The Real First Viennese School

The picture at the upper left is of an anonymous Dutch gentleman from a slightly earlier generation, evidently an amateur of the 'cello and a composer, standing in (because there are no pictures of him to be found in Cyberspace) for [1.] Georg Mathias Monn (1715 -- 1750).  In the upper right is an image of [2.] Josef Starzer (1726/7 -- 1787).  In the lower left, his full-bottom wig flowing, is [3.] Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715 -- 1777), about whom all anyone remembers today is that the kid, almost still an infant, Mozart--after the Empress Maria Theresa had kissed him and dandled him on her knees for a bit--said to him, "You turn over, Herr Wagenseil, and I will play!"  Which made everyone laugh because it sounded funny.  So, chuckling, Wagenseil put some music on the harpsichord and stood by to turn the pages (which is what little Wölferl had meant), and the tiny little boy from Salzburg played it at sight: perfectly.   Three years later, when he was eight, during his appearance at the French court in the château of Versailles, when Mme. de Pompadour had coldly pushed him away, he said, "Who is she who will not kiss me?  The Empress always kisses me!"  Out of the mouths of babes.   

Dismissing for a moment, however, the interesting topic of Austrians who, having been kissed by Maria Theresa, went on to have fatefully prickly non-relationships with Louis XV's Maîtresses en Titre--I have only heard the music of one of them (thanks to ¡Tunes and Internet Radio), a symphony by Georg Mathias Monn, rendered, as I recall, by Harnoncourt:  Rapturous Italianate delight!  Though with solid Teutonic counterpoint.  These guys, the real "First Viennese School," were all the figurative sons of Johann Joseph (Gradus ad Parnassum) Fux; Wagenseil, in fact, studied with Fux , and was considered his natural heir presumptive. We can be pretty sure, knowing who they worked for (Was there ever such a dynasty of instinctual connoisseurs as the Habsburgs?), that the music they wrote was top-notch, just the way they wrote it.   

Times, however, change, copyrights and royalties lapse.  Eventually, people lose the techniques and sensibilities, and the taste, that "old music" requires for its performance...even for its comprehension.  There had been this clavier concerto of Monn's lying around--who knows where?--and Arnold Schönberg, who had more in common with Pablo Casals than most people realize (see blog of July 29, '08), wanted, or needed, to write a 

'cello concerto' for Casals.  This presented certain difficulties for both of them.  

In the first place, despite the unconscious anachronism of his own playing of Bach (In Stravinsky's happy skewering, "Casals...plays Bach in the style of Brahms"), Casals detested the contemporary music of his day, roundly and often declaring he would have nothing to do with it.  But he was careful (One had to be!  Why?  Why indeed?) not to attack it or the sacrosanct Schönberg directly, saying no more even of Stravinksy than "Stravinsky always has to be à la mode."  It was only in his opinion of the popular, but not dangerously prestigious, music that he heard in his old age, that Casals felt free to say what he meant: "[Rock and roll is] poison put to sound--a brutalization of both life and art."

Schönberg understood--or thought he understood--this about Casals, whom he besieged with letters which glozingly laid out what he presumed to be the common ground which lay between himself and Casals on the subject of other music of the 18th century than that of Bach, Haydn, or Mozart (specifically the music of Handel, which Schönberg detested--or, should we say, felt free to detest); so setting up his desecration of the Monn clavier concerto, imagining (like the crass, oblivious Jew he evidently was) that Casals must find it irresistible as a cello concerto dedicated to himself: "Just as Mozart did with Handel's 'Messiah,' I have got rid of whole handfuls of sequences (rosalias, 'Schusterflecke'*), replacing them with real substance.  Then I also did my best to deal with the other main defect of Handelian style, which is that the theme is always best when it first appears and grows steadily more insignificant and trivial in the course of the piece."     

Stupid he may--as Stravinsky suggests--have been; but Casals never in his life acknowledged, or mentioned, either the 'cello concerto,' or Schönberg's dedication of it to him, and never played it. I, of course, have never heard it  (And, cela va sans dire, never will), and I have only just recently heard of it in reading the Grove Encyclopedia of Music biography of Schönberg, where it is described in these mildly encomiastical terms: "The concerto is a new composition to almost the same degree as a set of variations on another composer's theme.  Thus in each movement he overlaid Monn's exposition with additional counterpoints and harmonies reaching as far forward as Brahms, or even later, and then continued independently in the same style."

And, according to Robert Gerhard, by not having heard the Schönberg/Monn cello concerto, I have been spared a painful experience:  "I have now heard the Schoenberg-Monn cello concerto.  It has been a painful experience.  In the first place, I think I understand Monn.  No doubt he is not more than a good second-rank composer [the fucking presumption!], but the original Monn harpsichord concerto (on which Schoenberg based his cello concerto) has a polished 'urbane,' or rather 'courtly' style, not without distinct individual touches of some charm.  Schoenberg's comment that he has taken out boring sequences 'by the handful' and substituted for them ones of true musical substance is of a hair-raising pomposity and silliness.  He has destroyed the original's stylistic integrity, its simple but clearly-shaped form, and trodden down every single feature that has charm in Monn's work. The result is ham-fisted, thematically, tonally and formally erratic, and a confused farrago.  This is not the work of an artist, it's the work of a pedant, a crushing bore...."

*  "Schusterflecke" = Shoemaker's spots (?)