Czerny's School of Velocity No. 8, Op. 299 — the score is on screen, the tempo is 100 to the quarter, and with the repeat it opens out to a hundred and ten bars and four and a half minutes. C major, 4/4, the right hand running sixteenths from the first note to the last while the left just marks the beat. There is only one difficulty: making two and a half thousand notes come out even. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
The whole piece drills one thing: an even right hand
What this drills is evenness, not speed. The sixteenths never stop, so one heavy or late note leaves an audible dent. Play everything at the same volume and length slowly first, then move it up.
Do not let the wrist follow every note. With twenty-odd notes to a bar, a bouncing wrist is exhausted by bar thirty; the fingers move and the wrist only carries the hand along.
Keep the left hand quiet. It marks the beat and nothing else, and must sit well below the right; as a proper accompaniment it buries the line above.
Watch the position changes, around bars 21, 30, 37, 39, 40 and 51 — the joins are where it breaks.
The fingerings on the page belong to this edition and differ from book to book; where they disagree with the one you practise from, follow yours.
The tempo is 100 to the quarter, printed at bar 1 and taken as it stands. That is a practice tempo you can follow, not a performance tempo.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
Two and a half thousand notes, and the volume never changes
There is not one dynamic mark in this piece — no dynamics, no hairpins, no pedal. Czerny did not intend it to swell.
What you hear is an unbroken line moving across the keyboard: sixteenths on the right, a single point on each beat on the left. Nothing takes your attention, because nothing ever suddenly happens.
Four and a half minutes at almost flat density, bar counts running between twenty and thirty-two.
0:29, 1:07, 2:15 and 3:22 each begin a section, and you will barely notice: there is no pause between them, and what changes is the hand position, not the mood.
It works surprisingly well as background: as regular as rain, but a piano. Good for writing or reading, or any time you want sound and no distraction.
Fifty-five written bars become a hundred and ten
Fifty-five written bars with one repeat, opening out to a hundred and ten bars and two thousand five hundred and eighteen sounding notes, in 4/4 and C major, with no dynamics, no hairpins and no pedal at all.
Bar counts run between twenty and thirty-two, averaging twenty-two point nine — most bars give the right hand twenty-four sixteenths and the left one note or chord on each beat. They drop below twenty at bars 3, 21, 30, 37, 39, 40, 51 and 76, where the right hand changes position or the phrase breathes, and it closes at bar 110 on four notes.
The range is C2 to F7, a little over five octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.150 seconds.
The School of Velocity, Op. 299, has forty numbers; this is the eighth.
Beethoven above him, Liszt below
At ten Czerny was taken to play for Beethoven — he played the Pathétique — and Beethoven took him on there and then, weekly for the next few years.
He gave up performing in his twenties and taught instead: twelve hours a day, six days a week, for decades. Liszt was his pupil from the age of nine, and he charged nothing.
He is also a living record of Beethoven. He wrote down how Beethoven played his own music — tempi, pedalling, where he pulled back — 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, symphonies and masses among them, and almost none is played. What survives are the study books: Op. 599 for beginners, this School of Velocity Op. 299, and the Art of Finger Dexterity Op. 740.
It is a strange position to hold: nearly everyone who has learned the piano has played him, and almost nobody has been to a concert of his music. He never married, and on his death in Vienna in 1857 left everything to charity.
There are thirty-nine more in the same book
The School of Velocity, Op. 299, has forty numbers, roughly graded from easier to harder and usually issued in four books (1–10, 11–20, 21–30, 31–40). This is the eighth, from the first book. None of the others has been made yet.
Czerny's two other standard books are Op. 599 for beginners, which comes before Op. 299, and the Art of Finger Dexterity Op. 740, which comes after. Neither has been made yet.
The method playlist on this channel also carries pieces by Burgmüller and Kuhlau.
