I recently read Beyond The Art of Finger Dexterity: Reassessing Carl Czerny, edited by David Gramit (Cambridge University Press), one of the few recent academic books devoted entirely to Czerny. And I must say: it helped me understand Carl Czerny more than I could have imagined. Or, to put it differently: it opened a perspective that was quite shocking. Apparently, almost nobody really knows the man today. Not who he truly was, not his importance in history, and not his talen