Charles Rosen

Congreve: The Most Elegant, Subtle Writer of His Time

Mozart’s Early Trumpets

Freedom and Art

Extreme Romanticism at the Met

‘Ernani,’ and the extraordinary range of Verdi’s genius

The Super Power of Franz Liszt

The greatest pianist who ever lived

Elliott Carter’s Music of Time

Elliott Carter's Music of Time

A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamman, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today.

The Brilliant Music of Ravel

The Pleasures of Rimbaud

The Revelations of Frank Kermode

Music and the Cold War

Happy Birthday, Robert Schumann!

Happy Birthday, Frédéric Chopin!

Radical, Modern Hofmannsthal

On Isaiah Berlin: Gossip

Isaiah Berlin’s Civilized Malice

The hostile review of Isaiah Berlin’s correspondence by A.N. Wilson in the TLS—which has set off a heated controversy about Berlin and his reputation—exhibited a misunderstanding of university life as well as of the nature of Sir Isaiah’s career. Wilson was unappreciative of Berlin as a historian, comparing him unfavorably with his close contemporary, the Oxford historian A.L. Rowse. Neither were truly major historians but Berlin was not really a historian at all, in the full sense of that word, nor was he exactly a philosopher. His field, largely untrodden and little understood, was the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics and history: in this, his achievement was very great, above all in his profound elucidation of the way that ideas like freedom, enlightenment and nationalism could appear, develop and be challenged in the politics and art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Lost Pleasure of Browsing

I have read that more books in the United States are now sold online than in bookstores, and have noticed—and assume a causal connection—that there are less books on the shelves of stores. Since I almost never want to buy a book until I have held it in my hands and riffled through the pages, this means that I shall be purchasing fewer books in the future. Just as well, I suppose, as there is no space on my shelves.

Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!

T.S. Eliot Repents

What Happened to Wystan Auden?