Klavierstücke für Kinder
oder solche,
die es werden wollen

Doing different things with each hand is already a challenge for beginners on the piano; adding in time changes ratchets up the confusion considerably. At first glance, the second piece in Cerha’s piano album seems harmless. The right hand plays a memorable recurring motif; the left strikes three bass notes in a loop. The details of the interaction are, however, quite tricky: The lengthening and shortening of the time signature shifts the patterns, requiring the pianist to remain alert in order to keep everything in its proper place.

Cerha has multiple connections to south-eastern Europe, having at a young age come into contact with many people from the region—and thus also with their folk music. Ukrainian, Slovenian, and Slovakian sounds appear in several of his early works. “A Trip to the Balkans” turns out to be a kind of memory from his own childhood: The region’s aural mood unfolds in a simple, “rural” melody made up of just a few notes characteristic of the local folk music. It almost seems improvised. Assertive grace notes scattered here and there emulate the foreign flute sounds of the imagined “shepherds on the steppe”.

The fifth number of the cycle stomps along with preposterous attitude: It’s the director, coming to visit. The sound is that of lumbering, stodgy, yet funny dance—authority, seen from a child’s perspective. The music acts out a dialogue, allowing a mini-scene to emerge from the boss’s whirlwind visit. The pounding chords are always followed by a roving two-part melody—perhaps the director is inspecting something in particular? Perhaps it is also a simple exchange of questions and answers before he leaves, satisfied.

In the sixth Klavierstück, Cerha’s lifelong rejection of the military takes a playful stance without being overly explicit. Robust, “very short” chords advance, satirizing the regimented marching of a troop. This is experienced through the eyes and ears of a child, probably bored while watching the spring parade or maybe even finding the passing soldiers funny. The child might be trying to sneak away, or perhaps spies something more interesting—at least that is what the timid gestures carefully inserted between the lines suggest—a form of political scepticism.

The figure of the grandmother shows up a second time in Klavierstücken, after already appearing in the bizarre “Grandma’s Dance” (No. 3). In this short couplet, she becomes the opposing figure in an imaginary conversation. On the one hand, quiet chords with teasing grace notes show the child expressing their thoughts. On the other, a resolute melody in a completely different tonal framework expresses the old woman’s patronizing words rising above the child’s seemingly naïve statements. A mini-drama of tension between the worlds of children and adults.

Countless piano students have cut their teeth on finger exercises and études—and not always with pleasure. The eighth number in Cerha’s cycle is a piece about the (sometimes tiresome) necessity of grappling with technical challenges. Without pausing, arpeggios whirl across the piano keys in opposite directions in chains of sixteenth notes. The undertaking is “acrobatic”, as expressed in the performance description, and the details are reminiscent of the frenzied tonal cascades of Austrian piano teacher Carl Czerny’s “School of Fluency”. An almost meditative monotony.

After the virtuoso runs of the preceding songs fade out, a more lyrical music now unfolds. Following the initially crystal-clear broken harmonics in the left hand, one could almost assume that this will be a harmless, dreamy (possibly boring) piece. The telling title “Why Does Music Have to Be Beautiful?”, however, pokes at the concept of broken harmony in a broader sense: A growing tension between the left and right hand emerges and dissonances increase, steering the music into more daring realms, only to reach a conciliatory ending.

Cerha titles the last number of the section dedicated to children “Potpourri”. And the mini finale is in fact surprisingly diverse, unlike the previous numbers that often followed a specific idea. Here, on the other hand, the musical ideas (some of which appear to be references) change unpredictably and last only for brief moments—an almost collage-like process with rapid, cinematic cuts. However, the music is much more than a mindless stringing together. Although it is only a miniature, Cerha’s preference for creating a new whole from different parts manifests itself clearly—and is the reason that the piece seems so remarkably self-contained.

