What Charles Rosen's celebrated book The Classical Styledid for music of the Classical period, this new, much-awaited volume brilliantly does for the Romantic era. An exhilarating exploration of the musical language, forms, and styles of the Romantic period, it captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and in doing so it conveys the very sense of Romantic music. In readings uniquely informed by his performing experience, Rosen offers consistently acute and thoroughly engaging analyses of works by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, and Berlioz, and he presents a new view of Chopin as a master of polyphony and large-scale form. He adeptly integrates his observations on the music with reflections on the art, literature, drama, and philosophy of the time, and thus shows us the major figures of Romantic music within their intellectual and cultural context.

Rosen covers a remarkably broad range of music history and considers the importance to nineteenth-century music of other cultural developments: the art of landscape, a changed approach to the sacred, the literary fragment as a Romantic art form. He sheds new light on the musical sensibilities of each composer, studies the important genres from nocturnes and songs to symphonies and operas, explains musical principles such as the relation between a musical idea and its realization in sound and the interplay between music and text, and traces the origins of musical ideas prevalent in the Romantic period. Rich with striking descriptions and telling analogies, Rosen's overview of Romantic music is an accomplishment without parallel in the literature, a consummate performance by a master pianist and music historian.

Author/teacher/concert pianist Rosen delivers a monumental follow-up to his award-winningThe Classical Style, here concentrating on the generation of European composers who "came of age" in the 1820s and 1830s: Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and, first and foremost, Chopin...The thrust of [these] discussions is to illuminate some of the more startling and masterful changes in musical form that occurred as "Classical" gave way to "Romantic"...A valuable and important book.

This logical and long-awaited sequel to Rosen's award-winning The Classical Styleonce again demonstrates the author's extraordinary insights. Rosen explains and describes the first half of the 19th century in conjunction with literature, art, and social changes...[He] also examines the lives of the composers and pursues some detailed analysis of numerous compositions to make his points. The result is a fresh, challenging, and stimulating view of the society in which Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Schumann flourished. Highly recommended.

The Romantic Generationis handsomely produced and is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of a compact disc attached to the inside of the back cover containing Rosen performances of several of the works he discusses. Anyone who listens to this disc will recognize not only how sensitively and thoughtfully Rosen plays this music but also how his pianistic knowledge informs his writing about it...[This is a book of] many riches, which treats a complex, seemingly unmanageable topic in a consistently provocative, engaging, and stimulating manner. There is probably no one other than Rosen who could bring to this task such a range and depth of musical and cultural knowledge.

The Romantic Generationis handsomely produced and is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of a compact disc attached to the inside of the back cover containing Rosen performances of several of the works he discusses. Anyone who listens to this disc will recognize not only how sensitively and thoughtfully Rosen plays this music but also how his pianistic knowledge informs his writing about it...[This is a book of] many riches, which treats a complex, seemingly unmanageable topic in a consistently provocative, engaging, and stimulating manner. There is probably no one other than Rosen who could bring to this task such a range and depth of musical and cultural knowledge.

The Romantic Generationwill certainly be recognized as one of the decade's most important books about music...Rosen is a master of the sweeping generalization--more or less true,with exceptions and careful definition of terms--that will attract casual readers who seek a generalized knowledge of these composers. After a certain amount of random immersion in the music, one's disorganized perceptions can beusefully crystallized by short, pithy statements that put an experience into focus...Almost equally useful to the general reader are the pages where Rosen--often brilliantly--brings the findings of another discipline such as history orpsychology into the discussion of music.

Rosen is a fluent writer, having at his command both informality and rhetorical force. He is a musicologist and theoretician whose authority extends from Bach to Boulez. The rigor of his technical demonstration is, to a singular degree, grounded in a vivid knowledge of cultural history, of the social and intellectual background to Western music; it is this rich sense of background that made Rosen's The Classical Stylea masterpiece. But, first and foremost, he is a pianist of penetrating originality...A magnum opus.

Rosen is a fluent writer, having at his command both informality and rhetorical force. He is a musicologist and theoretician whose authority extends from Bach to Boulez. The rigor of his technical demonstration is,to a singular degree, grounded in a vivid knowledge of cultural history, of the social and intellectual background to Western music; it is this rich sense of background that made Rosen's The ClassicalStylea masterpiece. But, first and foremost, he is a pianist of penetrating originality...A magnum opus.

