Monn, Georg Matthias / arr. by Arnold Schönberg

Georg Matthias Monn / arr. by Arnold Schönberg – Cello concerto G minor, arranged by Arnold Schönberg

(b. Vienna, 9. April 1717 – d. Vienna, 3. Oktober 1750)

arranged by Arnold Schoenberg (Schönberg)
(b. Vienna, 13 September 1874 – d. Los Angeles, 13 July 1951)

Preface
Matthias Georg Monn was a composer whose music bridged the late Baroque and early Classical periods. Monn was born in Vienna in 1717, and died very young in that same city in 1750. Relatively little is known about Monn’s working life, other than that he served as a chorister, church organist and teacher in and around Vienna. During his short lifetime, he composed sixteen symphonies, chamber music, and a number of concertos. His musical style integrated the heavier, contrapuntal techniques of composers like J.S. Bach with the emerging thinner textures and formal innovations of the pre-Classical period. While Monn appears to have been well respected in Vienna—some of his music was performed at the Imperial court—he was not well known in the rest of Europe and none of his music was published during his lifetime.

What, then, accounts for 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seemingly idiosyncratic interest in this rather marginal Viennese composer? Schoenberg himself is best known as the putative father of modern music, a revolutionary and radical progressive whose disturbingly dissonant and expressive music—coupled with a quasi-mathematical compositional process developed in the 1920s—continues to challenge the ears of listeners well in to the 21st century. Indeed, Schoenberg has been heralded as the “boogeyman” of modern music and decried as a destroyer of the classical music tradition. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. …

Read full preface / Das ganze Vorwort lesen> HERE