The world of classical music has seen some notable borrowings, takings, and downright thefts over the years. For example, Bach’s concerto for four harpsichords, BMV 1065, was a transcription of a concerto for four violins by Antonio Vivaldi. The Vivaldi piece was part of a set of twelve concertos that the composer published around 1710 as his Opus 3. At the time, Bach had been developing the idea of using a harpsichord in concert with a full orchestra. When a friend returned from a trip abroad carrying a copy of Vivaldi’s Opus 3, Bach must have seen the possibilities inherent in Vivaldi’s compositions as soon as he opened the book. He transcribed five of the concertos soon after receiving the scores, but waited until 1730 or so to try his hand at converting the piece featuring four violins (Opus 3, No. 10) to a concerto for four harpsichords.
Did Bach at any point write to Vivaldi to ask for permission to transcribe his work? Bach’s transcriptions of these works stretched over a period of more than 15 years, ending no later than 1731. Vivaldi was alive and in good health throughout that time. (He lived to 1741.) I have seen no report of correspondence between the two. Admittedly, copyright law did not come into force in Germany until a generation after Bach’s death. Musical borrowings were common enough at the time. Still, law and custom aside, Bach, an honest man, might have asked permission. It doesn’t appear that he did. In the event, by the end of the 19th century, the source for BMV 1065 had been forgotten so that it came as a revelation, nearly two centuries after the works were written, that Vivaldi was the first inventor of Bach’s only concerto for four keyboards.
Beethoven did a bit of borrowing of his own. A music publisher and minor composer named Anton Diabelli wrote a simple little tune with the idea that he would ask all of the leading composers in the German-speaking world to write a variation on it. The compilation figured to be a nice little earner to sell into the market for music to be performed in the home.
You can listen to the theme, all 50 seconds of it, here: Diabelli’s Waltz – Tema – YouTube
If you were to measure the theme on a “simple” meter, the needle would be at the edge of the red zone marked “insipid”. Beethoven decided not to participate in the joint composition. Instead, he prepared his own entry, “33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli”, Op. 120, said by Alfred Brendel to be the single greatest piece ever written for piano. That evaluation sidesteps the entire Bach keyboard opus, since that music was not written for the piano, although that is the instrument on which it is most frequently performed today. How Maestro Brendel places this piece above half a dozen Beethoven piano sonatas, or profundities from Schubert and brilliancies by Liszt, without naming others, I do not know.
Anyway, when Beethoven was done, he offered the finished work to Mr. Diabelli for publication, so this was a borrowing rather than an appropriation, but I wonder if at any point Beethoven asked permission to divert Diabelli’s innocent little jingle into the grand work that it became and away from the project for which it was originally planned.
There is a sinister accusation involving the composition of La Bohème in the 1890s, or rather the composition of two operas by that name at nearly the same time. Giacomo Puccini was having lunch with his friend Ruggero Leoncavallo. They were two of Italy’s rising operatic composers, possible heirs to the legacy of Giuseppe Verdi. Each of them had a hit opera behind him. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) is still performed to this day, as is Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). In fact, Leoncavallo had worked for a time on the libretto for Manon. They were close friends and collaborators.
As lunch progressed, conversation turned to “What are you working on?” Leoncavallo mentioned that he was working on the staging of the novel “Scenes from the Bohemian Life”. He planned to title his opera “La Bohème”. Puccini later said that his response was something like “What a coincidence! I’m working on an opera based on the same book.”
That’s not the way Leoncavallo remembered the conversation. Forever after, he claimed that Puccini stole the idea. Puccini’s publisher produced proof that his man had been working on the opera for months before that fateful luncheon. It didn’t matter.
Puccini’s attitude was “we will both compose and the public will decide”. Puccini’s opera is among the most beloved in the repertoire. Leoncavallo’s is a museum piece. Indeed, Leoncavallo proved to be a one-hit wonder. Pagliacci is the only opera he composed that is performed with any regularity today.
I will end with a case of outright unambiguous theft. In the piano’s infancy, Europe boasted two magnificent exponents of the new instrument as it emerged from the shadow of its predecessors. These were Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).
When the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to the throne in 1780, things looked up for the music business in his realm. His mother, Maria Theresa, did not like to waste money on useless hangers-on, so she spent little time, energy, or money on music. Her son was a music lover. He arranged a head-to-head contest between the two maestros. They competed for prize money; winner take all. The emperor and some of his family judged the competition.
