Volume 53, Number 4 · March 9, 2006
From the Troubadours to Sinatra: Part II
By Charles Rosen
The Oxford History of Western Music
by Richard Taruskin
Oxford University Press, 6 volumes, 4,154 pp., $699.00
By the middle of Volume 2 of his entertaining, provocative, and massive Oxford History of Western Music (five volumes, plus a sixth with indices and a chronology), Professor Richard Taruskin reaches the repertory familiar to all music lovers—Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with the Romantics from Chopin to Tchaikovsky and Wagner following in the next volume. The landscape changes; writing about the familiar presents new problems. Perhaps the chief one is finding something novel and interesting to say about the most famous figures of the past, revered, written about, and overanalyzed for more than two centuries.
Review, 7699 words
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