Virtuosity and Innovation

This volume deals with a generation of composers that has often been overshadowed by previous music historiography: the generation between the Viennese classics and the Romantics born around 1810. To this day, piano music of the 'stile brillante' is sometimes regarded as superficially displaying virtuosity, but musically uninspired. However, the achievements of the 'pianistes compositeurs' and 'compositeurs pianistes' such as Carl Czerny (1791–1857), Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1784–1849), and Henri Herz (1803–1888) not only pertained to influencing the next generation, including such famous musicians as Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849) and Franz Liszt (1811–1886), but also they can be measured in their very own musical efforts. On this topic the volume provides an overview of the current state of international research in a multi-layered and wide-ranging manner. Both musicological and music-analytical contributions attempt to give a compositional œuvre, in many cases of very high quality and in some cases only recently rediscovered, a deservedly more central place in the specialist discourse.