‘Brilliant’, Charles Rosen would say to begin a response to a speaker. ‘Brilliant’, and then, so often, he proceeded to demolish him. ‘Brilliant’, I write, to begin my response to Freedom and the Arts, the last collection of essays about music and literature published in his lifetime (most of them are reprintings of writings that first appeared in the 1990s and 2000s), and hence, representing, for now at least, his final choices of self-representation as critic and scholar. (Was it a conscious final selection? I don't want to evoke the mythic idea of the ‘last work’. But at this late stage of his life, the ill man surely was aware that he might be making final statements about his work.) And, of course, ‘brilliant’, I write in response to the great corpus of writing that has enriched, provoked, and, with its emphasis on criticism, helped to alter the course of musicology in the late twentieth century, while positively transforming the nature of non-specialist music criticism (not concert reviews) in the many non-academic journal articles that collectively comprise a course in music appreciation (for readers conversant with undergraduate-level competencies in harmony and form) in the highest and best sense of the term.

My purpose is not to demolish (it would be foolish to try), but I will attempt to view his work critically, contextualizing and positioning it within the late twentieth-century discipline and analyzing its influence, while viewing it from the perspective that Rosen, despite his stature and his academic credentials (PhD albeit not in music but French Literature, university teacher in music, publications in university presses) remained something of a musicological outsider – a role that he seemed to relish, for it only eased his self-appointed function as one of musicology's most severe critics. In this he had only one true peer – not Joseph Kerman, who was less permanently committed to disciplinary critiques, although the ones that he made were crucial – but rather Richard Taruskin. This fact is perhaps a delicious irony, in view of their mutually antagonistic relationship, but not a paradox. Radical critics (and revolutionaries) united in opposition to a common enemy are so often united in mutual antipathy and mistrust stemming from the opposing values and agendas that motivate their opposition. (More about Taruskin later.)

On the other hand, over the decades Rosen largely avoided the kind of systematic disciplinary critique that marked Kerman's interventions, with one significant exception, the essay ‘The New Musicology’,Footnote ¹ which takes on a development in musicology that was, in the main, anathema to him, and treats certain individuals harshly. The closest he gets to this in Freedom and the Arts comes in his review of the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary,Footnote ² in which he confesses to the ‘despair and terror as well as considerable admiration’ (p. 203) about the ‘ephemeral’ nature of much of its contents. It features musicians and musicologists ‘whose modicum of interest has either long evaporated or will soon disappear’ (p. 204). Worse still, is ‘the ambition of the new edition to be up to date, to include recent trends, so many of them clearly unpromising’ (p. 204). Which trends they are he does not say; Rosen is not particularly interested in methodology or topics associated with intellectual history; he says nothing about the articles on musicology and historiography for example. But he singles out articles on sex, sexuality and gender as well as feminism for praise. No reactionary, he. While he praises some of the new contributions on topics that had been covered in the first edition, he devotes much of the article to critiquing lacunae in articles on composers, and is especially interested in pointing out the losses suffered from the replacement of certain articles of high merit from the first edition with new ones.Footnote ³ He also takes on Stanley Sadie, the editor of the dictionary, referring to remarks made about Rosen himself with respect to Rosen's critique of the first edition and the effect or non-effect that these remarks had on the conception of the second edition. I point this out because it represents an aspect of Rosen's criticism of other author's work that is striking: time and again Rosen makes himself – in a combative style that is not pleasant to read – as much the subject of his reviews as the authors themselves. The targeting of individuals holds true for most of the essays in Freedom and the Arts (I will discuss only those on music and I will not comment on every one.) Most of them appeared in the New York Review of Books, whose format, the review, was congenial to Rosen's modus operandi, critiquing an author's work and then telling the reader how it really is. (There are several non-review essays and four wonderful celebrations of composers on their 200th or 100th birthdays.Footnote ⁴)

