'Pianists are like tenors – we're very stupid; they like to feel their
voices, we like to feel the ivory under our fingers,' said Charles
Rosen. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
There have been musicians who are also critics, such as Alfred Brendel or Hector Berlioz, and there have been critics, such as Donald Tovey, who were also composers and performers. But none has displayed a combination of masterly practical musicianship, critical acuity and extraordinarily wide culture to compare with that of the American pianist and polymath Charles Rosen, who has died at the age of 85.
His talents were united by a ferocious intelligence that expressed itself with marvellous lucidity and malicious wit. To witness Rosen in full flight on the lecture podium, throwing out learned references in intellectual history, or playing bits of his vast memorised repertoire at the piano, was a dazzling experience. To be on the receiving end of his criticism felt, according to one well-known music writer, "like being a rabbit caught in the car headlights".
Such all-round brilliance is not acquired quickly. Although Rosen, born in Manhattan, New York, to an architect father and a mother who played the piano, started lessons on the instrument at the age of three, and enrolled at the Juilliard school when he was seven, he was no child prodigy. However, by the time he was 11, his playing of Beethoven impressed the great Moriz Rosenthal sufficiently for him to take Rosen on as a pupil. Rosenthal, a pupil of Liszt, had gone to the US after the Anschluss joining Austria to Germany, and he – together with his wife, a notable teacher who continued to guide Rosen into his 20s – impressed on him the necessity to acquire a wide musical culture rather than focusing narrowly on a few works.
That meant Rosen learning the core repertoire from Bach to Brahms pretty well by heart, and it was that lifelong sensuous contact with the great canonical works, so that they were felt under the fingers as well as analysed by the mind, that was the key to making Rosen the great critic that he would later become.
It should also have made him, given his native intelligence and musicality, a natural performer of those works, and indeed he could, in the lecture room, play difficult passages in Liszt or Schumann with careless ease. But when it came to the concert hall, that ease often deserted him, his performances being marred by a studied overemphasis and heavy, inflexible touch; though they could also be lucid and insightful.
Part of the problem may have been that, although Rosen came to piano-playing very early, he came to public performance rather late. When he was 17, Rosen went to Princeton University, New Jersey, to study French, and also took courses in mathematics and philosophy. After he gained a BA in 1947, he was offered a fellowship of $2,000 for three years, which he said he accepted because it gave him plenty of time to play the piano, though one suspects the opportunity to roam freely in Princeton's libraries was just as strong an incentive.
In 1951, when he was 23, Rosen acquired a PhD, gave his first recital, and made his first recording; after that, he said wryly, "it was downhill all the way". In fact, his career curve did head upwards, but not very steeply. After that first recording – of Martinu, one of the many luminaries on Princeton's music faculty in the 50s – Rosen made the first complete recording of the Debussy Études, described by the fearsome critic Virgil Thomson as "definitive".
Despite that plaudit, it took Rosen three years to find an agent, during which time he taught a French course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eventually he signed up with New York's biggest concert agency, and landed a recording contract with CBS, who initially thought they were taking on a French specialist. Rosen went on to make much-admired recordings of Bach's Art of Fugue, the Goldberg Variations, late Beethoven sonatas and an album of "virtuoso showpieces". Rosen never despised virtuosity, and in his 1971 book The Classical Style encourages the listener to enjoy the sheer brilliance of Mozart's concertos.
The connection with contemporary music forged at Princeton continued through the 1960s, when Rosen made marvellous recordings of Boulez's Second and Third Piano Sonatas. He also made the first recording of Stravinsky's avant-garde piano concerto entitled Movements, conducted by the composer. However the composer Rosen was most closely allied with was Elliott Carter. He was the piano soloist in the 1961 premiere of Carter's Double Concerto, and, 19 years later, was one of the four American pianists who commissioned Carter's solo piece Night Fantasies.
