A quarter-century's worth of trenchant thinking on Romantic culture
from celebrated pianist/musicologist/critic Rosen (author of The
Romantic Generation, 1995, and the National Book Award - winning
The Classical Style). First published, for the most part, in the
New York Review of Books, these pieces test contemporary
scholarship's vision of great Romantic artists from a variety of
nations and fields. Rosen's first essay considers how best to
republish Romantic-era literature by carefully contrasting the
quirks exhibited by recent editions of Wordsworth, Byron, and
Balzac. Rosen also spotlights other Romantic media. Comparing the
painter Caspar David Friedrich and the composer Robert Schumann, he
explores the Romantic destruction of "not only the barriers between
the arts, but the autonomy of art" from nature. In one piece, Rosen
even postulates (somewhat wildly, to be sure) that Elizabeth
David's cookbooks, with their evocation of pastoral sentiments,
represent "the last gasp of the Romantic momement." Elsewhere, the
critics join the cook as latter-day Romantics as Rosen thinks
through - and past - literary scholars like M.H. Abrams and William
Empson, the musicologist Heinrich Schenker, and George Bernard Shaw
considered as music journalist. Those who find Rosen's favor tend
to be those who, like Empson, Shaw, and the German theorist Walter
Benjamin, keep the flame of Romantic practice alive. (Rosen's
superb essay on the difficult but rewarding Benjamin remains quite
sharp 20 years after its original publication.) But the unity which
the common theme of Romanticism provides for Rosen's collection
makes one feel the absence of an introduction, or a new essay, that
might bring to a point the arguments that run throughout, while
considering Romanticism's relation to the classical and the modern.
Rosen certainly earns the authority to give such an overview.
Especially remarkable, perhaps, is the tone of intellectual
generosity that infuses Rosen's essays - as-much as his Romantic
avatars, he has a sure touch in uniting thought and expression to
expand the worlds of his audience's experience. (Kirkus Reviews)
Few can match Charles Rosen's cultivation and discernment, whether
as pianist, music historian, or critic. Here he gives us a
performance of literary criticism as high art, a critical conjuring
of the Romantic period by way of some of its central texts. "What
is the real business of the critic?" Rosen asks of George Bernard
Shaw in one of his essays. It is a question he answers throughout
this collection as he demonstrates and analyzes various critical
approaches. In writing about the Romantic poets Lord Byron, William
Wordsworth, William Cowper, and Friedrich Hoelderlin, he examines
the kind of criticism which attempts to uncover concealed code. He
investigates the relationship between Romantic aesthetic theory and
artworks, and explores the way Romantic art criticism has been
practiced by critics from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin. In
essays on Honore de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert, and
others, he highlights the intersections between Romantic art and
music; the artist's separation of life and artistic representations
of it; and the significance of the established text. With an apt
comparison or a startling juxtaposition, Rosen opens whole worlds
of insight, as in his linking of Caspar David Friedrich's landscape
painting and Schumann's music, or in his review of the theory and
musicology of Heinrich Schenker alongside the work of Roman
Jakobson. Throughout this volume we hear the voice of a shrewd
aesthetic interpreter, performing the critic's task even as he
redefines it in his sparkling fashion.
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