After poking around on the Internet, I found a site (the Petrucci Music Library) that has a good bit of Clementi available for download. But there are many gaps in the collection.

Other than a Dover edition of 10 sonatas, the Clementi sonatas appear to be completely out of print. Or am I wrong about that?

I'm strictly an amateur. I've learned several of the Haydn sonatas, so I thought I'd like to look at Clementi. And indeed, he seems to have been a very interesting fellow! The Op. 26, No. 2 sonata is in F# minor, but the first movement wanders as far afield as Eb major, which is more daring than anything I've seen in Haydn.

So my question is, does anyone know of a complete archive of Clementi sonatas, in scanned or some other form? If there isn't one, this might be an interesting project for an aspiring or amateur archivist.

The scans I've downloaded include old German editions and even older French editions, as well as some good-quality scans of a Schirmer edition from 1896. Schirmer's current catalog appears to have no Clementi at all, at least if we assume their web interface is up to date.

Thanks in advance for any leads.

--Jim Aikin

Hello Jim,

I have been wanting to try out a few Clementi Sonatas myself - just haven't gotten around to it yet.




He was actually sort of a mean fellow.



You're right - he was wandering about with Field. John Field, that is. (that's why I said Clementi was mean - he treated Field very poorly.)



I just did a quick search and found a lot of his sonatas in various books. Check out this link - look down the list to the Peters Editions. They have a lot of sonatas!

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/search?q=Clementi+Sonatas

Ah, thanks. I didn't know about the Peters volumes. Possibly Peters doesn't list their catalog on Amazon. Some of the Peters contents duplicate pdf's that I've downloaded, but about half are things I don't have ... unless they're items in the Moscheles edition, which were printed (about a hundred years ago) without opus numbers of any kind.

The numbering and naming of this material is not easy to nail down. There's an Alfred edition of six sonatas that are listed (in the web page) both as Op. 37/38 and as Op. 4. Among my downloads are six sonatinas (not sonatas) Op. 37/38, whose keys match those shown for the Alfred volume, so I think I'm covered there.

I'll never have time to learn all of the ones I've downloaded for free, but maybe I'll buy the Peters volumes anyway, just to support a music publisher. Together they cost no more than a bag of groceries!

--Jim Aikin