Charles Rosen: Freeddom And The Arts (Harvard University Press, £21.95)

Such a suggestion, however, is something he will doubtless contradict with further volumes in an output which, for most of us, began 40 years ago with his much-admired reflections on The Classical Style. Already, this year, he has received America's National Humanities Medal from President Obama in the White House, and (in his new book) has hailed Chopin not as a Parisian exquisite but as "one of the most radical composers of his age". The belief that Chopin was just a miniaturist, he declares, "is now pretty much obsolete, exploded, discredited".

Rosen himself has always been good at exploding outmoded beliefs, not only in his books but in the concert hall. The last time I heard him play in Glasgow was at an SNO prom in the Kelvin Hall in 1964, with the composer Aaron Copland as conductor. Their rehearsal of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, on which I was permitted to eavesdrop, sounded tense. Rosen holds strong and persuasive views on this work – and particularly on its revolutionary opening bars – which Copland, it seemed, did not wholly share. Memory recalls that the resultant performance was an uneasy compromise, though Rosen's playing possessed all his characteristic integrity.

When I heard him again, around 1980, at the Edinburgh Festival, he fortunately had the platform of the Queen's Hall to himself, which meant there was nobody to oppose him. The main work was Schumann's great C major Fantasy, which Rosen, as an outstanding Schumann exponent, presented in its little-known but thoroughly convincing original edition, conspicuously different in its closing bars from the familiar version. Reading Rosen's masterly bicentenary tribute to Schumann in his new book, I found no mention of what he did to the fantasy on that occasion. What I did find – surely even more to the point – was the assertion that Schumann, in his lifelong fear of insanity, pruned his revisions of many works of any evidence of irrational eccentricity, "thereby removing some of the most original and impressive details". In playing the original ending of the fantasy, with its haunting evocation of Beethoven, instead of the perfunctory arpeggios with which it was eventually replaced, Rosen demonstrated his trust in a composer who, he claims, radically altered the subsequent history of classical music.

Though the title of Rosen's latest book can scarcely be called eye-catching – that accolade should go to Romantic Poets, Critics, And Other Madmen (1998) – the opening chapter, with its emphasis on Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and Fidelio, shows why he chose it and how impressively he has justified it. Its scope, which touches on literature as well as music, is not only broad but invariably arresting. Though spattered with distracting misprints, it delivers his thoughts with all the expertise we expect of his substantial contributions to the New York Review Of Books, a number of which are rightly included here.

Anecdote is valuably employed not as myth but as a source of acute observation throughout. On hearing Josef Hofmann's superlative playing of Chopin's B minor Sonata, Rachmaninov is said to have called it "another piece I must strike from my repertoire". We learn of the consternation with which the Schuppanzigh Quartet discovered that Beethoven wanted the seven movements of his Op 131 string quartet to be performed without a break. In a closing essay on what he vividly calls "one-way streets to disaster", even his statement that no Mozart opera should be staged today in a theatre seating more than 750 people makes its (alas extensively ignored) point.

Freedom and the Arts

Charles Rosen, Harvard University Press, £21.95