IN recent decades, the musical life of cities has received increasing attention within musicology. As Tim Carter has pointed out, it is not surprising, given the field's history, that many studies of cities have focused on Italian centres in the Renaissance, or that one of the prominent early exceptions to the predominance of Italy, Reinhard Strohm's study of Bruges, examined a city associated with another foundational interest of the discipline, Franco-Flemish polyphony. Urban musicology, however, has broadened to include a variety of other cities, prominent among them the great metropolitan centres of Vienna, Paris, London and New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonial cities, too, particularly in Spanish and Portuguese America, have been the subject of pathbreaking studies.

There is one type of city, however, whose musical practices have so far received little attention: settler colonial cities, that is to say, the myriad cities that quickly grew from nothing, or from small and sleepy origins, to metropolitan areas of sometimes remarkable size, across central and western North America, Australia and New Zealand during the long nineteenth century. This is not, of course, to suggest that the music history of all these cities remains unknown: those that grew into major cities in their own right – Chicago and Los Angeles for instance – have attracted considerable musicological attention, and local historians have provided records of many other locations. But in part because historians and urban geographers have themselves only relatively recently begun to recognize the settler colonial city as distinctive and in part, perhaps, because of a reluctance to acknowledge that the American West, in particular, was populated through a process of colonization, studies of the musical life of those cities have been informed primarily by local and national perspectives. We have not yet considered what the peculiar dynamics of urban development in settler colonialism might have to do with musical practices that involved millions of city dwellers worldwide by the time of World War I.

There are good reasons to explore those issues, however. For one, the ‘instant’ nature of these cities – their extraordinarily rapid growth to sizes that in many cases rivalled those of European cultural centres that had existed for centuries, if not millennia – means that their cultural institutions too were newly created rather than evolving from pre-existing local practices.

According to the 2001 edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary, Czerny was “a composer of considerable talent.” Although, as we will see below, this evaluation represents a considerable rise in Czerny's fortunes, it nonetheless comes off as far from an unconditional affirmation or a battle cry calculated to fuel the composer's further revival. Indeed, it leaves a great deal unclear: is it the product of studied and even-handed evaluation or an expression of surprise, or even damningly faint praise? If, in the famous words of Pierre Bourdieu, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,” what are the stakes of this remarkably ambiguous formulation? There is of course no simple answer to this question; the significance of the label will depend as much on the reader's understanding of the nature and goal of musical activity as on any objective evaluation of the composer. And that is precisely why the historical development of Czerny's reputation merits exploration: not because, according to a crude application of Bourdieu's scheme, we can measure gains in social status accruing to those who have valued or dismissed this particular composer, but rather because exploring a cross section of responses to Czerny's activity as a composer from his lifetime to the present can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the diverse and changing criteria that have grounded critical evaluation during the past two centuries.

From the perspective of that history of critical responses, the reassessment offered in this collection is revealed as only the most recent in a chain of judgments that have continually sought to make sense of Czerny in light of the changing conditions of musical life. That history will also make clear that critical judgments neither come into being nor function independently of one another or of a network of other values. As literary critics have recognized for some time, the rise and fall of artistic reputations is contingent; in the words of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, value, including that of a work of art (and, I would add, of the creator of that work) “is an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables or, to put this another way, the product of the dynamics of a system.”

The international symposium at which some of the chapters in this volume were first vetted was part of a major musical festival mounted by what was then the Canadian Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies, and is now the Wirth Institute Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Presented in seven concerts over four days in June 2002, the event was the first major music festival devoted entirely to the nineteenthcentury Austrian composer and teacher, Carl Czerny (1791–1857). Our Institute's project was undertaken in conjunction with the Society of the Friends of Music of Vienna, the Francis Winspear Centre for Music in Edmonton, and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. The Carl Czerny Music Festival was under the overall artistic direction of the internationally renowned Austrian-Canadian pianist, Anton Kuerti. Kuerti, widely considered to be among the world's foremost interpreters of Czerny's piano music, also performed as a soloist and as a participant in several of the chamber music ensembles.

