Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)

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               Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) was the first to create keyboard works expressly for the capabilities of the pianoforte. Acclaimed as the father of the pianoforte and modern piano-playing, this composer of the definitive Classical piano sonata was a celebrated composer, teacher, keyboard player, orchestral conductor, music publisher, and piano manufacturer.

Muzio [Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Saverio] Clementi, was born in Rome, January 23 1752 and the following day baptized in the local church of S. Lorenzo in Damaso. He was the eldest of the seven children of Nicolo Clementi, a highly respected silversmith, and Magdalena Kaiser, who was Swiss. His father became aware of his son’s musical talent that by age seven he was sent to a musical instruction. He began his musical studies with a relative Antonio Baroni, maestro di cappella at St Peter’s basilica, but it was at age 11-12 that he was given counterpoint lessons by Gaetano Carpani. By the age of 13, he was so proficient that he gained a position as a church organist at the church of S. Lorenzo in Damaso. That time he had already composed an Oratorio, Martitio de’ gloriosi Santi Giuliano, and a mass.

In 1766, during a visit to Rome, he met a rich Englishman, Sir Peter Beckford who was taken by his skill at the harpsichord. Beckford resolved to take Clementi back to Dorset, England to provide musical entertainment at his house. He drew up a contract with Nicolo Clementi, in which Beckford agreed to make quarterly payments until Muzio reached the age of 21. It was in Dorset that Clementi spent the next seven years studying the harpsichord. He appeared to have spent eight hours a day practicing the works of Johann S. Bach and his son Carl Philipp, Handel, the Scarlattis and Bernardo Pasquini.

In 1770, Clementi made his first public performance as a pianist. The audience was so impressed that he was considered one of the most successful concert pianist in history at that time.

Clementi was freed from his obligations to Beckford in 1774. Moving to London in the end of 1774, he appeared at public concerts as a solo harpsichordist until 1779. His audience was greatly impressed with his playing that he was raised to the highest level of the pianists of the day in short order, widely considered a piano virtuoso. He also served as a conductor at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. In 1779 and 1780, his fame and popularity grew, due in part of his newly published well-known keyboard sonatas Op. 2 in which his concerts often included. Aside from Op.2 (1779), he also published Op. 3 (1779) and Op. 4 (1780), and variations on The Black Joke (W02 1777).

In 1781, Clementi began a European tour when he travelled to France, Germany, and Austria. He performed in Paris for Marie Antoinette, in Munich and Salzburg, and in Vienna, for Emperor Joseph II. It was also in 1781 that he took part in that famous piano contest with Mozart. This was in Vindabona, when he was asked by the Emperor to enter a musical duel with Mozart. The duel was to be done for the entertainment of the Emperor Joseph II and his guests. Each performer was called upon to improvise and perform selections from his own composition. Clementi played his own piano composition, “Sonata in B-Flat, Op. 24. Mozart performed a dazzling series of variations. The ability of both composers and vistuosi was so great that neither was declared the winner; instead the Emperor was forced to declare a tie.

On January 12, 1782, Mozart wrote to his father: "Clementi plays well, as far as execution with the right hand goes. His greatest strength lies in his passages in 3rds. Apart from that, he has not a kreuzer's worth of taste or feeling — in short he is a mere mechanicus". By contrast, Clementi's impressions of Mozart were rather enthusiastically positive: “Until then I had never heard anyone perform with such grace and elegance.”

But the main theme of Clementi's B-Flat Major sonata may have captured Mozart's imagination, because ten years later he used it (or something very close to it) in the overture to his opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). This so embittered Clementi that every time this sonata was published, he made certain that it included a note explaining it had been written ten years before Mozart began writing Die Zauberflöte.

In the autumn of 1783, he returned to England via Switzerland and France, also giving a concert in Lyon. Back in London, Muzio continued playing the piano, conducting and teaching. He started giving private lessons and in the first three months gave five concerts at Hanover Square. In April 1784 he went to Lyon once again to see Mlle. Marie Victoire Imbert-Colomes, with whom he had fallen in love, and to whom he dedicated his Op.8. After a brief stay in Bern, he returned to London. Two of his pupils, Johann Baptist Cramer and John Field, achieved fame for themselves. John Field became a major influence to Frederic Chopin. Other pupils included the German pianists Ludwig Berger (Mendelssohn’s teacher), Karl Zeuner and Alexander Klengel.

