They called him the Father of the Pianoforte. Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) was one of the few eighteenth-century composers to be wrapped in historical importance while still alive. In Great Britain, the land of his citizenship, only Handel before him had approached Clementi’s sustained and international fame. Among his living contemporaries on the Continent, only Haydn and Beethoven were in his league, with Mozart achieving celebrity status posthumously. Unlike these composer-performers, however, Clementi did not compose in the big public genres of the day, although he did try his hand at becoming a symphonist.^[1] 

Clementi’s fame rested on one thing only: his extraordinary relationship to the keyboard, but then in the manifold capacities of performer, composer, entrepreneur, and pedagogue. These abiding activities were fostered and developed first at the harpsichord. At the height of his celebrity, when he was famously depicted in a 1794 engraving by Thomas Hardy, the instrument he was indelibly bound up with was the piano; indeed, the above-mentioned epithet began to be assigned to him towards the end of his life. In 1810, a Polish artist rapidly sketched Clementi when he was an accomplished businessman touring Europe and Russia as the head representative of his piano manufacturing company Clementi & Co. These two pictures nicely underline Clementi’s career, which straddled both Enlightenment culture and emerging Romantic ideals. His obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine began matter-of-factly: “Clementi may be considered as the father of piano-forte music.”^[2] Most famously, this phrase can today be found on the composer’s grave in Westminster Abbey.^[3] 

What was it exactly that made Clementi “the father of the piano-forte”? Op. 2 was a standout in Clementi’s history, and it was mentioned whenever Clementi’s fame as the founder and father of a new school of piano playing was evoked. The obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, for example, wrote, “By the common assent of all musicians, [op. 2] is entitled to the credit of being the basis on which the whole fabric of modern piano-forte sonatas has been founded.”^[4] Originally published in London in 1779 as an opus of six sonatas in which difficult solo sonatas (nos. 2, 4, and 6) alternated with easier accompanied sonatas (nos. 1, 3, and 5), the accompanied sonatas soon disappeared from accounts and reprints. Clementi kept the core three solo sonatas—the C-major “Octave Lesson” (no. 2), the belle sonate in A (no. 4, with a nickname given by the French), and the last very difficult sonata in B-flat major (no. 6)—in the public eye with a steady stream of reprints, arrangements, revisions, and “improvements.”^[5]

C major is the key on the keyboard in which brilliant virtuosity is most easily achieved, and so the hugely popular “Octave Lesson” provided every amateur with a proud opportunity to shine, as a poem from 1807 attests:

Next, to ensure the brilliant sortie,

Miss strikes the grand piano forté;
Knows lessons, airs, duets, in plenty,
And plays the octave of Clementi.^[6]

If C major was the universal key of brilliance, velocity, and youthful virtuosity, then the key of A major held a special place in Clementi’s heart for song-like melodies: this was Clementi’s key for singing and espressivo playing. The much harder B-flat major, for its part, was Clementi’s signature key for his own brand of virtuosity and difficulty—he must have felt most comfortable running his able hands up and down the keyboard in this tonality. This was the key of Clementi’s 1781 competition with Mozart (the op. 24, no. 2, Sonata and the Toccata from op. 11, which he is known to have played at this occasion, are both in B-flat major) and also of Clementi’s self-portraits in the Musical Characteristics, op. 19.^[7] In essence, the solo sonatas of op. 2 encapsulated Clementi’s keyboard style and by later extension the “modern” school: brilliant, neat, and muscular playing combined with lyrical, expressive, and cantabile playing.

This website is designed as a companion to the monograph Clementi and the woman at the piano: Virtuosity and the market for music in eighteenth-century London. Here you will find audio examples for all the printed musical examples in addition to some complete recordings that help contextualize my discussions of Clementi’s early career (Chapters 2–4), the rise of the “work-concept,” (Chapters 1, 6), the accompanied sonata in domestic settings (Chapter 5), and the importance of Op. 2 to Clementi’s legacy (Chapter 6). Some of the examples have been recorded on different instruments, to highlight the diversity of keyboard technology that existed at the time of their composition. The “Instruments” document provides details on the instruments used in the recordings.

We present a recording of one of the rare examples of English printed keyboard virtuosity before Clementi’s Op. 2: William Babell’s fearsome 1717 transcription and arrangement of Handel’s “Vo far guerra” from Rinaldo. Also included is the controversial work that inaugurated Clementi’s debut in England, before the publication of Op. 2: his anonymous 1777 Black joke variations. I discuss both Babell and the Black joke in Chapter 4 of Clementi and the woman at the piano.

We also feature a rare complete recording of the six sonatas (both solo and accompanied) of Clementi’s Op. 2 in its original 1779 format. I have chosen to perform this on a 1775 Kirckman double manual harpsichord with a machine stop, beautifully restored by Carey Beebe (Sydney, Australia). This was done for two reasons: the more widespread English harpsichord had more symbolic capital than the new-fashioned square pianos in the late 1770s, simply as harpsichords were more expensive, larger, and made of more luxurious materials (see Chapter 5). I also wanted to highlight the harpsichord as the starting point for the long line of Op. 2’s many revisions and improvements by Clementi and emphasize too that “the father of the pianoforte” began his musical career on the harpsichord (Chapters 4 and 6).

Finally, we include world premiere recordings of Op. 2 in its final revised and “improved” state, a revision undertaken by Clementi when he was in Vienna in 1807 and cementing his reputation in the updating and editing of his “complete works” in preparation for publication by Gottfried Härtel (Chapter 6). This 1807 version of Op. 2 is performed on a modern replica by Paul McNulty of a Viennese grand piano by Conrad Graf, from around 1819 (and provided courtesy of Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney).

Much has changed between the Op. 2 of 1779 and 1807. Clementi has utilized the extra keys of the larger instrument, added much ornamentation and arpeggio marks, and has filled out his notation with intricate expressive, articulation, and dynamic markings (although—strangely—there are no pedal indications). The largest addition can be found in the first movement of what was originally Op. 2 No. 6 in B-flat major (here, numbered as Sonata no. 3). A remarkable cadenza has been inserted before the formal recapitulation, filled with long trills, novel textures, and rhapsodic modulations. This additional cadenza gives the impression of a modern piano sonata composed in the grand style by a virtuoso pianist and indeed the cadenza probably documents some of Clementi’s improvisational tactics.

The recordings of the musical examples and performances of the complete works can be found in the “Audio recordings” section of this website.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I should like to thank the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney) for research support with assistance in funding the recording and construction of the companion website, and for the use of their Graf replica. I also acknowledge the AMS 75 Publication Awards for Younger Scholars Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I thank David Kim-Boyle, Carey Beebe, Melissa Farrow for their technical and artistic collaboration and I acknowledge with gratitude the editors of Keyboard Perspectives and ABC Classic and Natalie Shea for permissions in reproducing previously published material. I particularly thank Carey Beebe for both his beautiful Kirckman harpsichord and his invaluable assistance in tuning, proofreading, and providing information on the instruments.

LINKS:

Erin Helyard

http://erinhelyard.com

Melissa Farrow

http://www.melissafarrow.com

Carey Beebe

https://www.hpschd.nu