MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Dussek: Sonatas Vol II

Like his contemporary Clementi, Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) was one of a new breed of itinerant composer-virtuosos, feted in salons and palaces from London to St Petersburg. He was also something of a chancer, reputedly implicated in a plot to assassinate Catherine the Great, escaping in the nick of time to England from revolutionary Paris, where he was a favourite of Marie Antoinette, and a decade later, in 1799, abandoning his young wife in London and fleeing to the Continent to avoid his creditors, foremost among them Lorenzo da Ponte.