Muzio Clementi (24 January 1752, Rome – 10 March 1832, Evesham, Worcestershire, England)
was a celebrated composer, pianist, pedagogue, conductor, music publisher, editor, and piano manufacturer. Born in Italy, he spent most of his life in England. He is best known for his piano sonatas, and his collection of piano studies, Gradus ad Parnassum. Nineteenth century enthusiasts lauded Clementi as "the father of the pianoforte", "father of modern piano technique", and "father of Romantic pianistic virtuosity".

Encouraged to study music by his father, he was sponsored as a young composer by Sir Peter Beckford, a wealthy Englishman who took him to England to advance his studies. He soon became known as one of the great piano virtuosi, touring Europe numerous times from his long time base in London. It was on one of these occasions in 1781 that he famously engaged in a piano competition with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Influenced by Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord school and Haydn's classical school and by the stile galante of Johann Christian Bach and Ignazio Cirri, Clementi developed a fluent, technical legato style which he passed on to an entire generation of pianists, including John Field, Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Carl Czerny. He was a notable influence on Ludwig van Beethoven.

Clementi also produced and promoted his own brand of pianos and was a notable music publisher. It was thanks to this activity that many compositions by contemporary and earlier artists have stayed in the repertoire. Though the European reputation of Muzio Clementi was second only to Joseph Haydn in his day, his reputation languished for much of the 19th and 20th centuries...

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Friedrich Wilhelm Michael Kalkbrenner (November 2–8, 1785 – August 10, 1849) was a German pianist, composer, piano teacher and piano manufacturer who spent most of his life in England and France. Before the advent of Frédéric Chopin, Sigismond Thalberg and Franz Liszt, Kalkbrenner was by many considered to be the foremost pianist in France and England, even Europe. The only serious rival he had was Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Kalkbrenner was a prolific composer of a multitude of piano works (altogether more than 200), piano concertos, and even operas.

Author of a famous method of piano playing (1831) which was in print until the late 19th century, he ran in Paris what is sometimes called a factory for aspiring virtuosos and taught scores of pupils from as far away as Cuba. His best piano pupils were Marie Pleyel and Camille-Marie Stamaty. Through Stamaty Kalkbrenner’s piano method was passed on to Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns.
He was one of the few composers who through deft business deals became enormously rich. Chopin dedicated his first piano concerto to him. Kalkbrenner published transcriptions of Beethoven's nine symphonies for solo piano decades before Liszt did the same. He was the first one to introduce long and rapid octave passages in both hands – today so familiar from 19th century piano music - into his piano texture.
Today he is not so much remembered because of his music, but because of his alleged vanity. Kalkbrenner was convinced that, after the death of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, he was the only classical composer left, and he never hesitated to let the world know this. Although of humble origins, he had a lifelong aspiration to be an aristocrat and delighted in rubbing shoulders with the nobility in London and Paris. He is invariably described as a somewhat pompous, formal, overly polite, yet intelligent and business wise extremely shrewd man. He was the target of many anecdotes already during his own lifetime and bitingly satirized by the German poet Heinrich Heine. There hardly is any other composer who lives on in so many anecdotes and stories as Kalkbrenner.
Virtually nothing of his huge output survived, although recently several pianists have taken some shorter works of his in their repertoire. A new recording of two of his piano concertos (No. 1 and No. 4) was released in 2005, an older (and abridged) recording of the piano concerto No. 1 is still available...

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Claude-Achille Debussy
(French pronunciation: [klod aʃil dəbysi]) (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer.


Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions.
Debussy is among the most important of all French composers, and a central figure in European music of the turn of the 20th century.
He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903.

His music is noted for its sensory component and for not often forming around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to 20th century modernist music.

In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant...


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Bösendorfer (L. Bösendorfer Klavierfabrik GmbH) is an Austrian piano manufacturer, and a wholly owned subsidiary of Yamaha. The brand is known for producing pianos with a uniquely rich, singing, and sustaining tone. Bösendorfer is unusual in that it produces 97- and 92-key models in addition to instruments with standard 88-key keyboards.



Bösendorfer, one of the oldest piano manufacturers, was established in 1828 by Ignaz Bösendorfer. It has a history of producing highly respected instruments; in 1830, it was granted the status of official piano maker to the Emperor of Austria. Ignaz's son Ludwig Bösendorfer (15 April 1835 – 9 May 1919) took over in 1859, operating from new premises from 1860. Between 1872 and its closure in 1913, the associated Bösendorfer-Saal was one of the premier concert halls of Vienna. In 1909, the company was sold to Carl Hutterstrasser, who was succeeded by his sons Alexander and Wolfgang in 1931. In 1966 Bösendorfer was taken over by the Jasper Corporation (later renamed Kimball International), parent company of Kimball Pianos, where it remained before returning to Austrian hands when it was purchased by BAWAG PSK Gruppe in 2002. BAWAG signed an agreement to sell all stock in Bösendorfer to Yamaha on 20 December 2007...

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Conrad Graf (17 November 1782, Riedlingen, Württemberg – 18 March 1851, Vienna) was an Austrian-German piano maker. His pianos were used by Beethoven, Chopin, and Clara Schumann, among others.



Graf began his career as a cabinet maker, studying the craft in his native Riedlingen in south Germany. He reached the status of journeyman in 1796 and migrated to Vienna in either 1798 or 1799. In 1800 he served briefly in an all-volunteer military unit, the Jäger Freikorps, then became apprenticed to a piano maker named Jakob Schelkle, who worked in Währing, then a suburb of Vienna. When Schelkle died in 1804, Graf married his widow Katharina and took over the shop...

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