JOHANN KASPAR MERTZ Capriccio

This month Declan Zapala explores the music of Austria at the turn of the Romantic period with a fiery caprice to level up your fingers and unlock your inner virtuoso.

- Declan Zapala

Born in 1806 in Pressburg, Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovakia), Johann Kaspar Mertz is a celebrated virtuoso guitarist and composer who came of age around the turn of the Romantic era. Mertz’s music was rooted in the tonal and textural colours of the great Classical composers, including fellow Austrian predecessors Mozart and Haydn. But he was also heavily influenced by the expressive, rubato-laden and more structurally free compositional approach of many of his Romantic pianist composer contemporaries such as Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann; all of whom were born within a year of Mertz. As such his music is a time capsule that draws from both sides of the divide and represents the artistic passage from one musical epoch into another, demonstrating that the transit