clementi, virtuosity, and the "german manner"

Clementi, Virtuosity, and the "German Manner"Author(s): Leon PlantingaSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1972), pp.303-330Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830934 .

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Clementi, Virtuosity, and the "German Manner"*

BY LEON PLANTINGA

DEBUSSY'S Children's Corner Suite

(19o6-8) begins with a little piece entitled "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum." Its unchanging sixteenth

notes and static harmony are evidently meant to recall the agreeable tedium of the child-pianist's keyboard exercises. The object of this bit of gentle parody is of course the Gradus ad Parnassum by Muzio Cle- menti, the massive three-volume compendium of diverse musical styles and types that moved one contemporary observer to predict, "like Bach's works it will stand as a record of the attainments in pianoforte playing, and, indeed, of the harmonic knowledge possessed by the living generation."'

That to Debussy the Gradus ad Parnassum seemed to suggest only finger exercises is not particularly surprising, for in all likelihood the version he knew was the one done over by Carl Tausig. From its very wide

range of contents--including sonata movements, scherzi, preludes, fugues, canons, and programmatic piano pieces--Tausig had selected

only the most mechanical etudes; these he disfigured elaborately and

published in many successive editions. From the I86o's until quite re-

cently, the Gradus ad Parnassum was scarcely known except in this dis- torted form, and Clementi was scarcely known by most musicians except as the perpetrator of the Gradus ad Parnassum.

Tausig's destructive editing seemed only to confirm the well-publi- cized obloquies of Mozart, who claimed that the Italian pianist had ex-

traordinary technique but no taste. When Mozart heard him perform in 1781, Clementi was only recently launched on his public career, and at that time, it is true, he was known as little more than a composer and player of uncommonly brilliant and difficult keyboard music. After having spent his boyhood in Rome and his adolescent years at the rather isolated country estate of Peter Beckford in Dorset, Clementi made his first recorded public appearances in two London concerts in the spring of 1775, at the age of twenty-three.2 His playing apparently made no

* This essay is a revised version of a lecture given at Oxford University on February 18, 1972, and at the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitit, Frankfurt, on May 4, 1972.

1 Repository of the Arts, Series III, Vol. IX (1827), 54. 2 These were "benefit concerts" for the harpist Jones and the singer Bonpace, on

April 3 and May I8 of that year, announced in the Gazeteer for March 31 and The Morning Post for May 16. "Benefit concerts" in 18th-century England usually lacked the philanthropic connotation the name now implies; the beneficiary was ordinarily the organizer of the concert and its principal performer.



304 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

very great stir, for though he remained in London, his name does not appear in the concert programs for the following two years. Then in the

spring of 1778, among the players in the new Rauzzini-LaMotte concert series there is one listed as "Clementini"-doubtless Clementi;3 in 1779 his name appears, correctly spelled, in the same series, and in that year he performed in three "benefit concerts" as well.4 By 178o it was clear that Clementi was making something of a name for himself as a solo keyboard player. That spring he appeared in at least four London concerts-

including the prestigious one "for the Benefit and Increase of a Fund established for the Support of Decayed Musicians and their Families"5- and a satirical musical lexicon, published in 178o in Bath, shows what sort of impression he was making on his audiences:

Clementi. An Italian. Has composed some setts of lessons, which abound in passages so peculiar and difficult, that it is evident they must have been practised for years preceding their publication.

We particularly allude to the successions of octaves with which he has crammed his lessons. Mr. C. executes these exceedingly well, and is a most brilliant performer.6

Only one piece Clementi is known to have composed by 1780 fits that allusion to "successions of octaves"; this is the second sonata of Op. 2 (the one later known as "Clementi's celebrated octave lesson"), first

published by Welcher in 1779.7 It begins as shown in Example i. This

mildly depressing excerpt shows something of Clementi's bravura octaves and his remarkable tolerance for the "hollow" sonorities octaves in both hands produce. The prolonged "murky bass" pedal point, too, was an expedient of which Clementi often availed himself-he was criticized for it as late as 1798.8

The remainder of Op. 2, No. 2, is an almost unrelieved parade of virtuoso keyboard figurations, many of them novel in 1779: more octaves, rapid thirds and sixths, very fast single-line passages with troublesome

repeated tones, scales in broken octaves, and the like. Except for two remarkable passages in octaves in his variations on "The Black Joke," pub-

3Public Advertiser, March 26, 1778. This diminutive form of Clementi's name

appeared in London and Paris journals several times in succeeding years-even as late as 1785, when the thirty-three-year-old composer's name was presumably well known.

4 Public Advertiser, April 17 and 22, and May 3, 1779. 5 Ibid., February 1, 1780. 6 A.B.C. Dario Musico (Bath, 1780), p. 17. 7The Op. 2 Sonatas have traditionally been assigned to i773; Alan Tyson first

gave the correct date in his exemplary Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Muzio Clementi (Tutzing, 1967). The numbering of Clementi's compositions used here cor-

responds to this catalogue. 8 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Vol. I (1798), col. 87. In this review of

Clementi's Sonatas Op. 37 (in an edition by Andre), the critic assumes that Clementi (like Haydn "in einer seiner neuesten in London geschriebenen Symfonieen"-no doubt the Symphony No. 1o4, "mit dem Dudelsack") is trying to imitate Scottish

bagpipes.



