My Teacher, Mr. Czerny

My sightreading of classical music improves daily, I'm happy to say. I owe that in large part to my current teachers, who are all stone dead but quite helpful nevertheless. See, what I'm doing is buying all the instructional books for children I can find by classical composers. My favorite of these composers is to the right there, Carl Czerny. Doesn't he look friendly? His music for children is friendly too, and when I play the little exercises he wrote for beginners like me I seem to feel his kindly presence. I bobble a passage, frown with frustration, and he just smiles. "You see zis quarter-note rest here?" he asks, pointing. "Zat is so you can move your hand here—ja, like that—to be ready for the new melody. Offen when you see a rest like zat at the end of a passage, is to help like dis. Soon you will notice without even tinking about it. Try again. Much better! Is easy, no?"

OK, I should say that I don't actually think he's sitting there, saying those things. But doesn't he look like he'd be a good teacher and a nice fellow? You'd want to do well, because you liked him. The spectacles, the gentle, faraway smile—he looks like he's calm inside. Serious about music, though—he was a child prodigy, actually, and one of his teachers was Beethoven. He enjoyed being a piano teacher himself, published lots of instructional books, and one of his own students was Franz Liszt. That worked out well—Liszt was famous as a pianist—and as I say, I'm coming along myself.