Chapter Twelve - Not Just a Dry Academic: Czerny’s String Quartets in E and D Minor

Summary

From a spirited virtuoso and warm, sensitive Romantic in his youth, Czerny developed over the years into a dry academician.

The above characterization of Carl Czerny as a failed Romantic first appeared buried in a footnote of Walter Georgii's 1914 dissertation Karl Maria von Weber als Klavierkomponist. William Newman elevated the passing observation to a textheading epithet in The Sonata Since Beethoven (1969), in which he memorably describes Czerny as one of three “Direct Beethoven Transmitters.” With his more than 800 published works (including books of exercises), multitudinous performing editions of classical works, and performance and composition treatises, Czerny represents, perhaps, the clearest example of early to mid-nineteenth-century academicism in music. Czerny was not alone, though, in his interest in codifying the musical tradition he inherited; many members of the generation of composers and musicians around him sought to preserve and extend the work of their artistic forebears both in their compositions and in theoretical and pedagogical works. The resulting music of the 1830s through the 1850s exhibits a palpable tension between following or utilizing classical conventions and incorporating romantic innovations. Of the dozens, probably hundreds of string quartets composed in the German-speaking realms between 1830 and 1880, very few survive in the modern concert repertoire, perhaps because of this tension.

The string-quartet genre, moreover, had accrued over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a certain mystique as the most elevated instrumental form, as can be ascertained from the next generation's descriptions of it— Czerny described the quartet in his School of Practical Composition as “the most refined, as well as the most difficult of all kinds of composition.” The string quartets of Czerny's generation—particularly those of Louis Spohr, George Onslow, and Friedrich Kuhlau, but also the better-known works of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann—exhibit a wide range of approaches to the inherited tradition, providing a snapshot of the wealth of possibilities at that time. The two quartets considered here were performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet at the Carl Czerny Festival of 2002, perhaps for the first time in the case of the EMinor Quartet. An exploration of these works reveals that they, like their midcentury contemporaries, exhibit features of both Classical and Romantic musical styles, preserving the eighteenth-century forms with an academic's eye toward formal conventions while extending the expressive boundaries constantly being tested by fellow “sensitive Romantics.” We sense in these works, too, a bit of the “spirited virtuoso” in several vigorous passages requiring finesse and showmanship in equal measure.