ABSOLUTE PITCH

By ELLIOT RAVETZ

IN THE FRONTIERS OF MEANING, A lively inquiry into music aesthetics published last year, Charles Rosen admiringly paraphrased painter Barnett Newman: "Musicology is for musicians what ornithology is for the birds."

It was probably Newman's epigrammatic conciseness that Rosen savored, not any disdain for the discipline to which he has committed so much of his career. Still, the idea conveys a familiar question: Is anything to be gained from description, analysis and criticism of music that cannot be discerned by listening to the music? After all, medical philosophy, however well wrought, cannot save a life. In both disciplines, what matters is who is doing the dissecting.

The Romantic Generation (Harvard University Press; 723 pages; $39.95) is Rosen's demonstration of the value and pleasures of musicology. In the narrowest sense, the author explores a relatively brief period of music history--from the death of Beethoven (1827) to the death of Chopin (1849). Rosen applies not only his experience as an extraordinary pianist, but also his considerable grasp of such disciplines as art history, philosophy, literature and linguistics. The result is an elegant and altogether irresistible study that is destined to endure, along with an earlier, seminal work of Rosen's, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven.

Never rigid, Rosen's ideas grow from his intimacy with the music. The book comes with a CD (a wonderful idea) on which Rosen plays 16 selections that he analyzes in the book. Rosen has concurrently released a separate recording, also called The Romantic Generation (Music Masters Classics), that contains six pieces--by Chopin, Schumann and Liszt--whose historical importance he discusses as well. One highlight is Rosen's commanding performance of Liszt's terrifyingly difficult tour de force of homage and imagination, Reminiscences de Don Juan, inspired by Mozart's Don Giovanni. In the text, he isolates from that piece a passage that erupts spectacularly in a cascade of chromatic octaves alternating with single notes. Liszt's dramatic ingenuity, writes Rosen, would "make explicit a Victorian condemnation of Don Juan's morals and amount to an assertion that his erotic misbehavior will lead to eternal damnation."

For Rosen the three leading figures of the era are Chopin, Schumann and Liszt. But in his wide-ranging study, where influences are as shrewdly detected as innovations, he illuminates the musical sensibilities of a great many composers. For instance, "That music should be completely audible was as obvious to Mozart as it was irrelevant for Bach," Rosen observes. And, "It has taken more than a century to realize that it is not Berlioz's oddity but his normality, his ordinariness, that makes him great."

The richly textured abundance of such insights makes for exhilarating reading. What's more, Rosen evokes the intellectual climate of an era that pulsates with the concerns and activities of writers, artists, scientists and philosophers as well as musicians. He relates the advent of Schubert's art songs, for example, to the Romantics' elevation of landscape painting (by Constable, Corot and later Gainsborough) and to the supplanting of epic poems by the lyrical landscape poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Goethe. All these artists, Rosen argues, supported and nurtured one another; their shared ideal was to give "nature an epic status" without sacrificing "the apparent simplicity of a personal expression."

Though the book is often technical and strewn copiously with musical quotations that may not be easily appreciated by musical laymen, the ideas are explained in vivid, comprehensible prose. It is, in short, a work that controverts Barnett Newman: this is musicology that captivates us with its style and enriches the act of listening.