Muzio Clementi

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Muzio Clementi was born in Rome, Italy, in 1752 as the eldest of the seven children of Nicolò Clementi, a successful silversmith. When he was seven, Clementi began his formal musical instruction. He was such a good a pupil that by age 13 he gained a position as a church organist.

In 1766, a wealthy Englishman by the name of Sir Peter Beckford was impressed by Clementi's musical gifts, and he negotiated with the boy's father to take him from his family to England where Beckford agreed to sponsor Clementi's musical education. In return for his education and board, Clementi was expected to provide musical entertainment at the nobleman's country estate.

In 1770, Clementi gave his first public performance as a pianist. His audience was greatly taken with his playing, and this was the beginning of a very successful career as a concert pianist. Apparently in 1774, Clementi was freed from his obligations to Peter Beckford, and he moved to London. His first known public appearances were as a solo harpsichordist at benefit concerts for a singer and a harpist in the spring of 1775. Clementi was fortunate that his fame as a pianist rose quickly, and he was considered by many to be among the greatest virtuosos in Europe.

His celebrity status grew to such an extent that by 1780 he felt ready to try his luck on the Continent. Stopping first in Paris, he went on to Vienna and his famous confrontation with Mozart. Clementi was asked by the Emperor Josef II to enter a musical playing contest with Mozart on December 24, 1781, for the amusement of the Emperor's guests. On January 12, 1782, Mozart wrote to his father: "Clementi plays well, as far as execution with the right hand goes. His greatest strength lies in his passages in 3rds. Apart from that, he has not a kreuzer’s worth of taste or feeling - in short he is a mere mechanicus."

Mozart's very ungenerous and perhaps envious estimation of Clementi's playing remains as a testament to Clementi's substantial abilities as a virtuoso and composer, and it is undeniable that the main theme of Clementi's Sonata in B Flat Major captured Mozart`s imagination, since ten years later he used it himself in the Overture to Die Zauberflöte. This fact so embittered Clementi that every time this piece was published the composer made certain that the edition included a note stating that his Sonata had been written ten years before Mozart composed the first notes of his opera.

In 1786 four Clementi symphonies (or parts thereof) were performed in London. Of these, the two short symphonies of Op. 18 that were published in 1787 were the only orchestral works that Clementi ever allowed to be published.

Clementi's unique historical position - together with the special bent of his enormous gifts - enabled him to temper and qualify Classical forms with both the contrapuntal rigors of the vanished Baroque age and the harmonic harbingers of the Romantic age.

In 1807, in Vienna, Clementi carried on elaborate negotiations with Ludwig van Beethoven that resulted in his becoming the composer's principal English publisher; and on June 21, 1824, Clementi attended the London debut of Franz Liszt. Such was the span of his long career. During most of his life, Clementi was as famous as Mozart, his reputation exceeded only by those of Haydn and Beethoven, both of whom he not only was influenced by but upon whom he was also an influence.

In 1810 Clementi ceased his concerts to devote all of his time to composition and piano construction. He spent his final, uneventful years in Evesham, where he died on March 10, 1832. He was buried at Westminster Abbey.