In the years 1785 to 1790, Clementi reached the peak of his fame as a composer and performer, and wrote a great deal of symphonic and chamber music. He conducted his own symphonies. In spite of his immense celebrity, after 1790 he ceased to pursue a career as a performer, instead devoted himself to composition. In 1798 Clementi established a music publishing and piano-making firm, touring Europe, initially with his pupil John Field. Among the firm's publications were major works by Beethoven. During this period he wrote much music for harpsichord or piano, chamber works, three Duo Op. 14, two Sinfonie Op.18 and the Musical Characteristics Op.19, a collection of preludes and cadenzas for harpsichord or piano.

From 1791 to 1793, Clementi’s position as a composer suffered greatly, overshadowed by the visiting Joseph Haydn in London. He resumed his activities, including that of orchestral conductor, after Haydn’s return to Vienna in 1793. Once again, his celebrity status eclipsed. At the same time, the number of his private pupils grew. He became a much sought-after teacher. In late 1790s, in collaboration with John Longman, Clementi founded a new firm ‘Longman, Clementi e Co.’. New partners were added in 1801 and the company was renamed ‘Clementi, Banger, Hyde, collard and Davis’. The company not only printed and sold music, it also manufactured pianos.

At the beginning of the summer of 1802, Clementi began a tour of the continent that lasted for eight years. He spent time in Paris, Vienna, St Petersburg, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Zurich, Leipzig, and in Rome, Milan and Naples. His journeys were primarily for commercial reasons, that is, to negotiate the rights for printing and selling new music with various publishers and composers, and also to sell pianos. However when time allowed, he also taught and held a number of concerts at private academies.

During the period 1802-1810, Clementi published only the Sonata Op.41. He worked on some orchestral works (believed were never published) and on the revision of works for Breitkopf & Hartel’s. On his visits to Vienna, sometime September 1804, Clementi married Caroline Lehmann, a proficient pianist he met in Berlin the previous year. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last as his young wife died, leaving him a son Carl. In 1807, Clementi’s factory was destroyed by a fire. It was also this year that he began negotiations with Ludwig van Beethoven, one of his greatest admirers, to acquire the rights to publish his music in the ‘British Dominions’. The contract was sealed in 1807 giving him full publishing rights to all of Beethoven’s music. Clementi’s stature in music history as an editor and interpreter of Beethoven's music is certainly not less than as being a composer himself.

In 1810, Clementi went back to London, where his company continued to thrive. On July 6, 1811 he remarried. His second wife Emma Gisborne, bore him five children. On January 24, 1813, the Philharmonic Society was founded by 30 composers. Clementi was one of its first directors. This new institution was intended for the performance only of orchestral and chamber music and for vocal ensembles music. Once again, Muzio Clementi had the opportunity to show his talent as a keyboard conductor and symphonist. He also wrote and published numerous arrangements for the piano of other composers’ works, including the Overtures of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Haydn’s The Seasons. In 1813, Muzio was appointed a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music.

Clementi continued to conduct his symphonies in London and abroad. At the end of 1816 he made another trip to Europe, presenting his new works. He only returned to London in June 1818. In 1821, he once again returned to Paris and also performed his symphonies in Munich and Leipzig. He was widely acclaimed as a symphonist. In 1824, at the King’s Theatre, his symphonies were featured in five out of six programmes at the ‘Concerts of Ancient and Modern Music’.

In 1826 Clementi completed his monumental Gradus ad Parnassum and set off for Paris with the intention of publishing the third volume of the work simultaneously in Paris, London and Leipzig. After staying in Baden, he returned to London in the autumn of 1827. On December 17, 1827 a large banquet, organised by Cramer and Moscheles, was held in his honour at the Hotel Albion. From Moscheles' diary we learn that on that occasion Clementi himself improvised at the piano on a theme by Handel. In 1828 he made his last public appearance at the opening concert of the Philharmonic Society.

