Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Has anyone ever tried the Clementi Etudes?

Because I'm confused.
I have a 30 year old LP record of classic piano etudes, and it features TWO outstanding CLEMENTI piano studies, one of which is so incredibly beautiful I simply have to try.

The LP lists the two etudes as follows:

Clementi Etude No 58 in F major
Clementi Etude No 47 in G flat major

Trouble is, I've looked EVERYWHERE for these set of Etudes and all I could find is
29 Selected Studies (Gradus Ad Parnassum)by Clementi.

What about the other 30 or so studies? Where can I find them? Have they ever been published?

There are over 60 studies in Gradus ad Parnassum.

IMSLP has them all, maybe they're in the complete version:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Clementi%2C_Muzio

Found the pdf! Thanks a lot Kreisler!

Gradus ad Parnassum is 100 pieces. It is available complete from Ricordi. Amazing how few people know this important work.

Not only is it important (and still useful), it's musically often quite interesting. Too many people have the idea that etudes that are real music started with Chopin.

I think some selections from Gradus still have modern currency, yet in general piano technique has left Clementi quite far behind. One is certainly welcome to study them, but there's no particular preparation for Chopin or Debussy. Tausig (nobody's fool) isolated the best of Clementi, fortunately excising the contrapuntal exercises and others of dubious use... better to hit Bach's WTC straight on. Why prepare for it via Clementi? That's just silly.

I have always admired Dohnanyi's Essential finger Exercises, and one afternoon I read through all of Clementi's Gradus. Very interesting. I lost count of the instances wherein Dohnanyi had isolated certain technical challenges found in Clementi's etudes. Dohnanyi obviously knew his Gradus.

Whatever. I adore Clementi's underrated sonatas -and he's not the useless, giftless bastard Czerny was- but I would be hesitant to recommend any more than a discrete selection of the Gradus these days. IMHO of course.

I have just downloaded Clementi's Etudes because apparently Chopin gave them to all his students (as well as Clementi's Preludes, Cramer's Etudes, Moscheles's Finishing Studies in Style, some Preludes and Fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and some of his English and French Suites).
Any particular studies you would recommend in Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum?

Arthur Loesser says of Czerny:"His talent was extraodinary. Within the limits of a narrow harmonic scheme, he developed a prodigious understanding of the motion shapes available to the keyboard-traveling fingers..."

But even if one thinks his compositions are very poor, in terms of pianistic talent he was good enough a pianist to be grabbed as a pupil by Beethoven and instructed by him for three years without charge. Liszt adored him as a teacher and said "I owe him everything".

Anton Kuerti thought highly enough of Czerny's five movement Sonata No.1 to perform it as part of an interesting program called "First Sonatas". Horowitz performed Czerny's Variations on a Theme by Rode.

Your "useless, giftless bastard" description is, I think, extraodinarily off the mark.

Many quasi 'learned' and 'experienced' comments, no mention of Ignaz Moscheles, so all the above are somewhat hampered...

In case anyone is confused, the Clementi etude in E flat that Chopin taught (as described in Eigeldinger) was from a different set, not from Gradus.

I was referring to the following passage in Mikuli's essay on Chopin as pianist and teacher:
As studies he assigned a selection from Cramer's Etudes, Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum, the Finishing Studies in Style by Moscheles (which he was very fond of), and Bach's Suites, and individual fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Since Mikuli doesn't say which ones Chopin taught, I guess you have to learn them all.

Further defense of Czerny:

Josef Lhevinne is also credited with having performed an entire program comsisting solely of Czerny's compositions. Sorry if OT.

Just out of curiosity, who was the pianist on the LP? (That would give a handle on looking for the disc, if it's been re-issued as a CD.



And if you're really an absent-minded professor, you'll misplace it!

Right, but would a pianist of Lhevinne's stature today get away with an all Czerny programme in a major venue?

Times have changed. It doesn't matter now what the past thought about Czerny -and he was evidently a very likable guy with a pathological weakness for cats- hindsight has shown that much of Czerny's output is predictable, watered down in the extreme, and mostly a product of its time.

If Clementi's inspiration comes more in flashes than a sustained searchlight, he is a far more interesting composer than Czerny, and IMO still has some relevance today, as the ongoing -and well received- series from Hyperion of the complete piano sonatas demonstrates.

Somebody recorded (??all) of Clementi's piano works (or at least a lot of them). Was it Howard Shelley? I am too lazy to look it up. But i remember coming across a review of a CD to that effect, volume x out of umpteen.. Does anyone have it/ them?

Howard Shelley (ideal bloke for the job) is the one recording them all for Hyperion. Each volume has two CDs (for the price of one), and the November Gramophone just reviewed the latest installment, volume 6.

I've been meaning to buy some of these (two much music, too little money!), though I have heard several of the sonatas on the radio. The performances have an authentic feel and the perfect advocate for this often unjustly neglected music.

No one has been claiming Czerny was a great composer for the piano. But Palindrome's comment and everything in my previous post were meant to show that your description of Czerny as a "useless, giftless bastard" was incorrect, to put it mildly. I think there's a big middle ground between a great composer and a "useless, giftless bastard."

I read that post. How many times do you need to repeat yourself?

Ah Yes.. That is it. Jason, my alter ego.. It was in Gramophone indeed that I caught wind of "serialist" Howard Shelly's feat.. (How many tomes will his Clementi reach?).. In the same issue that had that cool article about Gerald Finley. I love his voice and his stage presence..He will be singing in Pelleas et Melisande at the Met. Alas I shall not be going to that performance . I am wayyy over my budget with concert tickets this year.

Then allow me to rephrase. You have one opinion about Czerny's worth but Beethoven, Liszt, Loesser, Kuerti, Horowitz, and Hofmann all disagree with you.