- School of the Virtuoso, Op. 365

Hello! It’s been a long time since I played a piece by Czerny – almost five months! This is the 19th study of his “Schule des Virtuosen (School of The Virtuoso, Op. 365)”. These 60 studies are infamous for requiring techniques which are almost impossible to play, and there is a direction on each piece, saying, “Jede Repetition X mal (Each repetition X times)”, which means one has to repeat X times for every place between two repeat signs. In this case (No. 19) I had to repeat “20 times”, technically; however, it sounds quite awkward when literally following the direction, so I decided to repeat only one more time and even neglect some repeat signs. This étude is very similar to Chopin’s Op. 10, No. 2 – Czerny actually composed it as an “homage” to Chopin. I feel that Czerny’s is slightly easier than Chopin’s, because when playing the former, I don’t need to play the chromatic scale using only third, fourth, and fifth fingers, just like the latter. But this doesn’t mean that this is a piece of cake. The chromatic scale and two-note accompaniment chords at the same time are basically difficult to play, and somewhat more complicated passages in the beginning (especially mm. 5-6) and duplicated ones using both hands in the middle do increase the difficulty of the piece, so I believe that No. 19 is one of the most demanding piece among Op. 365. I will try discovering and playing more Czerny in the future, but do I play Czerny in the next video? Stay tuned. [Ps. Repeat twice(X) Repeat once(O)] #Czerny#Etude#Hard