In my new video I go through the Czerny books again: which ones to start with, and which ones I would skip.
The free Czerny PDF pack has all 16 books from this post, in this order. It also has the list of which etudes to play in each book, because doing all of them is too many.
Carl Czerny is the bridge between finger exercises and real repertoire. He gets dismissed sometimes, usually by people who have played him mechanically and found the experience dull. But Czerny is not mechanical in the sense of being empty — he is focused. Each etude isolates one or two techniques, and that isolation is exactly what makes them useful.
You can spoil a Czerny etude and still sleep at night. If you approach a Mozart sonata or a Chopin piece as an exercise — struggling through it, grinding passages, losing the music in the process — you build an aversion to it. That piece becomes difficult to love again. A Czerny etude does not carry that risk. You can work on it hard, technically, without endangering anything precious.
Dinu Lipatti called him "father Czerny." That is not a dismissive label.
Why Czerny Matters
Czerny was Beethoven's student. He premiered several of Beethoven's works, including the Piano Concerto No. 1. Beethoven himself considered him a serious student, and their relationship lasted until Beethoven's death in 1827.
After his studies with Beethoven, Czerny became at age 14 the most sought-after piano teacher in Vienna. His most famous student was Franz Liszt — who got all the fundamentals of his piano playing from Czerny. Theodor Leschetizky was also a Czerny student, and he later became the teacher of a whole generation of great pianists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Beethoven → Czerny → Liszt → Tausig → Barth → Rubinstein line is the direct lineage of the technique tradition that runs through my teacher Avi Schönfeld. So when I work with Czerny, I am working in the same tradition that shaped the greatest pianists of the modern era.
That is the historical argument. The practical argument is simpler: Czerny was a genius at solving problems in piano playing. He wrote hundreds of etudes, organized across multiple opus numbers, each targeting a specific pianistic situation. There is a Czerny etude for almost every technical challenge a developing pianist faces. Practising them with intent using the same approach that applies to Hanon extracts all of that value.
How to Practise Any Etude Effectively
Before going through the etudes by opus number, one technique applies to all of them: the umbrella technique.
Open the hand so the fingers are in a prepared position over the keys. Then strike fast — a speedy, decisive attack. After the key goes down, the finger lifts back immediately to the prepared position. The tempo is slow. The finger movement is fast.
This is how great pianists prepare for performance. Horowitz said he advises every pianist to play the first Chopin Etude (Op. 10 No. 1) very slowly and strong. Every day. That is the umbrella technique applied to advanced repertoire. The same method works on Czerny at every level: slow tempo, active fingers, fast attack, discrete relaxation between notes.
The system behind superfast fingers explains why slow preparation is what builds actual speed.
The Etudes: From Easy to Difficult
Czerny wrote so many etudes that navigating them requires a map. Here are the main opus numbers for technique, from the first five-finger pieces to the virtuoso level, roughly in order of difficulty.
Opus 777 — Five-Finger Exercises
Really for beginners, quasi-beginners, and really for kids: small hands, no octaves. The German title says what the book is for: 24 exercises with the right hand staying in one place.
The right hand keeps a single five-finger position through each piece, while the left hand accompanies, sometimes with its own running notes. So the work is evenness and lightness in five fingers, legato against staccato, and later a few positions in G, D and F major.
There is no thumb passing and no stretching to think about yet. Very simple, but good and rewarding for the fingers. This is the very first step, before Op. 139.
Opus 139 — 100 Progressive Studies
These are very easy. Very short pieces, only two lines each. You can choose your own tempo. Every beginner can manage these. Good for establishing the physical fundamentals without being overwhelmed by notation demands. Play them slowly, raise the fingers, feel the lower-arm muscles working.
Opus 599 — Practical Method for Beginners
From these 100 etudes, around 19 numbers are specifically designed for scale technique (Nos. 19, 22, 26, 27, and similar). In China, teachers sometimes use Op. 599 as a complete method — working from No. 1 to No. 100. That is not how I would use them, but the scale-specific numbers are worth selecting and working through in order of difficulty.
Opus 849 — New Studies in Technics
Czerny wrote these as a preschool for Op. 299, and the title page of the edition says so. They start easy, the curve gets steep quite quickly, and they are shorter than the 299 etudes. Nine of them are useful for scales, and depending on the tempo some can be rather challenging.
In my older video I said we should not dismiss them. Now I am more direct: I find them very boring. Not bad to play, but very mechanical, so I would skip them entirely.
If you already have the book, the nine numbers for scales in the list are the ones to take.
Opus 299 — The School of Velocity
The most famous Czerny opus. Two to four pages long, intermediate to advanced. These become genuinely difficult when played at real speed. If the first number feels manageable, the later ones in the book will challenge you significantly. This is the right opus to work through once Opp. 139 and 599 feel natural. How to practise piano scales covers the thumb mechanics and hand-position adjustments that Op. 299 demands.
Opus 740 — The Art of Finger Dexterity
Popular in conservatories alongside Op. 299. Similar difficulty, slightly longer pieces. No. 13 is particularly interesting — scales played almost like an embellishment, light and elegant, not mechanical at all. Some people think all Czerny is mechanical. No. 13 is the counterargument.
Opus 409 — Grand Finishing Studies
Not so well known. Czerny calls them Grand Finishing Studies; in my older video I called the book the School of Perfection.
They are musically, I think, more interesting than 299: charming etudes. Nos. 1, 18 and 42 are the ones for scales.
Opus 365 — School of the Virtuoso
Opus 365 is not long but repeats many times — 12 or 20 repetitions per variation, building stamina as much as technique. Conservatory-level.
