Carl Czerny: Piano Sonata I, Between Beethoven and Liszt
Same artist
Da Vinci Classics
Physical Release: 13 November 2026
Digital Release: 20 November 2026
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Kaori Saeki was born in Japan and began playing the piano at the age of four.
She studied law at university in Japan, focusing on human rights, legal studies, folklore, war, criminology, world history, and international politics. After graduation, she worked as an office employee in Tokyo. In 2010, she had the opportunity to attend a seminar in Tokyo given by Professor Stephan Möller. She was subsequently accepted into his class at the Prayner Conservatory in Vienna and moved there in 2012. She studied solo piano with Professor Stephan Möller and chamber music with Professor Konstantin Weitz. After only two years of study, she completed her artistic diploma with honors (Ausgezeichnet).
In 2014, she made her debut at the Golden Key Festival at Carnegie Hall in New York, performing Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 as a soloist and Beethoven’s Große Fuge Op. 134 in a piano duo with Professor Möller.
In addition to her solo work, she has gained extensive experience as a chamber musician and accompanist, having performed with vocalists and instrumentalists playing violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, horn, trumpet, trombone, and tuba in numerous concerts and diploma examinations. Her repertoire covers the major standard works for a wide range of instruments.
Kaori Saeki is currently one of the busiest and most versatile musicians based in Vienna. In 2018, she launched the “Beethoven–Czerny–Liszt Project” to promote the music of Carl Czerny, highlighting his identity as a true Viennese composer, born and died in Vienna. She regularly performed Czerny’s piano sonatas at the Gesellschaft für Musiktheater and at the Floridsdorf Museum in Vienna.
In 2021, she was invited to the Beethoven Festival in Brake, Germany, organized by Professor Kurt Seibert, where she performed an evening recital of Czerny’s sonatas and nocturnes. That same year, she performed all of Beethoven’s violin sonatas over the course of three days with violinist Jonathan Cano in Vienna. In 2022, she performed all eleven of Czerny’s piano sonatas in a four-day marathon concert series at the Gesellschaft für Musiktheater in Vienna, and again in 2023 at Salon Freiraum in Salzburg.
Together with violinist Jonathan Cano and countertenor/composer Rubén Berroeta, she founded the Ensemble JoKaRu, with which she performs regularly. Since 2020, JoKaRu has been consistently invited by the Polish cultural organization Fundacja Wspólna Przestrzeń, founded and directed by Mariola Fanselow and Cezary Fanselow, to give concerts and masterclasses. In 2024, the ensemble embarked on a concert tour to five cities in Poland and held workshops for children, sponsored by Polish national television and radio. That same year, they performed at the 39th Alfonso Ortiz Tirado Festival in Sonora, Mexico, presenting a program that included contemporary works by Rubén Berroeta.
In 2023, Kaori Saeki performed George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the wind orchestra “Musikverein Lenzing Werkskapelle” under the baton of conductor Manfred Röhrer. She also appeared as celesta player with Cappella Istropolitana, conducted by Vasilis Tsiatsianis, at the Great Hall of the Wiener Musikverein. Additionally, she was invited by Cerabino Pianoforti in Milan, Italy, to perform in concert with mezzo-soprano Yulia Savrasova at San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore.
Since 2024, she has served as a jury member for the International Rosario Marciano Piano Competition, organized by Professor Stephan Möller and presided over by Professor Kurt Seibert.
Carl Czerny: (b Vienna, 21 Feb 1791; d Vienna, 15 July 1857) Austrian piano teacher, composer, pianist, theorist and historian. As the pre-eminent pupil of Beethoven and the teacher of many important pupils, including Liszt, Czerny was a central figure in the transmission of Beethoven’s legacy. Many of his technical exercises remain an essential part of nearly every pianist’s training, but most of his compositions – in nearly every genre, sacred and secular, with opus numbers totalling 861, and an even greater number of works published without opus – are largely forgotten. A large number of theoretical works are of great importance for the insight they offer into contemporary musical genres and performance practice.
The primary source of information about Czerny is his autobiographical sketch entitled Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (1842). In it, he describes his paternal grandfather as a good amateur violinist, employed as a city official in Nimburg (Nymburk), near Prague. Czerny’s father, Wenzel, a pianist, organist, oboist and singer, was born there in 1750, and received his education and a good musical training in a Benedictine monastery near Prague. After marriage, Wenzel settled in Vienna in 1786, where he earned a meagre existence as a music teacher and piano repairman. Czerny, an only child, was born in Vienna in the year of Mozart’s death. He and his parents resided together until his mother’s death in 1827, and his father’s in 1832. He never married, and lived alone for the remainder of his life.
