Composer of the Month
Telemann has long been known for his prolific output but, asks Paul Riley, shouldn’t we be marking the 250th anniversary of his death with a more generous appraisal?
Paul Riley on Georg Philipp Telemann, the sadly undervalued workaholic of the Baroque era
Had Georg Philipp Telemann been born three centuries later he would surely have taken to social media like the proverbial duck to water. An enthusiastic and early adopter of the newest innovations right across the board, was there a composer more adept at networking, manipulating the system, or keeping himself and his music in the public eye? This was not out of vanity or an overweening ego – though as his three autobiographical sketches reveal, he was not a man to hide his light under a bushel. Largely self-taught (or so he claimed), Telemann simply wanted to reach out to the widest constituency in order to share his expertise, open-mindedness and enthusiasm. As well as the autobiographies, the running commentaries by letter or pithy verse and the copious self-published collections – engraved by himself using the latest state-of-the-art equipment – he led from the front. Impresario, church music director, opera house intendant, musical newspaper publisher, unstuffy pedagogue and unstoppable proselytiser for the so-called ‘mixed taste’ forging a lingua franca out of the different national styles, he was, in the words of the French writer Romain Rolland ‘a modernist in the great battle of the ancient and modern’. ‘It is clear,’ Rolland argued, ‘that in all fields… Telemann has his place where new developments begin.’
The young Georg Philipp’s precocious musical interests didn’t go down well in the Telemanns’ Magdeburg household. He later recalled taking up several instruments by ear but started keyboard lessons with an organist who insisted on using the old German tablature notation – ‘from which he played,’ remembered the student, ‘as stiffly as the grandfather from whom he doubtless inherited it… Happier tunes were already hopping around my head, so I departed after a fortnight’s martyrdom and since then I have never learned music from a teacher.’
French and Italian music devoured by the teenager on visits to Hanover and Brunswick consolidated his study of the composers
Lully, Campra, Corelli and Rosenmüller so that by the time Telemann enrolled as a law student in Leipzig (to placate his family), he was more than equipped for the twist of fate that intervened, allowing him to jump ship – having initially tried to hide his musical talents, he was found out when a fellow student discovered one of his psalm settings among his possessions. Law soon forgotten, he provided regular music for Leipzig’s famous Thomaskirche, founded a Collegium Musicum of some 40 student musicians – which Bach would one day direct – took command of the opera house, and landed the job of music director at the University Church. For the student band, he obliged with what would soon become his calling card: the ouverture-suite. More than 20 operas also found their way over time onto the Leipzig stage, and Telemann’s indefatigable sacred cantata production line swung into full capacity. The scene was set. As his subsequent career took him through Eisenach and Frankfurt, en route to Hamburg where he spent almost the last 50 years of his life, prodigious output and practical multi-tasking would go hand in hand.
This above itinerary omits one post, briefly held yet hugely influential. In the spring of 1705, Telemann entered the employ of Count Erdmann von Promnitz, whose Francophile leanings kept Telemann’s ouverture-suite nose to the grindstone – the composer estimated he wrote some 200 to keep the Count happy. But, in accompanying the nobleman on trips around his estates, he was also rewarded with an ear-opening entrée into the exuberant bagpipes-and-fiddle world of Polish folk
music. In the music of Poland, Telemann detected ‘a true, barbaric beauty’, and enthused ‘an observer could collect enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime’. To the Italian cloth of the concerto and sonata and the French finery of the ouverture and quatuor, rhythmic and melodic souvenirs of his adventures around Pless (latterday Pszczyna) and Kraków lent pungent colour – though JS Bach’s sometime pupil Johann Philipp Kirnberger wryly observed that ‘German polonaises differ from true polonaises as much as gravediggers differ from priests, though they both be clothed in black’.
If the city of Eisenach witnessed, by his own admission, Telemann’s ‘coming of age’, Frankfurt marked the transition into maturity. Director of municipal music and kapellmeister at the Church of the Barefoot Friars from 1712, Telemann quickly added St Catherine’s to his portfolio, not to mention the directorship of the Frauenstein Society’s Collegium Musicum. Their weekly ‘grand concerts’ necessitated a constant stream of new music, and the sacred sphere proved no less productive. In 1716 he composed the landmark Brockes Passion which strikes out on a totally different path to that taken by JS Bach in his later Passion settings (or Handel’s treatment of Brockes’s selfsame text, come to that). A powerful opening Sinfonia prepares the ground as if an opera were to follow – no imposing theologically probing chorus à la Bach for Telemann. And whereas Bach’s St John Passion takes the words ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (‘it is accomplished’) as the cue for a plangent meditative aria, the theatrically motivated Telemann offers a dramatic, conspicuously operatic trio for ‘Three Believing Souls’ before, softly expressed, ‘Es ist vollbracht’ steers the music to easeful closure.
