1791–1857 · Austria · Romantic
Carl Czerny (1791–1857) was a Vienna-based pianist, composer and teacher who studied with Beethoven as a boy and later guided Franz Liszt through his early training. Over his lifetime he produced more than a thousand works, though players today mostly meet him through his teaching études — pieces like The School of Velocity or The Art of Finger Dexterity, which are still widely used in piano teaching.
Carl Czerny was born in Vienna, in the Leopoldstadt district, on 21 February 1791. His father, the Czech-born pianist and teacher Wenzel Czerny, became his first teacher; his mother came from Moravia, and her maiden name was Ruzitschka.
When Carl was only six months old, his father took a post as a music teacher on a Polish estate and the family moved to Poland; they returned to Vienna only in 1795, after the third partition of Poland. From the age of three his father taught him to play the piano — mainly through the music of Bach, Haydn and Mozart — and at seven Carl began composing music of his own.
He grew up a child prodigy, playing for his parents at home, and under his father's guidance began giving concerts at about the age of nine. His first public appearance came at Vienna's Augarten in 1800, when the nine-year-old Czerny played Mozart's Piano Concerto in C minor.
In 1801 the violinist and composer Wenzel Krumpholz arranged for Carl to meet Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven asked the boy to play the “Pathétique” Sonata and the song “Adelaide,” was struck by the ten-year-old pianist, and agreed to teach him free of charge.
The lessons continued until 1804, and sporadically after that; Czerny then moved on to study with Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and in the same years also studied with Muzio Clementi and Antonio Salieri. He most admired Beethoven's freedom in improvising, how precisely he placed his fingers, how quickly he could run through scales and trills, and the restraint he kept at the keyboard. In 1805 Beethoven gave Czerny a letter of recommendation noting that, for his fourteen years, he had achieved “quite exceptional” success at the piano and possessed a remarkable memory.
By the age of seventeen Czerny knew all of his teacher's piano works by heart, and in 1804–1805 he would play them in the evenings at Prince Lichnowsky's palace, where the prince would simply call out the opus number. Beethoven chose him as the pianist for the premiere of his First Concerto in 1806, and in February 1812, at the age of twenty-one, Czerny performed the solo part at the Vienna premiere of his Fifth Piano Concerto.
Czerny's autobiography and letters became an important source of information about Beethoven for later generations: he was the first to describe the signs of his teacher's deafness — as a child he had already noticed cotton soaked in a yellowish ointment in his ears — years before this became widely known. Czerny kept his friendship with Beethoven for the rest of his life and gave piano lessons to Beethoven's nephew Karl.
Czerny began teaching at fifteen and built a very successful career as a piano teacher, basing his method on the practices of Beethoven, Clementi and Hummel; he taught as many as twelve lessons a day inside the households of Vienna's aristocracy.
In 1819 Franz Liszt's father brought his son to Czerny. Czerny recalled that as the boy played he swayed on the stool “like a drunk,” throwing his fingers about the keyboard at random — yet he was astonished by his talent. He taught Liszt free of charge, since the two families lived on the same Vienna street, and introduced him to the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi, Moscheles and Bach.
Ahead of Liszt's Vienna concert on 13 April 1823, Czerny had some difficulty persuading Beethoven, who disliked child prodigies, to receive the boy all the same — and Beethoven was so impressed that he kissed Liszt on the forehead. Liszt later performed Czerny's music at his Paris concerts, and in 1852 dedicated to his teacher the collection “Études d'exécution transcendante.”
By the middle of the century Czerny was regarded as one of the leading piano teachers: his pupils included Franz Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, Theodor Leschetizky, Theodor Kullak, Anna Caroline de Belleville-Oury and Alfred Jaëll.
Until 1815 Czerny kept up an active concert career — Beethoven entrusted him with performing his Third Piano Concerto. After 1815 he gave up public performing almost entirely and concentrated on teaching and composing, leaving Vienna only rarely: he toured to Leipzig in 1836, and in 1837, with Liszt's help, to Paris and London.
After 1840 Czerny gave up both performing and teaching almost entirely to devote himself to composition. Over his lifetime he wrote more than a thousand opus numbers, up to Op. 861: everything from small exercises for beginning children to pieces demanding the technique of a mature virtuoso.
Czerny also wrote a good deal about music: his output includes the “Sketch of the History of Music” (Op. 815, 1851) and the three-volume “Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Composition” (Op. 600, 1849), whose final volume is devoted to orchestration. His “Letters on the Study of the Pianoforte” appeared around 1840 and were already translated into Russian by 1842.
Czerny also worked as an editor: he prepared an edition of Johann Sebastian Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier,” published Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas along with a study of how to perform Beethoven's piano works, and translated Anton Reicha's treatises on composition theory into German. He set down his memories of his student years in a brief autobiographical sketch published in 1842; his complete memoirs, with a list of works up to 1860, appeared only in 1968.
Carl Czerny passed away in Vienna on 15 July 1857, aged 66, having never married and with no close relatives surviving him. He left his sizeable fortune to charitable causes — among them an institution for the deaf — as well as to his housekeeper and to Vienna's Society of the Friends of Music, and asked that a requiem mass be sung in his memory.
Czerny was buried in an honorary grave at Vienna's Central Cemetery. In 1907 a street in Vienna's Brigittenau district was named after him, the Karl-Czerny-Gasse, and later the asteroid (6294) Czerny was also named in his honour.
Over his life Czerny wrote more than a thousand opus numbers, up to Op. 861. His catalogue spans piano études, nocturnes, sonatas, and opera-theme arrangements and variations, but also sacred and choral works, symphonies and concertos, plus songs, string quartets and other chamber pieces. Best known today are his didactic étude collections — pieces like The School of Velocity or The Art of Finger Dexterity; Czerny was one of the first composers to put the word “étude” in a piece's title.
Czerny's piano sonatas stand as something of a bridge between the works of Beethoven and those of Liszt: traditional sonata form sits alongside Baroque elements such as fugato and free fantasia forms. His piano nocturnes share features with Chopin's — rhythmic freedom and an intimate character; Czerny and Chopin met in Vienna in 1828.
Roughly 180 of Czerny's compositions are variations — on his own themes and on those of other composers, from Haydn and Mozart to Rossini and Schubert. They can be played by a single performer or by an ensemble of four, six or eight hands, sometimes with an optional orchestra or string quartet behind them, and Czerny liked to blend the variation form with a fantasy, a rondo or an impromptu.
Most of Czerny's “serious” music — masses, choral works, symphonies and chamber ensembles without piano — remained in the shadow of his teaching collections for a long time, and only began to attract performers' attention at the end of the 20th century.
In book four of his piano method (Op. 500, issued 1838–1847), Czerny drew up his own ranking of the finest piano pieces from the preceding eighty years — naming Mozart, Clementi, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Schubert and Mendelssohn alongside a few pieces of his own.
The site collects study pieces from Czerny's “160 Eight-Measure Exercises” (Op. 821) — exactly the kind of work through which he guided a student from the very first lessons to advanced technique; they are marked at the “Intermediate” and “Intermediate+” levels and offer one way into his output.