1752–1832 · United Kingdom · Classical
Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) was born in Rome but spent most of his life in England. A composer, pianist, teacher and music publisher, he was among the first to write music aimed squarely at what the piano could do. His pupils included Cramer, Moscheles, Hummel and Field, and our site carries one of his sonatinas.
Muzio Clementi was born in Rome on 23 January 1752. His father, Nicolò, noticed the boy's talent and made sure he began musical training early. By the age of nine Muzio, who had already been learning singing, counterpoint and organ playing, entered a competition for a church organist's post and won it.
He learned singing from Giuseppe Santarelli and studied counterpoint with Gaetano Carpani. Before he turned fourteen he had composed a mass and an oratorio about the martyrdom of two saints, Julian and Celsus. He served as organist at the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, and from his youth his piano playing amazed listeners.
In 1766 a wealthy Englishman, Peter Beckford, visited Rome. The musical gift of the fourteen-year-old Clementi made a strong impression on him, and he reached an agreement with the boy's father and took him to his estate in England. Beckford undertook to pay for the young man's musical education until he turned twenty-one.
In return, Clementi was expected to play the instruments of the estate for long hours every day and to show his progress to his host and the guests from time to time. Seven years passed in this way. During that time he worked through music by J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Handel, Corelli, Domenico and Alessandro Scarlatti and Bernardo Pasquini. His first public appearance as an organist came in 1770, and the audience was reported to have been impressed.
From Beckford's estate Clementi moved to London, where he stayed for a long time. In 1773 the first collection of his piano compositions was published. He appeared as a harpsichordist at benefit concerts and conducted from the keyboard at a London opera house; he was the kapellmeister of the Italian Opera.
In 1780 Clementi set off on a tour of Europe. He played in Paris for Queen Marie Antoinette and visited Munich and Salzburg. In 1781 in Vienna, before Emperor Joseph II and Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, he competed against Mozart: both were asked to improvise and to perform their own compositions. The emperor tactfully declared a draw.
The two men came away with different impressions. In a letter to his father Mozart noted Clementi's strong passages in thirds but found neither taste nor feeling in his playing. Clementi himself, as Ludwig Berger later recalled, spoke about Mozart with enthusiasm. There is no evidence that the meeting was unfriendly, and the picture of the two as rivals was painted only later.
The opening theme of Clementi's B-flat major sonata (Op. 24, No. 2) turns up in Mozart's overture to The Magic Flute. When the sonata was reissued, Clementi remarked that he had composed it a decade before the opera. Even so, he kept his admiration for Mozart and made many transcriptions of his music, among them a piano version of that very overture.
Clementi played, conducted and taught widely in England, and he is regarded as the founder of the London school of piano playing. His pupils included Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Ludwig Berger and John Field. Berger later taught Felix Mendelssohn, and Field, in turn, had a strong effect on Frédéric Chopin.
Clementi was active in business as well. In 1798 he took charge of the London firm Longman and Broderip, and he also set up and co-owned instrument factories and music-publishing businesses. They printed works by composers of his time, Beethoven among them. A blaze on 20 March 1807 wiped out the firm's warehouses, costing about forty thousand pounds. That same year Clementi reached an agreement with Beethoven that gave him the publishing rights to all of his music in England.
Clementi improved the mechanism of the piano, and some of his improvements became standard. In 1813, alongside a circle of leading English musicians, he helped found the Philharmonic Society in London (in January of that year) and conducted its concerts until 1816. Also in 1813 he was admitted to the Swedish royal academy of music. In 1823 he took part, with three other musicians, in compiling a large music encyclopaedia, The Encyclopaedia of Music.
Late in 1816 Clementi crossed to the continent again with new compositions, which he presented in Paris among other places. A stop in Frankfurt preceded his return to London in June 1818. By 1821 he was back in Paris, and he led performances of his symphonies in Munich and Leipzig. In 1826 he finished the study collection Gradus ad Parnassum and left for Paris, planning to bring out its third volume in three cities at once: Paris, London and Leipzig.
A large banquet in his honour was arranged on 17 December 1827 by Johann Baptist Cramer and Ignaz Moscheles. Moscheles noted in his diary that Clementi improvised at the piano that evening on a theme by Handel. In 1828 he appeared at the Philharmonic Society's opening concert, and in 1830 he withdrew from the society. He settled in Evesham and died there on 10 March 1832, following a brief illness.
His burial took place on 29 March 1832 in the Westminster Abbey cloisters. Three pupils, Cramer, Field and Moscheles, walked with the coffin.
Clementi married twice. His first marriage, to Caroline Lehmann, left a son who lived only briefly. On 6 July 1811 he married Emma Gisborne, and the couple had four children: two boys and two girls. The composer's descendants include British colonial administrators, a Royal Air Force officer, as well as the pianist and piano teacher Marjorie Clementi.
Clementi wrote many piano sonatas. He was one of the first to compose keyboard music tailored to the piano's strengths. He recognised the new instrument's advantages over the harpsichord and worked to improve its mechanism at his own factories. References to his sonatas in secondary sources and in recording booklets are contradictory, so today they are identified by the thematic catalogue of Alan Tyson published in 1967.
Several of his earlier, simpler sonatas were later relabelled sonatinas once his Op. 36 set had proved popular. Our site has his Sonatina (O 36), at upper-intermediate level, and it is a good place to begin getting to know the composer.
Besides sonatas, Clementi wrote for orchestra: symphonies, overtures and an oratorio. Two symphonies appeared in 1787 as Op. 18, and his third symphony, in G major, quotes the tune of God Save the King. Many manuscripts have been lost, and he performed his symphonies with success in London and elsewhere in Europe, mostly between 1813 and 1828.
Clementi also wrote teaching works. The Méthode pour le piano-forte… appeared in 1801 and was translated into many languages and reissued many times, including in Russia. He completed the collection of studies Gradus ad Parnassum ("Steps to Parnassus") in 1826. Clementi also compiled an anthology, Selection of Practical Harmony, from works by 25 composers; the first volume came out in 1801, the fourth in 1814, and the complete edition in 1815.
Clementi's sonatas served as models for nineteenth-century composers. Beethoven played them often, kept a volume within reach on his music stand, and advised many others, his nephew Karl among them, to study them. Carl Czerny held Clementi's sonatas in the highest regard and used them successfully in teaching Franz Liszt. Chopin frequently made his own pupils work at Clementi's preludes and exercises.
Clementi enjoyed great renown in his lifetime, but his popularity later faded for many years. The 250th anniversary of his birth fell in 2002, and scholars marked it with fresh research on his life and music; the publisher Ut Orpheus is issuing a 61-volume edition of his complete works. In 2008 the complete edition of his works was given the status of an Italian National Edition. Vladimir Horowitz made recordings of five Clementi sonatas and a few shorter pieces.