It’s not often that I get goosebumps sitting in a library, but I came pretty near to it yesterday on a trip to the University of London Library. I have been looking for months for the Czerny piano studies on which Riisager’s ballet Etudes was based. I had traced about half of them, but some – in particular those that I like most – I simply could not find. Having trawled through all the online, digitized scores, I kept coming across the same old books over and over again (the School of Velocity). Then I spent a day walking round London’s music shops – the same story.
My last hope (and I’d nearly given up) was a library, and Senate House appeared to have some Czerny I hadn’t heard of on the stacks. Possibly one of the nicest people ever to sit behind a stack service desk fetched me four enormous volumes of Czerny from somewhere in the bowels of Malet Street.
And there they were, those elusive etudes, in a set of books that from their good condition appeared not to have been opened since 1838 when they were published. This was a different Czerny to the one I knew from being a piano student, and it was suddenly easy to see how Riisager got the inspiration for Etudes. Dance permeates these studies to the extent that you’d think Czerny must have done the 19th century equivalent of clubbing every night and come home so loved-up and buzzing that he just had to write exercises the way other people put on their favourite trance album. Saint-Saëns did him an enormous disservice by caricaturing him in Carnival of the Animals with the exercises in thirds. He might have been born in Austria, and associated with Beethoven, but he was Czech – his father came from Nymburk in Bohemia, which explains a lot about the good-naturedness of his music. It also explains why there’s a Czerny Piano competition in Prague.
Think about it – these books are 166 years old, and still in perfect condition. It took less than 5 minutes to get them from the stack shelves, and probably about half an hour to flick through about 1500 pages to find what I wanted. By conrast, I have already lost innumerable music files that I created using version 1 of Logic on my Atari only 12 years ago, and even with broadband, you can’t ‘flick’ through a digitized score.
All of which reminds me of an article I read in July this year by Bruce Stirling of Wired Magazine. He wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph called Delete Our Cultural Heritage?. His point is that the world is suffering ‘a silent phenomenon of “digital decay”‘; whereas books last centuries, the rapid obsolescence of computers and electronic storage methods means that things that we created only 10 years ago may be irretrievable unless they have been printed out, filed and catalogued – and as Stirling says, can you be bothered? It’s not until you come across an endangered species such as the Czerny pieces, that you realise that future generations may have less to remind them of the 20th century than they do of the 19th.
Hi Jonathan – great to read your post. I’ve been pining for a Czerny etude that I used to hear in ballet class all the time. The accompanist said it was #1 in C major, so I thought no trouble – I’ll go get it some day.
But there a zillion etudes in C and none seem to be the dreamy plie music I recall. On the off chance you might be familiar with it, may I?
The left hand does a carnival like oom pah pah, oom pah pah pattern over and over while RH does a melody C(hold 3) F(hold 3) G(eighth note) to F(hold 3) then E(Hold 3) — and then the pattern repeats going one step higher C(Hold 3) G(Hold 3) A(eightnote grace note to)G(hold 3) F(Hold 3) final phrase: C(hold 4) G(1) A(1) B(2) Bflat(1) A(1) G(1) (1) C(2) A(1/8) G(1) C(2) G(1) E(3)
There you go. Hope I did n’t bother you too much. All the best,
Marianne NYC
Hi Marianne, from your excellent description, it sounds to me like the music is the study used in Etudes as the “pas de deux romantique,” Op. 335 No. 39, which is in E major. You can find it easily on IMSLP by searching for Czerny Op. 335 and scrolling through to No. 39. I only know this because of another post I did, which you might or might not have seen here:
https://jonathanstill.com/2013/11/16/etudes-ballet-the-sources-for-riisagers-score/
All the best,
Jonathan
jonathan’s original post goes back 15 years–marianne’s reply is from last january (2019)–jonathan replied the next day–me, i’d have had no clue how to begin to figure out what study marianne (who was apparently a dancer in class but also something of a musician herself) could possibly have been remembering by her transliteration–with no meter, no opus # and the wrong key she came up with a notation…and notice that she says “the pattern repeats going one step higher”–that’s an ear
when jonathan replies that it’s op 335 #39 i look again at marianne’s transliteration–i know op 335 pretty well, but i still have to check: yes, following jonathan’s lead i can see that’s what marianne is probably trying to transcribe from memory, not “one step higher” but from V back to I
both elements of this post are really lovely: the dancer working out a way to formulate a music-source question for the accompanist and an accompanist able to rely on remarkable expertise to answer the dancer’s question–that’s not going to happen often
marianne seems not to have replied–maybe she didn’t get jonathan’s answer, or maybe she thought he was wrong and didn’t want to hurt his feelings…
Ah, but the contour/intervals of the first two motifs is there perfectly in Marianne’s description, even if the key is not correct. It was easy to identify because if you make a pretty good guess to start with that the music will have been from Harald Lander’s Etudes, that narrows it down. I’ve played that piece in rehearsals so many times, it’s etched in my memory forever! To set the record straight, Marianne did in fact reply, by email, but not on the site. It was the piece she was thinking of, and she was very happy to find it!
I couldn’t quite believe it was 15 years ago. Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not 😉