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Article Excerpt
This year's double Jan Vaclav Stamic anniversary (his dates are 19th June 1717-30th March 1757) is a good reason for a brief, overall consideration of the phenomenon, known as the Mannheim School, with which Stamic is so inseparably linked. The Mannheim School as a "technical term" appeared in music history at the beginning of the 20th century and went on to become the focus of lively discussions and polemics that occupied music historians most intensely roughly up to the seventies, when the various different opinions and conflicts settled into a kind of compromise position. Since then there has been relative harmony in views and now, thirty years on, it seems to be the right moment to try and give an overview of the whole period of debate and dispute but also of productive scholarship in this field, and to recall the key phases of the development of controversy and the important results that were gradually achieved. In resolving the "Mannheim problem" a major share was eventually taken by Czech musicology. Indeed, it was through involvement in discussion about the Mannheim School that Czech musicology actually made its first more prominent appearance on the international musicological scene, and even today it cannot boast very many conspicuous forays of this type beyond the borders of its domestic territory.
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The Mannheim School as Historical Fact
The Mannheim School in the sense of the phenomenon that is our subject here was formed in the environment of the Elector Palatine's Orchestra in Mannheim in the course of the 1740s.
The original Mannheim kappella had been established earlier, at the turn of the 17th/18th century in the reign of the duke Carl Philipp, Carl Theodore's predecessor. Carl Philipp had his residence in Silesia and it was here that that core of the kapella was formed, later moving a number of times with the ducal court: in 1707 it moved to Innsbruck from where it then followed the Elector Johann Wilhelm to Dusseldorf. When Johann Wilhelm died (1716) his younger brother Carl Philipp became elector, moving first to Heidelberg with part of his former Silesian kapella and finally to Mannheim in 1720. Here the kapella was reconstructed partly from members of the former Silesian and "Innsbruck" kapella, and partly from new members. In the reign of the Elector Palatine Carl Theodore (1742-1799) the orchestra experienced a great flowering both in style of performance and in terms of the music written by its members and associates. In Mannheim the orchestra perfected a style of interpretation celebrated and acknowledged throughout Europe, while the music produced by composers in the orchestra's circle displayed a series of new elements of material and technique that were later to be seen as crucially important for the development of the style of Classicist instrumental music. A whole range of allegedly distinctive innovations were to be attributed to the Mannheim School--in melodics (the so-called Mannheim manners: the "Mannheim sigh", the "rocket", the "Mannheim roller"), in structure (a higher developmental stage of the so-called sonata form, the introduction of the minuet into the symphony as a 4th movement), and orchestration (the emancipation of the wind instruments, the introduction of the clarinets into the orchestra). Music historians found the Mannheim composers to have written in a style not based on the figured bass foundation as heretofore. The dominant element in their work was instead the emancipated melody, divided into two-, four-, eight-bar units symmetrical and periodic in arrangement, and this was considered a fundamental influence on the new musical structuring.
The older, founding generation of the Mannheim School, represented by Jan Vaclav Stamic, Franz Xaver Richter, Anton Fils, Ignaz Holzbauer and a few others was particularly important in this regard. Stamic and Richter came from the Bohemian Lands, which meant that the "Czech Question" was a major issue in discussion of the Mannheim School from the very beginning. As research continued it was established that the Mannheim musicians had had contacts with the music-loving Austrian Count Jan Adam of Questenberg (Questenberk, 1678-1752), who had his own residential kapella in Jaromerice nad Rokytnou in South Moravia--a kapella that experienced a great flowering especially when headed by the kapellmeister Frantisek Vaclav Mica (1694-1744). Questenberg's demonstrable contacts with the Mannheim kapella were to play a considerable role in later discussions around the phenomenon of the Mannheim School, specifically in arguments for a strong musical connection between Mannheim and the Bohemian Lands.
In 1778 the Mannheim court moved to Munich with its the famous orchestra. Only a smaller orchestra with kapellmeister Ignaz Holzbauer was left in Mannheim. The "Mannheim School" was a phenomenon noticed by contemporaries 1) of course, but first and foremost in the sense of the elector's celebrated court orchestra, which astonished by its brilliance in performance. Only much later did assessments and commentaries shift in focus from the musical art of the kapella (which attracted attention in sources specifically from the time when it was headed by Jan Vaclav Stamic) to the work of the composers concentrated around the orchestra. The comments of contemporaries were not surprisingly related to the immediate events and concert practice of the day. Naturally while the orchestra was active and the Mannheim composers were presenting their pieces certain characteristic compositional techniques (especially melodic styles) were already noted, but without these being made the starting point for any general authoritative conclusions. The music of Classicism had been building up a relatively universal style of expression in which the characteristic elements of...
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