On a musical pilgrimage to Europe, would you include Mannheim, a German city on the Rhine, about equidistant from Frankfurt and Stuttgart? If you answer yes, it’s probably because of Mozart.
The 21-year-old composer spent the winter of 1777-78 in Mannheim, five months in total. This was his first journey away from his native Salzburg without his father (his mother accompanied him). He made new musical friends in Mannheim, fell seriously in love for the first time, with singer Aloysia Weber – he married her sister on the rebound. Leopold Mozart’s hope was that Wolfgang would secure a permanent appointment, and Mannheim was the first place he tried for this. No wonder: as Leopold wrote, Mannheim was ‘that famous court whose rays, like those of the sun, illumine the whole of Germany, nay even the whole of Europe’.
Mannheim in 1758.
This was the achievement first of the ruling prince the Elector Carl Philipp, who in 1720 moved his court to Mannheim, a town of minor importance in the marshes, and built a magnificent palace, the largest of the German Baroque. This prince’s strong interest in music was continued under the reign of his nephew and successor, Carl Theodor (1724-1799). Of him the English historian of music Charles Burney wrote that music was ‘the chief and most constant of his electoral highness’s amusements’.
The magnificent palace was destroyed by bombing in World War II and is still not fully restored, so that the most durable legacy of Mannheim to history was its music.
The Mannheim style
Anyone who has studied music history will recognise certain features of what has become known as the ‘Mannheim’ style, even if we mainly hear them, these days, reflected in the music of Mozart. In Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade, for example, composed in 1779 in Salzburg, there is in the first movement a typical example of the ‘Mannheim crescendo’, a gradual build-up of instrumental forces and dynamics. In the Symphony in G minor, No.40, the last movement begins with a striking, almost explosive upward arpeggio figure, which has been given the name ‘Mannheim rocket’. And Mozart’s music shows many examples of the descending stepwards appoggiatura figures called ‘Mannheim sighs’.
Here a warning note must be sounded. The idea that there was an influential ‘Mannheim school’ of composers is a 20thcentury invention, mainly due to the writings of the influential German musicologist Hugo Riemann. In 1902 Riemann announced that he had discovered in the Mannheim school the chief creators of the Classical style of Mozart and Haydn, hailing Johann Stamitz in particular as ‘the long-sought forerunner of Joseph Haydn’. It was a very German discovery. It is true that the symphonies of Stamitz and his contemporaries at Mannheim were influential in establishing the pattern of the symphony in four movements, adding a minuet in third position to the fast-slow-fast scheme with which the symphony began.
But the dynamic effects for which the Mannheimers became famous were not original to them. The real inventor of the orchestral crescendo seems to have been the Italian composer Nicolò Jommelli, with whom Cannabich studied in Rome. Johann Friedrich Reichardt reported, ‘They say that when Jommelli first introduced [the crescendo] in Rome, the listeners gradually rose from their seats during the crescendo, and only at the diminuendo noted that it had taken their breaths away. I myself have experienced this phenomenon at Mannheim.’ The ‘Mannheim rocket’, it has been proved, was not even particularly common in the music at Mannheim, and the ‘Mannheim sighs’ were a feature of the music of many centres in Europe in the transition from the galant to the Classical style. The Mannheimers’ achievement may have been to transfer to the symphony the graded dynamics which were such a surprise when they were introduced in opera overtures by Italian composers.
But in one area, Mannheim’s reputation remains beyond question: the excellence of its orchestral execution. The orchestra at Mannheim was famous throughout Europe, and deservedly so. Burney described it as ‘an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it’. The writer and musician C.F.D. Schubart, writing in 1773, claimed:
No orchestra in the world has ever surpassed that of Mannheim in performance. Its forte is like thunder, its crescendo a cataract, its diminuendo a crystal stream bubbling into the distance, its piano a breath of spring. The winds are used just as they should be: they lift and support, or fill out and animate, the storm of the strings.
The standard of the Mannheim orchestra had been established under the leader and conductor Johann Stamitz (1717-1757). His orchestra of 20 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos, 2 basses, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (from 1758) and 2 bassoons was twice the size of Haydn’s orchestra at Esterhaza.
A well-drilled ensemble
What struck listeners more than the sheer sound of the orchestra was its discipline. Stamitz developing a manner of violin and orchestral playing of his own. All the members of the orchestra were taught individually by him, and drilled in ensemble. Things we take for granted, like uniform bowing and precise observance of dynamic nuances, were pioneered by Stamitz. His contribution to the orchestra was developed and consolidated under his pupil and successor Christian Cannabich (1731-1798), described by Wolfgang Mozart as ‘the best conductor I have ever seen’. Schubart, describing his new method of bow control, wrote that Cannabich, conducting from the leader’s chair, ‘has the ability to keep the very large orchestra in order with a simple nod of the head and jerk of the elbow.’ The Mannheim court was proud of its orchestra, whose music, especially its symphonies, became a status-symbol equal or superior to the opera favoured at most German courts.
Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart, though not particularly impressed by the compositions of Mannheim composers, both praised the orchestra’s playing unreservedly. It must have been a thrill to Mozart, used to Salzburg standards, to hear his music played by the Mannheim orchestra under Cannabich, an excitement which can still be felt in his opera Idomeneo (1780), composed for Munich where the Elector, who had succeeded to the throne of Bavaria, transferred his court and his orchestra in 1778.
The impact of the presence of Wolfgang Mozart in Mannheim can be sensed in the enthusiasm of the wind players of the orchestra there, the flautist Wendling, the oboist Ramm and the horn player Punto (or Stich, to give him his Bohemian name – many of the Mannheim musicians were of Bohemian origin). The music Mozart wrote under the stimulus of these colleagues and friends, such as his Oboe Quartet for Ramm, may be Mannheim’s most durable musical memorial. It came at a maturing point in Mozart’s growing up, and its echoes resound in his later music.
Mozart had been taken into the bosom of a lively musical culture, which included if not historical path breakers, at least a talented and up-to-date group of composers. He was at his most susceptible, in musical and in other ways – we can hear this in the concert arias he wrote for Aloysia Weber, and also in the piano sonata (K.309) for Christian Cannabich’s daughter Rosa, his temporary piano pupil, who aroused at least his musical sensibilities.
First published 2003