Carl Czerny's Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben has long been familiar, both from its use by authors memorializing Beethoven and as the principal source of information on Czerny's own life. It has appeared in modern editions in both English and German. In accordance with a relatively widespread custom of his age, however, Czerny also left a variety of other testimonies to posterity. In what follows, I trace these seven other accounts in an attempt to clarify their status and interrelationship. After this chronological overview and some reflections on what the memoirs reveal (and conceal) about Czerny, the two previously unpublished autobiographical documents (nos. 2 and 3, below) are presented in both a German edition and in English translation.

The Sources

• 1. The first testimony dates to 1824, when Czerny replied to the advertisement sent to Leipzig's Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung by Eberhard von Wintzingerode, who was planning to expand Ernst Ludwig Gerber's Tonkünstler-Lexicon. Czerny provided his own biographical contribution, accompanied by a list of his compositions published up to that time. This “autobiographical letter” was published by Friedrich Schnapp in 1941 in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on the occasion of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Czerny's birth.

• 2. The second testimony, dated October 22, 1830, is a short, handwritten autobiography, barely two pages long, conserved at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. The essential information contained in it corresponds substantially to that subsequently provided by Czerny. It was Georg Schünemann who pointed out this manuscript in 1939: “little more than a page long, [it] contains information on the principal dates of his life and on the 248 works published up to that point in time. ‘I dedicate the evening hours to composing,’ he adds, ‘those left free after my teaching activities.’ “

  In 1958, Donald W. MacArdle cites Schünemann inaccurately and reports that in the latter's article “this [the autobiography] is described as being little more than a single page long giving the principal dates of Czerny's life and listing the 248 works that he had composed up to the date of writing.” In reality, the manuscript does not provide the list of the works published up to that time, but only indicates their number, which is given as 248. Czerny had written the list of his own compositions six years earlier, for Wintzingerode (see the discussion of source no. 1, above).