The Art of Fingering on the Pianoforte: A Comprehensive and Comparative Study of Clementi’s Didactical Works Applied to Period and Modern Instruments

This project is a case study of Clementi’s early didactic works (Six Sonatinas Op. 36, Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Pianoforte Op. 42 with its Appendix Op. 43) focusing on fingerings – a subject that has been either taken for granted or overlooked in today’s scholarship, performance, and education, despite its vital contribution to the composer’s great renown in his time. Through practice-based analysis and contextualisation of this corpus in relation to other didactic works accessible in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, I reconstruct a possible learning setting of Clementi’s time as the general framework of my research processes, implementing a hands-on approach for the scholarly treatment of early keyboard methods. By applying fingerings to a relevant repertoire I re-evaluate novelty in Clementi’s pedagogy on period instruments, thereby enriching historically informed performance with historically informed education.
The following questions best summarise my research:

• Which are the rules underlying Clementi's fingerings and how do they relate to or differ from other composers' fingering systems?
• How do these work on different piano actions?
• How to integrate fingering in a modern edition?
• How to perform fingerings