'The Classical Style' reading group, week six

Joseph Haydn in England in 1791 (John Hoppner painting)

The Classical Style: Part II – THE CLASSICAL STYLE 

1.The Coherence of the Musical Language 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This chapter title makes think of how Aristotle and Aquinas’s ideas of coherence influenced Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

Foreshadowing: In the last chapter of this book Rosen discusses a piece by Schumann that alludes to the final song in Beethoven’s “An Die Ferne Geliebte”, “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder”. I plan to listen to his song a few times a week for the next hundred days so that I can hopefully recognize the allusion when we reach the final chapter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsgS3I1NORY&list=RDRsgS3I1NORY&start_radio=1 

For anyone struggling a bit with this text, I suspect it will get easier when we get to the Haydn chapters. In these early chapters, Rosen deals with a wide variety of music from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussing topics like ”The Coherence of the Style”. When he focuses on one set of pieces by one composer, I think things will make more sense. I think books like this reward rereading because they cover such large topics, and I think Rosen covers them very well.  

Pg. 68: Rosen says of the classical style that “a single movement longer than twenty minutes is beyond its reach,” but the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony tends to run over 24 minutes. 

July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Pg. 94 mentions “the ferment that followed the American Revolution.” I feel this book suits the troubled times of 2026, I feel grateful for the people reading along with us.