Carl Czerny

About Carl Czerny

While he may be rather unfairly remembered today only as a purveyor of keyboard studies and instructional volumes, Czerny was a tireless composer and a central figure in the development and codification of modern piano techniques. He was born in Vienna the year Mozart died (1791) and, like him, was a keyboard prodigy as a child; by the time of his death in 1857, he had composed hundreds of works (his highest opus number is 861) and inculcated pupils including Liszt, Thalberg and Leschetizky with his pioneering rock-solid keyboard style. His strongest links, though, were with his own teacher, Beethoven, whose complete works he played from memory. (Czerny’s autobiography, published in 1842, is a major source of information on Beethoven’s life.) He was one of the 50 contributors to Anton Diabelli’s variations project and to Liszt’s Hexaméron, and he composed a string of choral and orchestral works, including seven symphonies that have been tantalisingly revived by enterprising and exploratory record labels over the past quarter of a century.

HOMETOWN
Austria
BORN
21 February 1791
GENRE
Classical

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