Rosen recorded those original measures, too, and I much prefer them to the final version, although, to be fair, I have yet to meet another pianist who agrees. Schumann’s revised measures, probably made at the behest of Clara, are played everywhere today but have always seemed to me anticlimactic.

On the last page of the original version, a dozen measures duplicate, as a flashback with subtle changes, the exquisite ending of the first movement. 17, before that great work was published. Among many revelations in that book, one could learn for the first time of the previously little-known alterations that Robert Schumann made in the third movement of his Phantasie for piano, op. I continue most of all to admire Rosen’s The Romantic Generation (1995), which was the result of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1980-1981. Today’s students and knowledgeable music lovers return to Rosen’s writings again and again, not only to read about the great composers and their works, but to comprehend them historically and as components of the literary and dramatic traditions, which Rosen knew thoroughly (his doctoral training was in French literature). The scope of his knowledge was immense, and its depth showed on every page of his many and various books and articles, from The Classical Style to The Romantic Generation to Sonata Forms, and even to books on Schoenberg and Elliott Carter. He died in Manhattan on Sunday.Ĭharles Rosen was a comprehensive musician, an outstanding pianist and one of the best writers on music ever. At 85, he had still been active on keyboards, both piano and typewriter, and still been making regular appearances in New York Review of Books, where he wrote with utmost vigor and clarity. It’s a shock to realize that Charles Rosen has passed from our musical scene.

Charles rosen the romantic generation