An insight on lecturing vs making art from late pianist and scholar Charles Rosen

There’s a nice obituary of Charles Rosen posted on New York City classical music station WQXR’s website along with a full 1985 performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Frick Collection.

He died on Sunday, aged 85, of complications from a struggle with cancer.

The obituary has a wonderful quote of Rosen’s that stands out among many insights he had about music, composers, interpretation and aesthetics:

Playing concerts is much less fatiguing than giving lectures for an odd reason: If you play a Beethoven sonata, it doesn’t matter what kind of audience you have, whereas if you give a lecture you have to keep thinking, ‘should I go a little slower, should I repeat what I’m saying?’ You have to make some kind of contact with the minds of the people – whereas playing a concert is like creating a work of art. You make as beautiful a work of art as you can and you hope that people will love it.

You’ll find everything here (including an interview on the music of Eliot Carter).

John Terauds