Volume 42, Number 12 · July 13, 1995
The Big Sound
By Joseph Kerman
The Romantic Generation
by Charles Rosen
Harvard University Press, 723, plus a 74-minute CD pp., $39.95
Charles Rosen is admired both as a concert pianist and as the author of The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, of 1971, and other writings. His new book, long awaited, is The Romantic Generation. Its dust cover reproduces a familiar Romantic painting, which has in fact become a staple of music-book illustration.[1] It shows a pianist (he is Liszt) playing for a group of rapt listeners, while he himself gazes upon an outsized classical portrait bust of Beethoven that seems to levitate outside his window, in an otherwise Romantic landscape. The listeners are leading intellectuals and musicians of the time; Rossini, Paganini, Hugo, Dumas père, and George Sand have all fallen under the pianist's spell.
Review, 4611 words
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