Opus 754 — 6 Salon Etudes
Six salon etudes in the same style as Op. 756, each with a character title. In this edition they come as Étude, Toccata, Tarantella, Impromptu à l'Écossaise, Romance and Impromptu passionné.
They train quite different things. No. 1 is a singing top line with the accompaniment in the same hand, and a lot of pedal. The Tarantella and the Écossaise are fast, light staccato, with double notes and chords.
The Romance is a slow singing line with trills and turns. Advanced. Rewarding to look at them.
Opus 756 — 25 Grand Salon Etudes
Interesting musical etudes, character etudes, not merely technical. Two books, 25 etudes, and some of them are very difficult: broken tenths, octave etudes, double notes.
A little bit Lisztian, too. You can see where Liszt got his techniques from, because a lot of these techniques come back in Liszt's etudes. I never play them myself, but I would certainly check them out.
No. 1 already mixes very fast, light right-hand figuration (velocissimo) with full pedalled harmony. Later on, No. 19 is octaves and repeated chords, loud and staccato, No. 22 has a wide broken left hand, a tenth and more from the bass, and No. 25 is light double notes in the right hand.
Special Etudes
These are special études, each book for one skill: the left hand, octaves, legato and staccato, or fugue playing.
Opus 861 — 30 Progressive Studies
Four etudes for scales here, at an easy-to-intermediate level. Notable: all the etudes in this opus are for the left hand. If your left hand is weaker (as it usually is), Op. 861 is valuable targeted work.
Opus 718 — 24 Studies for the Left Hand
Not the most difficult, but effective. No. 8 is a staccato etude — a little arm movement on each note combined with fingers. Worth including specifically for staccato scale work, which appears in Beethoven sonatas constantly. How I play that combination in a fast staccato scale, good fingers and a little arm on each note, is in my post on how to play fast staccato on piano. If you want to play Beethoven's sonatas, you should not dismiss Czerny.
Opus 399 — School for the Left Hand
Opus 399 is long and difficult. Conservatory-level.
Opus 553 — 6 Octave Studies
A collection of special etudes: a school of octaves. Six studies, printed in progressive difficulty, and they really do get harder as you go.
No. 1 starts gently, with light octaves marked leggiermente, first in the right hand and then in the left. After that come octaves filled in with chord notes, light staccato octaves in No. 3, broken octaves in No. 4, and at the end two fast, strong ones, the last con bravura with octave runs in both hands.
The first ones sit around the level of Op. 299; by No. 6 you are clearly at the advanced level.
Opus 335 — The School of Legato and Staccato
Two etudes here (Nos. 2 and 18) focused specifically on articulation contrasts. How to use the arm in fast legato scales; how to combine fingers and arm in staccato work depending on the sound required. Beethoven uses staccato scales constantly in his sonatas — this opus prepares you directly for that.
Opus 400 — School of Fugue Playing
The German title is longer: the school of fugue playing and of performing music in several voices, with their particular difficulties. There are 24 of them, preludes and fugues.
In the preface Czerny names those difficulties himself:
- awkward but necessary fingerings
- choosing which hand takes each note of an inner voice
- keeping every voice legato and clear, as if the others were not there
- bringing out the subject in whatever voice it appears
He dedicated the book to Mendelssohn and calls it the end of his whole series.
I would say: why not just play Bach, his Inventions? It's more interesting. Op. 400 is there if you want a Czerny route into the same skill.
In this video we're going to talk about scale etudes by Czerny, Carl Czerny. In the previous videos I was talking about scale technique, but it's also nice to put scales into practice. To put them into real pianistic situations.
What is good about etudes is that it focuses on only one or two techniques. Plus, you can spoil a Czerny etude and you can still sleep at night — but if you would spoil a Sonata by Mozart, or some nice piece of Chopin, just for the sake of practice, and struggle with it a lot, then you start to get an aversion to it. That would keep me awake at night! But not a Czerny etude.
Czerny was the student of Beethoven. He premiered several works of Beethoven, including his first piano concerto. He was since he was 14 years old the most sought-after teacher in Vienna. He had really hundreds of students and a few famous ones. The most famous one is Franz Liszt. He learned all his fundament of piano playing from Czerny. Also Theodor Leschetizky was a student of Czerny — the teacher of a whole army of great pianists in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century.
I see a nice link there to me with Czerny: Beethoven was teaching Czerny, Czerny was teaching Franz Liszt, Liszt was teaching Tausig — the most virtuosical student of Liszt, the Horowitz of the 19th century. Tausig was also the teacher of Barth, and Barth was the teacher of Arthur Rubinstein, and Arthur Rubinstein was teaching my teacher Avi Schönfeld. A nice link.
Dinu Lipatti called him, not without reason, "father Czerny."
My number one tip for learning any etude — and in fact any difficult passage: the umbrella technique. Open the hand and articulate the fingers very well. A special way of working that really can effectively develop finger independence, finger strength, and finger speed, while we work in a slow tempo. Open the hand. Fast attack, fast and speedy strike of the key. And there is a relaxation in the muscles between each note.
Horowitz said he advises every pianist to play the first etude of Chopin, Opus 10 No. 1, very slowly and strong. Every day! That is the first-phase exercises with the umbrella technique.
Exercises for weak fingers address the same muscle groups that Czerny develops, from a different angle. And once the Czerny etudes start to feel familiar, the next natural step is applying the same slow-practice precision to real repertoire — Für Elise is where many players make that transition. The Czerny in them will already be doing its work.
