ABSTRACT
Muzio Clementi, the celebrated piano virtuoso and keyboard composer – later piano builder and music publisher – moved from obscure beginnings in Rome to build his career as a central participant in the most vibrant musical scene in the world, London. The Italian Opera in the Haymarket each season attracted the best singers and instrumentalists from the continent. And in the 1770s and 1780s, London concert life was singularly rich. This was the only city in the world with established concert series, and the array of private and semi-private and benefit concerts was without equal. London was, more particularly, an ideal destination for an ambitious keyboard player. This was the only city where solo harpsichord or piano playing were a regular feature of public concerts. And when Clementi arrived in 1773–1774 London had become the foremost center of piano manufacture and publication of piano music. Clementi arrived in London with little advance reputation, and during his first five years in the city the London musical world took little notice of him. One might compare Clementi’s introduction to London with Mozart’s arrival in Vienna in 1781. Mozart came with the Salzburg court, but rebelled against his employers to become a free agent. Yet his court connection gained him almost immediate admission to the aristocratic musical life of the city. A decade later, Beethoven, another ambitious pianist-composer, came from the Electoral court at Bonn and quickly met with similar success with his new Viennese patrons. Clementi arrived in London with no aristocratic backing at a time when it was only gradually becoming possible for musicians to leave the patronage system behind and address their efforts to an anonymous, largely middle-class public. London was the first city where such a such a career became possible. Clementi simply arrived on the scene a trifle too early to fashion a nineteenth-century sort of career as a public musician. But he soon became one of the first musicians to score a solid success in this novel social milieu of music-making.
