Review Summary: The First Virtuoso.
Make Forgotten Composers Great Again. No. 3
Relative to the epoch of the First Viennese School, the next biggest fish in the pond after Joseph Haydn and C.P.E. Bach must be Muzio Clementi. Born in Rome two years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach (as you can see the death date of J.S. is so important that it is used as an axis around which specific events and eras are cast), Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Saverio Clementi lived perhaps the most successful and prosperous life of any composer in the high Classical/early Romantic eras.
It all began when Sir Peter Beckford of the illustrious and ultra-rich Beckford family, which among others boasts notable figures such as a Lord Mayor of London, a Colonel and Sheriff of London, a Governor of the colony of Jamaica, a Speaker of the House Assembly in Jamaica, a member of the British house of Commons, and a famous novelist, visited Rome in 1766. Something of an eccentric millionaire with a connoisseur’s interest in art and music, Beckford became so enamored with the young Clementi’s musical talent that he persuaded Clementi’s father to let him sequester Muzio back to his estate in England for a quarterly sum until the boy reached twenty-one. Later Beckford would claim that he “purchased” young Muzio for seven years. In return, Clementi would be expected to provide musical entertainment for the estate. During these years Clementi practiced no less than eight hours per day and relentlessly studied the works of J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti.
Clementi would never again live in Italy. After his contract with Beckford expired, Clementi toured England and the continent twice traveling far and wide from Paris to St. Petersburg to Vienna dazzling his audiences with his special blend of virtuosity, boldness, and depth of feeling. By the 1780s, Clementi was a household name. But posterity would remember Clementi for much more than his career as a performer, who as such is distinguished as the first ever pianist to develop a legato style. For good reason, Clementi has been called the founder of the modern piano school. During the 1780s, Clementi began taking on pupils, several of whom, such as Ignaz Moscheles, Johann Baptist Cramer, and John Field, would go on to become famous pianists and composers. There’s more. In the 1790s Clementi founded what would become a famous music publishing and piano manufacturing company, and himself had much to do with the improvements of the then quite feeble instrument.
During the last twenty-five years of his life Clementi seldom performed, for he was a rich man. Instead, Clementi turned his mind to pursuits of the scholarly, composition, and the countryside. Well-liked and an all-around good-natured man, Clementi lived to the ripe old age of eighty and was so esteemed in England that the Londoners honored him with a burial in Westminster Abby.
But let’s get down to brass tacks shall we, Clementi the composer. He was prolific. Clementi wrote over twenty symphonies, a large amount of miscellaneous music, a series of one hundred piano studies
Gradus Ad Parnassum on which the modern art of piano playing rests, and his famous
School of Piano Playing which Beethoven highly esteemed and recommended to students as late as the year before his death. But it is Clementi’s sonatas for the piano, of which he wrote sixty-four, that deserve the most recognition. Not only are they more pianistically brilliant and musically sophisticated than Mozart’s, their daring harmonic progressions and modern keyboard passages are surprisingly Romantic. It can even be said that Clementi’s piano sonatas anticipate Beethoven, who, again, esteemed Clementi very highly and assigned to him “the very foremost rank.” One of Clementi’s best compositions, the two movement Piano Sonata in B Minor Op. 40/2, written in 1802, illustrates these truths.
The first movement of Op. 40/2,
Molto adagio e sostenuto-allegro con fuoco, is at once anxious and brooding yet pulsing and heated. The piece opens with a capricious quasi-rhapsodic introduction in 6/8 which alternates between two moods, tortured and tranquil. To begin, notice the rhythm. Briefly, in 6/8 you count to three twice: 1-2-3 1-2-3. Here, Clementi attacks on 1 and 3. The rhythm sounds thus: Daaaa Da, Daaaa Da, Daaaa Da, Daaaa, and so on and so forth. The irregular nature of a rhythm in 6/8 that attacks on 1 and 3 evokes a lack of stability and an underlying presence of tension. Clementi wastes no time introducing non-key harmonies. The first measure sees the melody lilt downwards in thirds into a quite unusual DMaj7 in the 2nd measure with the tonic notes delayed for effect. Moving on, the third measure sees a non-chordal E-natural floating above a b minor harmony, and then a very dissonant tri-tone harboring V2/V, C#7 with B in the bass. This harmony includes two non-scale tones, E# and G#, which then lead into the stability of B minor’s dominant, an F# chord in measure four. Music theory stuff aside, Clementi creates an atmosphere of slow, foreboding anguish, a bog of messy depression and suffering. Measures five through eight resolve no tension. There are diminished harmonies, an A#, an E#, and the same lilting melody drifting downwards in thirds.