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER" 305

Example i

Clementi, Sonata Op. 2, No. 2

Presto

I. • i I l ] I I l I ! I y I ! I II! I II! I I I I I I I I I I I I

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. " I I'

if

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I M -

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ilk # i " - i •

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lished in i777, this kind of technical display was new to Clementi's style when Op. 2 appeared; it certainly stood in sharp contrast to the rather

pallid galant music he had written up to this time.9 Clementi's Op. 2, "Six Sonatas for the Piano Forte or Harpsichord

with an accompaniment for a German Flute or Violin," consists of two

very different kinds of music. For though there is no such indication on the title page, only three of the sonatas-the odd-numbered ones-have

accompaniments; the others are for solo keyboard. Clementi ordinarily made a very clear distinction between these categories, and he did so here. The accompanied sonatas (in Op. 2, the accompaniments cannot, as is sometimes the case, be dispensed with1') are without exception sim-

ple, thin-textured pieces with regularly periodized, ornamented melody supported by conventional triadic figures in the keyboard part. The even- numbered sonatas for solo keyboard all feature spectacular passages in double notes and other brilliant figurations like those we have noted in

Op. 2, No. 2. It may be significant that in all of Clementi's London appearances in 1780 he is advertised as playing "sonatas" or "lessons."" It was with virtuoso display pieces-in all probability the solo sonatas of

Op. 2-that he was making an impression on the London public in

1779-80, and his success there propelled him to further triumphs on the continent.

The principal source for Clementi's biography (though traceable to the composer himself, it is not always to be taken at face value) has al-

ways been the eulogistic piece that first appeared in the Quarterly

9 The extant earlier music consists of one unpublished sonata preserved in auto-

graph in the Bibliothique nationale (WO I3); the Op. I Sonatas, published in 1771; an alternate first movement to the G-major Sonata Op. I in autograph in the

Bibliotheque nationale (WO I4); and the Black Joke Variations (WO 2), published in 1777.

10 This did not necessarily mean that such sonatas could not be played if no flutist or violinist were available. Printed in score, these pieces lend themselves rather easily to performance of all essential components by the keyboard player; in a pre- face to his accompanied sonatas published by Johnson in 1760, William Jackson ex-

plained in detail how this should be done. 11 It has often been stated with considerable assurance that sonatas were virtually

never performed at public concerts in the i8th century. Robert Wangermbe, for

example, writes, "C'est environs de I83o qu'on a commence' A jouer des sonates dans des concerts publiques." "Tradition et innovation dans la virtuositi romantique," Acta musicologica, XLII (1970), 24. There is a more cautious appraisal of the subject in William Newman's The Sonata in the Classic Era (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1963), pp. 52-57. Clementi played a sonata in his second London performance in 1775 and in the majority of his appearances there until 790o. Many other keyboard players did the same; in 1784 alone, for example, no fewer than a dozen public concerts in London, advertised in the daily newspapers, included pianoforte sonatas performed by Clementi, J. B. Cramer, William Dance, and one Mlle. Vinet. Clementi's pianoforte sonatas were the first, so far as I know, to have been played in Paris concerts, perhaps by Clementi himself in 1780-81 (see below, fn. 27), and surely by a certain Mlle. de Pontet on March 8 and December I5, 1783 (announced in the Journal de Paris for those dates).



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER") 307

Musical Magazine and Review in i820 and subsequently, with variations, in five other publications.12 This biographical sketch describes the events under consideration with its customary touch of hyperbole:

... and the fame of his works and of his executive talents, having spread over the Continent, he determined, in the year 1780, and at the instigation of the celebrated Pacchierotti,13 to visit Paris.

In that city he was received with enthusiasm, and had the honour to play before the Queen, who bestowed on him the most unqualified applause. The warmth of French praise, contrasted with the gentle and cool approbation given by the English, quite astonished the young musician, who used jocosely to remark, that he could scarcely believe himself to be the same man.14

Clementi's assault on the French capital took place some time after

May 26, 1780, the date of his last recorded performance for that year in London, at a benefit concert for the young William Crotch. That he

actually played for Marie-Antoinette at the French court-the sort of honor that had not been his lot in London-is corroborated in a later, seemingly independent report by the French pianist Antoine Franqois Marmontel: "when he was admitted to perform at the court, the per- fection of his playing charmed the queen Marie-Antoinette; she ex-

pressed her warm approval and persuaded him to visit Vienna, assuring him of a recommendation to her brother, the emperor Joseph, the famous

melomane."'15 In the summer of 1781, according to the Quarterly Musical Maga-

zine, Clementi resumed his travels, pursuing rather a direct course to Vienna, with pauses en route at the courts at Strasbourg and Munich. On about December 19 he arrived in the imperial city, as is shown in a letter, recently discovered, that Clementi wrote to his father on Decem- ber 24: "It is five days since I arrived here, and this evening I shall have the honor to be introduced to the Grand Duchess, who wishes to hear me on the cembalo."16 It is perfectly clear that Clementi had no idea of what was in store for him that evening; the letter was written on the

12They are [Sainsbury's] Dictionary of Musicians, 2d ed. (London, 1827), pp. i6o-65; the Harmonicon, 183I, Pt. I, pp. i83-86; Apollo's Gift (i83i), pp. v-viii; Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Vol. XXXIV (1832), cols. 653-64; and The Annual Biography and Obituary, XVII (I833), 86-97. The standard modern biography of Clementi is still Max Unger, Muzio Clementis Leben (Langensalza, Germany, 1914). This is a detailed and, for the most part, accurate book; but now, inevitably, it is in need of revision.

13Gasparo Pacchierotti (1740-182 ), the famous castrato soprano, was engaged by the King's Theater in London in 1778 (Clementi was also active as a conductor at this theater in the late i770's). 14 Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, II ( 820), 311.

15 A. F. Marmontel, Les Pianistes cildbres: Silhouettes et medaillons (Paris, 1878), p. 51. This and the translations which follow are, unless otherwise noted, my own.

16 This letter is in the possession of Clementi's descendants who live in Foggia. There is a photographic copy of it in the unpublished papers of the late Mrs. George Wilshire (a great-granddaughter of Clementi) in the Music Library of Yale Uni- versity.




very day that the emperor Joseph II entertained his guests, the Grand Duke (the future Tsar Paul I) and Duchess of Russia, by staging a piano competition between Clementi and Mozart.

