J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Carpani; from the time he entered England he was essentially an autodidact.
And yet, paradoxically, the move from the flourishing musical centre of Rome
to the cultural wilderness of Dorset turned out in the end to be a move from the
periphery to somewhere near the centre of the ‘main stream’ of musical history. If he
had remained in Rome, he would no doubt have followed his predecessors and
continued to write vocal music: oratorios, cantatas, masses, and (of course) opera. He
might well have achieved great success and celebrity: become another Paisiello,
another Cimarosa; but it is a little disturbing to reflect that, had he done so, there is
almost no conceivable level of artistic attainment he might have reached that would
have enabled him to escape the historiographical black hole that is eighteenth-century
Italian opera. 88 Instead, his enforced concentration upon keyboard music brought him
into contact with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; the Viennese classics that history
was soon to consecrate as such. This may not have been his first engagement with
Germanic musical traditions, however.
According to J. Amadée le Froid de Méreaux, while he was at Beckford’s: ‘It
was the works of Sebastian and Emanuel Bach, of Handel and Scarlatti that he
practised and studied continually; he did this from two different standpoints; that of
finger technique, and that of instrumental composition.’ 89 Méreaux’s account was
published in 1867; he had apparently received this information from Clementi himself
during a lengthy lesson in 1820, but it bears a suspicious resemblance to an account of
Clementi’s life published in 1831, in The Harmonicon. 90 In this article the
88 A parallel could be drawn with the Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738), the Irish harpist
who imitated the music of Geminiani and aspired to travel to Italy and study opera. Had he been
able to do so he would almost certainly have disappeared from history, except as a name. There are
distinct advantages in being a large fish in a small pond.
89 Plantinga, Clementi, p.7.
90 There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Méreaux’s conversation; but there are other
demonstrable instances of Clementi misremembering chronological details of his early life (ibid.,
pp.34-35). We are dealing here, after all, with fifty year-old recollections of fifty year-old
recollections. S. Daw, ‘Muzio Clementi as an original advocate, collector, and performer, in
particular of J. S. Bach and D. Scarlatti’, Bach Handel Scarlatti: tercentenary essays, ed. Peter
Williams (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), 70, suggests that the association between
Bach and the Dorset years may have resulted from Méreaux conflating two separate utterances.
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