Mozart and Clementi lock horns in a royal piano duel
The history books are not short of great performers and composers whose burgeoning careers as musical prodigies were micromanaged at every degree by their parents. The father of Muzio Clementi, however, did exactly the opposite. When Muzio was 14, his father agreed to let Sir Peter Beckford, a wealthy Englishman visiting Italy, take his son away to his estate in Dorset. There, young Muzio would entertain Beckford’s family in return for a sponsored musical education, with Sir Peter later claiming to have ‘bought’ Clementi for a seven-year period.
Those seven years, however dubiously arranged, were crucial in honing the spectacular keyboard technique which later brought Clementi face to face with another precociously talented musician – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In December 1781, Clementi, now aged 29, was visiting Vienna as part of a concert tour in Europe. An invitation arrived from Viennese court circles: would Clementi care to play for the
Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and his guests on Christmas Eve?
Mozart, aged 25 and working as a freelance musician in Vienna, received