TELEMANN’S STYLE

Polonaise style

Telemann was deeply affected by the Polish folk music (violinist pictured left) he encountered while working for Count Promnitz. Its rhythms, modal melodies and raucous bonhomie

‘sets the entire world a-leaping’, he declared; and whether explicitly in many designated Polonaises or more generally throughout his output, the folk element flavours its prevailing urbanity.

Galant style

From the start, Telemann was drawn to an elegant simplicity that found its natural ally in the emerging ‘style galant’ which favoured a focus on melody and uncluttered textures underpinned by readily graspable harmonies. Musical directions such as dolce (‘sweetly’), and affettuoso (‘with tender affection’) signal a break with Baroque’s stiff upper lip.

Programme music

A born story-teller, he enjoyed painting fanciful musical pictures, especially in the orchestral suites which don’t shy away from such subjects as ‘The Inn of Lice’, the stock exchange and duetting frogs and crows. With a rich scoring including four horns, the Alsterouvertüre portrays the Hamburg waterfront.

The polyglot

German musicians were expected to be stylistically multi-lingual, producing what the composer Johann David Heinichen dubbed ‘the happy mixture’. Telemann was effortlessly fluent, adding elements of the Vivaldian concerto to the Lullian suite while nourishing his own roots with the homely directness of the German Lied.