In a letter written to his own father two weeks later, Mozart regis- tered his first reaction to the Italian's performance: "Clementi plays well, so far as execution with the right hand goes. His greatest strength lies in his passages in thirds. Apart from this, he has not a kreutzer's worth of taste or feeling-in short he is simply a mechanicus."17 During the following months Mozart apparently could not put thoughts of Cle- menti's playing and Clementi's music out of his mind, and as time passed his pronouncements grew increasingly indignant. On June 7, 1783, almost eighteen months after the contest, he wrote,

Supposing you do play sixths and octaves with the utmost velocity (which no one can accomplish, not even Clementi) you only produce an atrocious chopping effect and nothing else whatever. Clementi is a ciarlatano, like all Italians. He writes Presto over a sonata, or even Prestissimo and Alla breve, and plays it himself Allegro in 4/4 time. I know this is the case, for I have heard him do so. What he really does well are his passages in thirds; but he sweated over them day and night in London. Apart from this he can do nothing, absolutely nothing, for he has not the slightest expression or taste, still less, feeling.18

It is no accident that the part of Clementi's formidable technical

equipment to gain Mozart's grudging admiration was his facility with thirds (or, as we for some reason call them, "double thirds"). For Cle- menti later tells us which pieces he played at that contest.19 One is the

Bb Sonata of Op. 24 (formerly known as Op. 41), the composition from which, as Clementi's student Ludwig Berger first suggested in 1829, Mozart may have purloined the Allegro theme of the Zauberfliote over- ture.20 The other one is the Toccata Op. i i, the piece that very likely

17 Emily Anderson, ed., The Letters of Mozart and his Family (London, 1966), P. 792.

is Ibid., p. 850. Nor did Emperor Joseph soon forget the confrontation between the two pianists. Count Zinzendorf recorded in his diary almost a year after the event, "I remained [at the Countess von Pergen's house] until nine o'clock, having been unable to leave because of the arrival of the Emperor, who talked endlessly about music, and the contest between Mozhardt and Clementi." Quoted in Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart, a Documentary Biography (London, 1965), p. 207.

19 A revised version of the Sonata Op. 24, No. 2, in Bb, published in 1804 by Mollo, bears the notice that this work "a &te jou6e par l'Auteur devant S.M.I. L'Empereur Joseph II en 1781 Mozart etant present." And later in that year the sixth volume of Clementi's so-called Oeuvres compldttes appeared with this sonata under a slightly expanded version of the same superscription: "Cette Sonate, avec la Toccata, qui la suit, a 6t6 joule par l'auteur devant S.M.I. Joseph II .... "

20 Berger's suggestion (Caecilia, X [18291, 24o) appeared in his rejoinder to the publication, in 1828, of Nissen's biography of Mozart, which included copious extracts from the Mozart letters, including some of their choicest defamation of Clementi. Most writers on Mozart, perhaps with good reason, have discounted the significance of the striking similarity between the two pieces. But it should be pointed out that if Mozart wished to borrow Clementi's theme, he probably had no need to dredge it up from his memory. Two years before he wrote Zauberfldte, Clementi's



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER " 309

elicited Mozart's remarks about charlatans and Italians.21 This toccata is cast in an ABA pattern, of which the A section is a kind of double-thirds etude, marked, true to Mozart's characterization, Prestissimo alla breve. The last part of this section is shown in Example 2. The reviewer for the European Magazine (July, 1784) remarked that this piece "has more air in it than we generally find in this author's works."

One minor discrepancy might be mentioned here: Mozart said it was a sonata-not a toccata-that Clementi did not play up to its in- dicated tempo. But where did Mozart get his information about titles and tempo markings--from looking over Clementi's shoulder at the contest? It seems more likely that he had seen the unauthorized first edition of the toccata printed somewhat later in Paris by Bailleux;12 in this publication the piece is called sonata. Such a supposition, however, might seem to run afoul of a chronological discrepancy: the earliest known announcement of the Bailleux print is that in the Journal de Paris for

April 24, 1784, and Mozart's acerbic letter is dated June 7, 1783. But the Quarterly Musical Magazine (II [1820], 3I1) suggests that the publication in question actually appeared before 1784: "On his return to England he deemed it necessary to publish his celebrated Toccata, with a Sonata, Op. ii, a surreptitious copy, full of errors, having been printed without his knowledge in France." The "surreptitious copy" was the edition of Bailleux, and Clementi's "return to England" took place at least by the autumn of 1783. The new authorized edition of the Toccata, furthermore, was advertised in the Morning Herald of May 8, 1784. Clementi would hardly have had time to arrange for this publication in response to an edition that had appeared in another country only two weeks earlier.

Other observers do not bear out Mozart's claim that Clementi's keyboard technique was less spectacular in real life than it looked on paper. A report in Cramer's Magazin der Musik of 1784 exclaims: "When you see his fast passages in octaves for one hand, you can believe they are not easy to play; but he always does far more than is written-octave trills, no less-and every note sounds clearly distinct from the others."23 And a review in the European Magazine of the same year agrees: "As a performer Clementi stands unrivalled. His mode of playing is peculiar to himself, having by dint of application rendered the most difficult passages easy and familiar. He executes octaves and sixths with the right

sonata had been published. And there is some reason to think that Mozart saw that publication; it was the second part of the Collection of Original Harpsichord Music edited by Mozart's friend Stephen Storace, and it included Mozart's own Trio K. 564.

21 This was pointed out in an article by Alan Tyson, "Clementi's Viennese Com- positions," Music Review, XXVII (1966), 16.

22 "Quatre Ouvertures. . .par Guglielmi, Wanhal, Diters, et Haydn. . .et deux Sonates par Clementi et Scarlatti."

