Carl Czerny

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Carl Czerny was born on the 21st of February 1791 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt district, and he died in the same city on the 15th of July 1857, having never once married, never once left a permanent mark on a family of his own. Yet by the time of his death, his influence had fanned out across the entire landscape of Western piano playing. How does a man who taught up to twelve lessons a day, who composed more than a thousand works, who linked Ludwig van Beethoven to Franz Liszt, end up being remembered mostly as the author of finger exercises? What drew Beethoven himself to accept a ten-year-old as a pupil? And how did a pale, swaying child named Franz Liszt transform under Czerny's hands into the greatest pianist of the nineteenth century? These are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Child Who Could Not Stop Playing

  ›

  Czerny's grandfather was a violinist near Prague, and his father Wenzel was an oboist, organist, and pianist. Music was simply the family's medium. When Czerny was only six months old, Wenzel took a post teaching piano at a Polish manor, and the whole family relocated. They stayed in Poland until the third partition of that country prompted their return to Vienna in 1795.

  By age three, Czerny was already at the keyboard. By age seven, he was composing. His father taught him Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, and the boy began giving recitals in his parents' home long before he ever set foot on a public stage. That first public appearance came in 1800, when Czerny performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor. He was nine years old.

• 3. Inside Beethoven's World

  ›

  In 1801, a Czech composer and violinist named Wenzel Krumpholz arranged for the ten-year-old Czerny to be presented at Beethoven's home. Beethoven asked the boy to play his Pathétique Sonata and the song Adelaide. He accepted Czerny as a pupil on the spot.

  Czerny later wrote with the observational sharpness of a child that at that first meeting he noticed cotton in Beethoven's ears, steeped in what appeared to be a yellowish ointment. Czerny was the first person to report symptoms of Beethoven's deafness, several years before the matter became publicly known.

  Czerny remained formally under Beethoven's tutelage until 1804, studying sporadically after that date. He particularly admired Beethoven's skill at improvisation, his approach to fingering, the speed of his scales and trills, and his restrained physical manner while performing. These observations went beyond admiration; Czerny absorbed them and later passed them into his own teaching.

  Beethoven selected Czerny to perform the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1806. Then, in February 1812, at the age of twenty-one, Czerny gave the Vienna premiere of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. Between 1804 and 1805, he played virtually all of Beethoven's piano works from memory at Prince Lichnowsky's palace once or twice a week, with the Prince calling out only the opus numbers he wished to hear. Czerny also gave piano lessons to Beethoven's nephew Karl, and the friendship between the two men held firm until Beethoven's death.

• 4. The Art of Teaching

  ›

  At fifteen, Czerny launched a teaching career that would come to define him as much as his compositions. He based his method on the approaches of Beethoven, Muzio Clementi, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and he taught up to twelve lessons a day in the homes of Viennese nobility. His pupils included Theodor Döhler, Stephen Heller, Anna Sick, and Ninette de Belleville.

  In 1819, Franz Liszt's father brought his eight-year-old son to Czerny. Czerny recalled a pale, sickly-looking child who swayed on the stool as if drunk, throwing his fingers arbitrarily across the keyboard. The playing was irregular and untidy. But Czerny saw the natural talent beneath the chaos and was so struck by it that he taught Liszt free of charge. The Liszt family happened to live on the same street in Vienna.

  Czerny trained young Liszt on the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi, Ignaz Moscheles, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Shortly before Liszt's Vienna concert of the 13th of April 1823, Czerny arranged with some difficulty an introduction between Liszt and Beethoven. Beethoven, who had grown to dislike child prodigies, was nonetheless sufficiently impressed to give Liszt a kiss on the forehead. Liszt repaid Czerny's early generosity by performing Czerny's music at many of his Paris recitals, and in 1852 he published his Études d'exécution transcendante with a dedication to Czerny.

• 5. More Than a Thousand Works

  ›

  After 1840, Czerny withdrew from teaching and devoted himself entirely to composition. His output ran past one thousand works and extended to Opus 861. The catalogue spans piano études, nocturnes, sonatas, variations, masses, symphonies, string quartets, chamber pieces, and choral works.

  His piano nocturnes share qualities with those of Chopin, including rhythmic fluidity and an intimate character. Chopin had met Czerny in Vienna in 1828 and may have encountered these nocturnes there. Czerny composed roughly one hundred and eighty pieces carrying the title Variations, drawing on his own themes and on themes by composers ranging from Beethoven and Haydn to Niccolò Paganini and Gioachino Rossini. One of these, La Ricordanza, Op. 33, was later recorded by Vladimir Horowitz.

  Czerny was one of fifty composers who contributed a variation to the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein, published in 1824, for which Beethoven supplied the famous thirty-three Diabelli Variations as Part I. Czerny also wrote the coda that closed the collection. Together with Liszt, Chopin, Henri Herz, Johann Peter Pixis, and Sigismond Thalberg, Czerny contributed to the Hexameron in 1837.

  His seven symphonies began to be recorded only in the 1990s. Two additional symphonies, including one composed in 1814, came to light in the twenty-first century, along with two overtures and symphonic choral works. The majority of the pieces Czerny himself called serious music remain in unpublished manuscript form, held by Vienna's Society for the Friends of Music, the institution to which he willed his estate.

• 6. Reputation and Rediscovery

  ›

  Robert Schumann wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that it would be difficult to find a failure of imagination greater than Czerny's, referring to Op. 424. The writer Arthur Loesser described Czerny's music as without depth, intensity, or wit, though smooth and ear-tickling when played fast, and characterised it as offering endless variety of patterns alongside endless monotony of import.

  Even Liszt expressed ambivalence in an 1852 letter, observing that by too super-abundant productiveness, Czerny had weakened himself, and had not gone on further on the road of his first Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 7, which Liszt rated very highly as a composition of importance, beautifully formed and having the noblest tendency.

  Yet other voices pushed back. Johannes Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann in March 1878 that Czerny's large pianoforte course Op. 500 was worthy of study, particularly for what it said about Beethoven. Brahms added that people ought to have more respect for this excellent man. Igor Stravinsky went further, writing that he had been appreciating the full-blooded musician in Czerny more than the remarkable pedagogue. Positive assessments also came from Anton Kuerti and Leon Botstein.

  In 1842, Czerny published an autobiographical sketch, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. His 1846 essay On the Proper Performance of all Beethoven's Works for Piano preserved observations that no other living source could have supplied. Volume 4 of his Theoretico-Practical Piano School, published in 1847, listed what he judged the most important piano works of the preceding eighty years, a document that shaped how the classical piano canon was understood for generations.

• 7. A Legacy in Living Hands

  ›

  The April 1927 issue of The Etude, a US music magazine, published an illustration tracing how Czerny's pedagogy flowed through Theodor Leschetizky to Sergei Prokofiev and Leon Fleisher; through Theodor Kullak to Wanda Landowska; and through Liszt to Claudio Arrau, Daniel Barenboim, Van Cliburn, Ernő Dohnányi, Georges Cziffra, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. These are not marginal figures.

  In his will, Czerny left his large fortune to charities, including an institution for the deaf, to his housekeeper, and to the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna. He also made provision for a Requiem mass to be performed in his memory. The bequest to an institution for the deaf carries its own quiet weight: it was Czerny who had first noticed, as a child, the cotton in Beethoven's ears.