The Romantic Generation is an even more important book than Charles Rosen’s last title The Classical Style (1972) (winner of the American National Book Award and many other prizes) which rapidly established itself as one of the few truly indispensible modern books about music.

The subject of this book is the generation of musicians who came to maturity between the death of Beethoven and that of Chopin in 1849 – Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann, with shorter discussions of Bellini and Meyerbeer, and a prolonged glance back to Schubert. Rosen discusses how they changed th emusical language of their era and how their music achieved and achieves the effects it does; he does so in prose of wonderful clarity and with a range of references to other, non-musical cultural developments which makes him exceedingly rare among critics in any creative field. To these he adds the insights that only adistinguished performer can bring. The result is a second major landmark book in music criticism.

‘I have no doubt that this book is destined to become the definitive study of early Romanticism, suceeding and transcending The Classical Style. The present volume apart from being very strong on the music itself is noteworthy for two significant aspects which make it superior to anything I have previously encountered. Firstly, he directly invovles his pianistic experiences in his study; thus he is able to demonstrate facets of the compositions which simply would not be recognisable from listening or from the study of the score alone. I cannot remember any previous analogous writing of this quality by a considerable and experienced pianist. Furthermore Rosen’s extraordinary capacity for absorbing and remembering details, not only of music, for the first time makes it possible to understand Schumann and Chopin in the context of dominant cultural ideas of the early 19th century.’ Alexander Goehr, Professor of Music at Cambridge University.