Czerny describes his childhood as ‘under my parents’ constant supervision… carefully isolated from other children’. He began to study the piano with his father at an early age, and by ten was ‘able to play cleanly and fluently nearly everything of Mozart [and] Clementi’. His first efforts at composition began around the age of seven. In 1799, he began to study Beethoven’s compositions, coached by Wenzel Krumpholz, a violinist in the Court Opera orchestra, who introduced him to Beethoven when he was ten. Czerny played for him the opening movement of Mozart’s C major Piano Concerto, k503, the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, and the accompaniment to Adelaide, which his father sang. Beethoven indicated that he wanted to teach Czerny several times a week, and told his father to procure C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch. Czerny describes the lessons as consisting of scales and technique at first, then progressing through the Versuch, with the stress on legato technique throughout. The lessons stopped around 1802, because Beethoven needed to concentrate for longer periods of time on composition, and because Czerny’s father was unable to sacrifice his own lessons in order to take his son to Beethoven. Czerny neverthless remained on close terms with the composer, who asked him to proofread all his newly published works, and entrusted him with the piano reduction of the score of Fidelio in 1805.
In 1800, Czerny made his public début in the Vienna Augarten hall, performing Mozart’s C minor Concerto k491. He was renowned for his interpretation of Beethoven’s work, performing the First Concerto in C major in 1806, and the ‘Emperor’ in 1812. Beginning in 1816 he gave weekly programmes at his home devoted exclusively to Beethoven’s piano music, many of which were attended by the composer. Apparently he could perform all of Beethoven’s piano music from memory. Although his playing was praised by many critics (‘uncommonly fiery’, according to Schilling), he did not pursue a career as a performer. He made arrangements for a concert tour in 1805, for which Beethoven wrote a glowing testimonial, but although he describes himself at this time as quite proficient as a pianist, sight-reader and improviser, he concedes that ‘my playing lacked the type of brilliant, calculated charlantry that is usually part of a travelling virtuoso’s essential equipment’. For these reasons, in addition to political instability and the modest income of his family, he chose to cancel the tour. He also apparently decided at this point never to undertake the life of a travelling virtuoso, a path that would have made him more widely known as a performer. Instead, he decided to concentrate on teaching and composition.
He spent a good deal of time with Clementi when the latter was in Vienna in 1810, becoming familiar with his method of teaching, which Czerny greatly admired and incorporated into his own pedagogy (His op.822 is entitled the Nouveau Gradus ad Parnassum). In his early teens Czerny began to teach some of his father’s students. By the age of 15, he was commanding a good price for his lessons, and had many pupils. In 1815, Beethoven asked him to teach his nephew, Carl. As his reputation continued to grow, he was able to command a lucrative fee, and for the next 21 years he claims to have given 12 lessons a day, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., until he gave up teaching entirely in 1836. In 1821, the nine-year-old Liszt began a two-year period of study with Czerny. The teacher noted that ‘never before had I had so eager, talented, or industrious a student’, but lamented that Liszt had begun his performing career too early, without proper training in composition. Czerny also taught Döhler, Kullak, Alfred Jaëll, Thalberg, Heller, Ninette von Bellevile-Oury and Blahetka.
Around 1802, Czerny began to copy out many J.S. Bach fugues, Scarlatti sonatas and other works by ‘ancient’ composers. He describes learning orchestration by copying the parts from the first two Beethoven symphonies, and several Haydn and Mozart symphonies as well. He published his first composition in 1806 at the age of 15: a set of 20 Variations concertantes for piano and violin op.1 on a theme by Krumpholz. Until he gave up teaching, composition occupied ‘every free moment I had’, usually the evenings. The popularity of his first ten opus numbers issued in 1818–19, and of his arrangements of works by other composers, made publishers eager to print anything he would submit, and he earned a substantial amount from his compositions.
