Sonatas 1-4

An unappreciated composer

“In Czerny I have always appreciated the musician ‘pur sang’ even more than the remarkable teacher”. These words, written down by Igor Strawinsky in his Chroniques de ma vie, will by no means meet with universal agreement. Many will see Carl Czerny as a personification of frustrations sustained during their piano lessons, for almost every propestive pianist has had to struggle through such notorious volumes of studies as the Schule der Geläufigkeit, opus 299, or the considerably more difficult Kunst der Fingerfertigkeit, opus 740. This everyday fare for the pianostudent contains all conceivable kinds of difficult finger-combinations to build up velocity, clarity, strength and stamina, while the impossibly high tempo directions are off-putting enough by themselves. Yet it is true that Czerny is not merely a provider of technical study material. The studies, provided the technical problems have been conquered and the intended tempo has been mastered, include some very attractive pieces of music. Czerny has a lot more to offer as a composer, but as such he is completely unappreciated. Who, for instance, is aware that his published oeuvre consists of no fewer than 798 opus numbers, many titles of which contain dozens of separate pieces, and that the total number of his compositions, not counting the transcriptions, amounts to more than two thousand? But that still does not say anything about Czerny’s quality as a musician, for primarily this enormous body of work seems to point to hack writing. It is no coincidence that Czerny is reported to have been in the habit of working on four scores at the same time: his workroom contained four worktables on which he had laid out music paper; as the ink of one composition was drying he went on to the following, and so on. It must be admitted that Czerny was no second Beethoven, Liszt or Chopin and that among his compositions there are many occasional pieces which justly have not stood the test of time. But getting better acquainted with the early piano works of this composer will be surprising. The first piano sonatas in particular are highly original works with great power of expression, which can hold their own with the works of Czerny’s teacher Ludwig van Beethoven and those of Franz Schubert.