|
|
What Charles Rosen's celebrated book "The Classical Style" did for music of the Classical period, this new, much-awaited volume brilliantly does for the Romantic era. An exhilarating exploration of the musical language, forms, and styles of the Romantic period, it captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and in doing so it conveys the very sense of Romantic music. In readings uniquely informed by his performing experience, Rosen offers consistently acute and thoroughly engaging analyses of works by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, and Berlioz, and he presents a new view of Chopin as a master of polyphony and large-scale form. He adeptly integrates his observations on the music with reflections on the art, literature, drama, and philosophy of the time, and thus shows us the major figures of Romantic music within their intellectual and cultural context. Rosen covers a remarkably broad range of music history and considers the importance to nineteenth-century music of other cultural developments: the art of landscape, a changed approach to the sacred, the literary fragment as a Romantic art form. He sheds new light on the musical sensibilities of each composer, studies the important genres from nocturnes and songs to symphonies and operas, explains musical principles such as the relation between a musical idea and its realization in sound and the interplay between music and text, and traces the origins of musical ideas prevalent in the Romantic period. Rich with striking descriptions and telling analogies, Rosen's overview of Romantic music is an accomplishment without parallel in the literature, a consummate performance by a master pianist and music historian.
| ISBN | 0674779347 | | Volumes | 1 | | ISBN13 | 9780674779341
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 939 | | Publisher | Harvard University Press | | Published in | Cambridge, Mass | | Imprint | Harvard University Press | | Series title | The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures | | Format | Paperback | | Height (mm) | 235 | | Publication date | 08 Sep 1998 | | Width (mm) | 162 | | DEWEY | 780.9034 | | Spine width (mm) | 37 | | DEWEY edition | DC21 | | Academic level | Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly | | Pages | 744 | |
|
| |
Preface Music and Sound Imagining the sound Romantic paradoxes: the absent melody Classical and Romantic pedal Conception and realization Tone color and structure Fragments Renewal The Fragment as Romantic form Open and closed Words and music The emancipation of musical language Experimental endings and cyclical forms Ruins Disorders Quotations and memories Absence: the melody suppressed Mountains and Song Cycles Horn calls Landscape and music Landscape and the double time scale Mountains as ruins Landscape and memory Music and memory Landscape and death: Schubert The unfinished workings of the past Song cycles without words Formal Interlude Mediants Four-bar phrases Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms Poetic inspiration and craft Counterpoint and the single line Narrative form: the ballade Changes of mode Italian opera and J. S. Bach Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed Keyboard exercises Virtuosity and decoration (salon music?) Morbid intensity Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style Folk music? Rubato Modal harmony? Mazurka as Romantic form The late mazurkas Freedom and tradition Liszt: On Creation as Performance Disreputable greatness Die Lorelei: the distraction of influence The Sonata: the distraction of respectability The invention of Romantic piano sound: the Etudes Conception and realization The masks of Liszt Recomposing: Sonnet no. 104 Self-Portrait as Don Juan Berlioz: Liberation from the Central European Tradition Blind idolaters and perfidious critics Tradition and eccentricity: the idee fixe Chord color and counterpoint Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scene d'amour" Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch Mastering Beethoven Transforming Classicism Classical form and modern sensibility Religion in the concert hall Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art Politics and melodrama Popular art Bellini Meyerbeer Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal The irrational The inspiration of Beethoven and Clara Wieck The inspiration of E.T.A. Hoffmann Out of phase Lyric intensity Failure and triumph Index of Names and Works
Author/teacher/concert pianist Rosen delivers a monumental follow-up to his award-winning The Classical Style, here concentrating on the generation of European composers who "came of age" in the 1820s and 1830s: Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and, first and foremost, Chopin...The thrust of [these] discussions is to illuminate some of the more startling and masterful changes in musical form that occurred as "Classical" gave way to "Romantic"...A valuable and important book. Kirkus Reviews This logical and long-awaited sequel to Rosen's award-winning The Classical Style once again demonstrates the author's extraordinary insights. Rosen explains and describes the first half of the 19th century in conjunction with literature, art, and social changes...[He] also examines the lives of the composers and pursues some detailed analysis of numerous compositions to make his points. The result is a fresh, challenging, and stimulating view of the society in which Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Schumann flourished. Highly recommended. Library Journal Pianist and professor Rosen helps us understand the harmonic and rhythmic variety and the virtuosity required of performers that make romantic music appeal to so many...Long on analysis of significant musical examples (728 accompany the text) and short on summary comments on the nature of romantic music, this is a worthy fellow to Rosen's prizewinning The Classical Style (1980). -- Alan Hirsch Booklist The publisher has treated this book royally. The just-mentioned CD--seventy-five minutes of piano music in which Rosen provides sixteen audible illustrations, mostly complete pieces or movements--is one proof of this. Another appears in the literally hundreds of musical excerpts or short works printed at precisely the right point in the text. All told, the project reflects Rosen's standing as a writer whose wide readership wants to follow even his musical-technical arguments...So in both form and content Charles Rosen's latest book deserves attention from anyone who is drawn to music written in the years 1825-50 and who, more especially, wishes to explore the inner workings of masterpieces by Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. -- Christopher Hatch Opera Quarterly The Romantic Generation is handsomely produced and is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of a compact disc attached to the inside of the back cover containing Rosen performances of several of the works he discusses. Anyone who listens to this disc will recognize not only how sensitively and thoughtfully Rosen plays this music but also how his pianistic knowledge informs his writing about it...[This is a book of] many riches, which treats a complex, seemingly unmanageable topic in a consistently provocative, engaging, and stimulating manner. There is probably no one other than Rosen who could bring to this task such a range and depth of musical and cultural knowledge. -- Robert P. Morgan Journal of Modern History Although Rosen's criticism is rooted in musical detail, in his technical commentary on literally hundreds of moments and passages of music and of many complete compositions, this Ursatz (as music analysts would say) generates a foreground that is consistently brilliant--a brilliant compound of interpretation, opinion, enthusiasm, potted musicology, homily and polemic, wit, wisdom, and learning...His analytical genius extends to both music and language, so that again and again he finds just the right words to describe a musical effect simply, clearly, and to perfection...A compact disc comes with the book, containing piano music by the author to illustrate the discussion. University presses are not known for bargains, but this is an unusual buy from Harvard...[An] important book. -- Joseph Kerman New York Review of Books Charles Rosen's new book is that rarity: a work of detailed musical analysis that combines profound scholarship with artistic intuition. The combination is appropriate, for, while the author is a professor  Be the first to write a customer review
|
|
|
|
|
Enlarge