The quantity and diversity of Czerny’s compositional output is staggering. He divided his works into four categories: 1) studies and exercises; 2) easy pieces for students; 3) brilliant pieces for concerts; and 4) serious music. As Kuerti (1995, p.7) notes, it is interesting and revealing that he did not regard the ‘brilliant pieces for concerts’ as ‘serious music’. The compositions for piano illustrate the explosion in the number of works published for the instrument at a critical time in its development. In addition to approximately 100 technical studies, Czerny published piano sonatas, sonatinas and hundreds of shorter works, many of which were arranged for piano, four to eight hands. He also published a plethora of works based on national anthems, folksongs, and other well-known songs. Works for other instruments and genres include much symphonic and chamber music, as well as sacred choral music. Mandyczewski’s tabulation of the works remaining in manuscript in the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde includes over 300 sacred works. Czerny published approximately 300 arrangements without opus numbers. These works are based on themes from approximately 100 different operas and ballets, plus symphonies, overtures and oratorios by such composers as Auber, Beethoven, Bellini, Cherubini, Donizetti, Halévy, Handel, Haydn, Hérold, Mendelssohn, Mercadante, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Rossini, Spohr, Verdi, Wagner and Weber.
The predominant view of Czerny at the end of the 20th century – of the pedagogue churning out a seemingly endless stream of uninspired works – is that propagated by Robert Schumann in his reviews of many Czerny compositions in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (‘it would be hard to discover a greater bankruptcy in imagination than Czerny has proved’, review of The Four Seasons, 4 brillant fantasias op.434). However, Schumann’s rather cavalier dismissal of Czerny was not uniformly shared. During his sojourn in Vienna (1829), Chopin was a frequent visitor at Czerny’s home, and a good deal of correspondence between the two survives. One of Liszt’s letters from Paris to his teacher in Vienna (26 August 1830) describes his performances of Czerny’s Piano Sonata no.1 in A major op.7, and the work’s enthusiastic reception. He urged Czerny to join him in Paris. Liszt’s high regard is again seen in his inclusion of Czerny as one of the contributors to his Hexaméron, the Grand Variations on the March from Bellini’s I puritani, arranged by Liszt, and including variations by Chopin, Czerny, Herz, Liszt, Pixis and Thalberg, composed in 1837. Perhaps even more striking and challenging is Kriehuber’s famous portrait (1846), which depicts, assembled around Liszt at the piano (in addition to a self portrait of the painter), Berlioz, Czerny and the violinist Heinrich Ernst, who was regarded as one of the greatest virtuosos of the 19th century. All are lost in the Romantic reverie evoked by Liszt’s performance. Perhaps this symbolizes Beethoven’s spirit as transmitted by Czerny to Liszt, Berlioz and Ernst.
Czerny’s complete schools and treatises combine sound pedagogy with remarkable revelations about contemporary performing practices, and present a detailed picture of the musical culture of the day. He assigned prominent opus numbers to his four most ambitious instructional works. In the Fantasie-Schule, opp.200 and 300, he uses stylized models and what he terms a ‘systematic’ approach to improvising preludes, modulations, cadenzas, fermatas, fantasies, potpourris, variations, strict and fugal styles and capriccios. His Schule des Fugenspiels, op.400, comprising 12 pairs of preludes and fugues, is intended as a study in multi-voiced playing for pianists. His most substantial work, the Pianoforte-Schule, op.500, covers an extraordinary range of topics, including improvisation, transposition, score reading, concert decorum and piano maintenance. The fourth volume (added in 1846) includes advice on the performance of new works by Chopin, Liszt and other notable composers of the day, as well as on Bach and Handel, and Czerny also draws on his reminiscences of Beethoven’s playing and teaching. In his last major treatise, the Schule der praktischen Tonsetzkunst, op.600, he returns to the models of form and descriptions of style first expounded in his op.200, but here uses them for the instruction of composers.
Czerny’s works reveal, in addition to the familiar pedagogue and virtuoso, an artist of taste, passion, sensitivity, drama, lyricism and solitude. Douglas Townsend sees in the four-hand sonata in C minor op.10 (Sonata sentimentale) a fine example of the composers who straddled the classical tradition and early romanticism. Kuerti (1995, p.491) has described the Third Sonata in F minor op.57 as ‘outstandingly original’; because it is in the same key and carries the same opus as Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’, Kuerti suggests that Czerny may have been challenging his former master to a duel in the work. Townsend describes the Concerto in C major for piano four hands and orchestra, op.153 as ‘an interesting example of the late classical piano concerto combined with the emerging bravura piano technique of the mid-nineteenth century’. Certain of the exercises stand as fine compositions in their own right, such as some of the character pieces found in the Left Hand Etudes, op.718, and the Art of Finger Dexterity, op.740.
