Sunday, September 9, 2018

Carl Czerny - Fantasia for piano, flute and cello

After seven years and hundreds of classical music Sundays, it's getting harder to find composers whose music I haven't already posted.  In particular, I've just about mined out the Romantic era (say, from Beethoven through Mahler).  But not quite.

Carl Czerny was an Austrian (actually Czech, which was ruled by the Austrian Emperors back then) piano virtuoso - his 101 Exercises is still part of piano instruction today.  Pupil of Beethoven himself, he taught Franz Liszt while composing over a thousand pieces in the finest Romantic tradition.  A 1927 Etude magazine article showed that his teaching (and pupils) basically were the pantheon of great piano instructors.

The famous magazine The Etude, a U.S. magazine dedicated to music, which was founded by Theodore Presser (1848-1925) at Lynchburg, Virginia, and first published in October 1883 and continued the magazine until 1957, brought in its issue of April 1927 an illustration showing how Carl Czerny should be considered the father of modern pianistic technique and base an entire generation of pianist that extends to the present day.
Interestingly, he was one of the first to notice Beethoven's growing deafness

2 comments:

libertyman said...

Amazing that someone can coordinate fingers and mind to play the piano in such an impressive way.
Excellent post.

Ed Bonderenka said...

I remember a book of his exercises in my piano training.