On the other hand, Clementi was wonderfully fertile in figures that sound well on the piano, and many of his sonatas, empty enough of genuine feeling, are still pleasant and vivacious to the listener. Yet they seem to have sunk down into the tomb. They are perhaps never heard in concerts at the present day. Those which are only show music may willingly be let go. They lack the diamond sparkle of Scarlatti. But there are others, even among the earlier ones, which are musically too worthy and still too interesting to be so ruthlessly consigned to the grave as the modern temper has consigned them. Have we after all too much pianoforte music as it is? It seems to be more than a change of fashion that keeps Clementi dead. Perhaps it is the shade of the admirable but awful Gradus ad Parnassum over all his other work. Perhaps a man has the right to live immortally by the virtue of but one of his excellencies. In the case of Clementi posterity has chosen to remember only the success of a teacher. The great series of studies or exercises published in 1817 under the usual pompous title of Gradus ad Parnassum alone of all his work still retains some general attention.
And this in spite of many beauties in his sonatas. Even among the early ones there are some distinguished by a fineness of feeling and a true if not great gift of musical expression. Take, for example, the sonata in G minor, number three of the seventh opus. The first movement, allegro con spirito, has more to recommend it than unusual formal compactness and perfection. The opening theme has a color not in the power of the mere music-maker. It is true that there is the almost ever-present scale passage in the transition to the second theme; but the second theme itself has a grace of movement and even a certain sinuousness of harmony that cannot but suggest Mozart. There are sudden accents and rough chords that foreshadow a mannerism of Beethoven; and the full measure of silence before the restatement begins is a true romantic touch.
The spirit of the slow movement is perhaps a trifle perfunctory. There is little hint of Mozart, who, alone of the classical composers, could somehow always keep the wings of his music gently fluttering through the leaden tempo adagio. The sharp—one may well say shocking—sudden fortissimos herald Beethoven again. The movement is, however, blessedly short; and the final presto is full of fire and dark, flaring and subsiding by turns.
Of the later sonatas that in B minor, op. 40, No. 2, and that in G minor, op. 50, No. 3, have been justly admired. Yet excellent as they are, one can hardly pretend to do more than lay a tribute on their graves. Only some unforeseen trump can rouse them from what seems to be their eternal sleep. One feature of the former may be noted: the return of a part of the slow movement in the midst of the rapid last movement. Such a process unites at least the last two movements very firmly together, tends to make of the sonata as a whole something more than a series of independent movements put in line according to the rule of convention.
The sonata in G minor also seems to have an organic life as a whole. Clementi gave it a title, Didone abbandonata, and called the whole a scena tragica. This is treating the whole sonata as a drama based upon a single idea; but inasmuch as it was written probably between 1820 and 1821, this conception of the sonata probably came to him from Beethoven rather than from his own idealism.[25]
It is hard to turn our thumbs down on Clementi. It may be unjust as well. He entered the arena of the sonata and in many ways no man excelled him there. Mozart’s impulsive condemnation has gone hard with him. We are like sheep, and even the wisest will listen all but unquestioning to a man who had, if ever man had, the voice of an angel. And so Clementi is all but forgotten as a sonatorial gladiator and remembered only as a trainer. That the greatest of the fighters profited by his teaching cannot be doubted. That they despoiled him of many ideas and even of his finery before his flesh was cold is also true. They made better use of them.
A glance over Clementi’s sonatas can hardly astonish more than by what it reveals of the great commonness of musical idioms during the Viennese period. Phrase after phrase and endless numbers of fragments bob up with the features we had thought were only Haydn’s, or Mozart’s, or Beethoven’s. Mozart quite openly appropriated a theme from one of Clementi’s sonatas[26] as the basis of his overture to the ‘Magic Flute.’ Such a fact is, however, far less suggestive than the intangible similarity between the stuff Clementi used and that which his greater contemporaries in Vienna built with. Compare, for instance, the first movement of Clementi’s sonata in B-flat, op. 34, No. 2, with the first movement of Beethoven’s symphony in C minor. Likeness of treatment, likeness of skill, likeness of mood there are not; but the juxtaposition of the two movements creates a whisper that Clementi passed through music side by side with some of the greatest of all composers.
IV
Both Schobert in Paris and Wagenseil in Vienna are more than straws which show the way the wind blew through the classical sonata. They are streaks in the wind itself. On the one came the seeds of the new works in Mannheim to the clavecins in Paris; and on the other such seeds were blown to harpsichords in Vienna. Both men wrote great quantities of music for the harpsichord, but oftenest with a part for violin added. This part was, however, usually ad libitum.
Concerning Schobert we may quote once more from the ‘Life of Mozart’ by Messrs. de Wyzewa and de Saint-Foix. ‘From 1763 up to the general upheaval caused by the Revolution, he was the most played and the most loved of all the composers of French sonatas. * * * Outside France, moreover, his works were equally highly prized; we find testimony to it in every sort of German, English and Italian treatise on the history or on the esthétique of the piano.’