Charles Rosen

Charles Rosen commenced piano instruction at age four and attended the Juilliard School from ages seven through eleven. During the following six years he worked with Moriz Rosenthal, who had studied under Rafael Joseffy and Liszt. After Rosenthal’s death in 1946 Rosen continued lessons with the widow Hedwig Kanner-Rosenthal, completing eight years altogether with the couple. He also took instruction in music theory and composition from Karl Weigl and, at Princeton University, concentrated in music history and romance languages, receiving a B.A. summa cum laude in 1947, an M.A. in 1949, and a Ph.D. in 1951—the same year he made his New York debut on the piano.

Alongside his performing career he taught modern languages at MIT from 1953 to 1955. In 1971 he returned to university life as Professor of Music at SUNY Stony Brook. During 1976–1977 he held the Ernest Bloch Professorship of Music at UC Berkeley, occupied the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard in 1980–1981, served as George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford in 1988, and, from 1986 until retirement in 1996, was Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and Music at the University of Chicago.

At that institution he gave three consecutive farewell recitals. The first featured Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies with the Contemporary Chamber Players; the second offered a solo program of Beethoven’s Op. 110 Sonata, Schumann’s original-manuscript Fantasie in C, and a Chopin work whose composer had taught the earliest instructor of Rosen’s own teacher Moriz Rosenthal; the third presented the Brahms First Piano Concerto with the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Three years afterward in London he delivered the BBC Radio 3 series Rosen on Chopin marking the sesquicentennial of the composer’s death.

While maintaining an active concert schedule he recorded for Columbia/CBS Masterworks the Art of the Fugue of Bach, first-edition versions of works by Schumann and Chopin, the Liszt First Piano Concerto, Beethoven’s final six sonatas (Opp. 90–111) together with the Diabelli Variations, the complete solo piano music of Pierre Boulez, Stravinsky’s Movements for Piano and Orchestra under the composer’s direction, and a disc of Elliott Carter’s piano music comprising Night Fantasies, the Piano Sonata, and 90+ (composed 1996). He also partnered with Isaac Stern on Webern’s Op. 7 Violin Pieces.

Although his tone was not invariably ingratiating and his interpretations could appear austere, at his finest Rosen brought clarity to keyboard works by the most intellectually demanding composers of Western music history, extending from Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms to Stravinsky, Carter, and Boulez. No element of his artistry was ever superficial. As a pianist, teacher, and author combined, Charles Rosen remains without parallel.