Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid d...
Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand. Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity - for pleasure - is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.
The purposes of the continuo were manifold:
[...] 6. To serve as a guide so that the keyboard player could keep his or her place. Unlike tympanists, keyboard players were not expected to be able to count empty measures
Function 6 is clearly operative as late as Beethoven's Missa solemnis, where the bass is written into the organ part even when it is marked senza organo or organo tacet, and therefore the organist plays nothing at all at these points, but can follow the bass part. (查看原文)
The contrast with Schumann’s immediate contemporaries—above all, Chopin—is very great. Almost every bar of Chopin can be analyzed as the realization of four-voice harmony that was academically correct. That came from his lifelong study of J. S. Bach, and one is always aware of the independence of the inner voices in his music. Not so the piano music of Schumann, who is in this respect the first truly modern composer for today’s piano with the sustaining pedal. For him the piano was not the medium for four separate contrapuntal lines but a vibrating instrument for the realization of a single line and its dependent harmonies. (查看原文)
查尔斯·罗森 作者
还没人写过短评呢
还没人写过短评呢