Charles Rosen - The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations about Art & Performance

Almost all the best-known works of Johann Sebastian Bach, for exampleThe Well-Tempered Keyboard, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, the Italian Concerto, the Art of Fugueare educational, models of composition to be studied and played at home: the kind of public concert at which they could be played did not exist during Bachs lifetime, and he could never have envisaged a concert performance of any of them. In fact, public performance of most of these works is largely an invention of the twentieth century.

Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments

I F MUSIC WAS composed for private concertsBach played for himself, as Charles has writtenCatherine and Charles played for themselves and their own duo. They gave a series of private concerts, of private discussions and private dinners on literature, architecture, science, and, of course, music. They both enjoyed writing. And Catherine enjoyed translating as well. Catherine suggested to Charles that they do a book together, and Charles said he would love to do the book but only with Catherine. Catherine knew Charles and the circle of musicians that were close friends of her familyElliott Carter, Arthur Berger, Dimitri Mitropoulos, among otherssince her childhood. Her mother was a painter and her father a violinist. Her mother prepared superb dinners, and her father played sonatas with Charles. They lived for music.

But music was not their only bond. Catherine had a doctorate in comparative literature from New York University and Charles a doctorate in French literature from Princeton University. Catherines father was French, and she was raised in France and had a bilingual education. Her mother was Russian, and she spoke Russian and studied Russian literature at Sarah Lawrence College and Harvard University. Charles had visited France on a Fulbright.

Their private concerts were a pleasure in themselves, the preparation of another kind of representationa public one. There was no better public than Catherine. She was not passive. She discussed things with Charles and helped his ideas take shape. One could make an analogy with the music of Elliott Carter and Cubist paintings. They both depend on multiple points of view. It was these multiple points of view that created the pleasure of discussions, writing and playing.

As in Schuberts and Schumanns lieder or the sonata Les Adieux of Beethoven, where the past and present are represented simultaneously, there was in the dialogues of Catherine and Charles the presence of musicians and artists they had known and who came to life in their discussions. These dialogues are a work unto themselves and they resonate with an enlarged conception of music; they give two pleasures: one muscular and the other intellectual.

Charles has written on the Double Concerto of Elliott Carter: When the work was written, playersat least in privatewere taken aback by the lack of a central rhythm that would have made ensemble playing easier, just as painters felt a curious anxiety with the loss of central point of view in Cubist paintings. A multiplicity of points of view has become central to the artistic imagination of the twentieth century. It is the multiple points of view, the wonderful synthesis of literature, science, painting, and, of course, music that makes the book of Catherine and Charles a joy, a pleasure to read and think about.