Charles Rosen has always written from a height in the Earth's atmosphere at which the gas exchange is not the same as it is for most regular folk. That's the edification, fun, exasperation – and chill – of reading him. The latest collection of his writings, Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature (Harvard University Press), offers more communications from his particular beyond, yet collectively these pieces are not just bracing but pleasurable, revealing a personal, even affable side of Rosen.
The wholly new pieces in the collection are a substantive piece of Mozart scholarship on a matter of genuine importance (tonal organization in the operas) and an essay whose title sounds an alarm but whose content is, if sage, also little more than common-sensical. "Old Wisdom and Newfangled Theory: Two One-Way Streets to Disaster" argues for a balance to be struck between what are in fact the two dead-end streets of historicity and relevance as drivers of present-day performance.
Although the bulk of the writings are on music, and specifically the performance of it (Rosen has had a parallel career as a concert pianist), the ones on literature range from Montaigne to Mallarme by way of the Marquis de Sade, the latter of whom gets consideration in a provocative essay on what constitutes today's literary canon.
Sade receives only three pages, but they're emblematic of these essays as a group and Rosen's writing taken as a whole. "It is true that Sade does not write particularly well," Rosen observes, "but the inspired originality of Sade was to introduce the excesses of cruelty systematically into the vast corpus of erotic literature which played such an important role in 18th-century culture. By its icy intensity, his work attains the monumental sublime." That's the voice of the French scholar, another of Rosen's chapeaux.
"The actions current in the strange world of S and M make those that he actually committed look, by comparison, like the experiments of a timid beginner; his sadism was almost purely literary," he writes transitionally. Then comes the telling passage: "When I was writing a review of Alban Berg's correspondence, I remarked to an elderly and very distinguished psychoanalyst that I was surprised by how many of Schoenberg's students seemed to enjoy being treated so badly and humiliated by him. She replied, 'I have no time to explain this just now, but I assure you there are a great many masochists and not nearly enough sadists to go around.' I have since asked around in S and M circles and have found that this was indeed accurate."
Asked around.
Similarly, in a review of a volume of prose by W.H. Auden, Rosen leavens his praise for Auden's genius with pointed analyses of how Auden got both Huckleberry Finn and Oscar Wilde fundamentally wrong. After noting that Auden fell deeply in love with the American poet Chester Kallman, maintained the relationship until he died in 1973 and "treated it as a marriage," Rosen with some Sade-like matter-of-factness of his own, adds, "I understand that Kallman refused to have sexual relations with Auden after a very short time, and they were always together only in vacation months in Austria and Italy."
The scholarship and sheer range of knowledge in these essays are predictably dazzling. And Rosen's sniping is always amusing and sometimes pleasurable. But it also bears noting that he is adept at finding what my editor calls the "gangle" – the gay angle – in any topic. His 1993 review of The Grove History of Opera (which he famously savages) and Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat (his praise of which has a Pauline Kael-like surprise element to it) sets the stage for a remarkable half-dozen sapient pages on the phenomenon of the opera queen, in which Rosen confides that seeing Callas as Norma in Rome was "the only time I have ever gone to the same opera twice in one week."
A note sounded throughout this collection is stated with particular eloquence here: "It is the erotic power of music, which achieves its most obvious effects in opera, that presents the listeners with both a momentary release from anxiety and a transient sense of ecstasy."
Recasting his work in terms of freedom – and making good on it – balances that feeling of the corrective that can make Rosen's writing so tart. "In the end we must affirm that no single system of interpretation will ever be able to give us an exhaustive or definitive understanding of why a work of literature or music can hold an enduring interest for us, explain its charms, account for its seduction and our admiration," he writes in his short, essential introduction. "Listening and reading with intensity for pleasure is the one critical activity that can never be dispensed with or superseded."