Research reveals, however, that it would be truer to say that Clementi wrote predominantly for the piano. He also composed 6 symphonies and several piano concertos that survive. It seems, therefore, that he was able to give to the young John Field a complete musical education.

Such has been the concentration in music on the German line from Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Schuman to Brahms that others have been overlooked. Among these indubitably is John Field but his tutor Clementi must also be included.

There was an extraordinary blossoming of keyboard talent which coincided with the development from the harpsichord first of the fortepiano and then of the pianoforte. London played an important part in that progress. The firm of Broadwood dates from that era. Clementi was present in London not only as pianist composer but also as a manufacturer of pianos. Clementi pianos were the most advanced, mechanically, of the age. Not all the talent was in Vienna.

Clementi was born in Rome in 1752 two years after the death of Bach. When he was 14 an English traveller, Peter Beckford, heard him play and obtained permission from his family to give him a musical education. He was brought to England and spent 7 years of intensive study in Beckford's home in Dorset. Eventually, around 1774, he left his patron and, moving to London, became harpsichordist at the King's Theatre. It was there that he began to compose and publish the piano sonatas with which he is most associated.

Deciding to visit the musical centres of Europe, Paris and Vienna, he finally arrived in Vienna in 1781.It was during that visit that he aroused the jealousy of Mozart resulting in a contest between them. Mozart disparagingly described Clementi as mechanical and lacking in talent. Such was the public hostility between them that a piano duel was arranged.

The outcome was that the adjudicators declared the contest to be a draw refusing to say that one was better than the other. That is testimonial enough.

Muzio Clementi composed hundreds of melodic piano sonatas and was influential in the development of that form as his pupil, John Field, was to be in the development of the nocturne. He also wrote orchestral music at this time much of which has been lost. Just two symphonies and odds and ends survive from that period.

It emerges that he was a much more important figure in the music world than he has been given credit for. He met people like Haydn in Vienna. He crossed pianos, not swords, with Mozart and became a personal friend of Beethoven. He was much admired by the young Beethoven as a composer of sonatas. Of course he was acquainted with Haydn during his period in London when he wrote his London symphonies. He was an acknowledged piano virtuoso. With others he founded the Royal Philharmonic Society to spread knowledge of symphonic music. That Society commissioned the last three symphonies of Beethoven, the last (the tenth) being lost on his death. He contributed his own four mature symphonies to the cause.

Having listened to them I have to say that he was a considerable symphonist post Mozart. His orchestra was the full ensemble familiar to Beethoven with whom he forms a bridge between the classical and the romantic. He was a master of form, possessed of a fertile musical imagination, and is not to be ignored.

If you are content to follow paths signposted for you by others by all means stick to the familiar. You cannot go far wrong. If however you are more adventurous, and better still, if you rely on your own judgement, you could do worse than get to know Muzio Clementi.