Resumen de Teaching Piano Through Letters: An Innovative Educational Tool by Carl Czerny
This paper aims at analyzing the ten letters published by Carl Czerny on the art of playing the piano. These letters constitute an epistolary work intended to accompany Czerny’s School of Piano, as a guide for every budding pianist. The choice of the letters, instead of a treatise, allowed Czerny to use a style of writing that put the teacher in dialogue with his ideal pupil. In this sense, the letters were conceived to meet the needs of the new class of music amateurs, growing between the 18th and the nineteenth century. Thus, the letter becomes a new teaching instrument, that facilitates the learning of practical (fingering, improvisation, ornamentation) and theoretical (musical writing and reading, harmony) elements, also underlining the importance of selecting the piano repertoire, that should be inspired by general principles of proportionality and progressive increase. For their features, the letters by Carl Czerny represent the work of a pioneer of piano pedagogy, based on a learner-centered approach, which makes them worthy of specific consideration by contemporary musicologists and piano teachers.
