Erin Helyard sets out in this book to bring a new perspective to the study of Clementi's keyboard music. His work is the result of copious research, as reflected in the bibliography, helpfully divided into items from pre- and post-1900 and stretching over twenty-eight pages. The book is a treasury of valuable ideas and information, concerning not only the two main areas indicated in the book's title – Clementi's virtuosic style and the female presence in the cultivation of keyboard music in eighteenth-century England – but also a wide spread of topics, both of a musical kind and beyond that sphere. His narrative constantly makes connections and traces histories, going off on rewarding tangents. A host of persons of a diverse nature (musicians, novelists, theorists and other thinkers and individuals), together with the places, institutions, musical opuses and genres, keyboard instruments and technical aspects of performance related to them, appear and reappear throughout the book's six chapters in differing contexts. Also enhancing the narrative is the generous provision of illuminating quotations from a variety of sources, and of illustrative figures, comparative tables and annotated music examples. The illustrations include evidence of historical keyboard culture, such as the page showing eighteenth-century fingerings in a copy of Clementi's Op. 23 No. 2 (227), and the decorative cover of that same opus published by Longman and Broderip: ‘Three Sonatas for the Piano-Forte or Harpsichord’ dedicated to ‘Miss Gavin’, with the owner's name, ‘Miss Lushington’, pencilled in on the right-hand corner (10).

In chapter 1 (‘Clementi and the Enlightenment’), setting the scene for the chapters that follow, the author explores the context and reception history of Clementi and his music from various angles. Having observed that ‘Clementi was and is an important figure in music history’, he asks, ‘So why do we not talk about him?’ (11). His answer is that Mozart is ‘part of the problem’, a line of argument that will resurface in chapter 2. He also identifies as a factor inflecting the reception of Clementi's works the role of his pedagogical publications, singling out the Gradus ad Parnassum (Paris: Erard, 1817) and what he calls the ‘infamous’ six sonatinas, Op. 36 (16). For Helyard these items represent an obstacle blocking appreciation of Clementi's more advanced (and less pedagogical) works, so that, he suggests, we ‘unconsciously associate him with “beginner's music”, something that can be dismissed once we reach maturity, which for many is symbolized by Beethoven’ (16).

Helyard sets out in this chapter his distinctive approach to the relevant repertoire, involving a performance-oriented analytical method. He observes that ‘we are willing to talk more and more about the eighteenth century on its own terms, yet some of us continue to be repelled by what [W. Dean] Sutcliffe has called “the ugly face of virtuosity”’ (23). He offers, as ‘part of a way forward’, the replacement of systematic analysis applied to the music's text by a performance-oriented analytical commentary, designed to portray ‘more of a historical account of the performer or listener's reaction and engagement with this kind of music’ (23).

Chapter 2 (‘Mozart's Insult and the Irritations of Virtuosity’) pursues his campaign on behalf of Clementi's fabled virtuosic style, first exhibited in the Op. 2 sonatas of 1779. (I remember the excitement with which, in the 1970s at the Music Faculty in Oxford, I heard Leon Plantinga perform extracts from those sonatas as well as speaking about them, when his book on the composer was in progress.) Helyard marshals on his side Dean Sutcliffe, whose thoughtful reinterpretation of late eighteenth-century style has helped to give it a new lease of life. The work of the late Rohan Stewart-MacDonald is also evoked in support of Helyard's argument. The author's disapproval is aimed at a number of scholars who have contributed to the development of Clementi research as well as the broader picture of eighteenth-century musical style. Besides Plantinga they include Daniel Heartz, Roberto Illiano and Luca Sala (editors of Muzio Clementi: Studies and Prospects (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2002)) and Dorothy de Val (a contributor to that volume), all of whom Helyard finds guilty of underestimating the artistic value of Clementi's virtuoso passagework. Helyard rejects that last noun, attributing his dislike to its accumulation of negative connotations. He prefers ‘difficulty’ – and he rejects also ‘virtuoso’ on the grounds of its anachronistic application, which he explains in conjunction with the emphasis shifting from object to subject as nineteenth-century pianistic culture developed.

