We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 162 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist and teacher Carl Czerny. 

Carl Czerny (1791-1827) in 1833

What would we do without him? Indeed. Excepting Ferdinand Ries (who was, like Czerny, a student of Beethoven’s), no one has left us more numerous and more accurate first-hand accounts of Beethoven than Czerny. He was a great pianist and perhaps the greatest pianist who never played in public. (I would qualify that statement, because as a young man Czerny did indeed play in public a handful of times; for example, Beethoven entrusted the 21-year-old Czerny with the first public performance in Vienna of his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor”, on February 12, 1812. But in fact, Czerny hated the pressure of performing in public, hated travelling, and felt that “my playing lacked the type of brilliant, calculated charlantry that is usually part of a travelling virtuoso’s essential equipment.” So he stayed home in Vienna, where he performed in private, composed, and taught.)

He was, very likely, the single most important piano teacher of the nineteenth century. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians he was “a central figure in the transmission of Beethoven’s legacy”, a piano teacher who numbered among his star students Stephan Heller, Sigismond Thalberg, Theodor Leschetizky, and Franz Liszt.

 

Flow-chart of Czerny’s impact as a piano teacher as of 1927, from The Etude magazine

(In late August of 1819 Liszt’s father Adam brought his son to Czerny’s studio in Vienna. Czerny remembered:

“One morning in 1819, a man with a small boy approached me with a request to let the youngster play something on the piano.  He was a pale, sickly-looking child who, while playing, swayed about on the stool as if drunk, so that I thought that he would fall to the floor. His playing was also quite irregular, and he had so little idea of fingering that he threw his fingers quite arbitrarily around the keyboard. But that notwithstanding, I was astonished at the talent nature had bestowed upon him. He played something which I gave him to sight-read like a pure ‘natural’. It was just the same when, at his father’s request, I gave him a theme on which to improvise. Without the slightest knowledge of harmony, he still brought a touch of genius to his rendering. The father told me that he himself had taught the boy till now; but he asked me whether if I would myself accept his little ‘Franzi’. I told him I would be glad to.”

Czerny later wrote:

“Never before had I had so eager, talented, or industrious a student. After only a year I could let him perform publicly, and he aroused a degree of enthusiasm in Vienna that few artists have equaled.” 

Czerny, who taught from 8 am to 8 pm, giving twelve lessons a day – a workload he himself called “lucrative but taxing.” – taught Liszt for free, giving him lessons every evening after having finished his day’s work. Liszt became a de-facto member of the Czerny family, and was grateful to Czerny – whom he always referred to, no matter how famous he got, as “My Dear, Revered Master” – for the rest of his life.)

Czerny as a young man

Czerny was a tireless composer, who churned out thousands of works and whose final opus number was a staggering Op. 861(!!!) Harold Schonberg describes Czerny’s method of composing:

“A skullcap on his head, he would work on four or five compositions simultaneously, running from one to the other as the ink dried enough for him to turn the pages, while carrying on an animated conversation with anybody who hap...