The publisher has treated this book royally. The just-mentioned CD--seventy-five minutes of piano music in which Rosen provides sixteen audible illustrations, mostly complete pieces or movements--is one proof of this. Another appears in the literally hundreds of musical excerpts or short works printed at precisely the right point in the text. All told, the project reflects Rosen's standing as a writer whose wide readership wants to follow even his musical-technical arguments...So in both form and content Charles Rosen's latest book deserves attention from anyone who is drawn to music written in the years 1825-50 and who, more especially, wishes to explore the inner workings of masterpieces by Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt.

In his long-awaited new book, The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen opens the reader's ears and mind with his brilliant insights, his enthusiasm for the music, and his elegance and wit. One wants to spend time poring over the ideas and the music, both to understand and confirm as well as occasionally to challenge Mr. Rosen's points. Like the author's The Classical Style, this is a book of ideas and opinions that shows off Mr. Rosen's awesome command of the musical repertory and of much else besides.

Although Rosen's criticism is rooted in musical detail, in his technical commentary on literally hundreds of moments and passages of music and of many complete compositions, this Ursatz(as music analysts would say) generates a foreground that is consistently brilliant--a brilliant compound of interpretation, opinion, enthusiasm, potted musicology, homily and polemic, wit, wisdom, and learning...His analytical genius extends to both music and language, so that again and again he finds just the right words to describe a musical effect simply, clearly, and to perfection...A compact disc comes with the book, containing piano music by the author to illustrate the discussion. University presses are not known for bargains, but this is an unusual buy from Harvard...[An] important book.

A vast expansion on the Norton Lectures Mr. Rosen gave at Harvard 15 years ago, the book reveals how the arts influenced one another: how literature, especially the literary fragment, affected Romantic composerslike Schumann and Chopin; how landscape painting related to song cycles like Beethoven's "An die Ferne Geliebte," and how music shaped contemporaneous attitudes toward art and writing. Above all, the book underscores that Romanticcomposers elevated, as did Romantic poets, once trivial genres to the level of the sublime and, in so doing, defined a revolutionary approach to culture.

striking descriptions and telling analogies, Rosen's overview of Romantic music is an accomplishment without parallel in the literature, a consummate performance by a master pianist and music historian.

An exhilarating exploration of the musical language forms and styles of the Romantic period, "The Romantic Generation" captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and in doing so conveys the very sense of Romantic music. 728 musical examples.

Charles Rosenis a pianist and Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the <>University of Chicago. In addition to The Classical Stylewhich won the National Book Award, his previous books include Sonata Formsand Romanticism and Realism(with Henri Zerner).

Preface

Music and Sound

Imagining the sound

Romantic paradoxes: the absent melody

Classical and Romantic pedal

Conception and realization

Tone color and structure

Fragments

Renewal

The Fragment as Romantic form

Open and closed

Words and music

The emancipation of musical language

Experimental endings and cyclical forms

Ruins

Disorders

Quotations and memories

Absence: the melody suppressed

Mountains and Song Cycles

Horn calls

Landscape and music

Landscape and the double time scale

Mountains as ruins

Landscape and memory

Music and memory

Landscape and death: Schubert

The unfinished workings of the past

Song cycles without words

Formal Interlude

Mediants

Four-bar phrases

Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

Poetic inspiration and craft

Counterpoint and the single line

Narrative form: the ballade

Changes of mode

Italian opera and J. S. Bach

Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Keyboard exercises

Virtuosity and decoration (salon music?)

Morbid intensity

Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Folk music?

Rubato

Modal harmony?

Mazurka as Romantic form

The late mazurkas

Freedom and tradition

Liszt: On Creation as Performance

Disreputable greatness

Die Lorelei: the distraction of influence

The Sonata: the distraction of respectability

The invention of Romantic piano sound: the Etudes

Conception and realization

The masks of Liszt

Recomposing: Sonnet no. 104

Self-Portrait as Don Juan

Berlioz: Liberation from the Central European Tradition

Blind idolaters and perfidious critics

Tradition and eccentricity: the idée fixe

Chord color and counterpoint

Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scène d'amour"

Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch

Mastering Beethoven

Transforming Classicism

Classical form and modern sensibility

Religion in the concert hall

Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art

Politics and melodrama

Popular art

Bellini

Meyerbeer

Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal

The irrational

The inspiration of Beethoven and Clara Wieck

The inspiration of E.T.A. Hoffmann

Out of phase

Lyric intensity

Failure and triumph

Index of Names and Works