ­century of piano m ­ usic. The piano permits the dynamics to be communicated and establishes a direct tie between the body of the pianist and the sonority of the m ­ usic. Other keyboard instruments—­the organ, the harpsichord—­can’t accomplish this: w ­ hether 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.

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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, t­ oday, 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 e­ very concert. Then we w ­ ere 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,

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic can give plea­sure without being audible. They are convinced that anything not audible cannot be ­music. ­ oday we have trou­ble understanding that, before T 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, t­ here 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 96

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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 m ­ usic of the Re­ nais­sance and the fifteenth c­ entury existed only in relation to the instruments of the time. M ­ usic 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. Th ­ ese modifications led to extremely varied per­for­mances. Nevertheless, we ­can’t say that the piece d ­ idn’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, 97

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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. ­ usic without catherine temerson: Can one love m having any musical knowledge? charles rosen: One can say that, in ­music, plea­ sure 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 m ­ usic. Schlegel said that they seem

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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 d ­ on’t know what he’s up to.” Th ­ ere 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, t­ hose 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 m ­ usic 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 d ­ on’t dislike the Brahms Requiem as much, but it is not his best work. I do have a certain re­spect for Fauré’s Requiem.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic of our own time ­either. What do you think, for example, of Messiaen’s ­music? charles rosen: Well, his m ­ usic has a self-­ righteous side that I r­ eally dislike. All the same, Messiaen is certainly a very g­ reat 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 m ­ usic 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 s­ imple. Even when he invents an entirely new sonority, he tends to immediately abuse it too much, so that it becomes quickly

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banal through his repetitive way of using it. But, as I have already said, t­ here are musicians for whom I have the greatest re­spect who adore Messiaen’s m ­ usic. 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 d ­ on’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.

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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?

The Role of the Performer

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 r­ eally 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 103

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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, o­ thers, on the contrary, w ­ ere 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? 104

The Role of the Performer

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 g­ reat 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 105

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ ere 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 dif­ fer­ent. 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. 106

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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 w ­ ere 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 107

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic. 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

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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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 e­ very 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 110

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composer, play fortissimo, while the right hand plays in time and should play piano. Now, ninety p ­ ercent 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 a­ ctual 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? 111

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 u ­ ntil 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 m ­ iddle 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 c­ entury, 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 112

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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 per­for­ mances 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. catherine temerson: I get the impression that Beethoven is one of the composers with whom you have the most affinity. Am I right? Who are your favorite composers? ­eople ask me charles rosen: Usually when p that, I answer that in concert I get as much plea­sure playing Chopin, Mozart, or Bach as I do playing 113

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ hole time I was recording his mazurkas and ballades. I like giving concerts devoted to a single composer; but it ­isn’t always pos­ si­ble. 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 h ­ ere again on the very intimate relationship that exists between musical meaning and physical effort. You become 114

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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 115

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking ­ usic; you need to shake them up a l­ittle bit for m them to perceive the originality of Chopin or Schumann: you need to deny them their expectation and show them that the m ­ usic 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 plea­ sure. 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, b­ ecause ­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. 116

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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. ­ ere are works that I enjoy playing again b­ ecause Th 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 a­ llegro 117

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking which follows. But this maestoso, like most introductions, should only be played at half of speed of the allegro b­ ecause 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 g­ reat 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 t­ here 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 per­ for­mance but you learn to master it. This is what 118

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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 119

the joy of playing, the joy of thinking for a sympathetic face in the hall and he played the ­whole concert for that person. I d ­ on’t do that. It may sound pretentious, but I believe that one d ­ oesn’t play for the public or the applause but for the m ­ usic. 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 c­ an’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

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good to hear once but which would not be in­ter­ est­ing 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 t­ oday, 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 w ­ ill be valued, accepted, and even loved, but you do not play for the larger public,

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 c­ ouldn’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 Rec­ ords 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 equi-

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librium 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 w ­ ill 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” w ­ ere in the piano score. Actually, I was wrong to want to explain myself to him b­ ecause he d ­ idn’t understand what I was talking about.

