The Classical Style - New Edition, by Charles Rosen, Faber & Faber 533pp, £25 in UK
In the "New Preface" which is one of three major bonuses of this new edition of The Classical Style, Charles Rosen refers to "the small increase of genuine musical pleasure that comes with understanding". Those who believe that music and intelligence are mutually exclusive - I suspect this includes a great many Irish "musiclovers" - should shun this book and indeed everything else Rosen has written in his long and admirable career (frustratingly, this volume lacks a proper bibliography).
Those for whom music is supremely - perhaps uniquely - capable of rectifying the much-lamented "dissociation of sensibility" will revel in the dense and passionate argumentation at which Rosen excels, a kind of idiosyncratic dialogue between the author/pianist and his beloved subjects. Here, he discusses Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; elsewhere he has trained his mind and his colossal pianistic technique on such moderns as Schoenberg and Boulez, and this radical catholicity lends depth and perspective to everything he writes (and plays - the pianist who cannot face Schoenberg can only give us a limited view of Beethoven). It's not without significance that The Classical Style is dedicated to the "avant-garde" composer Elliot Carter and his wife.
Rosen's definition of "the classical style" proceeds from a deep analysis of the phenomenon of tonality, which is as central to the formal architecture of Classical music as was its dissolution to the development of post-Classical forms. Here, at the very outset, the hasty reader will find his/her patience and concentration severely tested. Nonetheless, anyone wishing to derive maximum pleasure both from Rosen's book and from the music he discusses should apply themselves rigorously to this "cumbersome" (Rosen's word) section, after which the sailing, while never plain, is invariably exhilarating. Let Rosen's own headings provide a synopsis: "The Origins of the Style"; "The Coherence of the Musical Language"; "Haydn from 1770 to the Death of Mozart"; "Mozart"; "Haydn after the Death of Mozart"; "Beethoven"; "Beethoven's Later Years and the Conventions of his Childhood". The latter chapter is the second bonus of this edition, and has been added "to define more precisely his relation to the two famous composers that preceded him".
One of the most attractive aspects of Rosen's writing, incidentally, is his constant and mercurial literary allusiveness. E.T.A. Hoffmann, the composer, music critic, cartoonist and fabulist, is a constant reference point. The Marquis de Sade's pamphlet One More Step, linking political radicalism and sexual liberation, provides an unexpected context for Mozart's Don Giovanni. Rosen's epigraphs are invariably apposite, amusing, and often remarkably recondite: the dedication page, for example, boasts the following: "Zangler: Why do you keep repeating that idiotic word `classical'? Melchoir: Oh, the word isn't idiotic, it's just often used idiotically." The source for this is Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen, which is probably not on everybody's shelves.
The third bonus of this edition is the CD unpretentiously tucked away inside the back cover, featuring bravura performances by Rosen of Beethoven's Sonatas Op. 106 and 110. Unusually, this CD doesn't replace musical examples in the text, which is unfashionably awash with quotations.
Irritatingly, the book is far from devoid of misprints. More seriously, the index is a minor mess. Many references are misleading: e.g., page 454, which should refer to Gesualdo, consists entirely of a quotation from Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto; the murderous Italian turns up on page 516. All references to the Epilogue (dealing mainly with Schubert and Schumann) are two pages out. These cavils aside, The Classical Style in its new guise is more indispensable than ever.
Raymond Deane is a composer, pianist and author