Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Czerny op.337 Anyone use this

I've currently been working with Czerny's Op.337. 40 daily exercises.

Is anyone familiar with this set or use it as a teaching aid with their students? I teach myself, and was just wondering if anyone else has used or uses what I'm currently using?

I was intrigued by all the old Czerny
method books that are still in print,
and I ordered a bunch of them to see
if I could glean something of the
master's famous teaching from them.
There were so many that I had to settle
on: 160 eight-measure exercises, op. 821;
5-finger studies, op. 777; op. 823; op.
636; 100 recreations; and practical method,
op. 599. I personally was disappointed by them.
They seemed for the most part archaic,
haphazard, impractical, and apparently just
cranked out for profit--Czerny wrote hundreds
of these and made money doing it; he
apparently used the fact that he had
been taught by Beethoven and then taught
Liszt briefly to great advantage financially.

I haven't seen op. 337, but I would guess
it would be similar and of questionable value.

Hello vanityx3,

Off the top of my head, I don't recall what Op 337 covers, at what level, but you should know that Czerny was one heck of a fine pianist, and wrote many compositions besides etudes.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Carl_Czerny for a partial listing.

His piano had a much lighter touch than today's grand, so using his etudes for pre-romantic literature training would make the most sense. However, Czerny knew well what Romantic music was, and many of his later etudes are good preparatory work for this literature. A good teacher would cull from the etudes those which would help you solve specific problems. You don't need to do all 40 etudes on a daily basis.

I was on sheetmusicplus the other day and looking at the Op.337 by Czerny, it said it was level 7, but I haven't gotten to the level 7 stuff yet.

The way Czerny says to go through it is, all 40 exercises over the course of 4 days (4 practice sessions) I'm not up to that level, so I do it differently. I learn a few new things each day, gradually moving through it. I will play the things I've already learned the day before just briefly to refresh my memory, and then start on things I haven't done yet.