Muzio Clementi and British Musical Culture

Sources, Performance Practice and Style

Luca Sala, Rohan Stewart-MacDonald, Luca Lévi Sala, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald, Luca Sala, Rohan Stewart-MacDonald, Luca Lévi Sala, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367589783
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351800884
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music publishing, music consumption, concert life, instrument design, performance practice, pedagogy and composition. Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) provides an ideal case-study for continued exploration of this web of relationships. Based in London for much of his life, whilst still maintaining contact with continental developments, Clementi achieved notable success in a diversity of activities that centred mainly on the piano. The present book explores Clementi's multivalent contribution to piano performance, pedagogy, composition and manufacture in relation to British musical life and its international dimensions. An overriding purpose is to interrogate when, how and to what extent a distinctive British musical culture emerged in the early nineteenth century. Much recent work on Clementi has centred on the Italian National Edition of his complete works (MiBACT); several chapters report on this project, whilst continuing to pursue the book's broader themes.

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Britain and Europe in the time of Clementi

Cosmopolitanism and perceptions of national culture

Simon McVeigh

The term ‘cosmopolitan’ has passed into the popular vernacular as a term not only for a certain worldly-wise, tolerant outlook on the world, but more generally as a synonym for sophistication, modernity and contemporary chic, both cool and stylish. Yet there are ambiguities even within these seemingly positive connotations, and the idea of cosmopolitanism has not always been so celebrated. Certainly recent scholarship, not to speak of present-day political movements, have problematised the concept, forcing a reconsideration of the relationship between universalism and the notion of national culture–a debate among historians and political theorists that has ranged from revisionist perspectives on Enlightenment philosophy to contemporary critiques of globalisation. On the face of it, music is among those arts best-placed to transcend narrow nationalism in favour of a spirit of tolerance and shared humanity, but this utopian vision of cosmopolitanism may need to be tempered, or even contested.

Clementi himself has become associated with the term almost as a matter of course: only recently in the title of a collection of conference papers (Muzio Clementi: Cosmopolita della Musica, Bösel and Sala 2004), in the title of an article by Luca Lévi Sala (‘Muzio Clementi: A Virtuoso Cosmopolitan’ 2011) and in a critical assessment (‘Muzio Clementi … fu indubbiamente un compositore cosmopolita’, Gerhard 2004, p. 61). The label is clearly justifiable with regard to Clementi’s mixed nationality (an Italian father, possibly a German mother) and upbringing (in England from the age of 14); it was to be reinforced in adulthood by his European outlook and continental travels as both musician and piano dealer. Clementi’s cultivation of a European persona, through his mastery of multiple languages and his carefully nurtured face-to-face contacts with prominent musicians and publishers across the continent, enhanced his cosmopolitan aura. It can also be argued that Clementi’s musical output, at times eclectically drawing on different compositional traditions, eventually coalesced into an individual universality embodying precisely this cosmopolitan spirit.

Yet at the same time, there have been attempts to link Clementi more directly with British culture: for example, Nicholas Temperley’s identification of a distinct London pianoforte school with Clementi at its head (1984–1987),¹ Anselm Gerhard’s positioning of Clementi’s musical development in the context of British aesthetics and neo-classicism (2002) and Rohan Stewart-MacDonald’s analysis of Clementi’s transformation into an English middle-class gentleman (2010), following in the wake of Leon Plantinga’s pioneering study (1977). Certainly in any debate about the relationship between cosmopolitanism and national musical culture in this period, Britain–as the country that unreservedly accepted the idea that all European music was there to be bought and appropriated–is of particular interest. Fundamental to the discussion must be the question of how and when, during Clementi’s lifetime, the notion of a self-consciously distinctive British musical culture began to be promulgated. First, however, it will be helpful to re-examine how cosmopolitanism itself played out in a broader context.

The notion of cosmopolitanism goes back to classical antiquity; yet even at this early stage it had two different aspects. Most positive was the outlook of the Stoics, for whom cosmopolitanism was enshrined in a universalist, shared community, affirming moral obligations towards all humanity, regardless of political or religious affiliations, by implication the opposite of local, parochial or national concerns and cultures.² Potentially more negative, though honouring a certain individual self-sufficiency, was the view of Diogenes and the Cynics for whom the ‘citizen of the world’ was an eternal vagabond, living from day to day ‘without a city, without a home, without a fatherland’ (quoted in Branham 2007, p. 76). These two perspectives have continued to permeate the debate to the present day.