23 C. F. Cramer, ed., Magazin der Musik, zweiter Jahrgang, erste Hilfte (1784), p. 369.




Example 2 Clementi, Toccata Op. I

Prestissimo

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CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE tGERMAN MANNER7 311I

hand with as much fleetness as many people can perform single notes, and that with the greatest neatness and exactness."24

Clementi's bravura passagework obviously struck his audiences in the early 178o's as something very new. The dense combination of various kinds of virtuoso keyboard writing in Op. 2 and the unrelieved thirds of the Toccata Op. i i were probably unique in 1779 and 1781. But Clementi did not, of course, invent all these techniques himself. Earlier examples of rapid passages in thirds are particularly easy to find; several composers who played and published in London previous to Clementi's Op. 2 made some modest use of them. Example 3 shows a passage from the Op. 4 accompanied sonatas of the shadowy Neapolitan cembalist, organist, and plagiarist,25 Ferdinando Pellegrini (i714-ca. 1767), published in London about 1763-

These pale little runs of thirds are hardly to be compared with Cle- menti's varied and exhaustive use of the technique. And the same is true for most of the isolated precedents that can be cited for the virtuoso techniques of Op. 2. Only one keyboard composer within Clementi's ken, I believe, looks like a plausible model for the most prominent char- acteristics of his early virtuoso music, namely Domenico Scarlatti.

Clementi probably first came to know the brilliant sonatas of the Neapolitan emigre when he encountered the Scarlatti cult in England. "In Italy," writes Ralph Kirkpatrick, "Domenico Scarlatti was little more than a name. Little enough of his music was circulating there in manuscript, and nothing of his was published in Italy during the eighteenth century."26 But beginning in the early 1780's, there is plenty of evidence that Clementi had come to know Scarlatti well. He apparently performed Scarlatti sonatas in Paris during his stay there in 1780-8 1,27 and the correspondent for Cramer's Magazin der Musik, just mentioned, wrote in 1784, "I have never heard anyone play the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti as he does; until now I only half knew them."28

24 The European Magazine and London Review, V (1784), 366. 25 Sonatas by Galuppi and Rutini were published under Pellegrini's name by Walsh

in 1765. See Fausto Torrefranca, Le Origini italiene del romanticismo musicale: i primitivi della sonata moderna (Turin, 1930), pp. 716-22; and William S. Newman, The Sonata in the Classic Era, p. 725. The Op. 4 Sonatas Pellegrini apparently wrote himself.

26 Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton, 1953), p. 125. 27 In a review of the peculiar Bailleux publication named above (fn. 22), it is

pointed out that the Scarlatti sonata included in this miscellany (K. I13, previously published in London by Johnson, ca. 1752) is the one "que M. Climenti ex6cutoit avec tant de succes apres les siennes." Mercure de France, June 19, 1784.

28C. F. Cramer, ed., Magazin der Musik, zweiter Jahrgang, erste Hilfte (1784), p. 369. The biographical sketch in the Quarterly Musical Magazine lists the composers Clementi studied as a boy; Alessandro Scarlatti is included but not Domenico. An- other account of his early education-this one specifically referring to the years at Beckford's estate in Dorset-is reported by Amadee Mereaux as he says Clementi re- counted it to him in I820. Mereaux cites "Scarlatti" (there is no further identification, but surely he means Domenico Scarlatti) as one of the composers whose works "il travaillait et etudiait sans cesse au double point de vue du mecanisme, [sic] des doigts,




Example 3 F. Pellegrini, Sonata Op. 4, No. 4

Allegro

F-'F" - iF arl• I i 'M '

-- P IIIL I I I J I I

Iti

et de la composition instrumentale." Amadie Mereaux, Les Clavecinistes de 1637 a 1790 ([Paris:] Heugel & Cie., 1867), p. 75. Clementi's fascination with Scarlatti was a lasting one. In 1791 he edited and published "Scarlatti's Chefs-d'oeuvre . . . selected from an elegant collection of manuscripts, in the possession of Muzio Clementi"- later mistakenly published by Breitkopf und Hirtel under Clementi's own name, doubtless without his consent, in Volume V of the Oeuvres complettes. And the second volume of Clementi's Practical Harmony (1802) includes two fugues of Scarlatti.



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER"I 3I3

Scarlatti's extravagant new figurations and sonorities seem to have served as a ready fund of techniques from which Clementi fashioned the most characteristic features of his virtuoso style. Passages in thirds and sixths abound in Scarlatti; the Sonatas K. 29, 44, 57, 120, 140 provide only a few of many examples. And Scarlatti, like Clementi, specialized in various kinds of repeated-note figurations, as in the Sonata K. 116. But more telling, perhaps, is the older composer's relentless exploitation of sonorities at both ends of the spectrum from the most saturated (as in the astonishing Sonata K. 119) to the most sparse. This last sometimes takes the form of a texture consisting-as in the opening of Clementi's Op. 2, No. 2 (Ex. i)-of only the barest octaves (see Ex. 4). Such "ex- treme" sonorities are among the most distinctive features of the keyboard music of both Scarlatti and early Clementi. The likelihood that Clementi learned such things from the Neapolitan, moreover, is en- hanced by the circumstance that every one of the Scarlatti sonatas mentioned here would have been available to the young composer in editions printed in London.

In an article of 1829 designed to defend the aged Clementi from Mozart's bitter attacks, recently published in Nissen's biography, Lud- wig Berger records the Italian's own account, given him in 18o6, of the contest in Vienna. Mozart's censure, Berger-and by implication, Cle- menti-seems to admit, were not altogether undeserved:

Example 4 D. Scarlatti, Sonata K. 13 3

AllegroA fl n Iof.. . .

