Born in Dublin, Field first studied the piano under his father, who was a violinist, and later under Tommaso Giordani. He later went to London where he studied under Muzio Clementi. He toured Europe both to demonstrate the pianos that Clementi made and as a concert pianist before settling in Saint Petersburg in Russia where he was a popular performer and teacher. He died in Moscow.
Field is best remembered as the first composer to write nocturnes, single movement pieces for piano which were not in a fixed form (as the minuet or fugue are) and which maintained a single mood throughout. These pieces greatly influenced Frederic Chopin, who went on to write 21 nocturnes himself. Inasmuch as Field's nocturnes were the first single-movement piano character pieces, they can be seen as important forerunners of many other Romantic composers' works, among them Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and Edvard Grieg.
Field also wrote seven piano concertos of which the best known is probably the second (1811).
External links
An article on Field originally published in The Etude, 1915 (http://www.web-helper.net/PDMusic/Biographies/FieldJohn/)
A biography by Charles K. Moss and list of Field's works (http://www.carolinaclassical.com/articles/field.html)
A fictionalized Sir JohnFielding is the protagonist of 10 historical detective novels written by the late American writer Bruce Cook (1932-2003) under the pseudonym Bruce Alexander.
He was the brother of Mary Fielding, the second wife of Hyrum Smith, and an uncle of Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Fielding was born on March 26, 1797 in Honeydon, Bedfordshire, England, to JohnFielding and Rachel Ibbotson.
Fielding was released as mission president when Brigham Young and other apostles arrived in England in 1840, but continued to serve as a missionary until 1841.
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