Introduction

Summary

And should it ever happen that a history of nineteenth-century music opened with the remark, "On 20 February 1791 Carl Czerny was born," this would involve less the transmission of a fact than an announcement that a roundabout and tortuous argument was about to begin in ex post facto justification of such an obviously grotesque placing of emphasis.

Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History

Carl Dahlhaus's brief mention may seem a singularly inauspicious way to begin a volume of essays devoted to Czerny. And yet, his choice of Carl Czerny to lead off a self-evidently preposterous approach to the history of nineteenth-century music neatly reveals Czerny's paradoxical situation in the received history of European music. Dahlhaus's strategy is clear enough: in order to demonstrate the rhetorical practices implicit in music-historical narrative, he places an icon of insignificance in the rhetorically crucial opening position of an imagined history. Just to make certain that there would be no mistaking this strategy, he preceded his turn to Czerny by another music-historical fact, one whose status as significant is to be understood as unimpeachable: "On 19 October 1814 Franz Schubert composed his 'Gretchen am Spinnrade.' " Czerny, then, serves as a foil, simultaneously representing historical inadequacy and warning against illconceived attempts by historians to engage in "obviously grotesque" revisionism. Not just any mediocrity, however, would do in this position. In order for the reference to succeed, Dahlhaus needed more than an obscure name; he needed a name that was familiar enough to represent obscurity. And to do so, whether in a sudden burst of inspiration or after prolonged reflection, an inspired choice- Carl Czerny-came to mind.

Why did Czerny work so effectively in this role? First, his name accomplishes something that few others in the history of classical music would: recognition not only by scholars of the Kleinmeister of the period, but by virtually everyone with more than a passing familiarity with that musical tradition-but that familiarity is not based on any reputation as a great composer. So firmly established and enduring was Czerny's name that early in the twentieth century, Willa Cather could also use it as a kind of self-evident shorthand, albeit of a more positive sort.