OW

- _. _

W 6mmm=




When I asked him if at that time he treated the instrument in his present style (this was the year I8o6), he said "no," adding that in that earlier period he had taken particular delight in brilliant feats of technical proficiency, especially in those passages in double notes that were not common before his time, and in improvised cadenzas. It was only later that he adopted a more melodic and noble style of performance.29 Clementi was in several ways a kind of prototype of the 19th-century piano virtuoso. We can see this in his glittering and difficult passagework -tailored to suit his own technical strengths-in his flair for improvisa- tion, in his specialization on one instrument,30 and in his deep involve- ment in the commercial world ancillary to music. And, particularly in retrospect, he has come in for his full share of the odium that attaches to those who seem to blur the distinction, so essential to 19th-century aesthetics, between "art" and "entertainment."

But Clementi's preoccupation with technical display was, as he claimed, a passing phase. Like Liszt, he retired from solo public performance while yet in the prime of life. Though until the I82O's he occasionally conducted concerts from the keyboard and played the piano privately, his last public appearance as soloist took place, as far as I can ascertain, at a London benefit concert on May 31, I790.31 But well before that time, the music he writes suggests that his days as a firebrand virtuoso are over; the last publication in which bravura passagework seems to be something of an end in itself is the Op. 12 sonatas of I785-in the rondo of the third sonata of this set there are even rapid simultaneous scales in thirds for both hands. And there certainly are signs in the 1780's of the "more melodious and noble style" of which Clementi spoke; an example of this, surely, is the F-minor Sonata of Op. 13 (now familiar to many in the recording of Vladimir Horowitz), perhaps the most impressive of all his earlier compositions. It may be worthwhile for our purposes to examine this sonata, as representative of Clementi's most ambitious and consequential writing, in some detail.

All three movements of this piece, like most of Clementi's best music of whatever period, are in minor. Dominating the first movement is a tortuous and driving figuration, enlivened with recurring bits of imitative counterpoint, and a running contest between duple and triple di-

29 Caecilia, X (1829), 239. 30 A consideration of Clementi's instrument (was it always the pianoforte, or did

he at first write for harpsichord?) would lead beyond the boundaries of the present discussion. In the later I780's and early 1790's, Clementi made a determined effort at

symphonic writing; a considerable number of his symphonies were brought to performance, but they met with little success. In 1798 a reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Vol. I, col. 86) still wrote, "Clementi ist Virtuos auf seinem Instrument, dem Fortepiano .. . und schreibt allein fiir dieses Instrument."

31 Gazeteer, May 31, 1790. W. T. Parke, in his Musical Memoirs (London, 1830) I, 142 and 216, mentions two later appearences, in 1791 and 1796, not confirmed by announcements in the newspapers.



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER"

I 315

visions of the beat. This opposition is played out between upper and lower voices of the two- and three-part texture almost throughout (see Ex. 5). But as each half of the movement draws to a close, that texture dissolves into a single-line figure doubled at the octave, solidly duple, but harmonically ambiguous almost to the end (see Ex. 6).

The close of Example 5 of course prepares for the coming section in Ab--though it misleadingly implies Ab minor. This is the sort of static

passage Clementi had always reserved for the ends of movements or half movements (as for example in the first movement of the G-minor Sonata Op. 7, No. 3); a pedal point (here dominant) is attacked from above and below by semitone appoggiaturas. In the music to come, that prominent Fb is put to good use; though the mode is indisputably major, Clementi insists, with remarkable effect, upon a lowered sixth degree (see Ex. 7).

There follows an expansive Largo in C minor; this is a full "sonata

allegro" and the longest slow movement Clementi had written to date. It begins enigmatically with abrasive dissonances arranged in suspension figures that are resolved in the wrong direction; in the first measure the resolution leads to one of Clementi's favorite "hollow" sonorities lacking the third (see Ex. 8). After enduring that elusive approach to the tonic in the first four measures, the listener is given little time to enjoy it. There is an immediate shift to relative major where an even sixteenth- note pattern is superimposed upon the opening rhythm. But the real

Example 5 Clementi, Sonata Op. 3, No. 6

Allegro Agitaco

A7 L

11vo r N M

1007- --,ALA- "-,M-S.

I I IPF- V4- 1 W cresc.p



3 6 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Fa NO,

dim.

~7 7 kh #? If r:rO:.

1 1

-'I

_

7 i 4r •

-

zf ~' res .




Example 6 Clementi, Sonata Op. 13, No. 6

1

[~ooocftsc4 o?

Efson

-

L r Io 11 -

Gm 1 6 W I I1 F

a I-I

dic.

v v Tenuta

- , ,F ' ..,

'

w

secondary key has not yet been reached; another swift modulation leads to dominant (G) minor, where the "exposition" is eventually brought to a close with a potent new adaptation of one of Clementi's favorite de- vices: eight full measures of pedal point on the local tonic support a

figuration in which an accented Eb produces a very strong (and ten- uously resolved) dominant ninth (see Ex. 9). That Eb, together with the

recurring CQ, comprise semitone appoggiaturas-lower and upper leading-tones, so to speak-to the dominant.



3 I8 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Example 7

Clementi, Sonata Op. 1 3, No. 6

[29]

cresc. dim.

6-? i | k I •'

Many features of this sonata may remind us of Beethoven and no- where more so than the beginning of the final Presto; its melody, presented in imitative fashion, is startlingly like the contredanse tune that was to make several appearances in Beethoven's music, notably in the last movement of the Eroica." And if that initial imitative setting of the

melody, with its afterbeats and dominant pedal-consistently coupled with its leading tone--bears Clementi's personal stamp, what follows is

very much indeed like Beethoven's early piano style:33 the same tune is

fragmented by octave displacements and set against an active, oscillating accompaniment in the middle register (see Ex. io).

