[1] Rosen: Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen
[2] Rosen: Music and Sentiment
#1 has been around for a while and is the perfect book to pick up on any occasion and start reading anywhere. Rosen writes in a manner where one learns easily without trying very hard. He has a way of expressing his ideas and thoughts in an encouraging and positive manner. Here's one analysis of #1 book above: "In the first of these essays, Charles Rosen is discussing whether there can be any such thing as a definitive edition of a work of modern literature...His essay takes in a new edition of La Comedie Humaine, Jerome J. McGann's edition of Byron's poetical works and two new books on Wordsworth, but has an even broader agenda than that: the distinction between a definitive edition of an ancient work--a matter of getting it right--and the multiple demands of modern ones, starting as early as Montaigne's marginal entries in his late-16th century essays, in which he observes that 'I am myself the matter of my book'...The piece, like its fellows, will delight the bookish, and the writing is always crisp, salted and peppered with throwaways like 'authors are often no worse than any one else at correcting their works.' That essay kicks off this collection of 10 written over the past 20 or so years...Mr. Rosen's attitude in the book is to see modern works of art, literature and music--by modern meaning that they date from the late-18th century or later--as moving rather than fixed targets...The essay on Walter Benjamin is the book's longest one and a tour de force...The discussion of the problematic nature of criticism and art history in the modern world goes to the heart of Mr. Rosen's critical outlook, first distinguishing between formalist and biographical or historical forms of criticism, then recombining them in the Benjaminesque notion of the work of art in history as a beauty-filled ruin...This [is a] volume of delights." —Colin Walters, Washington Times
#2 was just published (2010). Conductor/composer Pierre Boulez says it like this: "Charles Rosen's qualities as an interpreter are nourished by the range of his knowledge, his vast culture lending his interpretations an intensity and validity that prove that, far from killing spontaneity, cultureenrishes it. It is precisely this combination of culture and a pragmantic approach that lends his personality its exceptional profile. In the end, it is also what makes him and ideal pedagogue in the broadest and least pedantic sense of the term." —Pierre Boulez
