Chamber Music

Johann Anton André (1775–1842), the scion of a Huguenot family that emigrated to Germany at the end of the seventeenth century, is known among musical experts primarily as the first publisher of an extensive edition of Mozart’s works, but hardly as a composer. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Johann André Music Publishers in Offenbach, the firm founded by André’s father in 1774, this first ever production of works by Johann Anton presents a series of chamber music works from around 1800. They reveal a young, openminded talent who developed an original personal style before the consolidation of what was to become known in music history by the epochal term “Viennese Classicism”: a craft honed on models by Mozart and Haydn meets elegance and subtle irony, an inheritance from Johann Anton’s French ancestors.