After hearing the contestants, the judges decided to call the contest a draw. Supposedly, the judges decided on this result as a matter of diplomacy even though they agreed in private that Mozart was the better pianist. How anyone can be sure about an off-the-record conversation long after the fact is anyone’s guess.
Clementi accepted the outcome with grace. He had great admiration for Mozart as a musician.
Much later, the pianist Ludwig Berger recalled him [Clementi] saying: “Until then I had never heard anyone play with such spirit and grace. I was particularly overwhelmed by an adagio and by several of his extempore variations for which the Emperor had chosen the theme, and which we were to devise alternately.”
Mozart on the other hand was not a good sport. He had no doubt that he was the true winner. He criticized Clementi’s performance and made a derogatory comment about Italians.
January 12, 1782, Mozart reported to his father: “Clementi plays well, as far as execution with the right hand goes. His greatest strength lies in his passages in 3rds. Apart from that, he has not a kreuzer’s worth of taste or feeling – in short he is a mere mechanicus.” In a subsequent letter, he wrote: “Clementi is a charlatan, like all Italians. He marks a piece presto but plays only allegro.”
Both quotations from: Muzio Clementi (Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Saverio Clementi) (1752 – 1832) – Genealogy (geni.com)
The first piece of serious music that I ever got to know was Mozart’s 40th Symphony, K. 550 in g minor. He has always been my favorite composer, the one whose music I would take to that desert island if I could take but one. Still, even his most fervent admirers have to admit that he could be an ass, and was on this occasion. In Mozart’s defense, he really needed the money. He had no steady income. Clementi was supported by a wealthy patron in England.
If revenge is a dish best served cold, Mozart waited ten years for his chance. He remembered one of the pieces that Clementi performed at the 1781 competition, his Sonata in Bb, Opus 24, No. 2. You can see and hear it performed by Zenan Kwan here (and I would say that after you get past the first two minutes of the piece, the main reason to continue watching and listening is to witness Ms. Kwan’s artistry, skill, and musicianship):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnMFaEpfeiE
It’s easy to see why Clementi chose this piece for the competition. It displays brilliant passage-work and requires the hands to play independently at times. In its opening bars it demonstrated Clementi’s ability to extract rapid-fire repeated notes from the instrument. This is an effect that is permitted by the action of a piano as the key lifts and drops a hammer. The plucking action of a harpsichord is not well suited to playing rapidly repeating notes.
This is pleasant music requiring a high level of technique, but it is not especially deep. That opening theme shows off the piano and the artist, but doesn’t go anywhere and is not developed with any particular skill.
Mozart tucked that opening theme away in his active and copious mind and pulled it out ten years later when he found a use for it. The overture to The Magic Flute, K. 620, opens with a solemn introduction. After some 90 seconds, it leads to the theme that will dominate the remainder of the overture. This is lifted directly from the opening bars of Clementi’s sonata: eight repeated notes and a turn followed by eight more repeated notes and so on. The theme is taken up by one section of the orchestra after the other in fugue-like fashion until the entire orchestra gives us the tune in unison. From its first appearance the theme infuses and saturates nearly every moment of the overture except for a brief respite when the mysterious chords that opened the piece intervene for a few seconds. After that, the repeated notes theme is reintroduced in a minor key and is further developed right to the coda.
Sir Neville Marriner and an unnamed orchestra (evidently not the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, his everyday band) provide a fast-paced virtuoso performance here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvhlJC04JtM
Watching this performance, you get the sense that Sir Neville knew how to run a happy ship.
In later years, those who didn’t know assumed that Clementi had lifted the theme from Mozart. When the score was republished, Clementi took to appending a note confirming that he wrote it ten years before Mozart used it.
There is no question that Clementi was the wronged party. Neither is there any question that the jaunty little theme he wrote would have done nothing but gather dust over the years had it not been repurposed by the monumental talent who stole it.
If Mozart was exacting revenge for receiving only a half point in 1781 instead of a win, the pleasure did not last long. The Magic Flute premiered on September 30, 1791. Mozart fell ill in late November and died on December 5 of that year at the age of 35. Because he was neither moneyed nor titled, he was buried in a “common” grave, along with countless others who like him did not qualify for a permanently marked final resting place. Clementi lived to 1832, dying in England, his adopted country, at the age of 80. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a rare honor.
The Passing Scene 