Judit Rácz: Maybe the last 5–6 centuries were a golden age which simply has ended? There were inexplicable golden ages in other arts as well—why was there such an unbelievable multitude of talents in Dutch painting for about a century, and why not afterwards? You can have bits of explanations, but none of them explains it really. Was there a golden age of Western music?

Charles Rosen: Well, that is an old theory. It takes us back to 1770, when Charles Burney went to Italy and visited a lot of composers, among others Rinaldo di Capua, who said to him: “Music is finished! All the beautiful melodies have been written!” When Burney decided to publish his diary in 1805, he added to the story: “Let Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart answer this.” But even the ancient Greeks thought that music is finished when after the Dorian mode the “terrible” Ionian mode came. There are periods in which interesting composers emerge, and then for a time there is nothing. In the period from 1810 to 1825, the only important composers were very old—the younger composers started to write good music only later. In the 1930s and ’40s the only really interesting composers were very old, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern. It’s not until the late 1940s that interesting composers started to come along: Boulez, Stockhausen, etc.

Music that we call “Western” also comes from a “golden place”, in that it originates from such a tiny part of the world, namely Europe. We take a justified pride in that (which sometimes even turns into arrogance), but we practically ignore the music of the 90 per cent of the world’s population, while Mozart can be heard in the small shop of a remote village in Cambodia or Ecuador.

Yes, because Europe is the only place in the world where people invented a system of notation. Cultures with ancient roots, like China, may have had their music but they never wrote anything down.

I have the impression that composers—regardless of their time—are either focused on structure or on sound.

Where would you put Debussy?

Reading you, this division seems to be valid chronologically: before the Romantics, structure, after them, sound…

The history of Western musical tradition is very curious. You have a notational system which largely only wrote down pitch and certain aspects of rhythm. It’s not until the late 18th century that tone colour and dynamics enter into the actual composition of music. About music written earlier, we have no idea what it sounded like; as for the 15th century, Josquin des Prés for instance, we don’t even know what some of the pitches were, or even which instruments they used. And Bach sounds quite good no matter what you play it on… It is only in the late 18th century that for instance the sforzando would become a part of a theme.

That brings us close to Liszt, the bicentenary of whose birth we are celebrating this year. Writing about Liszt, you said he put sound and colour on equal footing with pitch and structure.

Yes: Liszt taught the piano to make entirely new sounds; he made a new range of dramatic piano sound possible. He was a master in transforming sound into musical gesture. He gave real musical significance to new techniques of execution. As a result of thousands of hours of performance and improvisation, the new techniques became inventions of sound. His performance techniques become integrated into his compositions. Of course, many composers before him had some specific sound in mind for their compositions, but Liszt seems to be the first for whom the realization of sound is more important than the actual musical text.

Liszt’s critics say that his music shows little invention.

The real inventions are in tone colour, density and intensity of sound, texture. By that, he challenged the basic assumptions of previous Western music, that pitch and rhythm are the most important elements of music.

You wrote that in Liszt’s compositions realization took precedence over the underlying structure. Doesn’t it make his music more vulnerable to performance? His greatest biographer, Alan Walker notes that if Mozart is played badly, the audience blames it on the performer, but if Liszt is played badly, it turns the audience against the composer, not the performer.

I think if Mozart or Bach is played badly it is just as terrible. On the other hand, it is unfortunately true that a great deal of Liszt is performed mainly for showing off your technique. He is the only major composer of whom this is true. Some of his harder pieces are close to impossible.

Transcriptions, paraphrases, arrangements and operatic fantasies are typical and very popular genres of the 19th century, and Liszt is probably their greatest representative.

I believe that it is a simplification and a useless misinterpretation to think that the “faithful” transcriptions are inferior to the “free” and therefore more “interesting” paraphrases. His transcription of the A minor organ Prelude and Fugue by Bach is very recognizably Liszt’s, although there is not a note added, no indications of tempo or dynamics. The transcription of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is a “simple” transcription, but it is peerless in its imaginative richness. Just as the Schubert song arrangements were not mere popularizations of the songs.

Liszt’s critics deplore his alleged indifference to the quality of material he uses for his transcriptions and paraphrases.


Liszt remains controversial, even so long after his death. Why?

It is true that while the controversies that surrounded many musicians during their lifetime tended to disappear with time, this is not so much the case for Liszt (and for Berlioz, by the way). Posterity acknowledges his greatness, but this same greatness is not well understood. Many of the old criticisms prevail, and he still appears to need rehabilitation, because we still did not have the proper critical understanding of him. Even admirers seem sometimes to be ashamed to admire his most successful works, and tend to rest their case on less well known pieces like the Lieder—where Liszt stands closer to the French tradition—and the late piano works, much of which was not published during his lifetime.

When musicologists look at Liszt’s place in music history, they also emphasize his influence on other composers and on the development of musical language.

Liszt is a major figure among composers. His influence was indeed great. The late piano works foreshadow Debussy and the atonal works of the early 20thcentury composers, but they were little known. The influence on Ravel is undeniable for instance. One of the most quoted direct influences is his setting of Heine’s Die Lorelei on Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde; but when we follow the history of Die Lorelei to which he returned many years later, we see that its real depth is revealed if we consider it in its own terms, not by comparing it to Wagner’s use of it.

We regretted that health problems prevented you from chairing the jury of the Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest last September. How does the career of Charles Rosen, the polymath, the pianist and the writer on music evolve in the near future?

Next spring, I’m invited to Finland to give a lecture and a recital and to a recording session in London.