Carl Czerny-Hateful or Helpful?
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- Music in the intro is Earl Wild’s Etude no. 1 after George Gershwin’s “Liza”
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THANK YOU for mentioning op. 821! 🙏 Everyone talks only about the popular ones like op. 299 but it's MUCH more efficient to learn a bunch of varied 8-bar etudes in the same time you would spend on one 3-page etude that has only one technique. This set covers a lot of techniques and the later ones are really virtuosic. Highly recommended!
Thank you very much for this video! I have always found Czerny very helpful and often very charming. It's always a question of dosage and how to use his etudes correctly and intelligently. Almost more important than the question of which etude to practise is knowing why you are practising it and how you should practise it sensibly. And Czerny can be excellent practice material.
Thanks for this talk. I love the 8 measure collection. Just 8 measures is perfect. Students can learn the entire piece in one week and continue to practice them for tempo. For more advanced students, I love the School of Virtuosity. Those pieces are divided in small sections, making them very doable. My former teacher at the Vienna Academy assigned those pieces when I was a student and I practice them from time to time still, so many decades later.
Great video! ❤🎉 Thanks so much!
Thanks Cole, this is one of my favourite videos of yours. I'd love more videos on pedagogy and advice for technique development as an intermediate level pianist. My technique is far behind my musicality, so I'm desperate for more information like this. Most of what you find on YT is for beginners, and the rest is behind paywalls.
Thank you. Looking forward to more etudes.
You are absolutely right, I am, for my self, in a painful struggle, to let Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart and Beethoven aside and start to play the more difficult, expanded and energetic demanding new piano technique of Liszt and Chopin most difficult works like their Studies, Ballades and Sonatas, this is a lack in my piano technique that I must overcome, it will be hard, but I like winning challenges, thank you for your awareness on this subject of the huge piano technical gap between great Classical piano works and the great Romantic piano works.
I appreciated your talk on Czerny. I remember my piano teacher complaining about a student whose favorite composer was Czerny, but for a while, he was mine also because I could play his pieces much better than most other music, and playing is so much more conducive to appreciation than passive listening (even, I believe, playing badly!). Plus, Czerny often employs themes and phrases from other composers, such as Bach, which serve as good introductions to the originals. Sonatinas by Clementi, Kuhlau, etc. had (have) a similar place in my student repertoire.
it's important to mention as well Liszt was probably drilled heavily in scales, and exercises Czerny came up with for 5 fingers and so on before he tackled the Clementi Sonatas.
Liszt also I'm sure did Clementi and Cramer as well, and ofc spent 3-5 hours a day over a certain period, and Chopin got his technic basis off of op 43 by Clementi.
The quote about Liszt: “For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don’t go mad you will find an artist in me! Yes, an artist such as is desired, such as is required today.
Thank you Cole. Transposition is helpful, too. I benefited from Cramer's beatiful studies. Moscheles should be on the list! Some of them are poetic gems. He also wrote lovely memoirs in which he remembers time with Beethoven (he prepared the piano vocal score of Fidelio) and Chopin - with whom he played his wonderful grand four hand sonata. A living composer who's etudes are lots of fun (Absofunkenlutely is one that comes to mind) David Rakowski - he's probably passed the 100 mark by now!
I think everyone who started piano is given Czerny in Japan. So I did all 100 (op.139), 30(op.849), 40(op.299)... then after 10 pieces of 50(op.740), exam came and that was the end of my Czerny....but I really appreciate how much his etudes gave me a good foundation.
Hello, I am from the "pure good music bunch"... I just feel that if you need to learn technique you can learn it pragmaticaly in situ, when you need it in your repertoir. If you come across a technical challenge in your repertoire, you can transform it into an exercise and derive many types of exercises. I just don't believe that practicing "exercise letterature" per se will transfer to a general piano vocabulary. Scales are not always scales, arpegios are not always arpegios. Every case requires a particular study approach.
This is a great perspective, and I do think deriving exercises from repertoire is also essential, but unfortunately I think for most people this won't take you all the way there in the hardest repertoire. We need a little preparatory conditioning to be able to handle the greatest "Olympic events" of piano playing!
I’ve never practised (consistently) studies like these. Guess what, despite learning some difficult pieces, my technique is limited by poor foundation. I often tell myself I should play some study every day, any study, but I never do! I really wish that I had. It’s almost too late (I’m 66), but not quite. Maybe this time …😮
I’m pretty sure I have lots of tattered Czerny books somewhere
I've never heard of this set, but it sounds very useful, I'll definitely check it out! I've only tried some school of velocity etudes thus far but gave up after a while because I found them boring haha
Only partly related to your video, but I wish more pianists performed his immense study in f minor, the Grand Capriccio Op. 369. Certainly one of the most difficult études written in the 19th century and one which both predated in time, and (arguably) surpassed in difficulty Liszt's infamous 1837 Grand Études.
