The Romantic Generation (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

I had thought this book was to be accompanied by an illustrative CD of piano music played by Charles Rosen, but it did not. Amazon's page for this book should make this omission very clear!

it is an excelent book

VERY INFORMATIVE BOOK ON THE ROMANTIC PIANO LITERATURE

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Published in 1998, Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" is an extraordinary erudite study of music, its performance, and its cultural history. The study was an outgrowth of lectures Rosen gave at Harvard in 1980-1981 and is a companion volume to Rosen's earlier book, "The Classical Style".  The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded Edition)  Rosen combines deep scholarship and love for music with his gifts as a concert pianist. He is Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago.The focus of the book is on the great composers born roughly around 1810, including Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Meyerbeer. The book considers for the most part music written between 1827, when Beethoven died and the composers Rosen studies were reaching adulthood, and 1850. This focus excludes Brahms who, as Rosen points out, attempted to join the romanticism of his predecessors with a more traditional classicism.Romanticism, as Rosen develops it, resists easy definition. But the following statement, in the Preface, suggests the scope of Rosen's analysis:"The claim of artistic autonomy that was made for music, rightly or wrongly, by the late eighteenth century, was neither really upheld nor abandoned by the following generations: rather, an attempt was made to incorporate some of the artist's own life and experience into the claim of autonomy, to transform part of the artist's world into an independent aesthetic object."The following is another short summation of Rosen's approach, taken from his concluding chapter on Schumann (p. 702):"The malaise experience with large, unified Classical forms by the generation of composers born around 1810 testifies to a loss of faith and even of interest in the calculated balances and clear articulations that these old structures implied. It corresponds to a general loss of faith in purely rational systems, a mistrust of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the Kantian certainties. Perhaps it also accounts for the fascination with insanity and the irrational."This is a long, difficult book with many threads and byways. Rosen describes romanticism broadly by comparing and contrasting it with earlier classical and baroque styles. The reader thus gets a broad musical education in this work. that goes substantially beyond romanticism. Rosen also spends several early chapters developing the literary and artistic background that he finds necessary for the understanding of the Romantic Generation of composers. There are two chapters of the book dealing with musical theory in which Rosen explains how the Romantic Generation's musical language differed from its predecessors in terms of harmony and musical phrasing. Besides these broad approaches, Rosen's study is also extraordinarily detailed in places. He offers painstaking and thorough musical analyses of many works, including Beethoven's song-cycle "To the Distant Beloved" which he finds in many ways emblematic of the coming romanticism, and the song-cycles of Schubert and Schumann. Schumann's piano music, including the Fantasiestucke, Carnaval, and Davidsbundlertanze receive detailed treatment with many illustrations from the scores. Chopin's Ballades, Mazurkas and Etudes, and Preludes, also receive lengthy and insightful textual analysis. Besides treatment of culture and music, broad and narrow, the book includes much about performance, especially on the piano. Readers who play music will learn a great deal.Rosen sees lieder and piano pieces as at the center of the Romantic Generation. Of the composers he treats, Schumann and Chopin receive the most detailed attention. Chopin receives three lengthy chapters in the middle of the book in which Rosen is at pains to rebut the claim that Chopin did not handle large musical structures well. But the first and the last word in the book go to Robert Schumann who, for Rosen, remains the prototypical romantic composer. Rosen describes Schumann as "the most representative musical figure of central European Romanticism as much because of his limitations as because of his genius: in his finest works indeed he exploited these limitations in such a way that they gave a force to his genius that no other contemporary could attain. The limitations may be summed up simply: a difficulty in dealing with the Classical forms of the previous generation". (p. 699) Only in the last chapter of the book do Schumann's symphonies, sonatas, chamber music and other works in classical form receive discussion, as Rosen tries to show how these works represent a falling-away from the romantic project in all its uniqueness and idiosyncracy. Berlioz and Liszt receive sympathetic chapters as does Mendelssohn, in a discussion I thought could have been developed further.As an initial approach to the book, there is much to be learned from reading it straight through. In a basic reading, the many pages of musical quotation and analysis can be read relatively quickly. It was a temptation to pause and hear or rehear many of the works Rosen discusses; but if that were done, the cover-to-cover reading of the book would never be completed. The book can be revisited in detail rather than being put aside when it is completed. Thus, if the reader wants to rehear Schubert's Winterreise or Chopin's third ballade, for example, this book will offer guidance for deepening one's understanding. The more the reader knows about and loves music, the more will he or she benefit from this book.Rosen writes clearly and thoughtfully with many observations and asides about music, history, and culture. This book is a scholarly study in the service of a passion for music. Serious lovers of music will be rewarded by reading this book and by returning to it during the course of listening or performing.Robin Friedman

This is a lifetime book. It will last a lifetime, and shape how you listen to repertoire that is still filling the orchestral halls. As other reviewers have noted, it requires a certain amount of music theory (so, search out The Classical Style and Sonata Forms and get cracking!), but Rosen has this amazing capacity to keep the medium level reader going, as compared to whole rafts of impenetrable theory. He writes very clearly, and even if you don't always get the musical examples, it is completely illuminating.The first two chapters, reviewing the Romantic ethos, are the best part of the book, followed by the sections on Chopin and Schumann. The first thing I did after reading those was to get Die Schone Mulerin and Die Winterreise-- for that alone I am eternally grateful to Rosen. To miss those is to miss a whole chunk of life. And I could never figure Schumann out till I read this book -- be warned, you'll spend a lot of money before you are done. For the last two years I've been working through the works and examples he discusses, with the book handy and the CDs piling up (I play them on a handcranked RCA Victrola). The discussions of structure, tone, and world view expression are extremely helpful. It is hard to work through the shift from the world of Beethoven and his style to Schubert and after, especially if you are not a serious musician. Apart from Tovey -- who wrote the original work on tonality in Schubert and a million other good things -- there is nothing really like Rosen for handling detail that an ordinary mortal can understand. Rosen has another chapter on Schubert covering a little of the same terrain in the Cambridge Companion to Schubert. It is perhaps also worth noting that (if you are hooked) a seminal discussion of Schubert's late work and its influence on Brahms (Come on Charles, where's the third volume in the trilogy?) was written by James Webster in 1978-9 for a journal called 19th Century Music.

Rosen's "The Romantic Generation" is really written for people with a thorough grounding in music theory, but even with a limited understanding of harmony, counterpoint, and structure, I was able to derive much enjoyment from these essays.Rosen's first love is obviously Chopin, and his three chapters on the Polish master are essential reading, I think, for anyone trying to master the subject. Rosen effectively explodes any lingering remnants of the charge that Chopin was incapable of handling large forms, or was an "untrained genius." He makes a convincing case for Chopin as the most assiduously trained and capable musician of his generation -- and it was not a generation of lightweights. The structural analyses of the Ballades (particularly the 4th) are excellent, but where Rosen really shines is in his examination of the Etudes and Mazurkas. In the former, he elucidates the Etudes' pivotal place in the history of concert music, and the interplay of theoretical composition and physical execution that they embody. In the latter, Rosen explores the Mazurkas as the receptacles of Chopin's most subtle, and personal, artistic accomplishments.Other chapters are not always as convincing, but Rosen's examinations of Liszt, Mendellsohn, Berlioz, and Schumann all have their merits. After Chopin, Schumann is probably closest to Rosen's heart, and is given the most compelling treatment.

This book is referenced in so many places it's really required reading for the student of western music history.

It’s a reference book, absolutely worth buying.