Czerny—the student of Beethoven and the teacher of Liszt—is known to generations of piano students as the composer of innumerable etudes, studies, and technical exercises that have been used for almost two centuries as aids to learning. What few people realize, however, is that Czerny was an important composer in his own right. Some of his nonpedagogical works, which have only recently come to light, have fascinated and astonished music critics. As a result, it is now increasingly clear that Czerny did not lack for invention, craft, or emotion; that he is, in fact, an unjustly neglected major late Classical and early Romantic composer. Some of Czerny's most impressive compositions, however, were never published, and it was for this reason that our institute, together with Kuerti and the director of the Archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, Otto Biba, selected a series of unpublished Czerny manuscripts for world premiere performances at the festival. These included the Violin Sonata in A Major from 1807, five unpublished songs (including Czerny's version of “Der Erlkönig”) from 1811–12, the Overture in E Major from 1838, the Mass in C Major from 1839, the String Quartet in E Minor from 1850, and the Symphony in G Minor from 1854.

Carl Dahlhaus's brief mention may seem a singularly inauspicious way to begin a volume of essays devoted to Czerny. And yet, his choice of Carl Czerny to lead off a self-evidently preposterous approach to the history of nineteenth-century music neatly reveals Czerny's paradoxical situation in the received history of European music. Dahlhaus's strategy is clear enough: in order to demonstrate the rhetorical practices implicit in music-historical narrative, he places an icon of insignificance in the rhetorically crucial opening position of an imagined history. Just to make certain that there would be no mistaking this strategy, he preceded his turn to Czerny by another music-historical fact, one whose status as significant is to be understood as unimpeachable: "On 19 October 1814 Franz Schubert composed his 'Gretchen am Spinnrade.' " Czerny, then, serves as a foil, simultaneously representing historical inadequacy and warning against illconceived attempts by historians to engage in "obviously grotesque" revisionism. Not just any mediocrity, however, would do in this position. In order for the reference to succeed, Dahlhaus needed more than an obscure name; he needed a name that was familiar enough to represent obscurity. And to do so, whether in a sudden burst of inspiration or after prolonged reflection, an inspired choice- Carl Czerny-came to mind.

Why did Czerny work so effectively in this role? First, his name accomplishes something that few others in the history of classical music would: recognition not only by scholars of the Kleinmeister of the period, but by virtually everyone with more than a passing familiarity with that musical tradition-but that familiarity is not based on any reputation as a great composer. So firmly established and enduring was Czerny's name that early in the twentieth century, Willa Cather could also use it as a kind of self-evident shorthand, albeit of a more positive sort.

The Lied has a kind of double nature, born of the interaction of poetry and music. This is scarcely an original observation; indeed, it is a truism so familiar that it would not bear repeating if not for its relevance to another sort of double life, one that has far less frequently received consideration: throughout its history, the Lied has existed both as an artistic genre and as a class of commodity, an object for sale in the marketplace. To be sure, this does not by itself set the Lied apart from many other forms of art within capitalist societies – and as we will see, the Lied's existence is closely bound up with a specific phase of capitalist production. That double life, however, is particularly revealing in the case of the Lied, whose status as a genuinely artistic genre long was contested precisely because its status as an all-too-viable commodity appeared to threaten its standing as art. Because of the Lied's location on the border between high art and popular music, a consideration of the ways in which it has circulated can reveal much, not only about the Lied per se, but also about the shifting nature of that border, which is less certain at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it has been since the boundary between high and low came into existence in the minds of the advocates of high art.

What was Schubert's circle?

To frame this chapter by means of such an apparently straightforward question may seem simplistic. If we take it seriously, however, it leads to an approach to Schubert's immediate context considerably different than the catalogues of Schubert's friends, their idiosyncrasies, and their accomplishments that have been a mainstay of Schubert scholarship. Both idiosyncrasies and accomplishments, admittedly, were considerable, and such anecdotes can provide entertaining reading as well as accurate information; however, not only are several accounts of this type already available, but a focus on the who of Schubert's circle also implies that the nature of that group is self-evident.

A moment's reflection suggests otherwise: why should Schubert have been associated from the earliest studies and accounts with a circle of friends, to the extent that “Schubert's circle” (or the equivalent Schubertkreis) has achieved the status of a standard formula? “Bach's circle,” or “Mozart's,” for instance, have nothing approaching such currency in their respective fields. No one would suggest that these earlier composers had had no friends or associates, so what is it about Schubert's friends – or our perception of them – that has made them indispensable in Schubert studies, to the extent that Newman Flower, whose 1928 biography focused perhaps more single-mindedly on the circle than any other, could write: “the passion for friendship lived in Schubert. He could not exist without friends”?