Helyard's verdict on Mozart versus Clementi (an opposition enshrined in their famous contest before a distinguished audience) is made clear before the evidence is set out. Mozart is variously termed ‘racist’, ‘jealous’ and ‘ungenerous’ towards his rival (35). The chapter goes on to trace the references to Clementi in Mozart's letters, in the context of his situation in Vienna and the relationship with his anxious and critical father, Leopold. Helyard balances his resentment of Mozart's attitude to Clementi's performance style with the acknowledgment that their values in respect of keyboard performance and composition differed sharply.

The focus on gender signalled in the book's title takes a prominent role in chapter 3 (‘Keyboard Performance and Gender in Eighteenth-Century London’). Here Helyard draws on a wide range of primary and secondary literature for insights into familiar tropes on the appropriateness of musical activity for women and for men (in whom signs of such interests might also be suspect). The author's analysis of the evidence regarding socio-cultural attitudes towards music making is supplemented by an appendix (within the book's end-matter) in landscape format, presenting details of ‘Keyboard Practicing/Music Education in Thirty-Six Conduct Books and Treatises’ (269–280). Helyard concludes that Clementi's situation during his formative years, as house musician to Peter Beckford in Dorset, was akin to that of women's cultivation of music within the domestic sphere. Beckford is later quoted in chapter 5 (‘Male Theoria and Female Praxis’) as having said admiringly of ‘the Turks’: ‘Those who love music have slaves to play to them’ (159).

The central part of chapter 3 turns attention to the keyboard repertoire in circulation at the time. A series of examples demonstrates the method indicated in the introductory chapter, with what in my experience is a novel style of annotation, whereby the author's commentary is based closely on the implications for the performer, identifying the level of the composer's demands on them. This approach is applied to excerpts from two contrasting first movements, both in C major: Example 3, from the Sonata Op. 1 No. 1 by Johann Samuel Schroeter (published in London in 1777), highlighting its ‘performative characteristics’ (84), and Example 4 from Clementi's Op. 2 No. 2, known as the ‘Octave Lesson’, captioned as ‘imaginary first contact’ with his music (87). The Schroeter example is defined at its start as ‘sight-readable’, ‘symmetrical’ and with ‘transparent texture’ (84). Helyard notes the passage of arpeggiated writing in quaver triplets following the opening thematic statement as featuring ‘grounded hand position’ and ‘slow moving thumb’ (84). His further observations on the passages that follow include ‘repetitive practice built into work’ and the use of ‘normative’ scale figures (84). This music would have suited the less confident of C. P. E. Bach's ‘Liebhaber’ (amateurs – representing half of the designated target for his six volumes of keyboard pieces published between 1779 and 1787).

The commentary on Clementi's Op. 2 No. 2 suggests Emanuel Bach's ‘Kenner’ (connoisseurs), the other half of his target market. Here Helyard inscribes over the music such indications as ‘non-sight-readable’, ‘leaps that might necessitate looking down at the hands’ and an ‘unusual and tricky ornament’ (87). Helyard's introduction of a hypothetical eighteenth-century consumer confronting this difficult music resembles a device used before, notably in Tom Beghin's ‘A Composer, His Dedicatee, Her Instrument and I: Thoughts on Performing Haydn's Keyboard Sonatas’ in the Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 203–225. (I have found students misled by Beghin's invented narratives, taking them as genuine.)

