About This Item
Concerning his teaching method, Chopin held rigorously to the old legato school, the school of Clementi and of Cramer. This statement by George Mathias is in itself enough to gauge the importance of Johann Baptist Cramer in the history of piano teaching. Cramer's approach to composition retained the strong baroque influence of Bach, Händel and Scarlatti combined with the Viennese classicism of Mozart and Haydn - Cramer's lasting friendship with the latter began when he played for Haydn in 1791. Cramer was also open to the new music of the time and his tours enabled him to hear it first hand in Paris, Berlin, the Low Countries, Munich and Vienna. From 1817 he lived for a period in Germany - indeed in the second decade of the 19th century Cramer was considered among the greatest pianist-composers together with Clementi and Dussek. The 60 Etudes contained in this publication are those which have become classics as selected and revised by Hans von Bülow with comments and fingering. Cramer published the original complete 84 Etudes in two books the first in 1804 for Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig and the second some time between 1807 and 1808. Those dates are particularly important because Book I of Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum op. 44 did not come out until 1817.
