Mannheim School

The Mannheim School refers to an orchestra and opera company which was based at the elector's court at Mannheim, Germany from 1720 to 1781, as well as the style of composition which flourished from 1750 under the direction of Johann Stamitz. Made up of some of the finest musicians in all of Europe, the Mannheim court orchestra was renowned for its precision and dynamic control; Charles Burney, a contemporary writer and critic, called it "an army of generals," referring to the fact that so many of the musicians were excellent soloists and composers in their own right. Since their period of activity comes between the end of the Baroque and the beginning of the Classical period, their innovations in playing technique and pan-European musical cosmopolitanism were symptomatic of, if not an important influence on, the general change which was occurring in musical style during the mid 18th-century that would culminate in the classical stye.

Mannheim "Mannerisms"

The orchestra's famed dynamic control took on two aspects which represented an advance over Baroque instrumental practices. First was the ability of the full orchestra to accompany a soloist without covering them, which requires that every member of the orchestra master playing with utmost softness without sacrificing clarity. In the Baroque period, composers avoided this difficulty by reducing the instrumentation of solo passages, but since the Mannheim orchestra members were all virtuosi, the composers who wrote for them were able to create new orchestral sounds by capitalizing on this new development. The second innovation was the famed "Mannheim crescendo," where the whole orchestra would transition from very soft to very loud within a very short time. In contrast, Baroque music's dynamics were mostly uniform, either piano or forte, but without effects such as crescendo or diminuendo.

The other famous technique associated with Mannheim was the "Mannheim Steamroller," which combined this crescendo with tremolo effects in the strings and a rising scale. Other important techniques which would be utilized by classical composers were the "Mannheim Rocket," which is a quickly rising arpeggio, and the "Mannheim Sigh," an effect created by a falling interval intended to depict an exhalation.

Mannheim's Influence on the Classical Style

Before the early 20th century, music historians were unable to explain the temporal and stylistic gap between the Baroque and Classical periods. In other words, with early historians' focus on a succession of great composers, there was a gap between the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750 and the music of Haydn and Mozart, which did not begin in earnest until the late 1760's. Moreover, their styles of composition were so different from Bach's (whose music was likely not well known to them until much later), it was obvious that some intermediary figure had to have influenced them.

Hugo Riemann, a German musicologist and music theorist who is credited with the invention of roman-numeral analysis (still taught in music schools internationally), published a series of articles in the first decade of the 20th century claiming to have found "the definitive precedent to Haydn" in Johann Stamitz. In the course of several publications of Mannheim orchestral music, Riemann was tireless in proclaiming the Mannheim school the ultimate source of the classical style.

In truth, the relationship was more complicated. Mannheim's success was at the time mostly local, and music from Mannheim was not published and circulated. It is therefore not likely that Haydn, who did not travel far from Vienna or Eisenstadt until his old age, had ever heard their music. Mozart, on the other hand, visited Mannheim several times beginning in 1777, and wrote the opera Idomeneo in 1781 with this orchestra in mind (though they had relocated to Munich by this time).