Opera ‘proper’ meanwhile was still setting Telemann’s creative juices flowing, and at the beginning of 1721 he was in Hamburg to oversee the premiere of his latest venture: Der
geduldige Socrates, a comic tale of Athenian bigamy. Later that year he was confirmed in his appointment as Kantor at the Johanneum, the city’s flagship grammar school. Also responsible for music at Hamburg’s five main churches, he was entering a world of music-making on an unprecedented scale – for the festivities attending the bicentenary of the Augsburg Confession, Lutheranism’s 1530
Telemann’s tally of works exceeds Bach and Handel combined
In the music of Poland Telemann detected ‘a true barbaric beauty’
statement of belief, 74 trumpeters and their drummers played from the city’s towers before regrouping to swell the instrumental forces assembled for a specially composed oratorio by the Cathedral’s Kapellmeister Reinhard Keiser. Public concerts in the Drill Hall were enhanced by the erection of a purpose-built (heated!) concert hall; and, while he might have a vested interest in giving it the thumbs up since he took over its musical directorship in 1722, Telemann declared that the Goose Market Opera House was ‘now in the fullest flower’. A bonus, he hinted, was that the music-loving Hamburgers and their money could be easily parted.
Latter-day music lovers, whether in the concert hall or on disc, probably part with their money most freely on discovering the secular Telemann: the ouvertures, often with a programmatic story to tell (be it a day in the life of lakeside goings-on, a remedy for gout, or the travails of Don Quixote); the concertos which, he suggested, habitually turned out ‘smelling French’; the chamber music, including 1733’s delectable collection of ‘Musique de table’ or the Paris Quartets, whose second set is the fruit of a longanticipated sojourn in the city where they were performed by an all-star cast including the flautist Michel Blavet and the viola da gamba player Jean-baptiste Forqueray.
Less well known (to put it mildly) are the operas. Among the survivors, Pimpinone, a comic intermezzo first presented as a spot of light relief between the acts of Handel’s
Tamerlano, chronologically steals the thunder of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, while Orpheus oder Die wundebare Beständigkeit der Liebe (‘Orpheus or the marvellous constancy of love’) is indisputably required listening. Its plot, mind you, must have come back to haunt Telemann when his second wife ran up considerable gambling debts before running away with a Swedish military man. Curious to modern ears is its mix of languages, with arias in Italian, French and German cohabiting comfortably under one roof – each, moreover, an artful match of words and appropriately characterised music. Act III’S ‘Esprit de hâine’ sports a splendidly Rameau-esque French ferment, while
Orassio’s splenetic Act I ‘Sù mio’ aria crackles with strikingly authentic Italianate fury.
Just as mystifying is the neglect of Telemann’s sacred music – a necessary constant throughout his working life. The 30-plus cantata cycles make Bach’s five look positively indolent (though admittedly they’re less ambitious). So too do the 46 Passions Telemann produced for Hamburg alone.
And the oratorio Der Tag des Gerichts (‘The Day of Judgement’), a late ‘poem, for singing’ conceived in the shadow of the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755, is by any standards a major achievement.
With a tally of works exceeding Bach and Handel combined, Telemann was perhaps too prolific for his own good. ‘Polygraphs seldom produce many masterpieces’, the Hamburg literature professor Christoph Daniel Ebeling sniffed shortly after Telemann’s death.
Yet just as Handel was once considered ‘Bach-lite’ by some, now that their different priorities can be assessed as complementary rather than antithetical, perhaps Telemann can emerge into a less ideologically biased focus. His music – inquisitive, amiable, direct, engaging, fastidiously calibrated – bears out composer Johann Mattheson’s unapologetically nationalist tribute to a‘t’: ‘A Lully is renowned; Corelli one may praise. But Telemann alone, above mere fame has been raised’. Or as Telemann less grandiloquently put it: ‘I didn’t search for notes; the notes searched for me’.