{"id":1953,"date":"2011-04-27T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/info-libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/?p=1953"},"modified":"2023-07-20T17:49:34","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T17:49:34","slug":"1971","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/2011\/04\/27\/1971\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 111 – 1971: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven by Charles Rosen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published: New York, 1971\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style<\/em> won the 1972 National Book Award in Arts and Letters. It has since become a standard text \u2013 perhaps the definitive text \u2013 on the three great masters of the classical style, as well as on the style itself.<\/p>\n

Rosen is remarkable both for his erudition and for the clarity and elegance of his writing. But he didn’t begin his career authoring book-length works.<\/p>\n

For Rosen isn’t just an important scholar. He’s also a celebrated pianist \u2013 he completed his studies at Juilliard at the age of eleven. He earned his writing chops by preparing liner notes to accompany his own highly-regarded recordings of piano works by Liszt, Haydn, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Carter, and others.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nHad he confined his activities to either pursuit \u2013 scholarship or performance \u2013 he would easily have achieved distinction in the field. But Charles Rosen is that rare individual who’s excelled in two distinct, if related, realms. At the age of 84 he continues to enthrall large audiences when he does both at once: in May of 2011, for example, he\u2019ll give a lecture in London on \u201cThe Romantic Revolution,\u201d which will be paired with a performance (by Rosen) devoted to works by Chopin.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s written several other well-received works on music and musicians, including his landmark The Sonata Form<\/em>, but The Classical Style<\/em> remains his most important book. Significantly, this is a serious scholarly work that’s read not only by academics but by working musicians as well.<\/p>\n

Had neither writing nor performing worked out for Charles Rosen, he had yet a third career to fall back on. His Princeton Ph.D. was in Romance languages, and in an April 2011 interview with The Guardian<\/em>, Rosen recalled that<\/p>\n

I could have stayed on as an academic, but I never intended to do anything but play the piano. The only time I taught was when my playing would only support me for half a year \u2026 So I taught French at MIT Monday to Wednesday, [and] Thursday through Sunday I was a pianist. In 1955, after two years [at MIT], I got an offer from Columbia Artist Management [to make recordings] and so I resigned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact while he was at the Institute, he headed the pioneering “Humanities in French” program. So add Charles Rosen’s name to that long list of polymaths who\u2019ve passed through the halls of MIT.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Find it in the library<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published: New York, 1971 Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style won the 1972 National Book Award in Arts and Letters. It has since become a standard text \u2013 perhaps the definitive text \u2013 on the three great masters of the classical style, as well as on the style itself. Rosen is remarkable both for his erudition and for the clarity and elegance of his writing. But he didn’t begin his career authoring book-length works. For Rosen isn’t just an important scholar. He’s also a celebrated pianist \u2013 he completed his studies at Juilliard at the age of eleven. He earned his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":false,"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1953"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4392,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions\/4392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.mit.edu\/150books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}