Georg Matthias Monn

(1717–1750)

Biografi

It was in 1908 that a scholarly publication in the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich first called attention to the music of Matthias Georg (or Georg Matthias) Monn. At the time the unanimous opinion was that this composer deserved broader recognition and was a worthy topic for thorough research.

Almost one hundred years later, however, we still know very little about Monn’s life. He was born in 1717 and was a descanter at the Klosterneuburg Monastery in 1721–32. It was presumably at this same monstery that he received his other musical training as well. His given name was Johann Georg Mann. He later changed his first name to Matthias and may have done so to keep from being confused with his brother Johann Christoph (1726–82), who was also a composer. He may have changed the spelling of his last name for similar reasons. It is also possible that the new spelling was nothing more than a sort of phonetic transcription of its pronunciation in Lower Austrian dialect. Monn is thought to have been the organist at the recently constructed St.Charles’s Church in Vienna from 1738 on. He died of a “lung defect” (tuberculosis) in 1750.

One of the few entirely credible bits of information about Monn goes back to Joseph Sonnleitner. He was not a personal acquaintance of our composer but claimed to have heard the following about him directly from Johann Georg Albrechtsberger: “He must have been of a very weak physical constitution, for though he never drank wine, a rare phenomenon in a community of canons, he did not live to be very old. His gloomy disposition and strenuous work also seem to have figured here. He never married and always dressed in block.”

Verk

Matthias Georg Monn composed more than twenty symphonies, not all of which are still extant today. The selected compositions from his symphonic œuvre on this recording offer a clear picture of his development and importance as a symphonic composer. Monn, together with Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715–77), is regarded as having been the leading figure of the Viennese school prior to Haydn and Mozart. During the mid-eighteenth century Vienna had yet to become the center and focus of the symphonic world. At least three different compositional currents can be distinguished during those years: the renowned Mannheim school centering on Johann Stamitz, the Northern German school including Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach among its representatives, and the abovementioned Viennese composers, whose importance was long overshadowed by the Mannheim school. All these composers tend to be lumped together under the rubric of early classicism or preclassicism. Such labels may accurately sum up the role of these composers in the development of the classicism represented by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven but reduce their importance to the role of precursors, to a role that certainly cannot be said to do complete justice to them. If we examine Monn’s symphonies according to the terminological criteria developed in the nineteenth century for the study of the great classical symphonies, then we will doubtless come to the conclusion that the “sonata-form movement” is already in evidence in his mature symphonies – even though he himself was not familiar with the term and the aesthetic idea going along with it had not yet established itself. These symphonies of his contain expositions with clearly elaborated secondary themes, development sections recognizable as such, and recapitulations. Moreover, a symphony by Monn from 1740 is the first composition in the history of the symphonic genre to exhibit a minuet. There thus can be no doubt that Monn belonged to the generation of the “forerunners of Viennese classicism”.

Yet we do not do complete justice to Monn and his œuvre when we view him and it from the perspective of prior knowledge of the later classical masterpieces. If we commit ourselves to trying to understand Monn within the context of his times, then a quite different picture emerges. The mid-eighteenth century was without question one of the most diverse and varied periods in music history and in the history of the arts and humanities in general. One might sum up this period as follows: it was a time of change during which the aesthetic of imitation that had held complete sway in the baroque gradually gave way to an aesthetic of expression. Up until then standard formulas prescribed by the doctrines of figures and affects had been employed in imitation of the ideal-typical, but from then on the individual with his personal emotions increasingly came to occupy the foreground of musical expressive intentionality. The presentation of one musical affect per piece of music had been an absolute law in music aesthetics, but composers no longer felt that they had to abide by this rule. After all, humans are governed not by one passion but subject to changing emotions. Just how progressive or even avantgardistic this new principle may be seen in a passage in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie. In the 1770s he was still speaking out against the new ideal: “A symphony expressing different emotions in its different movements is a musical monster; one emotion only must dominate in a symphony, and each individual movement must render audible just this one emotion, only with various modifications, whether according to its degree of intensity or animation or according to various mixings with other related emotions, and to seek to awake this emotion in us.”

Symfonier

Sinfonia in G major

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Presto

Sinfonia in B flat major

1. Allegro
2. Andante molto
3. Presto

Sinfonia in E flat major

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Presto

Sinfonia a quattro in B flat major

1. Adagio
2. Allegro
3. Largo
4. Allegro Assai

Sinfonia in D major

1. Allegro
2. Larghetto
3. Allegro

Sinfonia in A major

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Allegro

If we examine Matthias Georg Monn’s symphonic œuvre with the above points in mind, then we recognize him as a musical personality of remarkable powers of expression. With one exception, the symphonies presented on this recording do not admit of exact dating. It is obvious, however, that Monn composed them during different periods in his career. Here we should also note that these periods followed in close succession during what turned out to be a short life. The Symphonies in E flat major and the second of the two Symphonies in B flat major doubtless number among the earlier works on this recording. Although occasional episodes in these works might be regarded as secondary thematic material, the old aesthetic continues to make itself felt. The movements are marked by a uniformity of affect, and the compositional techniques quite clearly are derived from the past. As such, they point to Monn’s roots in the contrapuntal style of, say, Johann Joseph Fux. This applies in particular to the second Symphony in B flat major. Its movement sequence of Adagio – Allegro – Largo – Allegro assai is a clear sign of its origins in the tradition of the church sonata, and its second movement is a well-crafted fugue. Nonetheless this work already exhibits Monn’s original and suspenseful harmonic style. No matter what aesthetic and what compositional techniques he employs, his harmonic style lends his music a great deal of expressive power. The first Symphony in B flat major seems to come from a somewhat later period. In its first movement in particular we see what becomes very apparent in the three remaining Symphonies in A major, D major, and G major (the last-mentioned work of 1749): the new expressive ideal. A contrasting musical idea, namely a secondary theme (if one wishes to employ the classical terminology), serves to introduce a second expressive area, to introduce a second affect into the musical process. Moreover, the expressive area of the primary theme undergoes what are sometimes completely unexpected transformations owing to Monn’s imaginative harmonic style. The result is what was up until then an unprecedented variety of musical expression. Here the interpreters have to keep in mind what Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach said about “constant alternation with the passions”.

Cornelius Frowein
Translated by Susan Marie Praeder