more to Czerny, op. 300

Among the 121 preludes in Carl Czerny's op. 300 are several that play very directly to rising gestures and follow through into the design of the whole. No. 30 uses the same broad schema as no. 15 (discussed in the preceding post)--a line from ^3 to ^8--but clothes it in rapid scale and octave figures. The first half takes F# up to D but does not close the cadence; instead it starts over with broken octaves and then concludes with a stereotyped short cadenza that carries ^5, ^6, and ^7 up to close on ^8. This "freeing of the ^6" is one of the most characteristic and distinctive figures in 19th century music, especially in the first half of the century.

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:

Carl Czerny's Preludes

Figures below are taken from the English edition of Czerny's The Art of Preluding, op. 300. Please note that the cadences shown on the first page (p. 2 of the original volume) are not examples of chord spelling from a harmony textbook -- Czerny calls them the "shortest Preludes." It was assumed that a pianist would improvise a passage before playing a complete composition, such as a sonata or rondo -- a practice that only gradually faded away after the mid-nineteenth century. (One of the longest hold-outs was Clara Schumann, generally one of the most conservative concert pianists of the era.)

The "shortest Preludes" all use a ^7-^8 figure in the uppermost voice. Notice also that Czerny doesn't bother to express the other half of the old clausula vera formula (^2-^1) in an inner part.

In the "rather longer Preludes" (the second page, or p. 3 of the original), only the two on the fourth system unequivocally expand the cadence stereotype that Kofi Agawu cites as universal, with ^3-^2-^1 above: see my post on the topic.

The English edition of Czerny's op. 300 may be found on IMSLP: here.