Rosen was not just a critic and commentator on music: he must have been one of the few performers around who also had a PhD in French literature. Many of the most compelling pages here reflect his profound understanding of, and insights into, writers as disparate as Diderot and Mallarmé, periods ranging from the reign of Louis XIV to the Second Empire, and digressions that include tedium, boredom, and ennui as ‘one of the great literary subjects after 1700, particularly in France’. Rosen had also evidently read widely, if occasionally somewhat selectively, among those German writers who can be used to reflect or reinforce his views on topics such as freedom, the symbolist movement, and modernism. This can, however, lead to some odd methodological approaches, along with some extraordinary value judgements – ‘the great German poet Stefan George’, for example (an epithet which not too many critics would deploy these days). More of which later.

Much more appropriate is his use of the adjective when he applies it to the aphorist (and scientist) Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whom he quotes in the opening sentence of the first chapter:

That great eccentric of the Enlightenment … once jotted down: ‘Whoever decreed that a word must have a fixed meaning?’ He was perhaps the first to recognize the psychic constraint involved in the perception of meaning and the attempt to make it firm.

One can see why the Rosen who admires Pascal and La Rochefoucauld should be drawn to Lichtenberg,quoting him again with approval in his extended dissection of Theodor Adorno: ‘as … Lichtenberg once remarked about literary critics, when a book meets a head and there is a hollow sound, it is not always the fault of the book.’ But in fact his elegant and accurate demolition job on the high priest of the Frankfurt School goes a long way towards demonstrating the hollowness and over-elaborations of the figure Brecht dubbed, with devastating accuracy, ‘the Superclown’. Rosen does Adorno the honour of taking his writings on music seriously: and precisely because he knows his way round the arguments and evidence, his critique of Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is both perceptive and rightly dismissive.

He is sharp enough to note what he refers to as ‘the seduction of Adorno’s view’, quoting a typically high-sounding paragraph on late Beethoven where terms such as ‘subjective/objective’, ‘callow aphoristic motifs’, and ‘polyphonic complexes’ are deployed to sway the reader, before commenting briskly: ‘This is eloquent and moving. It is also largely false.’ It is high time this sort of critical awareness was brought to bear on Adorno’s impenetrable and grossly simplistic pronouncements; his Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1976) offers more than enough examples, such as the convoluted attempt to differentiate between American hit songs and standards (the one often becomes the other, for starters).

Towards the close of this exemplary close reading of Adorno, Rosen notes that he ‘combined brilliant insights into the phenomena of culture with an essentially fraudulent manipulation of terms to hide the inadequate relation of his theory to historical detail’. For all the at times scintillating deployment of a range of critical approaches to, say, Hofmannsthal, Rimbaud, Liszt, Chopin, and Elliott Carter, there are also occasions when Rosen runs the risk of falling into the same trap referred to in the above quotes.

To be sure, there is no suggestion whatever that he uses terms fraudulently. But there are too many instances in the book where detail is glossed over, or throw-away comment is passed off as critical judgement. What, for example, is one to make of his glib description of Schumann’s ‘masterpiece Frauenliebe und Leben’ as ‘male chauvinist piggery’? Or the assertion that ‘the principal movements’ of Chopin’s two mature sonatas are ‘idiosyncratic and even eccentric’, while on the next page he praises Brahms for his radical reinterpretation of classical forms and technique?

More disconcerting, however, is the habit of inserting quotations from various writers without providing actual sources. In one sense this is understandable, given that so many of the articles originated as review essays: but one might have expected that, when they were looked at for publication by Harvard University Press, some attention to standard scholarly practice might have been followed. This is particularly problematic in the case of the German author Novalis, clearly a favourite of Rosen’s, though probably unfamiliar to many of his readers. He informs us in his opening chapter that ‘Novalis defined freedom as Meisterschaft’ (which is usually translated as ‘mastery’ or ‘proficiency’): yet he provides no context for this definition. Even more confusing is his swift transition from a discussion of Haydn and Mozart past Charles Burney and the opera composer Rinaldo di Capua to single out Novalis (1772–1801) as an advocate of ‘one of the fundamental tenets of modernism’ because of his declaration ‘All excellence merits ostracism. It is well when it ostracizes itself’ (the translation appears to be Rosen’s own, and the second sentence is not quite what the original German says).

I was so puzzled by this quotation that I decided to check the actual context, which is somewhat at odds with Rosen’s attempt to relate it to an artistic movement. It actually comes from Novalis’s writings on the theory of the State, where it appears immediately after a section spelling out the responsibilities of ‘the perfect citizen’, and precedes the explanatory declaration ‘Everything absolute must go from the world’ – something significantly different from what Rosen wants it to mean.

And when he turns his (rather jaundiced) eye on contemporary opera and theatre practice, his snap assertions are often so wrong-headed as to be amusing: on one page we learn that ‘performances of Shakespeare have been getting considerably slower since 1950’ (with no supporting evidence); that the fascist updating of Ian MacLaren’s [sic] Richard III was ‘oddly vacuous’; that Roger Planchon’s production of Tartuffe ‘destroyed all its moral significance’ – apparently because the actor was not ‘disgustingly fat’, as tradition stipulates, and the director suggested a homosexual subtext to the relationship with Orgon.

Set against these missteps are the surefootedness and elegance of his musical commentaries; the sparkling dismantling of Richard Taruskin’s approach to a whole series of topics in his Oxford History of Western Music (2005); and (my particular favourite among all the essays) the wide-ranging ‘Lost Chords and the Golden Age of Pianism’. This essay combines personal recollections of giants such as Lhévinne, Rosenthal (with whom he studied for six years), and Hofmann, whose recitals he attended from four (!) till fifteen, with unerring observations on issues such as ‘dislocation’ (with the wonderfully Freudian typo ‘Liszt mist have “limped” too’); fetishism in performance practice; and arpeggiation. Here, Rosen packs more detail and insights into nine pages than most critics could manage in a study ten times that length.