Charles Rosen on Beethoven

[Chaszz]

Thank you all for your good wishes.

I hope Prof. Rosen appears at some other time in the New York area and I can still see and hear him.

[Peter]

Sorry to hear your news Chaszz, but glad you are on the mend - another couple of Wagner operas! - what could follow Parsifal? (Except Richard Strauss!) All best wishes - Peter.

[Chaszz]

Well, here is a newspaper review, anyway. From the New York Sun:

Beethoven As Birthday Guest
Classical Music

BY FRED KIRSHNIT
May 16, 2007

While some of us might stick a candle in our oatmeal to celebrate our 80th birthday, pianist Charles Rosen, author of two of the finest books of musicology of the past half century, celebrated his at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday by talking about and performing the music of Beethoven.

Mr. Rosen apologized in advance to those who thought he would discuss the works he was about to perform, but said doing so would focus the audience too sharply on the aspects discussed, leaving the performance as a whole largely unappreciated. He spoke instead about tangential topics as they related to Beethoven.

Asked about period performance practice, Mr. Rosen stated there were two surefire methods of killing a tradition. The first was to play a piece with no regard for its original performance technique; the second was to reproduce the work exactly as it had been originally played. He waxed rhapsodic about the best pianist he had heard in his lifetime, Sviatoslav Richter, who performed the late piano sonatas of Schubert with his piano lid closed and only the dimmest of lights shining in the hall, attempting to re-create under modern conditions the intimacy of a Schubertiade.

Mr. Rosen also discussed how the Beethoven piano sonatas became such universal favorites of recitalists. It was simply a matter of right place, right time. In Beethoven's lifetime, only two of the 32 were ever performed at a public concert, but soon after his death, Franz Liszt invented the piano recital as a popular art form. Looking for serious material to offset his virtuosic opera fantasies, Liszt seized upon Beethoven as the ideal combination of profundity, difficulty, and showmanship — Mozart was much too tame and intimate for these rather flamboyant sessions.

After lunch, the audience settled in to hear Mr. Rosen traverse the last three sonatas. At this stage of his life, he is a serviceable craftsman but a superb artist. Hearing him play these pieces reminded me of what Irving Kolodin, of Saturday Review, had to say about these valedictory works. They contained, the critic wrote, "intellectual and emotional demands that defy the fleetest fingers if the mind that directs them is not equal to Beethoven's own." Here, the mind was equal, even if the fingers sometimes lagged behind.

Mr. Rosen is especially adept at displaying the shape of a piece, not just in the aggregate but also internally. In the E Major, Op. 109, he demonstrated the structure of the Adagio espressivo section — there are no movements per se — fashioning an unhurried and remarkably tasteful rendition. Similarly, when moving to the Opus 110, he took great pains to lay bare the architecture of the Adagio ma non troppo. His fluidity is impressive and he establishes a beautiful singing line even when unwanted notes occasionally peep through.

The final sonata, the C Minor, however, proved to be a bit much for Mr. Rosen this day. Even as he toiled to establish the dramatic tenor of the piece, which he did without bombast or melodrama, the fingerbreaking runs went off of the rails on three or four occasions. But this was still a richly rewarding experience — Beethoven realized by a true expert. There is so much froth and pandering in musical performance today, and so little intellectual grounding, that the privilege of hearing such an informed and honest effort is to be savored.
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Question from Chaszz: though almost unperformed in public, were the sonatas good score sellers and therefore presumably performed a good deal in private, at soirees, family gatherings and so forth?

[Chaszz]

Another review, from the NY Times:

May 15, 2007
Music Review | Charles Rosen
A Scholar of the Master Distills Beethoven’s Details
By STEVE SMITH

When considering an intersection of the pianist Charles Rosen with the late piano music of Beethoven, an old cliché comes to mind: Mr. Rosen has forgotten more about Beethoven than most people will ever know. The temptation to use that expression is best avoided. Mr. Rosen’s 80th-birthday recital at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday afternoon, in which he played Beethoven’s last three sonatas, made it clear that he has forgotten nothing.

Mr. Rosen, a leading authority on Beethoven, recorded an authoritative set of the final sonatas in the late 1960s. At 80 he does not command quite the same range of touch heard on those recordings. Even so, his detailed playing did justice to the stylistic demands and daunting strangeness of what are essentially inner dialogues. Mr. Rosen paid scrupulous attention to Beethoven’s copious expressive markings and offered considered solutions where meaning was left open to debate.

Coming after the nuanced amiability that opened the Sonata No. 30 in E (Op. 109), the Prestissimo was a hair-raising dash. The gentle mitosis of the final theme and variations was measured in a masterly way. The Sonata No. 31 in A flat (Op. 110) began with persuasive delicacy. Mr. Rosen’s articulation grew cloudy in the writhing middle portion of the Allegro molto. But he poetically conveyed the changeable moods of the final movement, carefully delineating strands in the fugal passages.

A few especially torrid passages in the first movement of the Sonata No. 32 in C minor (Op. 111) were cause for concern. But so vivid was Mr. Rosen’s account of the music’s terrible agitation that small slips were insignificant. The closing Arietta opened on a note of gentle humility. Mr. Rosen clearly savored the jazzy bounce of the third variation and presented a rapt account of those gentle closing passages that suggest Beethoven’s shrugging off mortal concerns.

After such a concentrated journey, the notion of an encore seemed somewhat superfluous. But a rousing ovation prompted one, and Mr. Rosen graciously complied with a suave rendition of Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor (Op. 64, No. 2).

[Chaszz]

Sorry to hear your news Chaszz, but glad you are on the mend - another couple of Wagner operas! - what could follow Parsifal? ...

Buddha und die Sieben Zwerge (1886)

Nietszche die Dumbkopf (1888)

Spiderman (1890)

[Preston]

Yes Chaszz, sorry to hear about the terrible news, no, I am not talking about missing Rosen , about your heart attack. I wish you the best.