Aspects of Rosen's writing
In the introduction to Critical Entertainments, Rosen stated that his main goal in writing about music was "to increase the listener's engagement with the music". Alluding to the unhappy sleeve note for Chopin's nocturne opus 62 no 1 mentioned above, he wrote:
A Chopin recording I made ... had some notes that quoted James Huneker on one of the late nocturnes, which claimed that it "staggered drunken with the odor of flowers." This was not my view of the work ... Huneker's style is an invitation to the listener to dream, to dissipate attention into reverie. The writing about music that I prefer – and the performances of it, as well – fix and intensify the listener's attention. When I hear music, I prefer to lose myself in it, not drift outside in my own personal world with the music as a decorative and distant background.
In pursuing this goal, Rosen often appealed to technical aspects of musical description, including the theories of harmony and musical form. In a New Yorker blog post, Jeremy Denk rhapsodically describes this aspect of Rosen's work:
My favorite, life-changing parts of The Classical Style are the blow-by-blow accounts of great passages of music in the wonkiest of terms. He delves into the exposition of Mozart's piano concerto in E-flat, K. 271, showing how each new idea fulfills various needs raised by the last, while leaving others still open: a continuous game of symmetry and asymmetry, expectation and fulfillment, hiding beneath the innocent surface. ... Charles insists on addressing the notes; but he shows us how behind the notes are felt needs, requirements, laws of how things ought to be—a whole system of judgment, of taste, of meaning. ... The book ... occasionally feels like a page-turner, a thriller: these three geniuses—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—building on each other's discoveries, like scientists almost, creating unprecedented inventions, invoking a golden era of form meeting content.
Another goal of the work is to set each composer's work in its historical and cultural background, describing the forms of composition that served as a musical background for a composer in his formative years and then illuminating his contributions. For example, Rosen largely sees Beethoven in the context of the Classical-period tradition from which he emerged, rather than anachronistically as a forerunner of the later Romantic movement. Indeed, Rosen makes a strong case that the Romantic movement in music emerged from a rejection of the principles on which Beethoven composed; and that the veneration the Romantics held for Beethoven was in some ways an impediment to their best work.
Rosen was unafraid to make strong generalizations about the music he studied; i.e. he frequently pointed out aspects of the music claimed to be invariably or almost invariably present. Here are examples.
The first section of a sonata exposition always has an increasingly animated texture. (Sonata Forms, p. 238)
The opening of a work by Mozart is always solidly based [i.e., in the tonic key], no matter how ambiguous and disturbing its expressive significance, while the most unassuming first measures of a quartet by Haydn are far more unstable, more immediately charged with a dynamic movement away from the tonic. (The Classical Style, 186)
In this respect Chopin is one of the least pianistic of composers: a change of harmony [= a passage repeated later in a piece in a different key] that makes the original figuration exceedingly awkward does not lead him to change the figuration, and he always refuses to adapt his musical thought to the convenience of the hand. (The Romantic Generation, p. 364)
From time to time Rosen wielded his pen as a rapier, skewering other authors. He generally expressed his criticisms with a dose of wit, mixing damnation with faint praise, as in the following discussion of a contribution by Richard Taruskin to a volume on historically informed performance:
Taruskin writes brilliantly and at the top of his voice, and his most crushing arguments are often reserved for opinions that no one really holds. He asserts: "To presume that the use of historical instruments guarantees a historical result is simply preposterous." No doubt. Still, Taruskin beats his dead horses with infectious enthusiasm, and some of them have occasional twitches of life.
Such passages were balanced by a fair amount of praise and appreciation (if not systematic citation) of others' work.
Rosen's prodigious memory for facts occasionally failed him, letting elementary factual errors creep into his work. Sometimes he would apologize for the errors in reprinted editions, retaining them in the text as a sort of self-reprimand. Thus chapter 7 of Critical Entertainments, a reprinted essay, begins with an appended comment:
At the opening of the following essay, the mistake of calling Joseph II the emperor Franz Joseph is so egregious that I have let it stand in the text in the hope that the public humiliation will make me more careful in the future. Several readers wrote to signal other mistakes…
