- rudyapffelmusic
Czerny Op 740 #42, 3 Versions
There’s a lot to recommend #42 to a ballet accompanist. If you fill out Czerny’s LH with a light waltz accompaniment it makes a solid petit allegro 6/8. It’s effective at much slower tempos, at which the “dexterity” challenge isn’t particularly great. The first 36 measures nicely resolve into regular phrases (when you eliminate mm 29-31) that can be cut-and-pasted in a variety of ways to give you a shorter or longer piece. Add to all that, it pairs well with #41.
Op 740 #42 1st Version: quick 6/8 waltz in running 16ths, 16 sets of 8
This is my performance of #42 projected as a quick 6/8 waltz. I supply a score to show my recipe for structuring a substantial ternary form piece from Czerny’s material, and to show my ideas for realizing a LH accompaniment, and it will be seen that I transpose Czerny’s material up to Gb, a very comfortable key for me. As with other similar studies, I halt Czerny’s continuous 16ths with full stop cadences to mark off large structures. I do this not because I think it “improves” Czerny but because it’s helpful in ballet class. And as with other of my scores, I’ve not written out the da capo of my arrangement of #42; as expected, the recapitulation of the A section will be the entire mm 3-18. You might or might not reharmonize the closing of the recapitulation with the conventional sign-off: ii - V7 - I.
If you like this study enough to add it to your repertory you’ll have no trouble getting a useful 2/4 piece out of it: almost all of Czerny’s 16ths can be accented as pairs of triplets, exactly like #41.
Op 740 #42 2nd Version: light 2/4, RH in continuous triplets, 16 sets of 8
This is my performance of my 1st Version recast in 2/4, the RH rebeamed as paired triplets. Czerny’s LH is the basis for my accompaniment material, but I aimed for something a little lighter and spare. I supply a score (back down to F) to show my ideas for the LH and to show where I’ve tweaked Czerny’s RH (eg mm 7-8) to allow his 16ths to be smoothly accented as triplets.
Having recast #42 in 2/4 with triplet pairs it’s now metrically identical with #41. The pairing can be seamless depending on the rate at which you want to alternate between the two studies. That rate will determine how quickly and smoothly you must modulate from F Major to A Minor and back again. It usually works out that I can play a one-pager for one side of a combination and switch to its pair for the second side, or one study for both sides of a combination and its pair for a repeat of both sides (often faster, which means I’ve got to be careful which one I choose). What’s special about pairing #41 and #42 is that they have such contrasting characters. This can be a source of fun if you alternate at a quicker-than-usual rate, say two phrases of one immediately followed by two highly contrasting phrases of the other.
Op 740 #42, 3rd Version (with #41): presto 6/8 with alternating character, 16 sets of 8
Op 740 #42, 3rd Version (with #41) Audio
This is my performance of my paired one pagers #42 and #41, emphasizing their contrasting characters.