“Charles Rosen’s new book is that rarity: a work of detailed musical analysis that combines profound scholarship with artistic intuition. Above all, 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. Rosen gave at Harvard 15 years ago, the book reveals how the arts influenced one another: how literature, especially the literary fragment, affected Romantic composers like 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.

“A vast expansion on the Norton Lectures Mr. ” -Joseph Kerman, The New York Review of Books University presses are not known for bargains, but this is an unusual buy from Harvard… important book. “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. “ 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, The Wall Street Journal

Charles rosen the romantic generation