One of Vladimir Horowitz's favorite recordings of himself was of his 1945(ish?) recording of Czerny's Variations on a Theme by Rode, Op. 33.
Raymond Lewenthal used to play Czerny's Toccata Op. 92 regularly, and he also encored the Ètude Op. 740/3 after an all-Liszt recital.
Where Czerny lacked in so called "greatness", which again is subjective, he more than made up for it in spades with loads of pianistic charm.
The Czerny Toccata is of extreme difficulty (and one of his better pieces), and an excellent preparation for Schumann's even more difficult Toccata! I also didn't mean to say that Czerny never wrote any great pieces (Sonata in A-flat anyone), but they are outnumbered by lighter weight etudes.
responding to "a school of thought evidenced in message boards dedicated to piano practice that we should never waste our time with un-musical things like Czerny"
are you familiar with Bernhard from Piano Street? i think he may be the progenitor of that school. i think it worked well in his case because he was a repertoire encyclopedia and could instantly recommend musical pieces to practice on any technical difficulty. he also unfairly grouped Czerny in with Hanon, in my opinion.
i think the best method is to cater the practice approach to the student's preference. i think method books and technical exercises get a bad wrap because some teachers force them on their students to the point of the student losing interest in music. but they definitely have their place!
I think I have read some of Bernhard's writings. Again, not to say you can't do without Czerny, it just is very effective (especially with younger students).
Helpful and important … in moderate doses😄Most important is to arrange ones repertoire so that it includes a little bit from every period.
Another great point-I always like to have my students playing some Baroque/Classical repertoire as well, nothing can replace what you gain from that!
@Absolutely. I also have a cycle of sonatinas and children pieces (for example Schumann and Bartòk) and some Bach and Haydn and things like Schubert wonderful German dances / Ländler. Easy pieces but wonderful music and its great as warm ups, scales and such stuff and above all train ones musicality.
As someone who's taking Czerny Op. 299 and Burgmuller Op. 109 at the same time, I found Czerny very boring - the rhythms are mechanical and the harmonics are predictable. They are not much more than glorified finger exercises.
I think Schiff's point was that if you practiced Czerny too much, you got accustomed to playing the scales and arpeggios unmusically, and you apply them to all repertoire automatically.
I can not imagine that a pianist who can play Bach, Mozart and Beethoven very well, will not be able to master Chopin or Liszt without the help of Czerny. If you really want some technical exercises I think Cortot and Brahms will do. Czerny and his peers were undoubtedely didactical usefull in the mid 19th century, but today we have so much more quality repertoire to chose from that is full of technical challenges. And indeed life is too short. For every Czerny, Cramer, Clementi or Moscheles study that you spend time on you have to give up on pieces that you could have practiced instead.
Yes, it is hard to imagine, but in reality there are many well-known pianists who play Bach, Mozart and Beethoven superlatively who cannot handle the most difficult portions of the 19th-20th century repertoire (or at least not without playing VERY slowly). I also like Cortot and Brahms exercises, but surprisingly, I find that Czerny translates much more directly to "real" repertoire than do more abstract exercises. Also, it may not be a waste of the time if the gradual study of etudes like these halves the time it takes to learn the more difficult pieces later on!
If you can do such inverted LH playing, try what Christopher Seed does, play a left-handed piano.
Name of piece in the thumbnail?
Thanks for the vid. Can you put the czerny you recomend in the description please. Op 160 or 180 was it?
Ah right op. 821 got it
I'm guessing that if you don't understand Czerny's metronome marks, his music will sound unmusical more often. Wim Winters' channel, AuthenticSound, expounds a lot about how most of the composers of that age approached tempi. They used the metronome very unlike we do. The emotional meaning they saw in their own music, for the most part evades us, for that reason.
Oh, no, not the whole beat theory again 😖
Tried one of his exercises once. I felt like I needed hand surgery afterwards. I am not a fan. He did teach Franz Liszt though, so maybe it can just be chalked up to my supremely mediocre skills on the keyboard lol.
Ah yes, that doesn't sound right at all! It all depends on which one you start with and how you practice
I agree with Andras Schiff- to take Czerny with a grain of salt and focus more on rep.-- i tend to avoid "pure" etudes with my students and instead look for pieces that cover ideas that want them to work on....
(RCM has a great series of real pieces etudes)
As for that, RCM includes several Czerny etudes in their curriculum!
What kind of shirt is that? It looks really comfortable.
I think it came from Express if I remember correctly