In Chapter 4, the focus on repertoire shifts to Clementi's ‘The Black Joke’, the set of variations on the tune of that name performed at his ‘rather spectacular debut in London’ (119). As an example of the song's ‘potency’ even when wordless, Helyard cites ‘a Protestant’, writing to the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (June 1770), who found that ‘the tune of the Black Joke, lately played on a Sunday before some Soldiers at St. James's Park, in their march to the Parade, was very unsuitable to the day, and highly offensive to every hearer’ (126). The context he traces around it includes Hogarth's portrayal of ‘The Rake's Progress’ (1735), in which a scene conceived in response to the bawdy text features it being sung in a brothel. Clementi revised the variations, giving them the alternative title the tune had acquired, ‘The Sprig of Shillelah’, around 1824 (127). As regards the extreme demands the work places on the performer, Helyard suggests that ‘it is possible that Clementi, after arriving in England, quickly became aware of the vast potential for female amateurs to improve their technical abilities and expand their keyboardistic vocabulary’ (134).

Chapter 5 highlights the genre of accompanied sonata to which Clementi contributed. This was popular in the eighteenth century for its flexible model of self-sufficient keyboard part and ad libitum parts for violin or flute (useful when gentlemen came to dinner bringing them). It receded from view as the more egalitarian models of duo sonata and piano trio developed, although echoes remained throughout the nineteenth century in the styling of chamber work titles. Helyard prefaces the chapter with an evocative quotation from Leigh Hunt, tinged with gender-biased vocabulary and reflecting the entrenched position of the pianoforte in English households. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of culture emphasizing ‘the construction of a cultural network from which status objects are evaluated’ (151) is rallied in support of Helyard's search for a more holistic view of Clementi. This he considers might be ‘better achieved by understanding the material and economic conditions surrounding the consumption of his music’ (151). Clementi emerges (as has been developing in the book) as an agent of change in cultural perceptions: Helyard observes that ‘after the semi-anonymous publication of the “Black joke”, Op. 2 openly delineates an agenda that newly begins to associate solo with difficult and accompanied with easy’ (154–155). The chapter also draws on descriptions of musical performance in diaries, essays, novels and other writings of the period conveying gender-inflected aspects of keyboard culture.

Having established Clementi as a ‘game changer – a heresiarch’, Helyard devotes his final chapter to the reception of Clementi's music, continuing his multi-faceted approach. Entitled ‘Clementi in the Marketplace and the Conservatoire’, chapter 6's sphere of reference includes consideration of such varied aspects as the trends shown in reviews of Clementi's sonatas around the turn of the nineteenth century, Clementi's wealth at his death, his habit of revising his works, the gendered associations of pedalling, and aspects of the analytical and critical commentary his works have accumulated. In the Allegretto vivace second movement of Op. 37 No. 3, Helyard finds a ‘rich distillation of Clementi's stylistic markers’, featuring his ‘well-established brand of difficulty . . . and his confident counterpoint’ (219). He notes that the printer (‘or Clementi?’) has managed to fit the movement on one page, marked out by its smaller format so that ‘the performer must squint a little to read and decipher this page’ (219); its complexity includes hand-crossing. (His description occasions an extensive footnote on the author's experience of playing the movement from this print.)

In the ‘Conclusion’ that follows, Helyard takes an extraordinary turn, summoning up the ‘much, much darker interpretation of Clementi's achievements’ (259) contained in a ‘polemic on the current state of piano pedagogy’ (published in 2019) in order to refute its view of Clementi's influence as toxic. Here aspects of the pianoforte of Clementi's time (and indeed his manufacture of them) come to the surface, since the author of the polemic makes his criticisms ‘from the perspective of a teacher working on modern Steinway-type pianos’, and ‘Clementi's pianism . . . is a world away from modern technique’ (260). Even within the short compass of this concluding section, Helyard manages to draw together a web of historical and contemporary views referring to a range of sources, in connection with Clementi's widespread reputation as ‘father of the pianoforte’. In closing, Helyard positions his ‘[attempt] to show how female pianists and Clementi's music are intertwined’ vis-à-vis the shift in attitudes to aesthetic and commercial values, that moved from the positive view of market success (as enjoyed by Clementi) to ‘precisely the opposite response’ (266). His book certainly encourages us to, as he puts it, ‘better appreciate the cultural landscape of the late eighteenth century’ (266).