Chapter Nine - Carl Czerny, Composer

Summary

Carl Czerny (1791–1857) occupies a pivotal niche in music history, linking Beethoven—his teacher, and the ultimate archetype of profoundly spiritual music—with Liszt, Czerny's student, who exemplifies the ultraromantic and often exhibitionistic virtuoso. Squashed between two of the most heroic, colorful, and influential personalities in the history of music, each of whom is adulated and imitated to this day, Czerny, quite in contrast, led a very modest, uneventful, and withdrawn life, and his name remains known mostly for his technical studies and etudes. Unbelievably numerous as these are, they still represent only a modest portion of his life work, which was remarkably fertile and embraced essentially every form of music except opera; indeed, he was possibly the most productive composer in the history of Western music, with 861 published opus numbers and a similar quantity of unpublished material.

To have written so much is a splendid accomplishment, but not necessarily beneficial to a composer's reputation, especially when the quality is variable. Just as bad money drives out good, large quantities of routine, quickly composed works emphasizing slapdash virtuosity and superficial prettiness destroyed Czerny's reputation and discouraged exploration of the rest of his oeuvre. Even those of us who have become convinced of the extraordinary value of his best compositions can easily be daunted by the sheer volume and relative inaccessibility of the detritus that must be scoured to find the true gems, despite the fact that these, too, are gratifyingly numerous.

Czerny was himself very aware of the qualitative schism in his output, and he divided his music into four categories: (1) studies and exercises; (2) easy pieces for students; (3) brilliant pieces for concerts; and (4) serious music. How interesting that the “brilliant pieces for concerts” are not what he considered “serious music!” In an 1824 letter to Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann's father, he asked Wieck to “beg the musical world's forgiveness for me, dear friend, for producing such a quantity of small things and so few great ones until now. As a man of my word, I’ll endeavor to make up for it.” And thirty-three years later, in a letter written just ten days before his death, he vowed to henceforth write only serious music and expressed the wish that the Lord would grant him many more years for that purpose.