Possessing “une culture vraiment intimidante,” as Pierre Boulezremarks in a tribute included in this volume, the pianist and man of lettersCharles Rosen is perhaps the single most influential writer on music of thepast half century. Rosen’s repertoire ranges from Bach to Boulez, andhis immersion in this repertoire as a pianist informs his writing,contributing to its unique strengths. Rosen’s abiding concernsinclude the definition of style and the nature of canon formation. He haswritten widely admired books on the Classical style, sonata form,Beethoven’s piano sonatas, the Romantic generation, Romanticism andrealism in nineteenth-century painting, and Schoenberg—as well ascontributing a steady stream of influential essays on art, music, poetry,and criticism to the New York Review of Books.

Inspired in its liveliness and variety of critical approaches by CharlesRosen’s work, the present volume features a selection from the bestof recent research on canonical composers by some of the world’s mosteminent musical scholars. Contributors address such issues as style andcompositional technique, genre, influence and modeling, and receptionhistory; develop insights afforded by close examination of compositionalsketches or literary Nachlass; and consider what languageand metaphors might most meaningfully convey insights into music. Howeverdiverse their modes of inquiry, the contributors are animated by a desire toshed new light on the works of those composers posterity has deemedcanonical.

Four contributors address aspects of fugal technique. Responding tosuggestive remarks from Rosen on the expressive power inherent inBach’s use of various contrapuntal devices, Joseph Kerman detects anambivalence toward the fugal project in some of Bach’s late fugues,drawing examples from the second book of the Well-TemperedClavier and the Art of Fugue. As inRosen’s discussions of the piano repertory, DavidSchulenberg’s contribution marries observations about fingering inBach’s music to form, demonstrating how Bach’s musical ideasderive from technical ones, showing how rudimentary keyboard figurationsbecome articulatory devices in some of Bach’s fugues. Exploring anobservation of Rosen’s, Richard Kramer delves into the deeperpsychologies that lie behind Mozart’s recourse to fugal technique ata remarkable juncture in the C-Major Quintet, K. 515.