Friday, February 14, 2014

Czerny, op. 300

Carl Czerny's The Art of Preluding, op. 300, may be the ultimate compendium of this aspect of sophisticated concert practice in the first half of the 19th century. Unlike The Art of Improvisation, op. 200, which is a treatise with examples, The Art of Preluding is a collection of preludes of many types in all keys. All are "ossified" (that is, published) versions of the kinds of preludes that pianists would apply to any and all of the music they performed in concert, including chamber and ensemble concerts, not just solo recitals.

A surprisingly large number of the 121 preludes have prominent rising gestures, but only a few follow through into the cadence. The most obvious of them elaborates a simple V7-I cadence by expanding the V through an octave's worth of a harmonized chromatic scale: see no. 31 below.


 An earlier Prelude in Ab major takes a rising line very gradually upward from ^3 to ^8: