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The twenty-four Studies that form Chopin’s Opp 10 and 25 are a milestone in the piano’s literature. On one level they form a bridge between Chopin’s apprentice years and his stylistic maturity, for almost all his subsequent developments in harmony, modulation and fingering have their precedents here. They also offer a vade mecum of piano technique which, once mastered, gives unfettered access to all subsequent piano-writing until well into the twentieth century, even if their comparative brevity does not equip the pianist with the required stamina.
An étude is a composition designed to improve the performer’s mechanism in private and display virtuosity in public. Because Chopin’s études have always been regarded as the sine qua non of their kind since their publication in 1833 and 1837, there has been a tendency to view them as isolated phenomena that appeared almost magically from nowhere. It is in the early nineteenth century, with the advance of the piano as an instrument, the concomitant development of piano technique and the spread of the idea of the public concert, that we first see the publication of dedicated collections of études. Those for piano written shortly before or after Chopin’s include sets by Bertini, Czerny, Cramer, Hummel and Wieck among myriad others, all of them offering short pieces in which a particular theme or motif addresses a particular technical difficulty. The first études intended for public performance, rather than private practice, were by Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) and published in 1827. Not all of these are concerned with technical problems, and by no means do they have consistent musical value..... |
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