Clementi, MUZIO

Clementi, MUZIO, in his time an eminent pianist and composer for the pianoforte, was born in 1752 at Rome, where he competed successfully for a post as organist at the age of nine. Before he was fourteen, he had composed several contrapuntal works of considerable size, one of which, a mass, had produced some sensation in Rome; he then attracted the notice of an Englishman, Peter Beckford, M.P., who brought him to England, and at whose house in Dorsetshire he studied till 1770. When he appeared in London, his extraordinary command of the pianoforte secured him an almost unprecedented success. From 1777 to 1780 he conducted the Italian Opera; in 1781 he visited Paris, Strasburg, Munich, and Vienna, where he engaged in a prolonged musical combat with Mozart before the emperor, the victory being left undecided. Mozart's letters express the verdict that Clementi was 'a mere mechanician;' but the latter had not then exchanged his brilliant execution for the melodic style of his after performances. He made other visits to the Continent, and amassed an independence in England by teaching; and when much of this was lost in the failure of a musical firm with which he had become connected, he founded the business of manufacturer of pianofortes which is still carried on under the name of his associate, Collard. He died at Evesham, 9th March 1832. He has left over a hundred sonatas, of which sixty are for the pianoforte alone; his 'Op. 2' (composed in his eighteenth year) is considered the model of all modern pianoforte sonatas. Of his other works, the Gradus ad Parnassum (1817) is a splendid series of 100 studies, 'on which to this day the art of solid piano-playing rests.'