IC 76003 Booklet - Ivory Classics

taught scales with many black notes first (the C major scale came last as the
most difficult), using the thumb on the black notes and sometimes passing it
under the fifth finger (with a necessary bend of the wrist).
The piano was in transition in Chopin’s day, having evolved from a delicate
wooden instrument to a bold instrument with a very different key
action and a reinforced soundboard, allowing richer sympathetic vibrations
and increased carrying power for the concert hall. In Paris at that time there
were some 180 manufacturers producing a wide range of experimental
pianos, leading its citizens to refer to their city as Pianopolis. Some manufacturers
developed a more expressive instrument, one equal to the demands
of Chopin’s works.
Countless piano studies were composed in the eighteenth century and
early in the nineteenth by the likes of Berger, Moscheles, Hummel, Steibelt,
Reicha, Czerny, Cramer, Kalkbrenner and Clementi. Their starkly educational
purpose was strictly to perfect the techniques needed to play the repertoire
of the day, and they thus lacked the musical and affective properties required
for pieces intended for the public. Chopin’s etudes, however—twenty-seven
of them in all—eclipsed the earlier models and led piano technique to the
next logical step, exploiting the new resources of the evolving instrument,
and all its color possibilities, and exploring revolutionary techniques through
their stunning inventiveness. Each study concentrates on a single technical
problem and fully exploits the possibilities of the human hand, so much so
that a leery Ludwig Rellstab wrote that “those who have crooked fingers may
put them right by practicing these studies; but those who have not, should
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