Carl Czerny is known as Beethoven's pupil and secretary, as a pianist and piano teacher in his own right and even among piano lovers as an important composer for the instrument. Pietro Delle Chiaie now sheds light on another side of this influential figure in early Romantic Europe with the first complete collection of Czerny's organ music.

Today, every serious piano student works through Czerny's comprehensive study collections, which refine every aspect of piano technique. However, as a former pupil, Franz Liszt valued Czerny's creative abilities highly enough to invite him in 1837 to collaborate on a jointly composed piece, the Hexameron, along with the likes of Chopin and Thalberg. The works for organ collected here were published in London in the following years, at a transitional time for both organ building and organ music in general, as it gradually evolved from Baroque models and took on Romantic forms and harmonies.

Nevertheless, the works necessarily fulfilled a liturgical purpose within church music. Czerny's organ music consists of preludes and fugues as well as voluntaries, both of which could be played at the end of a Protestant service or during communion.

The preludes and fugues contributed to the Bach renaissance under Mendelssohn and show not only Czerny's skillful use of form, but also his interest in being part of the larger lineage of composers for keyboard instruments.

In keeping with their purpose, the voluntaries are mostly short and reflective: a counterpart to the songs without words that had brought Mendelssohn such great success with amateur pianists.

Czerny wrote skillfully for the organ, without having a huge Gothic instrument in mind, but the kind of one- and two-manual instruments found in churches throughout England and Northern Europe. For this new recording, Pietro Delle Chiaie has chosen a somewhat larger modern counterpart in Italy: the two-manual organ in the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Rocca Massima. The accompanying booklet contains a detailed introduction to Czerny's organ music and a complete specification of the organ. Pietro Delle Chiaie is himself titular organist and Kapellmeister of the Basilica-Cathedral of San Pietro Apostolo in Frascati (Rome).

- Carl Czerny (1791-1857), a famous pianist and teacher, pupil of Beethoven, wrote an immense body of work for the piano in which his astonishing technique was shown to its best advantage. His many didactic works, the etudes, are everyday fare for every aspiring young pianist, cruel but nourishing!

- Czerny's organ works include many preludes and fugues. Czerny's interest in the fugue undoubtedly stemmed from his familiarity with Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection that was widely admired at the time and studied in depth by the young Carl. The importance that Czerny attributed to a genre that was indeed beginning to lose popularity with the public is also linked to the fact that the Well-Tempered Clavier was also of fundamental importance to Beethoven, who would soon become Czerny's teacher and eventually his friend.

- The preludes and fugues are the Romantic composer's answer to an outdated form and lend formal counterpoint to many new keyboard instruments that Czerny himself invented.

- The style of the voluntaries is typical of Czerny; most are two pages or shorter. They could be performed either before or after a service or even as middle voluntaries. They have a melodic and harmonic charm that bridges the musical language of the more secular piano world, with which Czerny was strongly associated, and the sacred setting of the parish church or even the royal chapel.

- Played by Pietro Delle Chiaie on the Bonizzi Inzoli organ of the Church of St. Michael Archangel, Rocca Massima, Italy; the technical data are included in the booklet.