This fine sonata, with its driving figurations, its remarkable arsenal of expressive harmonies, and its occasional contrapuntal elaboration, is

quite unlike the virtuoso showpieces Clementi has just given up-and the simple galant music he continues to write almost until i8oo.34 There was to be more music like it in the years to come: in Opp. 25, 40, 47, and 50, for example, and in some numbers of the Gradus ad Parnassum.

32 As early as 1895, J. S. Shedlock called attention to the similarity of Beethoven's contredanse to an earlier Clementi theme, the opening melody of the G-minor Sonata Op. 7, No. 3. The Pianoforte Sonata: Its Origin and Development (London: Methuen & Co., 1895), p. 135. Shedlock wisely refrained, however, from naming that Clementi melody as a "source" for Beethoven's theme. All three tunes belong to a very common I8th-century melodic type; they are largely disjunct melodies and built alternately upon the tones of tonic and dominant chords. Alexander Ringer has maintained that Beethoven literally borrowed the earlier Clementi theme, as well as several other bits of melody from that G-minor sonata, for use in the Eroica. "Clementi and the Eroica," The Musical Quarterly, XLVII (i96i), 454-68.

33 See, for example, Op. 2, No. 2, first movement, mm. 73 ff.; Op. io, No. I, first movement, mm. 241 ff.; and Op. io, No. 2, first movement, mm. 55 ff.

34The Sonatinas of Op. 36, well known to most piano students, were first published in 1797.




Example Ii shows the slow introduction and opening bars of the Alle-

gro of the Sonata Op. 34, No. 2, published in 1795. When the subject of this chromatic opening fugato is transferred to the Allegro, it carries with it some of its fugal proclivities. The repeated tones in measures 13-14 are simulated imitative entries, and the lower voices rather

consistently sound more like countersubjects than accompaniments. Some of the ubiquitous semitone movement of the Introduction also

reappears in the Allegro, but in the more moderate form of Clementi's characteristic nonharmonic "leading tones." These appear prominently at the close of the Largo (where the dominant is approached from semi- tones above and below), and again in measures 19-23, where Clementi is willing to tolerate abrasive sounds like that on the last beats of measures 19 and 2 for the sake of that semitone inflection of the dominant.

When did Clementi begin to write this kind of music, and what sort

Example 8

Clementi, Sonata Op. 13, No. 6, Second Movement

Largo e Sostenuto

f i, f s f V

I In

- _ - - T-

_

1'? __ _




Example 9

Clementi, Sonata Op. 1 3, No. 6, Second Movement

sp f S :

Clementi, Sonata Op. 3, No. 6, Third Movement

V 4

Pr




' d$m. P

U I cres.c. "

dim.

"l I a




Example i

Clementi, Sonata Op. 34, No. 2

Largo e Sostenuto

U

"..... "..FA' 11 a!

?F Fi I

o ,-bk I I sempre legato

sf rinf . sf sf sf

dim.

[5].,"-: 15 f sf sf

Allegro con Fuoco

s -- d-P im.,.

ten

[20]

[,ol

cresc.

OP-d -I I I - i - ? I i

-]•"so i • T

"

lrIII

I

" I IP he

f ,f



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER)) 323

of influences could conceivably underlie it? The first question is easy enough to answer. In the first sonatas of Op. 5 and Op. 6, published in Paris in 1780-81, Clementi writes opening slow movements that show a dramatic escalation of harmonic complexities and contrapuntal tech-

nique; this is all the more surprising in that it occurs in accompanied sonatas-such pieces were expected to be uncomplicated and fashionably epicene. Example I2 shows a very brief excerpt from the Op. 5 Sonata in Bb major. This is part of the dominant preparation for the return of the opening theme; a low-lying tessitura and stretto imitation combine with a VII7 chord over a dominant pedal, followed by an elaborately resolved augmented sixth (apparently Clementi's first) to produce a most lugubrious effect.

Such grandiloquent pathos is without precedent in Clementi's earlier work, and it might seem puzzling that he should inject his music with such a stiff dose of counterpoint and recherche harmonies just as he presents himself for the first time to the Parisian musical public-hardly known, in those days of Encyclopedist influence, to favor such things. But Clementi himself suggests that at the time of Op. 5 and Op. 6 he was in the grip of a special musical preoccupation. For in addition to five sonatas and a four-hand duet, these publications contain between them six extended fugues that show a determined and resourceful imitation of late Baroque practice. At some points they seem, so to speak, too

Baroque. Clementi tends to keep all the voices going too much of the time, and his long stretches of modulation and harmonic sequence are sometimes overdone; for a moment one episode in the third fugue of Op. 5 seems to swerve disconcertingly from the late Baroque to C6sar Franck. But in these pieces as a whole there can be little doubt, I believe, as to whom Clementi is imitating; Example 13 shows some of the Bb Fugue of Op. 5.

Several features of this passage (and another very similar one, mm. 84-95) seem unmistakably like Bach: the deceptive cadences (mm. 44- 45 and 45-46), the double suspension producing a dominant ninth (m. 49), and the movement to diminished seventh chords and ninth chords on the first beats of measures 50, 51, and 53. The stylistic similarities here are striking enough to invite speculation as to specific models; the best candidates seem to be both the Prelude and Fugue in Bb minor of Volume I of the Well-Tempered Clavier-in this case Bach has con- nected the pair with rather a clear motivic relation. The eighth-note motive in the first half of Example i3 is very like that of the Bach Fugue (see Ex. 14a); in measures 48 ff. the motive takes the form in which it appears in the Prelude (Ex. i4b). Here, as in the Clementi Fugue, the motive almost invariably moves resolutely to unstable sonorities on strong beats, including one ninth chord (m. 17) and two diminished sevenths (mm. 17 and 18).




Example I 2

Clementi, Sonata in Bb Op. 5 [Larghetto con espressione]

P2 /,

l 0.•0,- .

--:

V• , A

I.

,fW ,I M V a.

