I discovered the music of Clementi when I was a teenager and utterly obsessed with Mozart. I had devoured Mozart’s entire output for keyboard and was moving onto Haydn. Beethoven was up next, as prescribed by my teachers, but I didn’t really understand him, and my technique wasn’t up to his later stuff. At this stage my curiosity led me to a dead end as my local music-seller (remember them?) had no other composers contemporaneous with Mozart. The entire eighteenth century was summed up on their shelves in publications of Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. But surely there weren’t just six or seven composers, I thought? There were others?
In search of clues, I started to read. Led to the eighteenth century through Robert Hughes and his evocative history of colonial Australia, I started reading the work of Enlightenment thinkers and was immediately struck by their utter contemporaneity. They were flesh-and-blood people, with real fire in their bellies. They were deeply human, and seemed to have all our flaws and beauties. Their voices reminded me of our voices. Diderot’s 1769 essay “Regrets for my old dressing gown” opens with a question and follows with a parallelism: “Why didn’t I keep it? It was used to me and I was used to it.”[1] In two sentences he has established a rapport with an old dressing gown and has also caught our attention. We are rapt. Diderot does all of this with elegance and grace. These qualities are some of the many I admire about eighteenth-century music. They are qualities I first discerned in Mozart. Naturally I wanted to find more of this kind of music.
At that stage (I was about fifteen) there was no internet with readily available scores, but I was lucky enough to have access to a library and it was here I discovered (among many other marvels) Nicholas Temperley’s monumental masterpiece published by Garland Press— an edited collection of facsimiles, with superb commentary, of the “London Pianoforte School.” Not only were these prints elegant and readable, but they were beautiful as well. Someone, long dead, had taken great pride in their engraving—indeed, in their composition too. And suddenly a whole bunch of composers I’d never heard of presented themselves to my eager fingers: J. C. Bach, Clementi, Cramer!
I had also started around this time to read books on music history or what I later learned was called “musicology.” I had so very much enjoyed reading through Clementi’s sonatas at the piano, and I considered them well crafted. My hands enjoyed them too. In fact, in some ways, they suited my hands better than Mozart’s music. So naturally I was disappointed and saddened to read that most writers didn’t like Clementi. All the music I had enjoyed was summarily dismissed by everyone. He was just a forerunner to Beethoven, who was a far better composer, they all suggested. Clementi was a businessman, and his music was worthless. He lost the famous competition against Mozart, after all.
Even as a teenager I had developed a critical suspicion of these kinds of grand and sweeping statements, and so it was refreshing to read Nicholas Temperley’s valuable prefaces to the Clementi sonatas. He was the first person I’d ever read who spoke positively about Clementi. It is first to him that I owe my scholarly interest in Clementi. Much later, my love of Clementi was revived when I was a doctoral student at McGill University, and here I was privileged to work closely with my then supervisor Tom Beghin, whose playing and thinking have deeply influenced and nourished my own. I am enormously grateful for all the support and collaboration he has extended to me over the years. This book would never have come about without Tom.
The difficult passages contained within three works published by Clementi in 1779 are unique among keyboard works published for a readership that was understood at the time to consist of predominantly female keyboardists. Clementi’s music thus presents female pianists with an entirely radical mode of expression. At first considered controversial and risky for performance by women, Clementi’s music soon became immensely popular. Attempting to understand the social, musical, and gendered implications of technically difficult music helps underline important changes in Enlightenment culture that can be seen to have had far-reaching consequences across the cultural landscape of the entire world. Along the way we examine the cultural transitions from music as “act” or “event” to music as “text.”
Many people have assisted, encouraged, or aided my research over the years, and among them I gratefully thank Carey Beebe, Caryl Clark, Penny Crawford, Nicholas Cronk, David Irving, Mark Ledbury, Nicholas Mathew, Stephanie McCallum, Kerry Murphy, Annette Richards, Inge van Rij, Glenn Roe, Dean W. Sutcliffe, Richard Tognetti, Peter Tregear, Robert Wellington, and Stephen Yates. I draw on previously published material from various issues of Keyboard perspectives, which is duly acknowledged through footnotes. I thank the editors of that journal for their permission and support. I am also grateful to the Library of Congress Music Division for their permission to reprint photographs in their collection. Finally, I thank the anonymous peer reviewers of my manuscript for their perceptive suggestions for improvement.
I have employed a short-hand system for the designation of sonatas within opuses. For example, measures 1–8 of the second movement of Clementi’s Op. 2 No. 2 are given as 2/2/ii, mm. 1–8. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
I should like to thank the various universities at which I have worked for support toward attendance at conferences that contributed to this monograph: New Zealand School of Music (Te Kōkī, Victoria University of Wellington), the School of Music at the Australian National University, and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. I also acknowledge the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney) for research support. Pinchgut Opera have been entirely supportive of my research interests over the period this book was written, and I thank my entire team for their encouragement and goodwill.
When I first discovered Clementi’s music, I did not anticipate that it would lead me to explore the history of female pianists in the eighteenth century. Women have been so important to my own development as a musician and as a person: my mother, Crista White, who taught me piano, my first piano teachers, Margaret Crawford (who introduced me to Quantz and the joy of music), and finally Stephanie McCallum, who taught me (and continues to teach me) everything I know about keyboard playing. Thus, I found and felt a great affinity with those women of the past who often battled (like me) with repressive ideologies or societal strictures. This book is dedicated to their memory—to all the many known and unknown female pianists of the Enlightenment.
[1] “Pourquoi ne l’avoir pas gardée? Elle était faite à moi; j’étais fait à elle.” Denis Diderot, “Regrets sur ma vielle robe de chambre” (1769), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux, vol.4 (Paris, 1875), p.5–12 (6).