Studies on Chopin's Études

They are renowned for their technical difficulty: critic Harold C. Schonberg called them "the most impossibly difficult things ever written for the piano."

In contrast, Godowsky's original numbering scheme runs only to 48.

An additional number of studies have been documented, but all got omitted from the final list,[1][2] three of them had been found,[2][3] fragmented and incomplete.

Godowsky told Grover Ackley Brower, an assistant editor at Carl Fischer, that there were 12 to 15 unpublished Studies.

[2] Godowsky's secretary, John George Hinderer, wrote that Godowsky had ten manuscripts left in Vienna at the outbreak of World War I.

[6] Only four pianists, Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Carlo Grante, Marc-André Hamelin, and Emanuele Delucchi have recorded the entire set of the studies.

Francesco Libetta performed them again in Miami on July 7, 2018, in two recitals in the same day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, also all of them by memory.

[7] Emanuele Delucchi performed the complete set in one afternoon in Cagliari on September 19, 2024.

[8] Ivan Ilić has made a speciality of the 22 études for the left hand alone.

The first was Vladimir de Pachmann, who recorded the Study on Op.

[9] Others include Boris Berezovsky, Michel Beroff, Jorge Bolet, Robert Goldsand, Ian Hobson,[10] Ivan Ilić, David Saperton, Victor Schiøler, Jacob Jettomersky, and David Stanhope.