Of course he does not always demolish, as in the substantial piece, ‘Dramatic and Tonal Logic in Mozart's Operas’, which takes as its point of departure work from the 1990s by James Webster (after Taruskin, Rosen's favourite bête noire) and John Platoff that critiqued the over-confident assertions about tonal unity in Mozart's operas and sonata-form thinking in large- and small-structural levels that marked some of the writing about these issues in previous decades.Footnote ⁵ He applauds them, and then leaves them for the most part behind. But, in pursuing the topic of the title with detailed analysis of key structures in several operas, he clearly seeks to provide a corrective to their corrective. His arguments centre on key structure: every mature Mozart opera ends in the same key as its beginning, every number, including finales, ends as it had begun tonally, the first finale is placed in a key opposed to the overture. A similar emphasis on key structure marks his ‘Structural Dissonance and the Classical Sonata’,Footnote ⁶ and I find both pieces, which don't cross the line into becoming lists of keys, but sometimes approach that line, less stimulating than the third style-critical essay on Mozart, ‘Drama and Figured Bass in Mozart's Concerto’ (initially a response to Leon Plantinga on continuo practice and his alleged misrepresentation of an earlier comment on the topic by Rosen),Footnote ⁷ which combines Rosen's own insights as a performer with his knowledge of late eighteenth-century performance conventions and the evidence in Mozart's autograph scores. The broader points in this essay address the recent revival of continuing continuo playing in the concertos, which Rosen opposes, and the question of their dramatic character, which he want to defend, even while acknowledging the legitimacy of critiques (again Webster) of platitudes about this (e.g. concerto movement=aria). Limiting continuo playing emphasizes the drama inherent in these works, the keyboard is more clearly a solo protagonist if the keyboard player largely abstains from continuo playing. The last essay on musical style in this section of the book is quite different in concept. Rosen does not start with another scholar's work, but rather pursues the problem of ‘Tradition without Convention’ in music spanning from Mozart and Haydn through Stravinsky. The argument is that conventional material of the classic style – tonal functions, melodic material, formal principles, become the basis of a post-classical tradition – with Beethoven in the lead – that consists in removing, by using this material in new ways, the conventionality that had been traditional. Rosen uses the terms ‘naturalized’ and ‘naturalizing’ (pp. 153 ff.). First given as a lecture in a series on human values at the University of Utah in 2000, it is a paradigm of humanistic musicology for a general audience.

This essay is about the freedom with which composers defined their relationship to tradition. And almost all of the articles in the volume have to do with freedom in one way or another, hence the title. In his introduction, Rosen articulates his agenda: ‘the necessity of preserving both a respect for the identity of the literary and musical works and the freedom from coercive interpretation, a freedom which provides the basis and the guarantee of the pleasures of reading, listening, and performing that justify the existence of the arts’ (p. 3). Admonishing the reader to acknowledge that no single interpretation is valid (a truism), he advocates what might be called a ‘naïve’ approach or response to art; we must, at times, listen or read ‘with innocent eye and ear, untainted or unblocked by critical studies, a state of objectivity unrealizable in all it purity, but which may be approached’ (p. 3).

This is the perspective that informed the writing on New Grove and new musicology mentioned previously. It is very strongly felt in the essay about (against) Theodor Adorno,Footnote ⁸ in which Rosen voices familiar criticisms (pro Schoenberg, contra Stravinsky and Debussy, condemnation of jazz), emphasizes the profoundly conservative nature of Adorno's world-view, and takes a potshot at Edward Said, Adorno's ‘most eminent disciple’ (p. 256). He is largely dismissive of Adorno's musical-critical competence; the focus is on Beethoven and his demolition of Adorno's famous essay on the Missa solemnis is very acute. He recognizes Adorno's ‘fundamental critical insight’ (p. 249) that art does not just reflect social reality but acts within it, but several pages later writes sarcastically about the conceptual terminology that underlies his sociological approach: ‘He himself makes a fetish of “fetishism”‘ (p. 262) and so on, while asserting that Adorno did not understand Walter Benjamin, despite his acknowledgement of Benjamin's fundamental importance for the development of his own thought. The best thing about Adorno for Rosen is the difficulty in reading him: it makes the reader think harder. It is a thoroughly negative piece and, perhaps even for readers who have similar views on Adorno, depressing in its lack of generosity.

The polemical tone of this essay is matched elsewhere in the book only in the two articles that document his wrangling with Taruskin: the famous review of The Oxford History of Western Music Footnote ⁹ and his angry responseFootnote ¹⁰ to an article on music in the cold war (‘Afterward: nicht blutbefleckt’) in which Taruskin describes himself ‘as one who regards Rosen's literary output – all of it – as cold war propaganda’.Footnote ¹¹ The review of the history makes me think back to the months after its appearance as the reviews began to appear. It was an exciting time in the field, not least because of the monumentality of the project and the personal achievement of the author, and not least because of the provocative nature of much of its contents. Rosen's was one of the longest and most comprehensive (probably the longest and most comprehensive) – it is twice the size of his review of New Grove 2nd edition – and the most negative. His critique takes two main forms; the exposure of lacunae in the coverage of music and musicians in different centuries and style periods; and the rebuttals of negative political interpretations of musicians and their music that are not justified (e.g. Taruskin's distaste for the ‘elitist’ nature of a wider variety of music in different centuries [see pp. 215 and 224] and his claim about Debussy's anti-Semitism [see p. 229]).

