Muzio Clementi

• 1. Introduction

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  Muzio Clementi was born in Rome on the 23rd of January 1752, the eldest of seven children of a silversmith named Nicolò. By the time he died on the 10th of March 1832, his students had shaped the entire arc of Western piano music. John Field taught Frédéric Chopin how to think. Carl Czerny taught Franz Liszt how to play. Ludwig van Beethoven kept a volume of Clementi sonatas permanently on his music stand.

  And yet for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the man who made all of this possible was nearly forgotten. How does a musician whose reputation in his own lifetime was exceeded only by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini slip so far from memory? And what exactly did Clementi build during his extraordinary eight decades of life? To answer those questions, you have to start not in the concert halls of London, but in a country estate in Dorset.

• 2. The Dorset Years

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  Sir Peter Beckford, a wealthy Englishman and nephew of a man who served twice as Lord Mayor of London, visited Rome in 1766 and encountered the fourteen-year-old Clementi. He negotiated with Clementi's father to take the boy back to his estate, Stepleton House, north of Blandford Forum in Dorset. The arrangement was straightforward: Beckford would pay quarterly fees to fund the boy's musical education until he turned twenty-one; in return, Clementi would provide musical entertainment.

  What happened during those seven years was something close to total immersion. Clementi apparently spent eight hours a day at the harpsichord, working through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, George Frideric Handel, Arcangelo Corelli, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Bernardo Pasquini. The works he produced in that period were few: the Sonatas Op. 13 and 14, and the Sei Sonate per clavicembalo o pianoforte, Op. 1.

  By 1770, he made his first public performance as an organist to an audience that was reportedly impressed. When Beckford released him from his obligations in 1774, Clementi moved to London and made his first appearance as a harpsichordist at a benefit concert on the 3rd of April 1775. He was twenty-three years old, and the long London career had begun.

• 3. The Mozart Contest

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  On the 24th of December 1781, in Vienna, Clementi sat down at a keyboard across from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The occasion was a musical contest arranged for Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, and his guests. Both composers were asked to improvise and to perform selections from their own work. The Emperor declared a tie.

  Mozart's private verdict was far less diplomatic. Writing to his father on the 12th of January 1782, he described Clementi's right-hand technique as capable, singled out his passages in thirds as a strong point, and then dismissed him as having not "a kreuzer's worth of taste or feeling." In a later letter, Mozart called him "a charlatan, like all Italians," accusing him of marking a piece presto while playing only allegro.

  Clementi remembered the evening entirely differently. The pianist Ludwig Berger later recalled Clementi saying of Mozart: "Until then I had never heard anyone play with such spirit and grace. I was particularly overwhelmed by an adagio and by several of his extempore variations."

  The historical record suggests their actual relationship was more complicated than either Mozart's contempt or Clementi's admiration implies. One piece Clementi performed that night was his Op. 11 toccata, a display piece built on parallel thirds. Mozart was then exploring a more classical restraint, which may explain the hostility. What is harder to dismiss is the opening motif of Clementi's B-flat major sonata, Op. 24, No. 2, which appears in the overture to The Magic Flute. Clementi noted in later publications that his sonata had been written a decade before Mozart's opera. He retained enough admiration to produce a piano solo transcription of that same overture.

• 4. Teacher to a Generation

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  From 1783, Clementi spent roughly twenty years in England teaching piano, conducting, and performing. The list of students who passed through his instruction reads like a map of 19th-century musical Europe. Johann Baptist Cramer studied with him, as did Ignaz Moscheles, Therese Jansen Bartolozzi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Ludwig Berger, who would go on to teach Felix Mendelssohn. John Field studied with Clementi and would become a primary influence on Chopin.

  What Clementi transmitted to them was a specific technical ideal. Moscheles described his playing in youth as marked by "a most beautiful legato, a supple touch in lively passages, and a most unfailing technique." This legato style was partly an inheritance from Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord school and Joseph Haydn's classical approach, filtered through the stile Galante of Johann Christian Bach and Ignazio Cirri. Clementi made it something new and passed it forward.

  Beethoven, who was not a student but an admirer, had his assistant Anton Schindler record the extent of his regard. Schindler wrote that Beethoven considered Clementi's sonatas "the most beautiful, the most pianistic of works" and confined the musical education of his nephew Karl to playing them for years. Beethoven reportedly said that those who thoroughly studied Clementi simultaneously learned Mozart and others, but that the reverse was not true. Carl Czerny, who used Clementi's sonatas in teaching Liszt, called him "the foremost pianist of his time."

• 5. Publisher, Manufacturer, Founder

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  In 1798, Clementi took over the firm Longman and Broderip at 26 Cheapside, then described as the most prestigious shopping street in London. He ran it initially with James Longman, who left in 1801. Clementi also held offices at 195 Tottenham Court Road from 1806. Through this publishing enterprise, works by Clementi's contemporaries and earlier composers were kept alive in the repertoire, a curatorial contribution that outlasted the business itself.

  The manufacturing side of the operation brought a serious setback. On the 20th of March 1807, a fire destroyed the firm's warehouses on Rotten Road, producing a loss of about £40,000. That same year, Clementi reached an agreement with Beethoven that gave him full publishing rights to all of Beethoven's music in England. He edited and interpreted Beethoven's scores, though he later drew criticism for making what were described as harmonic "corrections" to some of them.

  On the 24th of January 1813, Clementi joined a group of prominent professional musicians to found the Philharmonic Society of London, which eventually became the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1912. That same year, he was appointed a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. As an inventor, he made substantive improvements to the construction of the piano itself; some of those improvements became standard features of the instrument.

• 6. Gradus and the Final Chapter

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  In 1826, Clementi completed his collection of keyboard studies, Gradus ad Parnassum, and set off for Paris with the intention of publishing its third volume simultaneously in Paris, London, and Leipzig. He was in his mid-seventies. After stops in Baden and possibly Italy, he returned to London in the autumn of 1827.

  On the 17th of December 1827, Johann Baptist Cramer and Ignaz Moscheles organised a large banquet in his honour at the Hotel Albion. Moscheles recorded in his diary that Clementi improvised at the piano that evening on a theme by George Frideric Handel. He made his last public appearance the following year at the opening concert of the Philharmonic Society, and in 1830 he retired from it entirely.

  He moved with his wife Emma and his family to the outskirts of Lichfield in Staffordshire, renting Lincroft House on the Earl of Lichfield's Estate from Lady Day 1828 until late 1831. He then relocated to Evesham, where he died on the 10th of March 1832 after a short illness, at the age of eighty. He was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey on the 29th of March 1832. Walking with his body were three of the students he had trained: Johann Baptist Cramer, John Field, and Ignaz Moscheles. Chopin, who had never met Clementi, required his pupils to practise Clementi's preludes and exercises throughout his own teaching career, citing the exceptional virtues he attributed to them.