In the eighteenth century, cosmopolitanism became a topic of the Enlightenment. At one level it was associated with an urbane lifestyle, foreign travel, and networks of international contacts, such that the fortunate felt at home everywhere. Thus, in 1752 Lord Chesterfield advised his son on the real purpose of a gentleman’s travels: ‘By frequenting good company in every country, he himself becomes of every country; he is no longer an Englishman, a Frenchman, or an Italian; but he is an European’ (1932, pp. ii, 263). In other words, cosmopolitanism was inseparable from the learning and culture associated with the English gentleman of leisure. More profoundly, the concept recalled the Stoic philosophical tradition, focussing on a positive moral ideal of a universal community: open-minded, impartial, advocating human rights and the power of human reason. Politically, it tended towards the republicanism of citizens sharing in freedom, equality and independence; and at its most extreme (in the writings of Cloots) towards the abolition of all existing states. Economically, the concept entailed the pursuit of a fair form of free trade with neither burdensome tariffs nor national protectionism. Cosmopolitan intellectuals regarded themselves as members of a transnational republic of letters that transcended geographical boundaries; so too did other ‘imagined communities’ within the arts–music in particular, with its elusive social and political messages.

Yet even this tradition was undermined by ambiguities. Kant–often held up as a universalist overriding national boundaries, through his espousal of a league of nations–in fact both allowed and even encouraged the patriotism of national loyalties: as Pauline Kleingeld has argued, ‘a complete account of moral cosmopolitanism actually requires a determination of a person’s special obligations towards his or her own country’ (2012, p. 184). According to this view, pre-nationalist concepts of patriotism need not be pitted against cosmopolitanism: ‘Kant argues that states should be republics; and given the nature of a republic as a system of democratic self -legislation, citizens should have some special regard for their own state, as a matter of (cosmopolitan) principle’ (2012:187).

Others voiced a more negative perception of cosmopolitanism, one stemming from the tradition of the Cynics. Rousseau, for example, complained that cosmopolitans ‘boast that they love everyone [tout le monde] in order to have the right to love no one’ (quoted in Kleingeld 2012, p. 5). In Britain, too, cosmopolitanism became an increasingly loaded concept in the later eighteenth century: for some, it was associated primarily with aristocratic luxury and degenerate excess, whether expressed in the universal adoption by the ‘quality’ of French fashions (symbolised in the phrases à la mode, the beau ton) or in the pervasive appeal of Italian opera (Newman 1987, pp. 143–144; Colley 2009, pp. 167–169). In other words, cosmopolitanism was a luxury only available to those who could afford the Grand Tour; while in both instances popular resistance in Britain was xenophobically tied to anti-Catholic sentiment.

A further urgency was added by geopolitical and social upheaval. Following the loss of the American colonies and increasing social unrest across the English Channel, Britain was already in a state of heightened nervousness during the 1780s. The war with Revolutionary France, and subsequently with Napoleon, over much of two decades, for the first time directly affected the lives of ordinary people, due to the call for volunteers and the effects of the continental blockade. Even the Grand Tour was necessarily diverted to East Europe. The combination of renewed patriotism and practical restrictions on trade and European exchange (‘this damned war’, Clementi complained in a letter of 1806) fostered the development of indigenous artistic forms that reflected the resurgent national consciousness (Colley 2009, p. 169).

The external threat did much to unify Britain (including Ireland) as a set of countries under one British flag. In reclaiming a form of patriotism that transc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of examples
• Series editors’ preface
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Post scriptum
• Introduction
• 1 Britain and Europe in the time of Clementi: cosmopolitanism and perceptions of national culture
• 2 Clementi in London
• 3 The dissemination of Muzio Clementi’s output beyond England: issues of authenticity and textual problems in Vienna (1787–1799)
• 4 Clementi’s Introduction in European musical life, 1801–1830
• 5 Inventions and ideas on the peripheries of British piano design between 1752 and 1832
• 6 Shedding light on late eighteenth-century British piano performance style through Clementi’s edition of Scarlatti’s Chefs-d’œuvre, for the Harpsichord or Piano-Forte
• 7 Towards a new edition of Clementi’s ‘Viennese’ sonatas, Opp. 7–10: contemporary English sources and the problem of revision
• 8 Association by design: Clementi’s Musical Characteristics
• 9 Clementi and the tambourine: the waltzes Opp. 38–39 in the context of domestic music-making in early nineteenth-century Britain
• 10 Clementi’s minor-mode keyboard music and the rhetoric of ‘ancient style’
• 11 Locating the early-romantic British piano concerto: William Sterndale Bennett and his contemporaries
• Index