The history books are not short of great performers and composers whose burgeoning careers as musical prodigies were micromanaged at every degree by their parents. The father of Muzio Clementi, however, did exactly the opposite. When Muzio was 14, his father agreed to let Sir Peter Beckford, a wealthy Englishman visiting Italy, take his son away to his estate in Dorset. There, young Muzio would entertain Beckford’s family in return for a sponsored musical education, with Sir Peter later claiming to have ‘bought’ Clementi for a seven-year period.
Those seven years, however
