His teacher was Beethoven and his pupil was Liszt. In the line that runs through nineteenth-century piano playing, he is the link in the middle.
Czerny was born in Vienna in 1791 to a piano teacher. At ten he was taken to play for Beethoven — he played the Pathétique — and Beethoven took him on there and then; for the next few years he went weekly.
He gave up public performance in his twenties and taught instead: twelve hours a day, six days a week, for decades. Liszt was among his pupils, taken on at nine and taught for nothing, and the line runs on from there, so that most piano teaching today traces back through him somewhere.
He is also a living record of Beethoven. He wrote down how Beethoven played his own music — tempi, pedalling, where he pulled back — and that text is still first-hand material for anyone studying Beethoven performance. In 1812 he gave the Vienna premiere of the Emperor Concerto.
He wrote over eight hundred opus numbers, including symphonies, masses and chamber music, and almost none of it is played. What survives are the study books: the School of Velocity Op. 299, the Art of Finger Dexterity Op. 740, the Practical Exercises for Beginners Op. 599.
He never married and had no children. He died in Vienna in 1857 and left everything to charity and to the Society of Friends of Music.
A Czerny study has a recognisable shape: the right hand runs from start to finish and the left hand just marks the place. Each one usually drills a single thing — scales in this one, thirds in that one, changing fingers without changing position in the next.
So they come out regular, almost without emotional swing, and the volume stays in the middle. That turns out to suit background listening: nothing jumps at you and nothing takes your attention away.
He does not write stories or scenery. What there is to listen to is the evenness of the running itself.
