Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Rosen

Rosen, a pianist who made a second career out of puncturing musical pieties, is diagnosing a seduction: the high you get from thinking you have shaken hands with history. In classical music culture, “authenticity” is a drug with excellent packaging - gut strings, urtext editions, “period” anything - and Rosen admits its pull before he undercuts it. The belief may be wrong; the feeling of correctness can still be overwhelming. That’s not a cheap relativism, it’s a warning about how persuasion works when art is wrapped in scholarship.

The key phrase is “illusion of coming into direct contact with the past.” Rosen knows we can’t time-travel into Bach’s ears or Mozart’s rehearsal room. We reconstruct, we infer, we mythologize. Yet performers and listeners crave the moral clarity of proximity: if we can just get closer to “what they meant,” our choices stop looking like choices. Interpretation becomes destiny.

His punchline - “Sometimes confidence is all that’s needed” - lands like both critique and confession. Onstage, conviction is audible; doubt reads as incompetence. In the wider culture, too, confidence often substitutes for proof, and the “persuasive” story wins. Rosen is reminding us that historical performance, like any act of interpretation, is theater as much as evidence: it convinces by sounding sure of itself. The subtext is bracingly modern: the past doesn’t authorize us; we authorize ourselves, then dress it up as recovery.