Carl Czerny. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
For generations of piano students, Czerny is a life sentence: the speed studies, the metronome drills, the calisthenics. It is a serious historical injustice, because Carl Czerny is something else entirely: he is the cable that connects Beethoven directly to Liszt, and one of the most precious witnesses the history of interpretation possesses.
The facts. In 1801 a ten-year-old Viennese boy is brought to Beethoven, who hears him play and takes him on as a pupil: for three years Czerny studies with him, and he will stay at his side all his life, up to performing the Fifth Concerto in public, first after the composer. Thirty years later, in his Vienna apartment, another prodigy arrives, a Hungarian, eleven years old: Franz Liszt. Czerny teaches him, free of charge, for eighteen months, and Liszt will revere him forever, dedicating to him the Transcendental Etudes. In the handshake between the two pupils passes half a century of piano playing: everyone who plays today descends, through a chain of teachers, from that room.
But the treasure for us is what Czerny wrote. In his monumental piano school, Opus 500, he slipped in a treatise on the correct performance of all of Beethoven’s piano works: movement by movement, piece by piece, with metronome markings and indications of character, noted down by someone who had heard those pages from the author’s own hands or played them under his ear. It is the closest thing to a recording of Beethoven that we possess, and historically informed pianists consult it like a technical relic, with the caution required: Czerny wrote decades afterwards, and memory is an interpreter too. His autobiographical pages also hold the tenderest portrait we have of the Beethoven of 1801, the bear in a dressing gown with his ear already muffled, the same man who twenty years later would end up in a cell because of his coat.
All this while he was writing, for a living, an industrial quantity of music: the catalogue runs past a thousand opus numbers. Vienna mocked him; he cashed in and taught ten hours a day. The Melos library keeps his school and the pages on Beethoven on the shelf of teaching, next to Emanuel Bach’s Versuch, which Beethoven himself had set on the stand in front of him when he was a boy: three generations of manuals passing the fire along. The speed studies, we swear, are the least interesting part of the man.