Clementi: Complete Sonatas for fortepiano The early years Muzio Clementi, born in Rome in 1752, began his musical studies early in life and immediately showed exceptional talent. His teachers, who included Antonio Boroni, Giovanni Cordicelli, Giuseppe Santarelli and Gaetano Carpani, were some of the most respected musicians in Rome during the 1750s and 1760s, and Clementi enjoyed a rich and comprehensive musical education, particularly in the field of counterpoint. Boroni and Santarelli, a papal cantor and a priest, were both pupils of Giovanni Battista Martini (also known as Padre Martini), Italy’s most famous music theorist during the 18th century. Cordicelli, with whom Clementi began studying figured bass (drawing heavily on models by Corelli), was the chapel master of Santa Maria in Trastevere and San Girolamo della Carità. Carpani, the chapel master of the Chiesa del Gesù for over 50 years, dedicated his musical activities to the performance and composition of sacred music, writing Masses and Vespers that were generally accompanied by solo organ. One commentator wrote: ‘He who entered [the Chiesa del Gesù] for a brief prayer, would stay, astonished, to listen to his Masses and Vespers on the organ and would leave saying: this music by Carpani, played in this church, makes you feel as if you were in Heaven’. In 1764, at the age of 12, Clementi passed the exam to be admitted as an organist to the Congregation of Musicians of Santa Cecilia, allowing him to work as a musician in the churches of Rome. During that same year, his sacred composition Martirio de’ gloriosi Santi Giuliano e Celso was performed in the Oratorio dei Filippini, and in January 1766 he was employed as an organist at the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Damaso. Clementi’s precocious career would have been destined to follow the usual course of young musicians in 18th-century Rome if Peter Beckford, a rich English gentleman, had not arrived in Rome in 1766. Beckford, who had travelled to the city to admire the ancient Classical monuments and have his portrait painted by the most famous painter of the era, Pompeo Batoni, organised two open-air concerts during his visit – one in the Piazza di Spagna and one at the Porto di Ripetta. During his visit, he encountered Clementi and, impressed by his abilities, arranged with his father to take the 13year-old musician back to England in exchange for a sum of money that would be paid every three months. At the end of 1766 or, most probably, at the start of the following year, Muzio went to stay in Steepleton Iwerne, Beckford’s estate in Dorset, where he lived until his contract expired.
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