The famous French piano etudes collection on CD In 1840, two of the most respected musicians in Europe embarked on an almost impossibly ambitious project. Ignaz Moscheles - pianist to Prince Albert, teacher of Mendelssohn, and by common consent the elder statesman of modern piano playing - joined forces with the Belgian theorist and critic Francois-Joseph Fetis, director of the Brussels Conservatoire, to produce a "Method of Methods": a single, encyclopaedic treatise distilling everything of value from the great piano pedagogues who had come before them. The result, published in French, German and English, moved from the very first lesson at the keyboard to the outer limits of virtuosity, and culminated in something no method before or since has quite attempted: a set of etudes de Perfectionnement, commissioned from a roll-call of the era's greatest pianist-composers - Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg, Mendelssohn, Henselt, and others less celebrated today but no less admired in their own time.