The piano music of Muzio Clementi, or at least his pedagogical Gradus ad Parnassum, has been quite well known to generations of ambitious keyboard players. Clementi himself, born in Rome in 1752, was taken as a boy to England by Peter Beckford, cousin of the eccentric William Beckford. There he developed his abilities as a performer. His subsequent career brought success as a composer, teacher and pianist, and later as a manufacturer of pianos, an enterprise in which he employed the Irish pianist and composer John Field. He died at Evesham in 1832.

Piano Music

Clementi wrote a great deal of music for the piano, including more than a hundred sonatas. He published a number of pedagogical works, of which the Introduction to the Art of Playing the Piano Forte and Gradus ad Parnassum are the best known.