.I , JL I. JI J , P-on IJ

nrn AFe

How likely is it that a young musician in 78o0, having spent all his

days in Rome, Dorset, and London, should know the Well-Tempered Clavier? Of all Bach's unpublished music, this probably achieved the widest circulation in manuscript in the i8th century. But Italy and En-

gland were very far indeed from those centers, especially Leipzig and



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER " 325

Example 13

Clementi, Fugue in Bb Op. 5 Allegro

1441

L T-tl I r

639' -6

t.,j j. •

j .1 -I _] .

?

-

"-' -

?- ? -M

a Ad

? r • r c:' '

'-

Berlin, where J. S. Bach was remembered and his music preserved. Per- haps J. C. Bach, who arrived in London in 1762, took some of his father's music with him. Charles Burney probably brought a manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier, given to him by C. P. E. Bach, to London about a decade later,35 and his rival, Sir John Hawkins, quoted a bit of the Goldberg Variations in his History, published in 1774. But for all that, Bach was very little known in England before at least the later 178O's.

Here we should pause to recall something of the history of one of the earliest important Bach manuscripts to arrive in England: the "Lon- don Autograph" of the Well-Tempered Clavier. (This manuscript contains all but three of the Preludes and Fugues of the second volume, and as Walter Emery has shown, though the major part of the document is autograph, a small section is in the hand of Anna Magdalena

35 See Hans F. Redlich, "The Bach Revival in England (1750-1850)," Hinrichbsen's Musical Year Book, VII (i952), z88.




Example 14

Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I

a. Fugue in Bb minor

1421 mm

b..Prelude inBb "minor

[i61

W I FIR "R.

At/

W ._

6 " o" Fi '

I I PW

loft- "r;' •* -

b. Prlue-nIB mno -o- -#-a



CLEMENTI, VIRTUOSITY, AND THE "GERMAN MANNER"7 327

Bach.)36 The British Museum acquired this manuscript, the Add. 35021, in 1896 from Eliza Wesley, daughter of Samuel Wesley; previous own- ers had been a Mrs. Edward Clarke, Sarah Emett, and her father, the blind musician J. G. Emett, who in 1842 had the manuscript authen- ticated by Mendelssohn, then in England. Emett had bought it, his

daughter reports, in 1832 at a sale in Evesham of the effects of Muzio Clementi.37

It was almost surely this manuscript Clementi used when preparing the Second Part of his Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano- forte in i82o. Bach's C-major Fugue of Volume II is printed in that collection under the heading, "Fuge by J. S. Bach; from an Original MS of the author." As Walter Emery has pointed out, the readings in Clementi's edition correspond in almost every particular with the London Auto-

graph, and the English fingerings he has added almost exactly match those written into the manuscript itself in pencil-doubtless by Cle- menti.38 It can easily be shown, furthermore, that Clementi's interest in the various Bachs began long before 1820. The first three volumes of his

anthology, Practical Harmony, published in I8oI, 1802, and 1811, are in fact a kind of rogues' gallery of them; besides Johann Sebastian, Johann Christian, and Carl Philipp Emanuel, there are represented Wil- helm Friedemann and Johann Christoph Bach, quite unknown in En-

gland at the time. These three volumes contain, in all, five compositions of J. S. Bach: the Prelude in G major (BWV 572), the fifth French Suite (with its movements rearranged), the D-minor Toccata (BWV 913), and two fugues (BWV 944, 2; and 953). In every case, inciden- tally, these publications seem to be first editions that have so far gone unrecognized.39

If we can trace Clementi's acquaintance with Bach back to about

I8oo, what about twenty years earlier when he wrote those fugues of Opp. 5 and 6? One bit of evidence is offered by a manuscript, in Cle- menti's hand, of Bach's Duet BWV 805. Now in the Musikabteilung of

36Walter Emery, "The London Autograph of 'The Forty-Eight,"' Music and Letters, XXXIV (i953), 14 ff.

87 This information is included in the collection B.M. Add. 35022, consisting of letters and memoranda compiled by Eliza Wesley.

38Walter Emery, "The London Autograph," p. io8. The Second Part of Clementi's Introduction also contains the CQ-minor Fugue from Volume II--one of the three missing from the London autograph. It is possible that the manuscript was complete when Clementi had it and that his edition of this fugue preserves the readings of the lost portion.

39 These editions are not listed in Wolfgang Schmieder's Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach (Leipzig, 1950), in Max Schneider's "Verzeichnis der bis zum Jahre 185I gedruckten (und geschriebenen in Handel gewesenen) Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach," Bach-Jabrbuch, 1906, pp. 84-I13, or in Georg Kinsky's Die Originalausgaben der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Vienna, Leipzig, Ziirich, i937). Nor do these sources cite any other editions of these pieces as early as Clementi's.




the Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung preussischer Kulturbesitz in West Ber-

lin,40 this manuscript was presented to Aloys Fuchs in Vienna by J. B. Cramer in 1837. There is no watermark evidence to assist us in dating this document, but its handwriting is similar to that of Clementi's earlier

manuscripts, and it appears likely that it originates from the period 1783-84, when the young Cramer was Clementi's student. And there is reason to believe that the London Autograph of the Well-Tempered Clavier was in Clementi's possession well before this time. In a brief article on that manuscript, written in 1953, Constance Richardson mentioned that "Clementi is said to have come across this copy in the library of his patron Peter Beckford."41 I have not yet been able to discover by whom or on what authority Clementi is said to have found the manu-

script there; but if the claim is accurate, this must have happened before

i774, when Clementi left Beckford's home in Dorset under circum- stances that make any further friendly relations between the two men

unlikely.42 Indirect confirmation of Miss Richardson's report, and the most persuasive evidence we have of Clementi's early preoccupation with Bach, are supplied by the pianist Amadee Mereaux; during the conversation he had with Clementi in 1820, he records, the Italian told him something of his adolescent years (i.e. before 1774) at Beckford's estate:

