Bach’s Genius, Schumann’s Eccentricity, Chopin’s Ruthlessness, Rosen’s Gift

Edward Said

• The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen
  HarperCollins, 723 pp, £30.00, November 1995, ISBN 0 00 255627 8

Charles Rosen’s new book is about the group of composers who succeeded the great Viennese Classicists Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, and the aesthetic movement they represented. The Post-Classicists emerged for the most part during the period from the death of Beethoven (1827) to the death of Chopin (1849). A substantially expanded version of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard during 1980-1, The Romantic Generation, which follows in the path of its distinguished predecessor The Classical Style, is a remarkable amalgam of precise, brilliantly illuminating analysis, audacious generalisation, and not always satisfying – but always interesting – synthesis scattered over more than seven hundred pages of serviceable but occasionally patronising prose that takes Rosen through a generous amount of mainly instrumental and vocal music at very close range indeed.