Books and Journals
SKU: UT.QC-2
Composed by Rohan H.
Stewart-MacDonald.
Hardback (Cloth Hard
Cover with Jacket).
Quaderni Clementiani.
Classical. Books and
Journals. Ut Orpheus #QC
2. Published by Ut
Orpheus (UT.QC-2).
ISBN 9788881094585.
6.5 x 9.5
inches.
The career
of Muzio Clementi
(1752-1832) spanned the
lives of both Mozart and
Beethoven and was
exceptionally diverse. It
encompassed performing on
the keyboard, conducting,
teaching, business
activities and
composition in the realms
of keyboard, chamber and
orchestral music. This
book focuses on
Clementi’s keyboard
sonatas and aims to shed
new light on their
relationship with the
complex cross-currents of
late eighteenth-century
musical style, both in
England, where Clementi
was active for much of
his career, and the
continent, which he
visited
periodically.
The
first chapter summarises
Clementi’s
historical reputation as
it developed in the
nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and evaluates
the impact on it of the
significant developments
in Clementi scholarship
since 2000. The aim is to
stress the deficiencies
of the established view
of Clementi as a keyboard
pedagogue and to stress
the importance of
liberating him as much as
possible from this
ingrained perception.
This is attempted, in the
remaining chapters,
through close, analytical
readings of a variety of
keyboard sonatas from all
stages of his career,
comparing them with a
range of works by Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven and
other contemporaries such
as Jan Ladislav Dussek
(1760-1812). The
comparisons are made from
the perspectives of
distinguishing features
of Clementi’s style
such as his unusually
intense deployment of
strict counterpoint in
the later keyboard
sonatas; his cultivation
of irregularity in
recapitulations; his use
of the
‘three-key’
exposition in the
middle-to-later stages of
his career that seems to
anticipate
nineteenth-century
developments, and also
his assimilation of
heightened virtuosity
into the earlier sonatas,
often in the form of
cadenzas more suggestive
of the keyboard concerto
– a genre Clementi
seems, rather strangely,
to have neglected. The
book has been envisaged
as a direct response, not
only to the most recent
scholarship on Clementi,
but also to current
approaches to
eighteenth-century music
in general, including the
interdisciplinary work of
Annette Richards.
Musical Clementi
