ABSTRACT
The momentousness of late Beethoven has by stealth been reinserted into a long European history. An active power has been rediscovered inside a timeless ecstasy. And a similar rhythm of expansion and contraction is to be found throughout the work of Charles Rosen, an admirer of Donald Tovey's who has inherited his great predecessor's sense of music belonging at once to itself and to a larger social and historical order. Rosen's music criticism is informed, as many readers will know, by a keen sense of drama at all levels of argument and analysis. Music, being its own language and its own meta-language too, has seemed not to need to know about criticism, or not to need to know much about it. The best analysis of a work of music could just be another work of music, we are sometimes told. And a version of this much in favour among writers on music is that analysis needs a single technical language.
