Schubert acquired the art of improvisation from Salieri, who had trained him in the old school of a kapellmeister, a proficient keyboard improviser able to compose, in a short space of time, a mass, symphony or opera, and furnish publishers with songs, chamber music and piano repertoire. Schubert’s friends dismissed his teacher’s theoretically grounded practice of keyboard improvisation as old-fashioned, unknowingly realising that numerous treatises were lamenting its disappearance from musical pedagogy.The skills Schubert acquired were finely honed in Viennese salons. Whereas pianists of the mid nineteenth century played for a vastly expanded concert audience with a lower level of musical education, Schubert’s improvisations – unlike Liszt’s or Hummel’s – were exclusively in private, elite company, where he was immediately understood. Sonnleithner recalls Schubert’s multilevelled improvisations, where he played light waltzes for friends to dance to while others gathered around listening, as he satisfied simultaneously popular and learned tastes. Louis Schlösser remembers Schubert improvising fantasies on Hungarian tunes, which shows the pleasing, popular side of Schubert’s improvisations. One of the most distinctive elements resulting from Schubert’s ‘improvisatory’ compositional technique is his use of harmony at local and structural levels, and novel use of form whose roots are in his improvisor’s fingers.

This chapter provides an overview of the curriculum and modes of instruction within the Neapolitan conservatory curriculum. It focuses specifically on the instructional methods of solfeggio and partimento, drawing on exercises found in surviving eighteenth-century Neapolitan sources. It also considers larger historical contexts such as the diverse approaches of Francesco Durante and Leonardo Leo, whose students have been labeled as “Durantisti” and “Leisti.” Contemporary scholarship on the topics of solfeggio and partimento are also considered – in particular, the work of Robert Gjerdingen and Peter van Tour. The pedagogical importance of the conservatory curriculum served as the basis for a broad, diverse skill set, and the educational methodologies of the conservatories served as the foundation for prevailing stylistic unities derived from techniques learned in these institutions. The emergence of specific shared performance practices, compositional strategies, and broad parameters of style was closely associated with Neapolitan music in the eighteenth century and was widely discussed by contemporary and subsequent sources.

It is hardly surprising that the long tradition of partimento schemata is apparent in the music of Beethoven. Many of his teachers, including Haydn and Salieri, were raised in that pedagogic tradition, and the musical patterns surface consistently in Beethoven’s output. They are particularly evident in works that focus on the performer, such as concertos and fantasias, but their grammatical and syntactical features also contribute to the rarefied language of the late quartets.