In Search of Carl Czerny’s Schemata: Listening to Early Nineteenth-Century Improvisation

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyzes Carl Czerny’s exemplars for fantasizing in Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829). I argue that a musical prototype combining scale-degree schemata (Meyer 1980, Gjerdingen 2007) and sentential features (Caplin 1998) emerges as an implicit knowledge structure in several of Czerny’s notated musical examples that demonstrate how to react to a given theme for improvisation. Through an examination of notated fantasies recommended by Czerny as models for extemporizing, I propose a beginning-of-fantasy prototype, which allows us to discern improvisatory qualities in Beethoven’s notated “artworks” such as the Tempest sonata, the Appassionata, and others.