He retired in 1830 and moved to live outside Lichfield spending his final years in Evesham. On March 10, 1832, after a short illness, Clementi died at the age of 80. He was buried at Westminster Abbey. Accompanying his body were Cramer, Field and Moscheles. The original tombstone was replaced in 1877 with the present one, on which Clementi is remembered as the 'father of the pianoforte'.

Clementi's influence extended well into the 19th century, with composers using his sonatas as models for their keyboard compositions. Beethoven, in particular, had the highest regard for Clementi. The most accurate description of Beethoven's regard for Clementi's music can be found in the testimony of his assistant, Anton Schindler, who wrote "He {Beethoven} had the greatest admiration for these sonatas, considering them the most beautiful, the most pianistic of works, both for their lovely, pleasing, original melodies and for the consistent, easily followed form of each movement. Beethoven had but little liking for Mozart's piano music, and the musical education of his beloved nephew was confined for many years almost exclusively to the playing of Clementi sonatas." (Beethoven as I Knew Him, ed. Donald M. McArdle, trans. Constance Jolly, Chapel Hill and London, 1966).
Being a contemporary of the greatest classical piano composers such as Mozart and Beethoven cast a large shadow on his own work, despite the fact that he had a central position in the history of piano music, and in the development of the sonata form.

Foremost in Clementi's large output, he is best known for two influential didactic works, Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte (1801) and the comprehensive keyboard collection of piano studies, Gradus ad Parnassum (1817-26), to which Claude Debussy’s piece “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” makes playful allusion. He composed almost 110 piano sonatas. Some of the earlier ones were reissued as sonatinas after the success of his sonatina Op.36. His sonatinas would remain a must for piano students until late 20th century. Eric Satie would spoof these sonatinas in his Sonatine Bureaucratique. It’s interesting that Clementi’s sonatas have been noted more difficult to play than Mozart’s. In addition to the piano solos, Clementi wrote numerous other music including slightly unfinished symphonies, chamber music, and keyboard duets. While his music is hardly ever played in concerts, it is becoming increasingly popular in recordings.


Primary Sources:

Grove Dictionary of Music, Ed. by Stanley Sadie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzio_Clementi

http://www.muzioclementi.com
“Muzio Clementi. A Concise Chronology of his Life and Works” by Massimiliano Sala
Ut Orpheus Edizioni S.r.l

http://www.wolfmusic-publications.com/clementi.html


Some Recordings:

Muzio Clementi: Piano Works Vol 16 / Pietro Spada
New Music CD
Artist: Classical Collection
Record label: Arts Music
http://www.bestprices.com/cgi-bin/v...54738628BT.html

Muzio Clementi: Piano Sonatas
Performer: Nikolai Demidenko
Label: Hyperion
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...832115?v=glance

Label: BBC legends Catalog #: 4128 Spars Code: ADD
Composer: L. van Beethoven, Domenico Scarlatti, Muzio Clementi, Frédéric Chopin
Performer: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
Track #3: Muzio Clementi
Sonatas (3) for Piano, Op. 40: no 3 in d/D by Muzio Clementi
Date of recording: 12/1/1996
Length: 22 mins 1 sec
Performer: Pietro De Maria (Piano)
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical...?album_id=20333

Muzio Clementi: Piano Works
Clementi Vol. 1: MDG 618 0651-2
Clementi Vol. 2: MDG 618 0652-2
Clementi Vol. 3: MDG 618 0653-2
http://www.mdg.de/titel/0652.htm

Muzio Clementi: Compositions for Pianoforte, Vol. 1
Three Sonatas, op. 40, in G, b and d, (1801)
Three Sonatas, op. 50, in A, d & g – "Didone abbandonata" (1805)
Maria Tipo (piano)
First published 1978, location and date not given
Warner Fonit 3984 27267-5 [2 CDs, 67:07, 72:47]
http://www.musicweb-international.c...ementiTipo1.htm
 

 

Edited by Gary Smith