Georg Matthias Monn

Georg Matthias Monn (sometimes Matthias Georg Monn) (1717- 1750) was an Austrian composer, organist, and music teacher. Together with Georg Christoph Wagenseil and Josef Starzer, Monn formed the Viennese Pre-Classical movement (Wiener Vorklassik), 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. Much less is known 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 on the edge of the city center of Vienna. Monn died when he was only thirty-three years old. Together with Wagenseil and other contemporaries such as Leopold Mozart, Monn forms a school of Austrian composers who had thorougly studied the principles of counterpoint as practised by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Joseph Fux, but also forced the change from the rigid Rococo style to the looser, graceful Galante music. Moreover, they renewed the sonata form by expanding the concepts of secondary theme and development. Joseph Haydn and his brother Michael Haydn developed these concepts to a highpoint. Monn's works include sixteen symphonies,twenty quartets, sonatas, masses, and compositions for violin and keyboard. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.