It goes without saying that Clementi was not a romantic. Clementi’s suffering is not for its own sake. Interrupted between melancholic episodes is a respite, albeit brief, of tranquility. Measure twelve sees the beginning of an upward rising line starting on A major which sees us modulate to G major in m.14 and then D major in m.16. Nor has Clementi changed his rhythmic attack. We still move forward on 1 and 3. What was once heavy, tethered by chains, is now light and free. Happy are we, for we feel peace, even joy. But not so fast. Measure twenty-one introduces a diminished C chord, measure twenty-three a ridiculously far A# minor chord and then a G# diminished chord. Peace on 1 and 3 is over, and torment has returned. The finale of the introduction sees more unstable harmonies, note the F#-G#-B-D-E# three measures before the end which can be construed either as G# half-diminished or E# fully diminished, and the use of pedal F#s that exist to add anxiety to our suffering. The introduction ends on an agonizing V7 three measures in the making.
With the introduction over the sonata proper beings. Clementi bursts out of the gates in an allegro more akin to
furioso than
con fuoco. The main theme utilizes the techniques of the introduction; the harmonies are similar and so are the rhythms. But if we were sodden with deep sea blues and bleak blacks before, now we’re untethered in piercing, full of rage reds. Of particular interest is a series of virtuosic trills that don’t exist as ornamentation but as an integral part of the line. When I mentioned that Clementi’s sonatas feature figurations more brilliant than Mozart’s, this is what I mean. The trills occur on the tonic notes of a D major chord that twice rise from D to F# separated by two measures. Our second theme is reminiscent of the tranquility felt in the introduction. Now in D major, the melody glides along in a graceful stepwise motion only leaping in chordal thirds floating above simple accompaniment in the bass. As expected, the tranquility only lasts for a short while, twelve measures to be exact. From here Clementi races to the end of the exposition refusing to cadence until the very last measure. As such, Clementi has us exist in a quasi tri-dimensional realm of b minor, F# major, and C# major. B minor dances in the melody above what looks like an F# major scale except without the note that defines the chord, A#. Meanwhile Clementi introduces a large amount of E#s which at first serve as mere accidentals to F#, until you realize that Clementi is going to use this note to cadence. Effectively, Clementi is preparing our ear for the eventual arrival of F# Major.
The development sees Clementi skillfully rework the themes in a variety of harmonies and keys, and it is here you can see the influence Clementi had on Beethoven. We begin in G major, then float through a series of three fully diminished chords, find our way to d minor, C# minor, e minor, and back to d minor. From here Clementi flies through a series of chords and keys too various to list, but believe me they are many and quite harmonically distant. The music is quite exciting, quite Beethovenian, and it keeps us on our toes. The recapitulation sees an interesting development in the second theme. Instead of sounding the second theme in B minor, which would be the proper key according to sonata principals, Clementi sounds it in the sub mediant G Major before rapaciously hurling us towards a fortissimo cadence in B minor to end the movement.
The second movement again opens up with an introduction,
largo mesto e patetico, it is the calm after the storm. Perhaps calm is the wrong word. The vigor of the first movement has exhausted us, yet we feel a deep sense of yearning. The melody lilts ahead slowly, achingly. Clementi’s energy returns, however. Bursting once again out of the gates in an allegro pace in 6/8, the theme feels less angry, but still anxious and hurried. There’s more grace in the melodies, and Clementi’s pianistic figurations are quite exquisite. Nevertheless, we lack a sense of home as we travel through various and sundry harmonies and keys tumbling through accidental upon accidental along the way. From here, twice more does Clementi alternate between moods. The introduction, tempo primo, returns briefly before flying into a lighting paced presto that charges ahead towards the final cadence at such a speed it practically crashes into the barn. It’s no surprise that Beethoven felt a kindred spirit with Clementi.
Unfortunately for our discipline Clementi lived long enough to find himself an anachronism. By the time Clementi passed in 1832, Liszt, with his stunning virtuosity and over the top bravura, was taking Europe by storm. The old master, with his emphasis on a controlled hand that never lifted high off the keyboard, was considered an old yawn-inducing fuddy-duddy. The Romantics and their audiences yearned for a kind of showmanship and demonic virtuosity that Clementi could not offer, and just like Haydn and C.P.E. Bach before him, the Romantics believed Clementi struck out in a game he never intended to play in. Ironically, if Mozart was the first great
pianist, Clementi was the first great
virtuoso. Iganz Moscheles, one of the most astute musical minds of the 19th century, once analyzed what Clementi had brought to the piano, “the cultivation of amazing powers of execution, overwrought sentimentality, and the production of the most piquant effects”, in effect a school of playing that was being taken up by all the younger virtuosos. Nevertheless, many of the champions of absolute music understood Clementi’s true value. Among others, Clementi’s list of admirers included Clara Schumann, Brahms, and Beethoven, who in his own words put it best, “They who thoroughly study Clementi, at the same time make themselves acquainted with Mozart and other composers; but the converse is not the fact.”