For readers of this journal, his critique of Taruskin's approach to German music of the nineteenth century is particularly interesting, notably his attacks on the representation of Beethoven and his music as elitist (and hence non-democratic) products of the Viennese patronage system and on national-chauvinist elements in German musical life and in its historiography. Rosen finds much of this tendentious; in his remarks on the treatment of Beethoven, for example, he points out that Taruskin fails to mention Fidelio, especially the ‘Prisoner's Chorus’, while discussing Der glorreiche Augenblick. About Taruskin's critique of past and recent claims about the superiority of German instrumental music, he concludes that Taruskin's ‘manner develops ominous symptoms of conspiratorial theory (p. 227)’.Footnote ¹² It is very strong stuff, ad hominem as well as ad hoc.

Even more personal, for good reason, is the second piece, in which Rosen defends himself against accusations about the ideological character of his work and against Taruskin's broader charges that major institutions and individuals connected with post-war musical modernism in the US were ideologically motivated, conceived within a distinctly anti-Communist cold-war perspective and were sponsored/manipulated by government propaganda agencies. ‘Nicht blutbefleckt’, the key words in the title, of the polemic written for special issues of the Journal of Musicology on music and the cold war, were drawn from Schopenhauer's distinction between ‘world history’ and cultural history; the latter, constituting ‘the history of philosophy, science and the arts’, is ‘innocent and unstained by blood’Footnote ¹³. Taruskin, of course, vehemently opposes this view, which he identifies as a particularly Germanic notion that has had a great but bad influence in the West. It was, he argues, the predominating attitude among post-World War II American and western European composers and historians and critics. He starts with Milton Babbitt, exposing contradictions in Babbitt's views on the subject in the context of the Cold War, moves on to depict the entire serialist-music enterprise (and modernist music more generally) as a response to the political situation after the war. Rosen becomes part of the discussion because of his ‘phobic reaction to reception studies’,Footnote ¹⁴ which stems, argues Taruskin, from his affirmative stance on the autonomy of the artwork. Then everything gets complicated and entangled (one must read the articles in order to fully grasp the web of arguments and counterarguments), as Taruskin responds to Rosen's review of his Oxford History, notably to his critique of Taruskin on Elliott Carter. Not coincidentally, in ‘Nicht blutbefleckt’ Taruskin makes Carter and his music into a paradigm for ‘bloodstainedness’ with respect to his first string quartet, its European premiere (Rome, 1954, sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had close associations with the CIA), and its reception, and the ecstatic responses by leading western musicologists and critics. Prominent among them is Rosen, a long- standing champion and close friend of Carter.

Rosen's indignant response presents persuasive rebuttals of details concerning himself and others, principally Carter. But he does not (and cannot) deliver a knock-out punch to the broad argument that many American artists and intellectuals, in the 1930s and thereafter, cooperated with such institutions. But should we seriously entertain the notion that Rosen is an intentional ‘cold warrior’ and that The Classical Style constitutes propaganda? (Or is it better to regard Taruskin's sweeping condemnation as deliberate hyperbole motivated by the desire to provoke and antagonize?) The question reminds me of interpretations of Carl Dahlhaus's work as in a self-conscious struggle with Marxist musicology. But there are significant differences: Dahlhaus, an aesthetic autonomist himself, who not coincidentally opposed reception history, was on the front line in Berlin, and Dahlhaus engaged directly with his colleague/adversaries just a couple of miles eastward and beyond in his critiques of Marxist methodology. Rosen did not. However, rejecting the notion of an avowedly propagandistic nature to a body of work does not (or should not) lead to a denial of its political character. Rosen does not acknowledge this and he should have. As Taruskin tellingly points out, western artists and critics had no trouble identifying the ideological basis for the arts in communist societies – no wonder, because they were self-consciously proclaimed by their makers and controllers – but they are not sufficiently self-aware and self-critical to acknowledge their own situation, even if its political nature consists primarily in its self-definition as non-political.Footnote ¹⁵ But as we have seen, across his work Rosen is only sporadically interested in political and social issues, and his failure to recognize such qualities in his own work is consistent with his ‘pure’ aesthetics.

