Carl Czerny - Composition

Composition

Czerny composed a very large number of pieces (up to Op. 861), including a number of masses and requiems, and six symphonies, concertos, sonatas and string quartets and other chamber music. Many of these pieces remained unpublished. The manuscripts are held by Vienna's Society for the Friends of Music, to which Czerny (a childless bachelor) willed his estate. A number of these works received their world premiere performance in June 2002 at a Carl Czerny Music Festival mounted by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, under the artistic direction of the Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti. The better known part of Czerny's repertoire is the large number of didactic piano pieces he wrote, such as The School of Velocity and The Art of Finger Dexterity. He was one of the first composers to use étude ("study") for a title.

Czerny's body of works also include arrangements for eight pianos, four hands each, of two overtures of Gioachino Rossini. He also left an essay on performing the piano sonatas of Beethoven. He published an autobiographical sketch, "Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben" (1842; "Memories from My Life").

Czerny was one of 50 composers who wrote a Variation on a theme of Anton Diabelli for Part II of the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein (published 1824). He also wrote a coda to round out the collection. Part I was devoted to the 33 variations supplied by Beethoven, which have gained an independent identity as his Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. Czerny maintained a relationship with Beethoven throughout his life, giving piano lessons to Beethoven's beloved nephew Carl, and proofreading many of Beethoven's works before they were published.

Beethoven's influence can also be seen in Czerny's Variations on "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser", Op. 73, for piano and orchestra (1824; also a version for piano and string quartet), which were based on a theme by Beethoven's teacher Joseph Haydn.

A complete reevaluation of Czerny's compositions was undertaken at an academic conference mounted by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, held in conjunction with the Czerny Music Festival in June 2002. The proceedings of the conference were published by the University of Rochester Press in 2008 as "Beyond the Art of Finger Dexterity: Reassessing Carl Czerny," edited by David Gramit. The volume contains a catalogue of autographs held by the archive of the Society for the Friends of Music in Vienna.