The Romantic Generation

Consistently brilliant...[Rosen’s] 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. -- Joseph Kerman * New York Review of Books *
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 Style a masterpiece. But, first and foremost, he is a pianist of penetrating originality...A magnum opus. -- George Steiner * New Yorker *
What must be said immediately is how well, how enviably well, Rosen knows this music, its secrets, its astonishing harmonic and structural innovations, and the problems and pleasures of its performance...the book...is often grippingly, even excitingly, readable. -- Edward Said * London Review of Books *
Charles Rosen's new book is that rarity: a work of detailed musical analysis that combines profound scholarship with artistic intuition...it leads one to want to hear the music: to listen anew to the well-known works and to acquaint oneself with the lesser known. -- David Blum * New York Times Book Review *
The Romantic Generation will certainly be recognized as one of the decade's most important books about music...Rosen is a master. -- Joseph McLellan * Washington Post *
Although no pianist can afford to be without the book, musicians of every kind should partake of both its wisdom and its practical lessons...Among non-musicians, anyone interested in the cultural and literary history of the period can feast on Rosen's introductory and incidental essays about the Romantic movement as a whole. -- Robert Craft * Chicago Tribune *
Startling, brilliant, infuriating, revelatory...Rosen is able to see music in a fluid way, as a subtle play of processes that cannot always be precisely pinned down. -- Mark Swed * Wall Street Journal *
The book underscores that Romantic composers elevated, as did Romantic poets, once trivial genres to the level of the sublime and, in so doing, defined a revolutionary approach to culture. -- Michael Kimmelman * New York Times *
Author/teacher/concert pianist Rosen delivers a monumental follow-up to his award-winning The 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. * Kirkus Reviews *
A fresh, challenging, and stimulating view of the society in which Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and Schumann flourished. Highly recommended. * Library Journal *
Pianist and professor Rosen helps us understand the harmonic and rhythmic variety and the virtuosity required of performers that make romantic music appeal to so many...Long on analysis of significant musical examples (728 accompany the text) and short on summary comments on the nature of romantic music, this is a worthy fellow to Rosen's prizewinning The Classical Style (1980). -- Alan Hirsch * Booklist *
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. -- Christopher Hatch * Opera Quarterly *
[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. -- Robert P. Morgan * Journal of Modern History *
Historically informed, intellectually brilliant, profoundly intuitive and thoroughly practical—every pianist who wants to play Chopin, Schumann and Liszt will need to read it. -- Richard Dyer * Boston Sunday Globe *
Rosen opens the reader's ears and mind with his brilliant insights, his enthusiasm for the music, and his elegance and wit. -- Rufus Hallmark * Washington Times *
The Romantic Generation is a work that answers resonantly to the definition of Romantic style proposed by one of Rosen’s touchstones, the boy-genius Novalis: It ‘makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.’ -- Jonathan Bate * Wall Street Journal *