Carl Czerny is well known as Beethoven’s pupil and amanuensis; as a pianist and piano teacher in his own right, and even to pianophiles as an important composer for the instrument. Pietro Delle Chiaie now illuminates another side to this influential figure in early- Romantic Europe, with the first-ever complete collection of Czerny’s organ music.
Every serious piano student nowadays works their way through Czerny’s exhaustive collections of studies, which refine every aspect of piano technique. As a former student, however, Franz Liszt regarded Czerny’s creative abilities highly enough to invite him in 1837 to contribute to a jointly composed piece, the Hexameron, alongside the likes of Chopin and Thalberg.
The works for organ collected here were published in London during the following years, at a transitional time both for organ-building and more widely for organ music, as it gradually evolved from Baroque models and embraced Romantic forms and harmonies.
All the same, the works necessarily fulfilled a liturgical purpose within church music. Czerny’s organ music is divided between preludes and fugues, and voluntaries, both of which could be played at either end of a Protestant service, or during the taking of Communion.
Contributing to the Bach revival led by Mendelssohn, the Preludes and Fugues demonstrate not only Czerny’s deft handling of the form but also his interest in being part of the greater lineage of keyboard composers.
As fitting their purpose, the Voluntaries are mostly brief and reflective in mood: a counterpart to the Songs without Words which had brought Mendelssohn such success with amateur pianists.
Shrewdly, Czerny wrote for the organ not with a huge Gothic instrument in mind, but the kind of one- and two-manual instruments to be found in churches across England and northern Europe. For this new recording, Pietro Delle Chiaie has selected a slightly larger modern counterpart in Italy: the two-manual organ at the Church of St Michael the Archangel, Rocca Massima: the booklet includes a thorough introduction to Czerny’s organ music and a full specification for the organ.
Pietro Delle Chiaie is himself the titular organist and chapel master at the Basilica Cathedral of San Pietro Apostolo in Frascati (Rome).
- Carl Czerny (1791-1857), a famous pianist and teacher, student of Beethoven, wrote an immense oeuvre for the piano, in which his prodigious technique could be shown to the greatest advantage. His many didactical works, the Etudes, are daily fare for every aspiring young pianist, cruel but nourishing!
- Czerny’s organ works include many Preludes and Fugues. The interest that Czerny nurtured for the fugue unquestionably derived from his familiarity with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection that was widely admired at the time and closely studied by the youthful Carl. The importance that Czerny attributed to a genre that was actually beginning to lose favor among audiences also relates to the fact that the Well-Tempered Clavier had likewise been fundamental for Beethoven, who was shortly to become Czerny’s teacher and in due course also his friend.
- The Preludes and Fugues are the Romantic’s answer to an obsolete form, imbuing the formal counterpoint with many new keyboard devices of Czerny’s own invention.
- The style of the Voluntaries is typical of Czerny, with most being two pages or shorter. They could be performed either before or after a church service, or even as a middle voluntary. They possess a melodic and harmonic charm that bridges the musical language of the more secular piano world, with which Czerny was largely associated, and the sacred environment of the parish church, or even royal chapel.
- Played by Pietro Delle Chiaie at the Bonizzi-Inzoli organ of the St Michael Archangel Church, Rocca Massima, Italy, the specifications of which are included in the booklet.
