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.