A SIGNIFICANT ARTISTIC STATEMENT
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ESDRAS MUGATIK discusses Jerome Rose and Living Musical Monuments, putting the eighty-six-year-old American pianist in context


In Philip Davies' grand and sobering book Lost London (1870-1945) we can see stern photos of the buildings and streets now so vastly changed, with many architectural splendours lost. Destroyed by the simple depredations of time and flame, The Blitz or zealous modernizers, buildings of remarkable significance, stunning opulence left to decay and some of homespun naturalness, with yet others of depressing degradation, the many buildings shown there are mostly vanished and now recalled only in these stark photographs.

In Western Classical Music - and indeed all Musics before or beyond the inventions of notation methods and of recording devices, but we focus here on the piano repertoire - so much is lost. We have no recordings of Beethoven or Mozart playing the piano, Chopin in a salon, Liszt on the concert stage, much less of J S Bach at the harpsichord. We do have many musical scores and the recollections of musicians (like Sir Charles Hallé who in his autobiography gives us a little insight into his connections with Chopin or Liszt), but of sounding remembrances we have nothing until machines caught music and kept it for the edification of the future.

Well, there is one other source: the line of pianists - let us focus there for the moment - who can trace their studies back to master musicians in the past. These are a source of understanding and knowledge about the history of the piano and its musical and human monuments. For in the many photographs of Lost London there are countless humans lost to time and kept alive in these diaphanous grey images. They deserve our remembrance too, if only for the lives they lived and experiences each one must have had: good, bad, indifferent or glorious. For this reason then we must not forget the human connection, the stories and the ideas handed down. It is then to the human connection we must look. It is to the living exemplars of a long line of musicians that we must listen.

Jerome Rose is one of these. A pianist of the highest quality, he is very clear and expressive of his connection to the past through his own teaching masters: Leonard Shure and Rudolf Serkin.

Chart of lineages:

Jerome Rose
↓
Leonard Shure
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Artur Schnabel
↓
Theodor Leschetizky
↓
Carl Czerny
↓
Ludwig van Beethoven

Jerome Rose
↓
Rudolf Serkin
↓
Richard Robert (who studied with Julius Epstein and Anton Bruckner)
↓
Anton Halm (who had a tenuous and somewhat rocky connection with Beethoven)

In a recent interview with Martín García García, Jerome Rose makes his connections and the importance of these connections very clear. He has always made this clear. Indeed, this has been a leitmotif of his musical-cultural thinking since I first encountered him many decades ago. Through recordings, teaching and the organizing of various music festivals (such as the 1986 festival in Washington DC to commemorate Franz Liszt), he has always held up the importance of the musical tradition.

His own portion of this is clearly descended from Artur Schnabel and so has an emphasis on the Viennese masters. For Rose that is especially Beethoven and Schubert. To these he adds Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Liszt.

These are repertoire choices of his background but there is another very crucial one: the intensity and seriousness of music making. For Rose represents an idea that making music is important, not merely a pastime, not merely a frill and not merely sonic wallpaper to occupy the ears while the body does a workout or drives in the country.

That history itself is important is demonstrated by Rose's recordings of forgotten repertoire such as the Robert Volkmann Piano Concerto and many others. Rose was making these recordings decades before the recent tsunami of 'musical rediscovery' took place. His Liszt recordings must also be remembered as a significant artistic statement, since when Rose began his recording series (in the early 1970s), performances of Liszt's music were hardly represented by more that a few renditions of Hungarian Rhapsodies and Liebesträume. Rose helped us all learn that Liszt was so much more. (For two examples out of many, Rose's recordings of the Liszt Ballade in B minor and Sonata are superb.)

And so he continues at the wise age of eighty-six to perform - he travelled to China and Vietnam in the last few months - and as Artistic Director will present a series of concerts in New York: The International Keyboard Institute & Festival, which is now in its twenty-seventh year.

Rose himself will play his own program on 7 July 2025 to be followed each evening of the week by a fine list of pianists.

Those nearby should attend. And remember.