Chapter Four - A Star Is Born?: Czerny, Liszt, and the Pedagogy of Virtuosity

Summary

The discourse of musical virtuosity has attracted a good deal of attention in the past decade. Even monographs about nineteenth-century music that are not ostensibly about virtuosity prominently invoke it, as Lawrence Kramer did in the cover to his recent book Musical Meaning. Although each study takes a different approach in exploring the topic (for example, linguistic for Susan Bernstein, philosophical for Jane O’Dea, visual for Richard Leppert, and personal for Mark Mitchell), all authors seem to agree that virtuosity has been undervalued in scholarship. It is nevertheless surprising to discover that scholars have failed to look at a fundamental paradox of virtuosity, its construction as simultaneously a manifestation of “natural talent” and the product of “proper” mechanistic training. By ignoring the question surrounding the acquisition or pedagogy of virtuosity, cultural commentators have missed the basis for many of the tensions surrounding the practice.

It is these tensions that I would like to explore in this chapter, as they play themselves out in the relationship between Liszt and his only professional piano teacher, Carl Czerny. What interests me are not so much the biographical details of Liszt's ten-month period of study with Czerny between early 1822 and 1823, but rather how this relationship fits within the discourse of virtuosity at the time, the pedagogical practice of apprenticeship and the transcendental ideology of mastery, Czerny's and Liszt's constructions of self, and posterity's positioning of Czerny and Liszt. Ultimately, I would like to demonstrate how the answers to the question of whether Liszt the star was born or made reflect important shifts in the cultural and social climate of the day and in turn helped shape cultural work then, since then, and now.

To get to the root of the role Czerny played in Liszt's virtuosity, it is important to come to an understanding of the nature of private musical instruction at the time. Unfortunately, no studies exist that deal with this aspect of music education, even though it has served as the initial and principal means of training for professional musicians from the eighteenth century to the present. Of course, once a larger market for musical performance opened up in the early nineteenth century, not only did the demand for private instructors increase, but so too did the seriousness of lessons.