Beethoven's right-hand man

Charles Rosen shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Napoleon. OK, Beethoven actually. He took piano lessons in his teens from Moriz Rosenthal, a pupil of Liszt; Liszt had been taught by Czerny; Czerny studied with Beethoven. The genealogy, like Rosen’s career, is long and distinguished; the credentials impeccable; his combination of playing prowess, scholarship and writing unique. I shook the hand that shook the hand …

Rosen is in London to speak at the Culture Wars conference and to give a concert at the Wigmore Hall. At 71, he is the grand old man of American pianism, yet his manner is anything but grand. He does not pronounce, or pontificate or try to predict; he plays the piano. Everything else – his two bestselling books on music, The Classical Style and The Romantic Generation; his articles for the New York Review of Books; his professorships at Harvard and Oxford – is secondary to that.

He was born in New York in 1927 and has lived in the same spacious, high-ceilinged apartment since he was six; he has never married; his recollections of the musicians with whom he studied in the 1930s and 40s are pin-sharp. This, you feel, is a life lived for, and through, music, though he managed to fit in a PhD in French literature and a little high-level mathematics along the way.

“I started playing the piano when I was four, but everybody does,” he says matter-of-factly. “My favourite comparison is with tightrope walkers; if you don’t start at that age, you fall off. It has been my life – trying to produce a concert performance that is better than I have ever given before.”

In 1951, at the age of 24, he completed his PhD, made his New York debut, and made the first complete recording of Debussy’s Etudes. “It’s been downhill ever since,” he says self-mockingly. Not quite true, although the 1950s were quite tough: it took a while to get a manager and a recording deal, but by the end of the decade his fee levels were improving (“previously they were so low people assumed I was no good”) and he was making records for CBS.

He visited the UK on many occasions in the 1960s and 70s, and played regularly at the Proms, which William Glock was in the process of revitalising. He made fewer appearances in the 1980s, when he was concentrating on playing in the US and Europe. But with a new agent over here, he is now playing more regularly in the UK, where in the past decades he has been better known for his books than for his playing.

The way he tells it, the books came about by accident. He used to write his own sleeve notes; a publisher liked them and invited him to write a book. That became The Classical Style – essentially a book about the way in which Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven redefined classical music – which was published in 1971 and has never been out of print since.

The Classical Style was followed by several monographs. including a book on Schoenberg, and in 1995 by The Romantic Generation, which assessed the composers who succeeded Beethoven. His two big books are unusual in that they cater for an expert audience – they include many musical examples to elucidate his argument – yet they are accessible to the general reader.

Rosen was at the Culture Wars conference to discuss the provocative question “What’s wrong with cultural elitism?” He had been invited because of an essay he had written in the New York Review defending the musical avant-garde against the charge that it was irrelevant, hermetic, wilfully obscure. He has always been a champion of contemporary music, and is close to Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez, yet his advocacy is remarkably easy-going: he is a patrician polemicist, his barbs polite and dignified, his confidence complete.

“I was irritated by claims that the public was being turned away by the performance of difficult music and that there was a conspiracy to stop easy music from being played,” he says. “That is completely false. I don’t object to easy music at all; what I object to is the claim that the public is being turned off music in general because a lot of contemporary music is too hard. It is untrue that there is a big cabal to prevent easy music from being played, because contemporary music gets played very rarely. The idea that at every concert you go to there is a difficult piece of contemporary music being played is loony.

“I was interested in the rancour and resentment that people have. You have the same kind of difficulties with contemporary art and literature, but it is much more easily accepted there. My theory is that difficult writing doesn’t annoy you, you just don’t read it; with a difficult painting, if you can’t work out what it is about you just move on to the next one; but if you have paid a subscription to a series of concerts and they’re playing a piece of Boulez that lasts for 40 minutes, you sit there being irritated for 40 minutes and that causes a lot of resentment.”

Rosen puts his faith in the players, He is delighted if the audience like what they are playing, but their needs are secondary. That could be construed as elitist and selfish, yet his argument is hard to oppose: “Music is kept alive by people who want to play it. If people want to play something enough, they play it and will find a public for it, no matter how small. No one is forced to listen to it.

“Mozart was disliked by the critics and by the public for the first decade of the 19th century, but he kept appearing on programmes. Somebody must have liked to play him. That’s what kept Mozart going, and that’s why he became popular. The question about whether or not music is popular is in a way irrelevant if there are people who want to play it.

“There is an assumption that music is written either against the public or for the public, which is only half true, even in the second case. Occasionally one writes pieces just to be popular, but mostly you write them and hope that a lot of people will listen to them. Sometimes composers’ dreams come true and sometimes they don’t. The whole history of music is puzzling – the way composers die out and then come back into favour.”

Rosen stresses that classical music was written for small gatherings rather than the concert hall, and to try to fit these intimate pieces into cavernous spaces distorts them. A Schubert sonata was written for an audience of 20, and to play it to 2,000 or more in a vast hall is, he says, “asking for trouble because the music won’t take it”.

He is also a resolute defender of live music. “I don’t like the idea that music is permanent,” he once said of recordings. “I think that’s fake.” “When you play in public, you will suddenly get an inspiration and try something out. You can do that on a record too, but it might be something you’d like to hear once but are not sure you want to hear 10 times, so you tend to produce something that is a little less extreme, a little more bland.”

Challenging himself is, it seems, as important (perhaps more important) than communicating to his audience. The latter is there to frighten, cajole, inspire. “If you want to play the piano, you want to do something at your very best, and you can only achieve that by playing in public. You can at times push yourself further and play better than yourself.”

He talks of his “physical need” to play; compares playing with the joy a tennis player gets from hitting the ball; hopes what he is doing on stage will communicate itself to the audience but says he “doesn’t mind being misunderstood”. He can only play it the way he reads it. “That’s why I prefer concerts to lectures,” he says. “With a concert you don’t change the way you play for an audience; with a lecture, you may change the way you make your point according to the audience.” Elitism or the plain truth?

What he does communicate is that, at 71 and after a lifetime devoted to the piano, he still adores the art form, and is seeking fresh challenges, new readings. “I don’t want to hear a performance of a Beethoven sonata that sounds like half the other performances I’ve heard before,” he says. “And I don’t want to hear a Beethoven sonata played the way I would play it; if I ever heard a piece of music played the way I would play it, I would stop playing it. But that never happens with a piece of Beethoven because Beethoven is so rich. As Schnabel said, a Beethoven sonata is greater than any possible performance of it.”

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