witness to his excellence as a player, and his great command over the piano-forte, and his own remarks on piano-playing are full of point and suggestion.  He asserts “that the performer should possess a quiet and steady hand, with its natural lightness, smoothness, and gliding rapidity so well developed that the passages should flow like oil....  All notes, graces, accents, etc., should be brought out with fitting taste and expression....  In passages [technical figures], some notes may be left to their fate without notice, but is that right?  Three things are necessary to a good performer”; and he pointed significantly to his head, his heart, and the tips of his fingers, as symbolical of understanding, sympathy, and technical skill.  But it was fated that Clementi should be the Columbus in the domain of piano-forte playing and composition.  He was the father of the school of modern piano technique, and by far surpassed all his contemporaries in the boldness, vigor, brilliancy, and variety of his execution, and he is entitled to be called first (in respect of date) of the great piano-forte virtuosos, Clementi wrote solely for this instrument (for his few orchestral works are now dead).  The piano, as his sole medium of expression, became a vehicle of great eloquence and power, and his sonatas, as pure types of piano-forte compositions, are unsurpassed, even in this age of exuberant musical fertility.

II.

Muzio Clementi was born at Rome in the year 1752, and was the son of a silver worker of great skill, who was principally engaged on the execution of the embossed figures and vases employed in the Catholic worship.  The boy at a very early age evinced a most decided taste for music, a predilection which delighted his father, himself an enthusiastic amateur, and caused him to bestow the utmost pains on the cultivation of the child’s talents.  The boy’s first master was Buroni, choir-master a tone of the churches, and a relation of the family.  Later, young Clementi took lessons in thorough bass from an eminent organist, Condicelli, and after a couple of years’ application he was thought sufficiently advanced to apply for the position of organist, which he obtained, his age then being barely nine.  He prosecuted his studies with great zeal under the ablest masters, and his genius for composition as well as for playing displayed a rapid development.  By the time Clementi had attained the age of fourteen he had composed several contrapuntal works of considerable merit, one of which, a mass for four voices and chorus, gained great applause from the musicians and public of Rome.