Czerny’s will (published in Dwight’s Journal of Music, 15 August 1857) details the sizable fortune he had amassed from his published works and wealthy pupils. He left his considerable library to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.
by STEPHAN LINDEMAN (with GEORGE BARTH)
from From New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Carl Czerny’s name has long stood at the crossroads of memory and habit. He was Beethoven’s pre-eminent pupil, close enough to proofread newly published works and to prepare the piano reduction of Fidelio and later formed pupils whose careers shaped Romantic pianism. Czerny’s education began within a household of professional practicality. His father Wenzel, trained near Prague and active in Vienna as a musician, teacher and piano repairer, gave him the first foundations. The young Czerny absorbed Mozart and Clementi early, studied Beethoven’s music under Wenzel Krumpholz, then worked with…
Carl Czerny’s name has long stood at the crossroads of memory and habit. He was Beethoven’s pre-eminent pupil, close enough to proofread newly published works and to prepare the piano reduction of Fidelio and later formed pupils whose careers shaped Romantic pianism. Czerny’s education began within a household of professional practicality. His father Wenzel, trained near Prague and active in Vienna as a musician, teacher and piano repairer, gave him the first foundations. The young Czerny absorbed Mozart and Clementi early, studied Beethoven’s music under Wenzel Krumpholz, then worked with Beethoven himself. The lessons, as Czerny remembered them, began with scales and technique, moved through C.P.E. Bach’s Versuch, and placed special weight on legato. Such details explain these sonatas, where finger fluency serves articulation, passagework carries syntax, and melody grows from disciplined continuity. From 1816 Czerny gave weekly programmes in his home devoted to Beethoven’s piano music, many attended by Beethoven. He withdrew from the career of the travelling virtuoso and concentrated on teaching and composition. He understood virtuosity from the inside, yet his ambitions for the sonata belonged to a broader conception of serious music. His own division of his works into studies and exercises, easy pieces for students, brilliant concert pieces and serious music is revealing. The piano sonatas stand within the last category, where display is absorbed into form and technique into argument.
The Piano Sonata No. 4 in G major op. 65 occupies the centre of Czerny’s earlier published sonata sequence, following the A flat major, A minor and F minor sonatas and preceding the E major and D minor works. Its four movements present a recognisably Classical plan, sharpened by the energetic habits of the 1820s Viennese piano. The opening Allegro vivace e con energia joins vivacity to force. The music may be understood as a sonata discourse in which rhythmic profile and keyboard figuration act as thematic agents. Czerny’s inheritance from Beethoven lies in the conviction that a piano texture can bear dramatic weight through register, accent, interruption and the controlled accumulation of energy. Passagework in the first movement is structural. Scales, repeated notes, broken chords and rapid exchanges between registers articulate the argument, marking departure, intensification and return. Harmonic movement gains force from clarity, with modulatory passages acting as propulsion and cadential zones gathering public rhetoric. The slow movement, Adagio. Molto espressivo, brings the album’s bel canto dimension into focus. Czerny’s expressive language here is indebted to vocal thinking. The melodic line asks for breath, poised appoggiaturas and a legato that recalls Beethoven’s insistence on connected playing and C.P.E. Bach’s culture of expressive nuance. The accompaniment sustains an imagined resonance around the line, creating a timbral field in which harmony colours the melody from within. In Czerny, cantabile is a discipline of touch, timing and harmonic hearing. The Presto fulfils the role of a fleet inner movement, replacing the courtly minuet with a modern scherzo impulse. The finale, Rondino scherzando. Allegro vivo e leggiero, draws the sonata into a smaller rondo world. The diminutive Rondino suggests proportion, recurrence and elegance, while scherzando and leggiero point to controlled buoyancy. The movement turns cyclic return into wit, confirming G major as a field of agile resolution after the expressive inwardness of the Adagio.
