Foreword

Summary

The international symposium at which some of the chapters in this volume were first vetted was part of a major musical festival mounted by what was then the Canadian Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies, and is now the Wirth Institute Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Presented in seven concerts over four days in June 2002, the event was the first major music festival devoted entirely to the nineteenthcentury Austrian composer and teacher, Carl Czerny (1791–1857). Our Institute's project was undertaken in conjunction with the Society of the Friends of Music of Vienna, the Francis Winspear Centre for Music in Edmonton, and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. The Carl Czerny Music Festival was under the overall artistic direction of the internationally renowned Austrian-Canadian pianist, Anton Kuerti. Kuerti, widely considered to be among the world's foremost interpreters of Czerny's piano music, also performed as a soloist and as a participant in several of the chamber music ensembles.

Czerny—the student of Beethoven and the teacher of Liszt—is known to generations of piano students as the composer of innumerable etudes, studies, and technical exercises that have been used for almost two centuries as aids to learning. What few people realize, however, is that Czerny was an important composer in his own right. Some of his nonpedagogical works, which have only recently come to light, have fascinated and astonished music critics. As a result, it is now increasingly clear that Czerny did not lack for invention, craft, or emotion; that he is, in fact, an unjustly neglected major late Classical and early Romantic composer. Some of Czerny's most impressive compositions, however, were never published, and it was for this reason that our institute, together with Kuerti and the director of the Archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, Otto Biba, selected a series of unpublished Czerny manuscripts for world premiere performances at the festival. These included the Violin Sonata in A Major from 1807, five unpublished songs (including Czerny's version of “Der Erlkönig”) from 1811–12, the Overture in E Major from 1838, the Mass in C Major from 1839, the String Quartet in E Minor from 1850, and the Symphony in G Minor from 1854.