The Art of the Piano Étude
The piano study or ‘Étude’ has long engaged and challenged pianists, and the practice of writing Études to provide practice material for perfecting a particular pianistic technique, such as playing octaves or rapid scalic passages, developed in the early 19th century alongside the growing popularity of the piano. Playlist curated by Frances Wilson.
Read more…Those of us who had piano lessons as children will remember working on studies by the likes of Clementi and Czerny (Debussy mocks Czerny’s piano exercises in the first of his Études), and pianists today still swear by these and other exercises by Hanon, Brahms and Dohnanyi.
Frédéric Chopin elevated the student study into a work of great artistry and beauty, turning humble exercises into glittering concert pieces, and his Opp. 10 and 25 Études remain amongst the most popular works written for piano, regularly recorded and performed in concert. Other notable composers of piano Études include Liszt, Alkan, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Godowsky and Debussy, and the practice of writing piano etudes has continued into the modern era with composers such as Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage, Morton Gould and Nikolai Kapustin.
Études not only test fleetness of fingers and some of the most memorable in the repertoire are moody, haunting works where the pianist’s ability to create a beautiful singing line of melody is uppermost, as in Chopin’s Op 25 No. 7.