Saturday, July 17, 2010

The Chopin Preludes are so specifically about tonality on the piano I find it difficult to follow the popular notion that they were inspired by the Preludes in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. They share so many attributes with the preludes in Clementi's Preludes and Exercises: the sequence of keys, comprising all the major and minor keys; the specifics of hand position and shifts in relation to black and white keys; the effect on sustained notes of a running figure in the other hand.

A certain society of loyalists recall every year in a memorial notice in The New York Times that Richard III was framed, that he was, in fact, not the ogre Shakespeare makes him out to be. Following their example I am tempted to place a memorial notice to the effect that Clementi was not, as Mozart characterized him, a mechanicus, despite the fact that generations of piano teachers have chosen to believe Mozart rather than listen objectively to Clementi's remarkable music.