40 Fun Facts About Muzio Clementi

Which 1960s pop hit, later a number one for Phil Collins, borrows its tune from a Clementi sonatina?

A Groovy Kind of Love takes its melody from the rondo of a sonatina Clementi published in 1797. Songwriters Toni Wine and Carole Bayer Sager added the words and changed his music only slightly.

On which festive date in 1781 did Muzio Clementi and Mozart duel at the keyboard before an emperor?

Christmas Eve 1781 was the night of the contest, staged as entertainment for the emperor's guests. Both men had to improvise and then perform pieces of their own.

Muzio Clementi died in the market town of Evesham but was given a public burial in which famous church?

Westminster Abbey laid him in its south cloister, and three of his own star pupils walked with the coffin. His gravestone speaks of a fame acknowledged throughout Europe.

Which former British colony in Asia has a town called Clementi, named after a governor descended from Muzio Clementi?

Singapore's Clementi town honours a governor of the Straits Settlements from the composer's family: either his grandson Sir Cecil Clementi Smith or his great-grandson Sir Cecil Clementi.

Mozart borrowed the opening motif of a Clementi sonata for the overture to which of his operas?

The Magic Flute overture reuses the opening of Clementi's B-flat major sonata. Clementi later added a note to reprints pointing out that his sonata was written ten years before the opera.

Which composer, a great admirer of Muzio Clementi, granted him the English publishing rights to his music in 1807?

Ludwig van Beethoven often kept a volume of Clementi's sonatas on his music stand and had his nephew Karl schooled on them for years. Clementi's editing of his scores, though, has drawn criticism.

Before the piano took over, the teenage Muzio Clementi reportedly practised eight hours a day at which instrument?

Harpsichord practice filled his seven years on a patron's estate in Dorset, where his musical education was paid for in return for entertaining the household.

What disaster struck Muzio Clementi's London piano warehouses in March 1807, costing the firm about £40,000?

A fire destroyed the warehouses, but the business went on to flourish, and in 1810 Clementi gave up performing to concentrate on composing and building instruments.

For which French queen did Muzio Clementi perform in Paris while touring Europe as a young keyboard star?

Marie Antoinette heard him at the start of a three-year tour that set out in 1780 and went on to Munich and Salzburg.

In which Italian city, then part of the Papal States, was the composer Muzio Clementi born and raised?

Rome was home until he was 14, when a wealthy English visitor persuaded his father to let the boy leave for seven years of study in England.

Which Habsburg emperor pitted Muzio Clementi against Mozart in a keyboard contest to entertain his guests?

Joseph II took part himself, choosing the theme for variations the two virtuosos had to improvise in turn, as Clementi later recalled with admiration for his opponent.

Which Irish pupil of Muzio Clementi, a salesman for his master's pianos, is credited with inventing the nocturne?

John Field arrived from Dublin as a boy and became a sought-after concert pianist under Clementi, who also published his first compositions.

Which collection of 100 piano studies did Muzio Clementi complete in 1826 as the summit of his teaching?

Gradus ad Parnassum means steps to Parnassus, the mountain of the Muses. Clementi travelled to Paris hoping to issue its final volume at the same moment in Paris, London and Leipzig.

In a letter to his father, Mozart sneered that his rival Muzio Clementi was 'a mere' what?

Mechanic was Mozart's jab: he granted that Clementi's right hand was brilliant but claimed he had not a kreuzer's worth of taste or feeling.

Which patriotic British tune did Muzio Clementi weave into his Symphony No. 3, known as the 'Great National'?

God Save the King runs through the symphony, one of the few that scholars could rebuild from manuscript fragments after most of his orchestral scores were lost.

Which Polish-born composer made his own piano pupils practise Muzio Clementi's preludes and exercises?

Frédéric Chopin credited the exercises with exceptional virtues and often set them for his students, though he was only a young man of 22 when Clementi died.

Sir David Clementi, a descendant of composer Muzio Clementi, chaired which British broadcaster from 2017?

The BBC chairman had earlier served as deputy governor of the Bank of England, a long way from the keyboard that made his ancestor famous.

In which city did Muzio Clementi and Mozart meet for their famous keyboard duel during Clementi's European tour?

Vienna followed Paris, Munich and Salzburg, the town where Mozart was born, on a tour that kept Clementi away from England for three years.

What was the trade of Nicolò Clementi, father of the composer Muzio Clementi and of six younger children?

Silversmith Nicolò spotted his eldest son's talent early and arranged private lessons with a relative who was a church music director.

Carl Czerny used Muzio Clementi's sonatas to train which boy, later the most celebrated pianist of the 19th century?

Franz Liszt was brought to Czerny by his father as a pale, sickly-looking child, and Czerny was so impressed that he taught the boy free of charge.