We might also ask what Rosen was trying to accomplish by including these essays in the book. They certainly qualify as strong examples of the ‘coercive interpretation’ that he opposes, as a consequence of the essential difference in their approaches and agendas: the ‘non-political’, Germanophile, aesthetic-autonomist Rosen locked in combat with the ‘political’, Germanophobe (a charge that Taruskin would vigorously deny), contextualist Taruskin. And as Taruskin acknowledged in ‘Nicht blutbefleckt’ the exchanges help to clarify some of their many differences, notably their philosophy of history. But an equally strong impression was that of personal antagonism to his opponent, ad hominem subsuming ad hoc. It seems that Rosen needed Taruskin himself, not just Taruskin's work, to build up the level of anger and indignation that energized his response. And Taruskin, in turn, needed him. No one will miss Charles Rosen more than his principal opponent and erstwhile partner in a relationship defined by ‘elective disaffinities’.

‘Coercive interpretation’ versus freedom is a theme in several articles about performance practice. In a review of Kenneth Hamilton's After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance,Footnote ¹⁶ Rosen likes Hamilton's account of Romantic pianists arpeggiating chords, improvising small preludes to composed works, rubato playing, ‘dislocation’ (sounding the melody note after the bass), and other liberties with the score. But not surprisingly, in view of his own modernist pianism, he warns against their overuse and concludes that ‘the Golden Age is a mirage’ (p. 299). In the weighty conclusion to the volume, an original essay, ‘Old Wisdom and Newfangled Theory: Two One-Way Streets to Disaster’, Rosen attempts to mediate between two extremes that define contemporary practice in approaches to music, literature and the visual arts: (the myth of) historical authenticity, ‘absolute reproductive fidelity to an imagined original’ and the complete disregard of tradition motivated by a ‘ruthless unhistorical modernism’ (p. 403). The issues in musical performance that he raises are not new, but, as always, the discussion is lively and enriched by many historical anecdotes. I enjoyed reading that Rosen could discover virtue and excellence in the seemingly mutually exclusive Bach playing of Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter. And I was mildly surprised (but on second thought perhaps should not have been) that he does not summarily reject the non-orthodox so-called ‘director's theatre’ (the English equivalent of the German ‘Regietheater’) approaches to opera production, although I imagine that he found more to blame than to praise in contemporary European practices.

The many warnings against forced interpretation in this volume of essays are consistent with his own work, in which he largely refrains from interpreting the social or ideological meaning of works in any way that corresponds to so-called new-musicological approaches, while acknowledging the social and ideological conditions in which music was composed, performed and received. One could say that Rosen does not interpret; he elucidates, often in a matter of fact tone that seems intentionally non-interpretative, writing on style and structure in a remarkably consistent way that was fully formed in The Classical Style.Footnote ¹⁷ One could say that Rosen never progressed beyond The Classical Style with respect to method; he did however, broaden his view in his books on the nineteenth century to admit the ‘worlds’ in which music flourished. There is decisively more about literature, painting and contemporary thought (but not enough on philosophy) in The Romantic Generation Footnote ¹⁸ than in The Classical Style, but, crucially, the arguments about music do not substantially change. For which reason, at the end of his life, Rosen certainly must be viewed as a conservative (his opponents might well call him a reactionary), while at the beginning of his career he was in the vanguard. Academic readers accustomed to close readings of music that draw on a wide array of non-musicological methodologies might find his analytical work narrow, because it is self-contained. His analytical language is the language of music. And, because he moves so swiftly and covers so much musical ground (and offers so many musical examples with relatively little extended commentary), some might even find it superficial. I don't, but I do sometimes wish he would move at a more leisurely pace. And sometimes Rosen, who in many writings adopts a highly discursive approach, rambles – at least I cannot always find the thread. Other readers might wish for more documentation and attribution, especially in the pieces for the New York Review of Books and other non-academic journals. (I do wish this, but I accept the nature of the genre.) No one can reasonably deny: his immense knowledge of the musical (and literary) repertory, and musical and cultural history (nowhere more evident than in his short introduction to the music of Arnold Schoenberg with its brilliant synthesis of cultural history – why dissonance? why atonality? – and musical analysisFootnote ¹⁹); his acute musical sensitivity; his humour; and primes inter pares, his excellence as a writer. Charles Rosen created a style of musical criticism that will remain classic.