Chapter Five - The Veil of Fiction: Pedagogy and Rhetorical Strategies in Carl Czerny’s Letters on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte

Summary

Perhaps because it is occurring at a time in which the general prospects for classical music seem at best uncertain, the rediscovery of Carl Czerny as a significant and long-neglected composer of serious music understandably generates great enthusiasm among his advocates. It is equally understandable that such enthusiasm may seek to minimize those aspects of Czerny's multifaceted career that have led to skepticism about his ability to produce music of such a high caliber. And no aspect of that career is better known—or more of a potential liability— than Czerny's role as a pedagogue for amateurs, as the creator of etudes, which have “been dispensed in doses by generations of piano teachers as though to immunize their pupils against technical ills.” As the vessel through which Beethoven's legacy could be transmitted to Liszt, Czerny the pedagogue is respectable; as a leading figure in the training of countless (and predominantly female) amateur performers, however, he is something of an embarrassment. Thus, when I asked one participant in the symposium on Czerny that accompanied the festival of his music in Edmonton in 2002 about Czerny's possible significance among female amateur pianists, taking note of his Letters to a Young Lady on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte (1837), the response was dismissive at best: “they only played little songs, rondos, etc.” In other words, the amateur is unimportant to the rediscovered Czerny because she played unimportant music.

To anyone familiar with feminist musicology, and in particular with the work of Marcia Citron, such an overt demonstration of the close link between gender and the musical canon will be surprising only because it could be stated so unselfconsciously at a musicological event in 2002. And the linkage of that attitude to pianism in particular is also longstanding. As Matthew Head points out, the amateur pianist was traditionally associated with music that came to epitomize the feminine connotations of amateur and domestic music making, and that music, was, as Head notes, “almost invariably judged as inferior, or at best, mediocre.” Such associations endure and are particularly problematic to attempts to elevate any composer's status in the world of mainstream classical music.

Nevertheless, as Celia Applegate has recently argued, although “amateur musicianship discourages analysis by its ordinariness,” amateur musical practices were of great concern to early nineteenth-century music writers.