`Carl Czerny has never been much of a hero to the historical performance movement. The musicians who are credited with starting that movement—Thibaut and Mendelssohn, Choron and Niedermeyer, Fétis and Moscheles—belong more or less to his generation, but his name is hardly ever mentioned in the same breath as theirs. It deserves to be. For one thing, his editions of Scarlatti sonatas and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier were among the monuments of nineteenth-century early music publication, reprinted and recommended well into the twentieth century, even though his editorial methods were under attack already in his lifetime. Schumann, who somewhat guardedly approved the fingerings and tempo indications and introductory remarks of Czerny's Well- Tempered Clavier edition when it was published in 1838, was having second thoughts by 1845, when he wrote to Hermann Härtel pressing for a new edition that would be “as correct as possible” on the grounds that “Czerny’s, with its unnecessary fingerings and its truly foolish performance indications, seems to me like a caricature.” By 1924, when Donald Francis Tovey issued his own edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier, he could dismiss Czerny's editing for perpetuating a tradition of Bach playing (which Czerny said he learned largely from Beethoven) formed in ignorance of the “facts nowadays ascertainable about Bach's style”: “Its text is as worthless as a Shakespeare edited by Garrick.” We might conclude that Czerny was important to the historical performance movement in the same way as Mendelssohn: as one who revived interest in historical music, but whose versions of that music could not stand up once musicians began thinking of performance style in historical terms.

Actually, the Czerny to be presented here is utterly different from that: he is one of the important founders of the historical performance movement, but important precisely in his advocacy of historically appropriate performance practice rather than in reviving forgotten music. This advocacy, furthermore, can be found not in his editions of Scarlatti and Bach, but in his commentaries on the music of his own teacher, Beethoven. For that reason it is hardly surprising that his role in the history of performance practice has escaped notice: he was operating not in the realm where we expect to find the performancepractice tradition developed, namely, in the revival of music and performance styles that had fallen out of practice, but in the perpetuation of the music and practices he had grown up with.