Charles Rosen Quotations

When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered.

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.

Even Stravinsky does not evoke the same public affection as Verdi.

Beethoven in c minor has come to symbolize his artistic character...where he seems to be most impatient of any compromise.

Stage fright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness... It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense - that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success.

The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.

I am suspicious of teachers who claim to have invented the only successful method of bringing out the best in young performers, of theorists who claim to have invented a unique approach to analysis, or of historians who wish to reduce all the developments of the musical style of the past entirely to the determinism of social conditions.

To comprehend the distaste for modernism, it must be admitted at the start that the greatest works of modernism in all the arts are, much of the time, fundamentally disagreeable when first encountered.

It is a rare opportunity to work with a client whose product is so good, is willing to push the envelope creatively, and is this much fun -- we couldn't be happier to be working with the Checkers team.

With the combined benefits of radiation, chemotherapy and liver transplantation, our patients with bile duct cancer now have a much better chance to live longer and enjoy a good quality of life.

With the Beethoven sonata project, the emphasis was principally on the music, although Schnabel was considered its greatest exponent.

Except for recordings made by famous tenors, the emphasis in classical recording has for the most part recently been on the work, and even more on the composer-the performer being spotlighted as the composer's most accomplished representative.

I could never find out anything about Liszt's teaching methods from Rosenthal, except that it was difficult to persuade Liszt to leave the cafe and go back to the studio for a lesson.