Georg Matthias Monn

Georg Matthias Monn (born Johann Georg Mann [ref: Reel]) (April 9, 1717, Vienna – October 3, 1750, Vienna) was an Austrian composer, organist and music teacher whose works were fashioned in the transition from the Baroque to Classical period in music.

Together with Georg Christoph Wagenseil and Josef Starzer, Monn formed the Viennese Pre-Classical movement (Wiener Vorklassik in German), whose composers are nowadays mostly known only by their names. However, his successful introduction of the secondary theme in the symphony was an important condition for the First Viennese School that would come some fifty years later.

Life

We know much less about Monn's life than about his musical ideas. Only his appointments as an organist are known, at first in Klosterneuburg near Vienna. Afterwards, he was appointed in the same function in Melk in Lower Austria and at the Karlskirche in Vienna's district Wieden. Monn died from tuberculosis when he was only 33 years old.

Monn's brother Johann Christoph Mann (never Monn, 1726?-82) was also a composer whose works have been confused at times with those of Georg Matthias Monn. The reason for this is that most of Monn's compositions only survive in copies from the 1780s and could therefore also be the works of his younger brother. We still have absolutely no proof that the Johann Georg Mann born in 1717 is the same person as the Georg Matthias Monn who died in 1750. His role as pioneer of the symphony is a scholarly image, coined in the early 20th century, could need some basic musicological reevaluation.

From Baroque to Classical

Together with Georg Christoph Wagenseil and other contemporaries such as Leopold Mozart, Monn forms a school of Austrian composers who had thoroughly studied the principles of counterpoint as practised by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Joseph Fux, but also forced the change from the Baroque style to the looser, graceful Galante music. Moreover, they renewed the sonata form by expanding the concepts of secondary theme and development. Later on, Michael and Joseph Haydn would develop these concepts to a high point.

The catalog of works written by Matthias Monn contains sixteen symphonies, a score of quartets, sonatas, masses and compositions for violin and keyboard. A harpsichord concerto by Monn was freely transcribed by Arnold Schoenberg into a cello concerto for Pablo Casals. The Monn/Schoenberg cello concerto in D major has been recorded by Yo-Yo Ma and many other cellists. Schoenberg also wrote "continuo realizations" for several works by Monn, including a cello concerto in G minor, which was recorded by Jacqueline Du Pré.

List of works

• Sixteen symphonies including
  • Symphony in G major (also called Sinfonia in G major)
  • Symphony in B major
  • Symphony in F major

• Six Quartets including a Quartet in B major

• Concerti
  • Concerto for Violin, Strings & Continuo In B Flat Major
  • Keyboard concerto in D major
  • Cello concerto in D major (freely transcribed from Monn's harpsichord concerto by Arnold Schoenberg)
  • Concerto for Cello (or Double Bass) in G Minor
  • Concerto for Harpsichord, Strings & Continuo In G Minor (after Cello Concerto)
  • Concerto for Harpsichord in G Minor^{[citation needed]}
  • Concerto for Harpsichord, Strings & Continuo in D Major
  • Concerto in A for Fortepiano and Strings

Concerto in G minor for Cello or Double Bass

• Sonata in G minor^{[citation needed]}

• Partitas, including
  • Partita a tre no. 2 in G Minor
  • Partita a tre no. 7 in D Major

References

• Kenneth Emanuel Rudolf (1982). The Symphonies of Georg Mathias Monn: 1717-1750. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. 
• James Reel. "Georg Matthias Monn". http://www.allmusic.com/artist/q7737. 

External links

• Matthias Georg Monn in the Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, published in 1994 by Oxford University Press.
• Free scores by Georg Matthias Monn at the International Music Score Library Project

All the following links are in German.

• Matthias Georg Monn in der aeiou-Enzyklopädie
• Hörprobe aus Monn's Sinfonie in G