Charles Welles Rosen was born in New York on 5 May 1927, entered Juilliard at six, and from eleven studied with Moriz Rosenthal — Liszt’s pupil — and Hedwig Kanner, while later taking a Princeton doctorate in French literature. He won the National Book Award for The Classical Style, and died on 9 December 2012.

Rosen was the rare pianist whose writing changed how his instrument’s repertoire is understood: The Classical Style and The Romantic Generation are standard works, and his recordings — late Beethoven, the Goldberg Variations, Debussy’s études, and premieres of Boulez and Carter — play like demonstrations of their arguments. In a catalogue built for comparison, his readings are the ones that explain themselves.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rosen
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1065956