Which French composer turned a Clementi beginner sonatina into the 1917 parody Sonatine bureaucratique?

Erik Satie filled the score with jokes, marking the finale Vivache, a pun on the French word for cow. It was his only full-scale parody of a single piece of music.

Which French composer mocked the finger exercises of Clementi and Czerny in the opening piece of Children's Corner?

Claude Debussy dedicated the suite to his three-year-old daughter, known as Chou-Chou, with tender apologies from her father for what followed.

Which Ukrainian-born virtuoso championed Clementi after his wife, Toscanini's daughter, gave him the composer's scores?

Vladimir Horowitz recorded Clementi at home during a long retirement from the stage, and those records helped revive interest in a composer who had seldom been played for half a century.

Which London concert body, co-founded by Muzio Clementi in 1813, gained the right to call itself 'Royal' in 1912?

Philharmonic Society concerts began that March with Clementi at the piano, at a time when London had no permanent orchestra of its own.

Which composer wrote sonatas for Therese Jansen, a star pupil of Muzio Clementi, and was a witness at her wedding?

Joseph Haydn met her on his London visits of the 1790s and also dedicated three demanding piano trios to her. A writer of the day ranked her among Clementi's three finest pupils.

Clementi's pupil Ludwig Berger later taught piano in Berlin to which famous child prodigy and his sibling Fanny?

Felix Mendelssohn and his sister both studied with Berger, who turned to teaching when a nervous disorder in his arm ended his virtuoso career. Berger had earlier followed Clementi to Russia and stayed eight years.

Which church post did the 14-year-old Muzio Clementi win in his home city, shortly before leaving for England?

Organist was his title at San Lorenzo in Damaso, the same parish church where he had been baptised. He had started lessons in figured bass at the age of seven.

Which type of large sacred work had Muzio Clementi already composed by the age of 13, along with a mass?

An oratorio on the martyrdom of Saints Julian and Celsus came first, written while the boy was still taking counterpoint lessons.

Muzio Clementi's twelve Op. 38 waltzes add a triangle and which other hand-held percussion instrument to the piano?

Tambourine and triangle join the piano in all twelve, and Clementi repeated the unusual line-up in a second set of twelve waltzes published as Op. 39.

In which Russian city did Muzio Clementi leave his star Irish pupil behind in 1803 after a sales tour?

St Petersburg made the pupil's name: before leaving, Clementi appointed the young man his deputy there so that he could command similarly high fees.

Which relative did Mozart warn off Clementi's sonatas, fearing their wide stretches would spoil a naturally light hand?

His sister Marianne, the Nannerl who had toured Europe with him as a child prodigy, was told that the leaping runs and big chords might ruin her touch.

Mozart conceded that Muzio Clementi's greatest strength as a player lay in rapid passages built from which interval?

Thirds were Clementi's speciality: at their contest he played his Op. 11 toccata, a showpiece packed with parallel runs of them.

Ignaz Moscheles praised the young Muzio Clementi's playing for a 'most beautiful' example of which keyboard touch?

Legato, the art of joining notes smoothly, became the hallmark of the school Clementi founded and handed down to pupils such as Cramer and Moscheles himself.

Muzio Clementi's playing style was influenced by the keyboard school of which Italian composer of 555 sonatas?

Domenico Scarlatti's dazzling sonatas were on the daily practice list of the teenage Clementi in Dorset, alongside music by J. S. Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel.

Which wealthy Englishman claimed to have 'bought' the teenage Muzio Clementi from his father for seven years?

Peter Beckford, a fox-hunting MP who wrote a famous guide to the sport, took the boy to his country estate in Dorset and paid for his education in quarterly instalments.

On which London shopping street did Muzio Clementi's music publishing and piano firm trade from 1798?

Cheapside was the great commercial thoroughfare of the City of London. Clementi took over an existing firm at number 26, and its pianos soon carried his name.

Muzio Clementi's last published sonata tells the story of which abandoned heroine of classical legend?

Dido, the queen deserted by Aeneas in Virgil's epic, gives the G minor sonata its title, Didone abbandonata, and its opening is headed as a tragic scene. He dedicated it to Luigi Cherubini.

Which recently introduced invention did Muzio Clementi eagerly adopt from 1817 when marking up his scores?

The metronome, which Maelzel had only just brought into wide use, let Clementi print an exact speed above every movement of his final sonatas.

To which country did Muzio Clementi's clergyman son Vincent emigrate, raising two sons who became land surveyors there?

Canada became home to the Rev. Vincent Clementi, who served as the Anglican parson of Lakefield in Ontario and lived until 1899.

At an 1827 London banquet held in his honour, the elderly Muzio Clementi improvised on a theme by which composer?

Handel supplied the theme at the Hotel Albion dinner, which was organised by two admirers, Cramer and Moscheles; Moscheles described the improvisation in his diary.