Carl Czerny

Selected Piano Studies

The majority of works by Czerny are confusing to most Piano academics. Out of these, the following are still the classics: Op. 139, 261, 299, 335, 337, 355, 365, 453, 553, 599, 636, 718, 740, 755, 802, 821, 823, 834, et 849. Each one of these volumes contains numerous exercises, some contain more than a hundred. It is of course impossible for aspiring pianists to study them all, and it is difficult for Piano teachers to sort them out and organise them into the ones that could be the most interesting in a logical and progressive way. This is exactly what Heinrich Germer has tried to do. Germer, an outstanding teacher and German pianist, was born in Sommerdorf in 1839 and died in Dresde in 1913. He was 18 years old when Cerny died at the age of 66 years. Germer had great luck in knowing the first generation of pianists he was studying, and saw the need to reorganise this huge quantity of didactic material. Germer's success was down to the fact that his systematic organisation of Czerny's work, split into three volumes, continues to be the three used by contemporary piano teachers. Germer did not make hardly any changes to Czerny collections. And there is more - he adds dynamic text for phrasing and pedals so that there is more musicality in the books making the exercises more enjoyable to play. He changes some archaic armatures for more modern ones. He revises Czerny's method on regrouping notes by placing bar values making reading rhythms a lot easier. He corrected numerous printing errors. In the longest pieces, he adds capital letters to indicate the beginning of each movement, same or part period, which helps pupils to know blocks it would be better for him to practise. The revision work undergone by Germer introduces order and the results obtained for the Piano teachers that use them are very satisfying.