Franz Anton Hoffmeister  (1754-1812)

 Gary Smith

                       Franz Anton Hoffmeister was born in Rothenburg am Neckar in May 1754. When he was only 14 years old he arrived in Vienna to study law, but soon became so attracted to the city’s rich musical life, that upon graduating, he decided to devote his life to music, both with composition and, as it turned out publishing. By the 1780s he had become one of the city’s most popular composers, with an extensive and varied list of works to his credit. His music was geared more towards the skilled amateur market than to the professional, meaning that he was tapping into the developing middle class coming to the forefront in Vienna.

Hoffmeister’s reputation today however rests almost exclusively on his activities as a music publisher, though. In 1785, he established one of Vienna’s first music publishing businesses, second only to Artaria & Co that had ventured into this field only five years earlier. Vienna was the home to a great industry of copyists, who supplied the music market with hand-produced copies of various works by a multitude of composers.  Until Artaria and Hoffmeister came along, there were no major music publishers of printed scores in Vienna.  Over the next 15 years Hoffmeister issued works by many prominent Viennese composers amongst them Albrechtsberger, Clementi, E.A. Förster, Ordonez, Pleyel, Vanhal and Paul Wranitzky, as well as himself. Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn are all represented in his vast catalogue, Mozart by several important first editions including the G minor Piano Quartet K.478, and the single String Quartet in D K.499, the ‘Hoffmeister’ Quartet.

Hoffmeister’s publishing activities reached a peak in 1791, but thereafter they seemed to take a back seat to composition. He appears to have been somewhat of a dilettante overall in regards to business.  He often missed announced schedules, opened ill-conceived branch offices (which went bankrupt), and changed addresses more frequently than good business practices would dictate.  When times became tougher in the late 1780’s and early 1790’s, he sold the rights (and plates) of many works to Artaria and J. Amon.  In 1799 Hoffmeister and the flautist Franz Thurner set off on a concert tour that was to have taken them as far a field as London. They got no further than Leipzig however, where Hoffmeister befriended the organist Ambrosius Kühnel. The two must have decided to set up a music publishing partnership for “within a year” they had founded the Bureau de Musique that would later grow into the well-respected firm of C.F. Peters, which is still active today. Until 1805 Hoffmeister kept both the Viennese firm and the newer Leipzig publishing house going, but in March 1805 he transferred sole ownership of the Bureau de Musique to Kühnel, arranging as part of the transfer a life annuity for himself.  His interest in the Viennese firm was finally waning as well, for in 1806, apparently to allow more time for composition, he sold his 20-year-old business to the Chemische Druckerey.

As a composer Hoffmeister was highly respected by his contemporaries. This is evident from this entry in Gerber’s Neues Lexikon der Tonkünstler published around the time of his death in 1812:

”If you were to take a glance at his many and varied works, then you would have to admire the diligence and the cleverness of this composer.... He earned for himself a well-deserved and widespread reputation through the original content of his works, which are not only rich in emotional expression but also distinguished by the interesting and suitable use of instruments and through good practability. For this last trait we have to thank his knowledge of instruments, which is so evident that you might think that he was a virtuoso on all of the instruments for which he wrote.”

He was a very prolific composer; popular not only in Vienna and Austria, but throughout the German states and other parts of Europe.  His music can claim flowing and pleasant melodies, making them easy for amateurs to sound good with.  Overall however, his style is lacking in depth and originality. For the most part, his music was out of fashion by the 1820’s.   Prominent in Hoffmeister’s extensive listings of works are those for the flute, not only concertos but also chamber works with the flute in a leading role. Many of these works were composed with Vienna’s growing number of amateur musicians in mind for whom the flute was one of the most favored instruments.

Hoffmeister composed at least eight operas (including one in collaboration with Süssmayr), about 66 symphonies, numerous concertos (at least 25 are for the flute, 14 keyboard, and around 20 others for various instruments and combinations of instruments), a large amount of chamber music, piano music, and many collections of songs.

Some Recordings:

Wind Serenades on CPO CD 999107

Flute Concertos (1 by Hoffmeister) on Novalis 150162

String Quartets (2) on Naxos 8.55952

Sources:

Clive, Peter  Mozart and His Circle: A Biographical Dictionary  Yale University Press, New Haven  1993

Sadie, Stanley (Ed.)  The New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2^nd Edition   Groves Dictionaries, New York  2000    

Artaria composers list

Liner notes from some of the above CDs

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