The Grand Piano Sonata No. 6 in D minor op. 124 expands the sonata principle into a highly individual design. Its publication in 1827 places it beside the end of Beethoven’s life in Vienna, a historical proximity made meaningful by Czerny’s personal connection with Beethoven and by his role as custodian of Beethovenian performance practice. Its seven-movement layout creates a succession of dramatic spaces. Introduction, caprice, intermezzo, scherzo, variation-chorale, scherzando movement and fiery finale form a trajectory close to a large fantasy-sonata. The opening Introduzione, marked Adagio sostenuto ed espressivo, establishes D minor as an arena of concentration. The sustained tempo and expressive marking point towards declamation, allowing the instrument to assume an almost rhetorical stance before the main kinetic body of the sonata begins. In early nineteenth-century pianism the introduction often functions as a threshold, a place where harmony prepares the listener for larger utterance. Czerny uses that threshold to frame the following Capriccio appassionato. Allegro energico. The term Capriccio gives licence to volatility, while appassionato and energico require the volatility to remain purposeful. The movement’s title describes a disciplined paradox within Czerny’s idiom, passion organised by virtuoso command. The third movement, Allegretto con moto, vivace, acts as a vital hinge. After the gravitas of the introduction and the passionate force of the capriccio, its motion and liveliness introduce a mobile conversational register. Czerny’s multi-movement design depends on such contrasts. The listener is carried through successive modes of utterance, each with its own texture and tempo character, as a skilled improviser might move through prelude, fantasy, dance and variation while maintaining a single tonal horizon. This aspect connects the sonata with Czerny’s later theoretical concern with improvisation and composition, where fantasy, modulation, caprice, cadenza and strict form remained neighbouring practices. The Scherzo. Presto with Trio intensifies that theatrical sequence. The scherzo is a sudden tightening of pulse and articulation, and the Trio supplies contrast within the movement’s own frame. Czerny’s command of rapid texture should be heard against his broader musicianship. The same man copied Bach fugues, Scarlatti sonatas, Haydn and Mozart symphonies, and Beethoven symphonies in order to learn the art of writing. His keyboard velocity therefore carries an orchestral and contrapuntal memory. At the centre of op. 124 stands the extraordinary Cantique de la Bohême. Varié, further identified in German as the Bohemian chorale to the words of the Lord’s Prayer, with variations. This movement gives the sonata its most unusual cultural and spiritual profile. Czerny’s family background links him with Bohemia through his father and grandfather, and the title places a Bohemian sacred melody at the heart of a Viennese piano sonata. A chorale associated with the Vaterunser enters the sonata as a variation subject, joining sacred recollection, national colour and the domestic instrument. The marking Non troppo adagio preserves flow within reverence. Variation becomes meditation, and the piano’s singing line acquires a communal accent. The early nineteenth century cultivated variation sets on hymns, songs, national airs and operatic themes; Czerny published many works on such materials. In op. 124 the practice moves into a serious sonata context and becomes a formal centre of gravity. Variations allow the theme to be contemplated through texture, register and figuration, while the underlying sacred identity anchors the sonata’s most inward span. The following Presto scherzando releases the pressure accumulated by the chorale. Liveliness returns with the character of renewal, and Czerny’s scherzando manner regains the quick reflexes of the virtuoso theatre. The final Allegro con fuoco completes the sonata through an explicitly fiery rhetoric. After the introductory gravity, capricious passion, central chorale and post-chorale release, the finale can gather the work’s energies into public motion. D minor here offers a field for urgency, accentual force and turbulent figuration, yet Czerny’s craft keeps the movement directed towards resolution. The fire is compositional, carried by tempo, texture and harmonic drive.
The pairing of op. 65 and op. 124 presents two complementary images of Czerny the sonata composer. The G major sonata refines a four-movement Classical inheritance through brilliance, expressive song and a rondo-finale of cultivated lightness. The D minor sonata enlarges the genre through a sequence of contrasted character movements and a central Bohemian chorale-variation. Both Sonatas challenge the narrow reception that reduced Czerny to the industrial production of studies. His theoretical works preserve evidence about contemporary genres and performance practice, and his teaching joined Beethoven’s world to the age of Liszt. These works belong to that wider history. Czerny’s language respects formal clarity, yet it continually tests the expressive capacity of motion. In op. 65 the result is a sonata of poise, animation and lyrical cultivation. In op. 124 it is a grander drama of threshold, passion, scherzo, prayer and fire. The old image of the tireless pedagogue remains beside another figure, a composer who understood that the disciplined hand could become a thinking voice.
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Available from 13 November 2026.