There are concert pianists and there are classical music critics of prodigious learning, but seldom if ever has there been someone who combined the two as completely as Charles Rosen, who died Sunday at age 85.

Trained in childhood at Juilliard, though not considered a child prodigy, Mr. Rosen blazed a distinctive if unusual career path. Starting in his twenties he produced recordings of Debussy Études, Bach’s Art of the Fugue and Beethoven sonatas.

He got into writing by producing liner notes for his own recordings after he was offended that the notes writer to his recording of Chopin’s Nocturne in B Major stated that the music “staggers drunken with the odor of flowers.” Mr. Rosen’s 1971 book “The Classical Style” is widely considered a landmark of scholarship of classical music and won a National Book Award.

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