Left-Hand Techniques in Carl Czerny's Pedagogical Piano Works and Nineteenth-Century Pianism

To judge from most treatises and method books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writers on keyboard technique tended to put their emphasis on the training of the right hand. ¹ It is in the writings of Carl Czerny (1791–1857), however, that we find a different point of view emerging, one in which various aspects of left-hand technique are addressed ranging from the most basic up to virtuosic levels. This is especially evident in Czerny’s Vollständige theoretisch-praktische Pianoforte-Schule [Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano School], Op. 500 (1839). His pioneering exercises in this work, and elsewhere, covered various aspects of figuration, texture and style, which were especially intended for the development of left-hand technique.