Chapter Thirteen - Czerny and the Keyboard Fantasy: Traditions, Innovations, Legacy

Summary

By the time Carl Czerny achieved artistic maturity—say, by 1820, as he was born in 1791 and began composing in 1806, at the age of fifteen—keyboard fantasies of several kinds had flourished for more than a century. Czerny himself was responsible both for consolidating and for partially transforming the nineteenth century's attitudes toward fantasizing at the piano. In addition to producing fantasies of his own and teaching others how to improvise them, Czerny passed to Franz Liszt a legacy that powerfully influenced the potpourris and operatic paraphrases of Liszt and his contemporaries, as well as characteristic aspects of both the symphonic poem as a genre and such masterpieces as Liszt's “Dante” and “Norma” fantasies, his Fantasy and Fugue on “BACH” (in both its organ and piano versions), and his incomparable Sonata in B Minor.

The pages that follow are devoted to summarizing the evolution of the fantasy as a genre as well as exploring Czerny's brands of fantasizing, his contributions especially to potpourri and operatic fantasies, and his legacy especially as Liszt's teacher.

Czerny and the Fantasy Tradition

Although by the early nineteenth century, instrumental fantasies had acquired “a long, often confusing terminological history,” the keyboard fantasy in and of itself—which is to say, as a mode of musical expression—was “firmly established as a distinct and separate musical genre.” Throughout Czerny's lifetime it remained, as Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out, “one of the nineteenth century's paradigmatic virtuoso forms.” And,

although it was ostensibly concerned with freedom of expression, [the fantasy] was in reality bound by well-defined conventions regarding its musical content and style. Rooted in a long-standing tradition of keyboard improvisation, [it] was also the form in which eighteenth-century ideas regarding the nature of musical genius and imagination were most clearly expressed, ideas that continued to hold sway into the early years of the nineteenth century.

Three interrelated conventions associated especially with keyboard fantasies, all of them widespread before Czerny began composing, had won acceptance during the earlier decades of his career. In a nutshell, they consisted of:

• 1. improvisation, or the ability to invent whatever music might be necessary, on the spot;

• 2. virtuosity, or the ability to amaze, shock, and move listeners largely— although not exclusively—through displays of manual skill; and