By the mid-60s Rosen was thought of as a brilliant but rather wayward pianist, with a taste for bracingly intellectual music from Bach to Boulez; the role of critic, which would come to dominate the public's perception of him, was just starting to take shape. It began in a modest way. Rosen had noticed just how bad the programme notes to most of his concerts were and decided to start writing his own.
The Classical Style, a description of the musical language of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, was an impressive debut, winning the National Book award for arts and letters in 1972, and immediately put Rosen the pianist in the shade. His second book arose out of a rejected article on sonata form for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; this became Sonata Forms (1980). He was still seeking new perspectives in Music and Sentiment (2011) and Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature (2012).
As his concert and recording career faltered, so the writing and lecturing took off. Rosen taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, at Harvard, where he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1980-81, and at Chicago, where he was professor of music and social thought.
Meanwhile he gained a reputation as one of the New York Review of Books's most engaging, widely read, and brilliant critics, writing on everything from cookery to Walter Benjamin to Mallarmé. In this month's issue he writes about an edition of the works of Restoration playwright William Congreve. His review articles on 19th-century art, written in collaboration with Henri Zerner, were published as Romanticism and Realism (1984). But it is as a shrewd, eloquent and often moving critic of music – from Bach to Schoenberg – that Rosen will be remembered.
Rosen's ambiguous status within musicology, being both inside the academy and out of it, is reflected in his writing, which was always alert to trends in musicology and criticism, but refused to be captured by any of them. By instinct he was a formalist, in the sense that his observations were always rooted in a "close reading" of music. The perceived facts of music as they struck his sensibility, and appeared under his pianist's fingers, were always the starting point. He would then use whatever tools came to hand to elucidate and justify those intuitions, from harmonic and thematic analysis to the sociology of concert practice to the history of wider movements in ideas and aesthetics.
Rosen saw his role as teasing out and elucidating what listeners already knew, if only they had the wit to realise it. "We ought to be suspicious of the critic who claims to hear what no one else has heard, finds significances invisible or inaudible to less perceptive eyes and ears." He was amused by the ideologues of 80s and 90s "new musicology" who, in his view, often seemed deaf to the most obvious expressive values of music; but he was equally exasperated by the earlier fashion for finding "deep structures" in music. It is that ideological naivety – or is it faux-naiveté? – which allowed him to coin those splendid bons mots: "Liszt's late works are admirable and minor; the early works are vulgar and great"; "It is not Berlioz's oddity, but his normality, his ordinariness, that make him great"; "Mendelssohn is the inventor of religious kitsch in music which does not comfort, but only makes us comfortable."
He could move the reader, but more often he would amuse by darting a barb into a critical target while appearing to bow to it; as in his comment on the vogue for playing Beethoven on the fortepiano: "More than any other composer before him, Beethoven understood the pathos of the gap between idea and realisation, and the sense of strain put on the listener's imagination is essential here. The best argument for using the pianos of Beethoven's time in place of the modern grand piano is not the aptness of the old instruments but their greater inadequacy for realising such an effect, and consequently the more dramatic effort required of the listener. The modern piano, however, is sufficiently inadequate to convey Beethoven's intentions."
During the 90s Rosen published The Romantic Generation, an eloquent and penetrating study of the first generation of romantic composers including Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt, and two volumes of selected criticism from the New York Review.
Rosen's waspishness in print, and his refusal to sit easily in either the performing or academic community, made him a rather lonely figure. With his high-domed forehead and amused smile, he looked remarkably like those other smiling philosophers, Voltaire and Bertrand Russell. Like Voltaire, he had a tolerance for humanity's failings, reserving his malice for professionals. "Understanding music means feeling comfortable with it – taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension."
Pleasure, of the most primitive sort, remained at the root of his own musicality, as he cheerfully admitted: "Pianists are like tenors – we're very stupid; they like to feel their voices, we like to feel the ivory under our fingers."
• Charles Welles Rosen, pianist and writer, born 5 May 1927; died 9 December 2012
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