Teaching of exercise books in the past

[cuberdrift]

Greetings, all,

I've recently developed an interest in Czerny and have done a search for all his method/etude books (btw does anyone have a link to a bernhard post that included a huge list of exercise books? I really loved that list, but forgot where it was in pianostreet).

So, undoubtedly the man composed an IMMENSE amount of exercises. Each book contains dozens of them, and there are MANY books.

My question is - how did Czerny teach these books? Did he intend for his pupils to master an entire book, or simply pick exercises from those books according to what was needed - making those books more like reference material, rather than things to finish (as in Hanon)?

My question would also apply to other "exercise" composers as well, such as Liszt (who made the famous Technical Exercises in 12 volumes), Cramer, Clementi, Moscheles, Tausig, etc.

From the little research I did, it seems unlikely that they would be obsessed in finishing an entire book of exercises. Apparently playing particular movements of Sonatas in non-chronological order in recitals was a thing - so the attitude we have today of "playing the complete x works of x" didn't seem to be an obsession before. This leads me to speculate that probably Czerny and others didn't necessarily intend students to take on entire books of exercises.

But again, that's only my speculation.

I would want to know about this.