He devoted eight hours a day to the harpsichord; and if, because of social obligations to Sir Beckford he was forced to reduce the length of his daily practice, he took note of the deficit and repaid it the following day. Some- times he was obliged to work twelve or fourteen successive hours to remain abreast of the daily regime he had imposed upon himself. It was the works of Sebastian and Emanuel Bach, of Handel and Scarlatti that he practiced and studied continually.43

As the London Autograph contains only Volume II of the Well-

Tempered Clavier, we still cannot directly account for that peculiar similarity of those sections of Clementi's Op. 5 Fugue to the Bb-minor Prelude and Fugue from Volume I. But the first volume was probably circulating in London in 1774-80 when Clementi was there; Charles

Burney apparently had a manuscript of it, and by 1788 Queen Char- lotte had a copy prepared for herself, perhaps by August Kollman.44 At any rate, the resemblance between Clementi and Bach in this instance seems somewhat too close for coincidence, and perhaps Clementi showed

40 Mus. ms. Bach P 165. I am indebted to Mr. Richard Jones of Oxford Uni-

versity for calling my attention to this manuscript. 41 Music and Letters, XXXIV (1953), 39- 42 Clementi seems to have quit Dorset under a cloud of scandal involving himself

and Peter Beckford's young bride Louisa. The evidence for this-circumstantial, to be sure-is too involved for presentation here. Full disclosure is made in my study of

Clementi, to appear in the near future at Oxford University Press. 43 A. Mereaux, Les Clavecinistes, p. 75. See also fn. 28 above.

44 See Hans F. Redlich, "The Bach Revival," p. 290.




he was aware of the problem when in 1826 he published revised versions of the Op. 5 Fugues in Volume III of the Gradus ad Parnassum. By that time both parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier were, of course, easily available in several printed editions, and the offending passages in Cle- menti's fugue have been removed.

An anonymous critic, writing from Italy for Cramer's Magazin der Musik in 1787, recognized something of the new seriousness and con-

trapuntal integrity Clementi's music began to show during his first continental tour in 178o-83: Clementi surely learned a great deal during his stay in Vienna from many German composers, and especially from Haydn, Mozart, and Kozeluch; for from that time on his newest works bear the stamp of the German manner and of a more correct development of the middle parts. There is much genius in this man, but for its nurture he has to thank not his fellow countrymen- who rate him above all performers and composers of today-but the Ger- mans.45

This perceptive appraisal seems in need of only minor adjustment; signs of the "German manner" began before Clementi reached Vienna, and

they occur in conjunction with his imitation, not, in the first place, of any contemporary composers, but, seemingly, of J. S. Bach. Clementi's confrontation with Bach evidently occurred some years before Mo- zart's, and it had an equally decisive effect upon the future course of his

style. Many of Clementi's mature works continue to reflect his study of Bach. The introductory fugato in the Op. 34, No. 2, Sonata (see Ex. Ii above) is a case in point; its opening subject is in fact almost identical with that of the D-major Fugue in Volume II of the Well-Tempered Clavier-which Clementi would have had no trouble consulting, since he owned an autograph of the piece.

Since about the beginning of the present century, some scholars have, even in the absence of most of Clementi's music, seen his work as a

powerful influence in the mainstream of European music at the turn of the i9th century. First was J. S. Shedlock, whose book The Pianoforte Sonata (1895) includes rather an acute appraisal of Clementi's style (based on very incomplete evidence) and many suggestive comparisons with the future keyboard writing of Beethoven. And in three articles printed in The Musical Quarterly in 1923, 1931, and 1932, Georges de Saint-Foix also portrayed the Italian as an innovative, stylistically pre- cocious composer whose influence extended decisively to Beethoven and beyond. But most enthusiastic of all, surely, was Fausto Torrefranca, In his massive volume Le Origini italiane del romanticismo musicale,

45C. F. Cramer, Magazin der Musik, zweiter Jahrgang, zweite Hiilfte (1786), 1378-79. (This second Jahrgang of Cramer's journal extended over several years, and though its "second half" bears the date 1786, it includes contributions from late in the following year; the one cited here is dated July 26, 1787.) The term translated here as "the German manner" is "deutscher Zuschnitt."




that monument of erudition and childishness, he pointed to Clementi as the central figure in an involved transaction whereby the Italians presented to the world the gift of romantic music.46 All of these writers based their claims on Clementi's large-scale, harmonically adventurous, contrapuntally active sonatas, most of them in minor keys-that is, on the kind of music he began to write, evidently under the spell of Bach, during his first continental tour. It is somewhat ironic that the stylistic traits Torrefranca most admired in Clementi, and which he urged as evidence for an Italian origin for Romantic keyboard writing, should be traceable to this Italian's encounter with the most German of the sources of German Romantic music.

As Ludwig Berger suggested in I829, Clementi made something of a miscalculation when he chose his music for the competition with Mozart. That the entertainment that Christmas Eve was to be a contest, as we have seen, came to him as a surprise. But in any case, Clementi probably did what he thought was expected of him; despite the promising new

developments in his recent compositions, for this occasion he simply put on another of the glittering virtuoso performances that had won him

praise in London and Paris. He had no way of predicting that the other

participant-whom he probably knew only as a former child prodigy- should turn out to be so important or that his judgment of what happened that evening would be repeated for the next two centuries.

Yale University 46 Fausto Torrefranca, Le Origini italiane del romanticismo musicale, pp. 6o, 362-

63, 402, 527, 529, 581, 663, and 726. On p. 113 Torrefranca speaks of the motivation of his book with charming candor: "Ma io amo mia terra e la sua gloria musicale con un ardore feroce e orgoglioso."



clementi, virtuosity, and the "german manner"

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