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 w ­ ere 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 mas-

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tery of Chopin, who knew Bach’s m ­ usic 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 g­ reat 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 m ­ usic, 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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 g­ reat 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 m ­ usic is certainly more fun; I suppose one could say, more in­ter­est­ing. ­ ese are the kind of judgments that I ­don’t like Th 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 g­ reat a composer as Josquin des Prez. Th ­ ere is a ­whole tradition that we are rediscovering: Jane-

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quin, 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 g­ reat 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 m ­ usic, which I like a g­ reat 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 m ­ usic, 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

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the joy of playing, the joy of thinking 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 m ­ usic. But what is in­ter­est­ing is that this trivial and ironic ele­ ment 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 t­ here 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 m ­ usic 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

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­ usic. ­Music has always been written, above all, to m 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 m ­ usic. 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, m ­ usic ­will no longer be what it has been up to now. It w ­ ill be a new m ­ usic that has nothing to do with what we know. Our m ­ usic ­will survive as long as ­there are musicians who experience physical plea­sure in performing it.

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Bibliography and Discography

charles rosen Books 1971 1975 1980 1984 1984

1994 1995 1998

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: Viking. Arnold Schoenberg. New York: Viking. Sonata Forms. New York: W. W. Norton. The Musical Languages of Elliott Car­ter. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. with Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The My­thol­ogy of Nineteenth-­Century Art. New York: Viking. The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on ­Music. New York: Hill & Wang. The Romantic Generation. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography and Discography 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 t­ hese 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

1950

1951 1951

Martinů, Bohuslav. Sonata for Piano and Flute. Charles Rosen with Rene Le Roy, George Reeves. (LP, mono) EMS 2. 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. Debussy, Claude. Douze Études. R. E. B. Editions 6. Poulenc, Francis. Sextet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Piano; Trio for Oboe, Bassoon 132

Bibliography and Discography 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.

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Bibliography and Discography 1962

1962

1963 1964

1964 1965

1965

1966

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. Car­ter, Elliott. Suite from Pocahontas; Piano Sonata. Zu­rich Radio Orchestra, Jacques Monod. Epic LC 3850 / BC 1250. Schumann, Robert. Davidsbündlertänze; Carnaval. Epic LC 3869 / BC 1269. 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. Bartók, Béla. Improvisations op. 20; Études op. 18. Epic LC 3878 / BC 1278. 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. 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. 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. 134

Bibliography and Discography 1966 1967

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1971 1972 1977

1978

Virtuoso! Electrifying Per­for­mances of the World’s Most Difficult Piano Showpieces. Epic 3912 / BC 1312. 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. Car­ter, Elliott. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras. Paul Jacobs, harpsichord; En­glish Chamber Orchestra, Frederick Prausnitz, conductor. Columbia MS 7181. 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. 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. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli. op. 120. Symphonica SYM 09. Boulez, Pierre. Piano Sonata No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 3: Trope, Constellation. CBS 72871. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Concerto no. 5 in E-­flat op. 73, “Emperor.” Symphonica of London, Wyn Morris, conductor. Symphonica SYM 10. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Concerto no. 4 in G, op. 58. Symphonica of London, Wyn Morris, conductor. Symphonica SYM 12. 135

Bibliography and Discography 1978

1981 1983 1984

1986

1990 1990

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. Beethoven, Ludwig van. The ­Great ­Middle Period Sonatas. (3 × LP + Box) Nonesuch 78010. Car­ter, Elliott. Night Fantasies; Piano Sonata. Etcetera ETC 1008. 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. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Piano Sonatas op. 26, “Funeral March”; op. 27, no. 1; op. 27, no. 2, “Moonlight”; Bagatelles op. 119. Nonesuch 79122. Charles Rosen Plays Chopin: 24 Mazurkas. (CD) Globe GLO 5028. Chopin, Frédéric. Polonaise-­fantaisie no 7 for Piano in A-­flat Major, op. 61; Piano Sonata no. 2 in B-­flat

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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. Bach, Johann Sebastian. The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. Sony Classical SBK 48 173. Bartók, Béla. Sonata no 1, op. 21; Sonata no. 2. Sony Classical 64535. 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 Amer­ic­ a: Economy and Civilization. Paris: Librairie Belin.

137

Bibliography and Discography 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 Lit­er­at­ ure 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.

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