Chapter Eleven - Carl Czerny’s Orchestral Music: A Preliminary Study

Summary

The Unknown Czerny

Carl Czerny was born just six years before Schubert, and, like that composer, as a student he was exposed to and very much influenced by the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. In his “Recollections from My Life” (1842), he makes it clear that while he never met Mozart, he became familiar with many of his compositions while a frequent guest at the musicales given by Constanze, Mozart's widow. There many of her late husband's works were performed, including Mozart's piano and violin sonatas, and some of his chamber music. Czerny also became friendly with Mozart's son, Franz Xaver Mozart, who was exactly Czerny's age, and who also became a composer and piano teacher. Although he does not mention meeting Haydn, who died in 1809, it is more than likely that he and the older composer met several times, if not at the Mozarts’, then at other musicales where Czerny's teacher, Beethoven, performed.

Because of his unusually retentive memory, the young Czerny must have been deeply impressed by the music he heard performed at such private and public concerts. As he grew older and began composing his own nondidactic works (such as his piano sonatas, string quartets, and orchestral and chamber music), the sounds of the waning classical era were bound to have some influence on him. Czerny himself described his musical background in his “Recollections”:

From my earliest days I was surrounded with music, since my father [a piano teacher in Vienna] used to practice a great deal (especially works by Clementi, Mozart, Kozeluch, etc.) and received the visits of many fellow countrymen [i.e., from Bohemia] whom he knew professionally… . My father had no intention whatsoever of making a superficial virtuoso out of me; rather, he strove to develop my sight-reading ability through continuous study of new works and thus to develop my musicianship. When I was barely ten I was already able to play cleanly and fluently nearly everything by Mozart, Clementi, and the other piano composers of the time; owing to my excellent musical memory I mostly performed without the music… . Without my father's special encouragement I began, when I was only seven, to put down some ideas of my own; I should add that they were at least written correctly enough [so] that in later years when I received instruction in thorough-bass I found little occasion to change anything.