Czerny Symphonies

[ArturPS]

Hi all! I really like what I've heard so far, I have the cds of ns. 1, 2, 5 and 6, my favourites being the 1st and 6th.

I have two questions: what do you guys and gals think of those works and does anyone have any info on ns. 3 and 4?

[Alan Howe]

They're all thoroughly enjoyable and worthwhile works. For a previous discussion, see this thread...
http://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,129.0.html

[eschiss1]

by the way, there's a D major symphony that I'm not sure was listed in that complete list and which I think predates all of them, but which is mentioned and described at length in a book on Beethoven and the symphony in Vienna. (It's definitely not the symphony no.2- the scherzo's in a different mode (minor/major I mean), the tempo indications are different...)

[ArturPS]

Well, I sent the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde an email inquiring about Czerny's music but they never replied. I'd LOOOOVE to see more and more symphonies from him and I'd wish they were more easily available. To me that's one major barrier against his 'serious' music being better known.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Try directing your enquiry at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde to Dr Otto Biba.

[ArturPS]

Try directing your enquiry at the Gesellschadt der Musikfreunde to Dr Otto Biba.

How?

[Alan Howe]

Try an email to...
office@a-wgm.com
...with "Message for Dr Otto Biba" in the subject line.

[ArturPS]

Try an email to...
office@a-wgm.com
...with "Message for Dr Otto Biba" in the subject line.

Have you contacted him before? Should I write in English or German (my German is not that good, but it's serviceable...)?

[Alan Howe]

No, but I'm sure that a simple message in English would be fine...

[fuhred]

I was impressed with Athinaos' brilliant performance of No.1. What a big, bold work it is! ( I particularly love the sneaking, furtive scherzo!). Czerny is still sadly underrated, probably because people largely write him off as a composer of piano studies.

[semloh]

Fuhred - I think that listening to works by the 'unsung' composers alerts one to the fact that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, et al., were not isolated figures with unique styles - an impression that is bound to develop when they each receive so much exposure - but rather part of an historical stylistic continuum. The Czerny symphonies seem to me to have echoes (or pre-echoes!) of all them in there somewhere, to mixed effect. As an aside, it would be interesting to share some ideas as to whether there are any composers whose style we think is unique, as if it just 'popped up' from nowhere! Maybe that's simply not possible.....

[eschiss1]

Mozart thought, rightly I think, that his talent was something unusual, but as Alfred Einstein points out he learned everything he could from the music of his contemporaries (including his friends, JC Bach and the Haydns and others), and his predecessors (his encounters with a wider range of JS Bach's music courtesy of van Swieten may have caused him to rethink how he used counterpoint in his own works, among other things of course. But to get to my point I doubt many of these composers - some, yes- thought of themselves as somehow isolated and unaffected by their contemporaries - at least a thoroughgoing fan should follow likewise, I agree.  Besides, there's good eating on some of those tortoises. (Apologies to Pratchett.)

[Alan Howe]

Fuhred - I think that listening to works by the 'unsung' composers alerts one to the fact that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, et al., were not isolated figures with unique styles - an impression that is bound to develop when they each receive so much exposure - but rather part of an historical stylistic continuum. The Czerny symphonies seem to me to have echoes (or pre-echoes!) of all them in there somewhere, to mixed effect. As an aside, it would be interesting to share some ideas as to whether there are any composers whose style we think is unique, as if it just 'popped up' from nowhere! Maybe that's simply not possible.....

I think this is a very important proposition, and one with which I entirely agree. The key concept is that of a developing historical continuum in which no composer simply 'pops up' out of nowhere, but in some way works on and takes forward something that already exists. A proper overview of musical history shows us the manifold links and influences that go to produce particular composers.

It may be the sense of the violation of this continuum that makes me question the propriety of the more extreme compositional procedures of the past 100 years, but no doubt the answer to that lies in the notion that following, say, Tristan, there was no going back and that a thorough-going revolution in musical language would inevitably follow... 

[ArturPS]

Fuhred - I think that listening to works by the 'unsung' composers alerts one to the fact that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, et al., were not isolated figures with unique styles - an impression that is bound to develop when they each receive so much exposure - but rather part of an historical stylistic continuum. The Czerny symphonies seem to me to have echoes (or pre-echoes!) of all them in there somewhere, to mixed effect. As an aside, it would be interesting to share some ideas as to whether there are any composers whose style we think is unique, as if it just 'popped up' from nowhere! Maybe that's simply not possible.....

That's one of the first things I thought when I started listening to the 'unsung'. One of my first was Méhul, and the fact that he had the same 'fate' motif on his symphony that shares the date with Beethoven's 5th told me that Beethoven's idea was original and genius, but not unique. So I don't judge Ries' 'borrowings' too harshly, he is a child of his era. Lending our ear to the unsung puts the sung in perspective, and we can appreciate better what they were doing of extraordinary. Beethoven's treatment to that 'fate' motif is superlative, far better than his contemporaries which used the same rhythm and idea, that's why he's Beethoven (note: he's my favourite and all, but *damn*, he casts a shadow like Mordor!).

Few composers are out of the curve, maybe Gesualdo? Reicha (in his experiments with microtonality, polirhythms, strange agogics)?

(p.s.: spell check just alerted me to how "rhythm" is such an ugly word...)