All in all, Cerha’s piano pieces lead their players gently and playfully into the world of Neue Musik. The sub-cycle “for chimpanzees and adolescents of all ages” also employs avant-garde playing techniques. In the second number, the pianist must place their left forearm on the keys. The hammers, thus freestanding, create a resonance field stimulated by short, loud, and “angry” sound events. These are made up of three layers: a staccato note pendulum played on two black keys, interlocking with motifs on the white keys, and short interjections from the high register. The body of the piano reacts to this protest in the breaks with ongoing (or indifferent?) spherical reverberation.

A small drama takes place in the third piece of the adolescent cycle. It reflects on a typical subject of this phase of life: Crossing boundaries and the discipline that follows. This is told musically using broadened playing techniques, two in particular. An initially hesitant, two-part sound figure feels its way forward to a certain point, then ends with a short accent. The punishment follows: One hand slaps the other, creating a harsh, resonant sound cluster—though it fails to prevent any new attempts to break the law.

Cerha’s piano pieces are not only creative miniatures, they also introduce new types of notation and ways of playing. In the fourth piece of the teen cycle, for example, bars and metre are dispensed with entirely, a creative decision that takes the ecstatic, unfocused flow of the music into account. In a minimalist manner, the left hand plays only three notes (quarters) up and down. The right hand counterpoints this pattern with its own undulating movements, always stopping at different accented notes but never coming to rest. A manic piece of music.

Of the pieces of the piano cycle, this lively rondo with its meaningful and ironic subtitle is, to a certain extent, unique: It is the only piece detached from any group and was composed later, as revealed by the handwritten score. The musical composition is also different and contains countless allusions to familiar things (and of course also to Beethoven and his “Rage Over a Lost Penny”): Pounding, overly vivid chord repetitions, tonal garlands, and rapid runs are the pianistic clichés of a virtuoso piece. In parts, it can be understood as a parody of sometimes frustrating practicing—for example, when the rondo theme is increasingly accelerated towards the end: The thread of patience snaps. Like other pieces in the cycle, this one turns out to be an amusing reflection on piano playing itself.

In the last three pieces of the cycle, Cerha deviates from the earlier poetically comic titles—after all, the addressees are now “aging prematurely” and no longer need musical stories. The first number of the final sub-cycle is simply titled “Song”. The piece is, however, only partially a song—for example when short, ethereal cantilenas emerge episodically. Essentially, the short piece bundles exciting, dissonant harmonies, allowing them to unfold in different ways, sometimes as freestanding sounds, sometimes evolving gradually, sometimes throbbingly repeated, and finally, underpinned by staccatos. Once again, the music is diverse, characterized by a condensed, almost expressionist aura.

The end of Cerha’s Klavierstücke feature—in accordance with the logic of the cycle—the two compositions that are most difficult to play. They are both titled “Double”, alluding to a Baroque form of variation in which the note values are doubled (resulting in faster, more virtuoso variants). Cerha plays with this idea by referring back: In the first double, the main features of the previous “song” shine through clearly—becoming the nucleus of the new piece. Particularly at the beginning, the connections are clearly recognisable, with chord structures and arpeggios remaining the same. Over the course of the song, Cerha uses the model more freely. Finally, the closing part takes up the idea of sustained sound from “Song”, which is punctuated by short bass figures, and expands it imaginatively.

The second double and overall last piano piece cannot necessarily be interpreted as a variation of the previous one, but instead as a final escalation of the previous design elements. In the course of the piece, a rapid chord repetition reappears again and again, one that was briefly articulated in “Song”. Equally formative are the virtuoso staccato figures of the bass, some of which are performed in octaves and also derived from “Song”. Rhythmic leaps between the right and left hand emerged for the first time in “Double 1” and feed the motor-like power of the music here, often incorporating complex changes of metre. All in all, the demands on the pianist are enormous and bundle the lessons of the cycle into a single compact space. The final piece is no longer deliberately educational, proving instead to be a mature, independent, and yes, even “adult” work.