Chopin Mazurka's Op 63 No's 1,2 and 3 Rosen Rec 1990.wmv 

I took a course with Rosen on Chopin in the late 80's at the University of Chicago. He would sit at the piano and go through each piece we were studying with care and a great sensitivity to Chopin's musical taste. He was full of rich reflections on the origins of Chopin's musical ideas and would represent them with passages recalled from Bach, Mozart, or Schubert. His main overarching point I recall well: that Chopin was a great lover of Italian Opera and was forever writing arias and duets and other operatic pieces even when he composed merely for instruments. Rosen revealed the character of Chopin's musical romanticism in its continual reminiscences of music that Chopin himself was reliving. Rosen was a generous teacher and encouraged serious thinking on art. Unlike Philip Gossett (with whom I also took a course at Chicago) who, although a highly competent teacher & outstanding historical musicologist, was a narrow-minded conventional man, constrained by the prejudices of scholarship, and insensible to genuine taste, Charles Rosen cultivated the arts within himself and had broad reflections on the meaning of art in life. We spoke about Rousseau, Goethe, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Nietzsche as though these were the continual spiritual companions in his reflections on the 19th century looking back to Racine and Shakespeare.

I heard him perform the 3rd sonata in 1993. It's a minor crime that Rosen didn't record much Chopin.