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

Clementi.
In this respect the issue is different from the relationship between Bach and
‘nearly-Bach’ we discussed in chapter one. 111 The question we are asking is not
whether Clementi created works that could actually be mistaken for late Beethoven—
the conscious originality and uniqueness of Beethoven’s mature works means that such
a production would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, the question is: from a
standpoint within Clementi’s own style, is there a sense in which his late music, like
Beethoven’s, alternately grandiose, intimate, and rebarbative, could attain a
significance equivalent to Beethoven’s? And if not, why not?
Walter Georgii does in fact make a claim of this sort in relation to the op.50/1
slow movement discussed above: ‘in the opus 50 sonatas, his last, Clementi reveals, as
no other contemporary, his spiritual relationship with Beethoven....How powerfully
[this movement] expresses the moral character and high pathos of the composer!’ 112
and there is an explicitly Promethean reference in Cuthbert Girdlestone’s appreciation
of the opening bars of op.8/1: ‘Their passion is of some exiled fire-god, seeking far
and wide readmittance to the skies. Nothing more personal could be imagined,
nothing that was less of an inferior version of another composer.’ 113
And yet, for all this, Clementi’s music does not matter to us in quite the same
way as Beethoven’s, it is not public property to the same extent. We do not make our
home in it, nor find our own preoccupations reflected in it. It is unlikely that many
find his oeuvre can ‘command a lifetime of devotion, can be entered into so thoroughly
that every note becomes engraved on the deepest tissue of the mind.’ 114 William
Newman puts it more sympathetically: ‘perhaps because the delicate subtleties of his
111 Bach saw his works as participants in a tradition that was not just his own personal property. In
principle his style was teachable: ‘anyone who works as hard as I have will go as far.’ For
Beethoven on the other hand, the essentials of his style could almost be said to consist in its
departures from tradition.
112 W. Georgii, Four hundred years of European keyboard music; Anthology of music, ed. K. G.
Fellerer, vol. I (Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag, 1959), p.6.
113 Music & Letters 13/3 (July 1932), 289.
114 P. Barford, ‘Beethoven’s last sonata’, Music & Letters 35/4 (October 1954), 320.
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