Charles Rosen Short Quotes

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The eventual survival of the tradition is ultimately not at stake.

Charles Rosen
Even Stravinsky does not evoke the same public affection as Verdi.

Charles Rosen
Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.

Charles Rosen
The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.

Charles Rosen
Our freedom is hemmed in on every side. We must be grateful for what remains.

Charles Rosen
It is above all through landscape that music joins Romantic art and literature.

Charles Rosen
Visual delight, sentiment, and exploration become one in the new appreciation of landscape and Nature.

Charles Rosen
The music that survives is the music that musicians want to play. They perform it until it finds an audience.

Charles Rosen
None of Chopin's contemporaries could rival him for the variety and effectiveness of his treatment of the return.

Charles Rosen
Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension.

Charles Rosen
We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.

Charles Rosen
When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered.

Charles Rosen
For Mendelssohn, Beethoven was the new point of departure, and a German composer could not afford to ignore him, as Chopin and Verdi were able to do.

Charles Rosen
Liszt has never needed revival; his music has always been an important part of the concert repertoire. Nevertheless, he has appeared to need rehabilitation.

Charles Rosen
The relation of the performance of music to sound is complex and ambiguous: this is what makes possible Mark Twain's joke that Wagner is better than he sounds.

Charles Rosen
Sonata form could not be defined until it was dead. Czerny claimed with pride around 1840 that he was the first to describe it, but then it was already part of history.

Charles Rosen
The creation of a classical style was not so much the achievement of an ideal as the reconciliation of conflicting ideals-the striking of an optimum balance between them.

Charles Rosen
Schumann's humor is rarely either witty or light: the unrealizable musical structure, the musical motto hidden and partly inaudible, must have stirred his musical fantasy.

Charles Rosen
The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one.

Charles Rosen
Chopin's exquisite ear saved him from the ugly repetition of thick chords in the bass that frequently disfigure the work of Mendelssohn, Weber, and Hummel—and even of Field.

Charles Rosen
The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.

Charles Rosen
More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympathy with other listeners' enjoyment...

Charles Rosen
Meyerbeer's approach to opera may seem cynical. His music is not, like Donizetti's, an immediate expression of the sentiments of his characters but a calculated manipulation of the audience.

Charles Rosen
Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be "real" folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a communal personality, expressive of the soil.

Charles Rosen
Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form—a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide.

Charles Rosen
Stage fright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness... It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense - that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success.

Charles Rosen