The facts of Georg Philip Telemann's life are preserved in three autobiographies written between 1718, when the composer was forty-seven and at the height of his career, and 1749, a few years after his semi-official retirement. They reveal a being possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and a zest for virtually every aspect of music-making available in Protestant Germany in the eighteenth century.
The phenomenal amount of music he produced is ample proof of his energy. The eagerness with which he pursued and captured virtually every desirable musical position in Saxony suggests that he was a powerfully ambitious, even opportunistic, personality.
Every student of Telemann's life has remarked on the man's brilliance as an administrator and politician. Through his infinite capacity for hard work, considerable personal charm, and knack for nonconfrontational manipulation of bureaucracies, Telemann transformed the musical life of every town he worked in.
Although Telemann held posts in a number of courts and towns, including Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt, Telemann's story can be told in the context of two cities: Leipzig, where he emerged as a musician, and Hamburg, where he spent most of his maturity.
The musical cultures of Leipzig and Hamburg were extraordinarily rich. Both cities had made good economic recoveries from the devastations of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1638), and by the end of the seventeenth century were enjoying great economic prosperity.
A well-educated, well-to-do middle class possessed in each location a strong sense of civic pride and responsibility. In Leipzig, the city fathers built new municipal buildings, public parks, schools, and private houses that transformed the old walled medieval town into a baroque architectural showcase. A burgeoning musical scene was also considered to be a positive symptom of the good health of the community.
Since the end of the fourteenth century, most good-sized German towns had supported a small ensemble of Stadtpfeifers (city wind players) and Kunstgeigen (skilled string players). Often these people were one and the same.
They provided music for every conceivable kind of civic event, from piping the hours or marking the comings and goings of eminent personages, to playing for the inevitable weddings, banquets, and funerals. A first-rate town band was an important symbol of affluence and status; German instrumentalists were renowned and coveted throughout Europe during the Renaissance for their virtuosity and versatility.
In Hamburg in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, the city's music was lead by the great English composer William Brade and the violin virtuoso Johann Schop. By the century's end, however, the band had deteriorated, suffering from cronyism and other kinds of corruption. The town council abolished it sometime after 1695. In Leipzig, the Stadtpfeifer survived into the eighteenth century, although J.S. Bach remarked on their uneven abilities in one of his many contentious memoranda to the town council.
The privileged position of the Stadtpfeifer was undermined by the emergence of another sort of ensemble, the collegium musicum. Collegia were a cross between a humanist academy and a social club; however, collegia were more oriented towards performance than speculative discourse. Their membership was comprised of the more ambitious professional musicians in town, middle-class amateurs, and university students. The term first crops up in the 1570s, but collegia began truly to flourish throughout Central Europe in the later seventeenth century.
The Hamburg collegium musicum was revived after the Thirty Years' War by Matthias Weckmann and Christoph Bernhard, both students of Heinrich Schütz. While still a student at the University in Leipzig, Telemann founded a collegium musicum which became so successful that it laid the foundation for his musical career.
Telemann was born on the 14th of March in 1681 into a family of teachers and clergymen, and his mother intended that he follow in the ancestral footsteps. (His father died when he was four.) When she discovered that her 12-year-old son had written an opera, she sensed a disturbing trend and separated him from his musical instruments.
Throughout his primary education, Telemann nevertheless continued to play and compose. Within a year of his arrival in Leipzig in 1701, where he was sent to study law at the university, he had organized a collegium musicum that consisted mostly of his fellow students; it was an immediate and enormous success. Somehow, he contrived to have the collegium perform one of his compositions at the Thomaskirche, which was heard with great favor by a member of the town council.
At this time, the kantor of the Thomaskirche was Johann Kuhnau, a fine church composer, whose work is known to us through only a few surviving compositions. His duties as Thomaskantor were established by the town council, an oligarchy of wealthy citizens who controlled all aspects of municipal life.
The Thomaskantor was required to provide liturgical music for several of Leipzig's more important churches and passions and oratorios for the major holidays, to train choirboys, and to teach academic subjects at the Thomasschule. His performing resources were limited to choirs drawn from the school and a small orchestra made up of the Stadtpfeifer.
With this limited manpower, it was possible only to perform cantatas at the Thomaskirche and one other church on alternate Sundays. This frustrating state of affairs was made infuriating when Kuhnau's most gifted students flocked to Telemann's collegium. Telemann further undermined Kuhnau's position by proposing to the town council that he and his collegium provide the Thomaskirche with cantatas (presumably gratis) on the alternate weekends. The council delightedly accepted over Kuhnau's outraged objections.
Telemann's collegium also gave the first public concerts in Leipzig, and formed the orchestra of the mostly amateur Leipzig opera, of which Telemann became director in 1702. The opera also ate away at the ranks of Kuhnau's student choirs, which further embittered the Thomaskantor.
(In 1723, J. S. Bach was appointed to the position of Thomaskantor after Telemann and Graupner had turned down offers for the position. He found that the post was still as laden with responsibilities and beset with frustrations as it had been in Kuhnau's time.)
Telemann left Leipzig in 1705 to work as a court musician in Sorau. While his behavior to Kuhnau was regrettable, it cannot be denied that he greatly enriched the city's musical life. He doubled the number of cantata performances heard weekly, revitalized the opera, and established a tradition of public concerts. These were given either outdoors or in coffeehouses, the most famous of which was Zimmerman's. J. S. Bach eventually took over the directorship of this collegium, with whom he performed orchestral music and, of course, the "Coffee" Cantata.
Over the course of the next decade, Telemann was married, widowed, and remarried. He worked in Eisenach, where he met Bach (it seems that their relationship was friendly; Telemann was godfather to C. P. E. Bach), and in Frankfurt. There, he was kapellmeister at the Barfüsserkirche, and led a collegium musicum, establishing a weekly series of public concerts, as he had in Leipzig. In 1721, he secured a kantorship in Hamburg, where he remained happily until his death in 1767.
Hamburg supported a number of the same musical institutions that flourished in Leipzig. A Stadtkantor appointed by the city council had the unenviable task of coordinating all civic, religious, and educational musical activities. The Johanneum Lateinschule, founded in 1529, was an important institution for the training of church musicians. Telemann was its director from 1722 to 1764. The town band and collegium musicum flourished in the seventeenth century; there were occasionally fifty performers in the latter ensemble.
One of Germany's few successful permanent opera houses was begun in Hamburg in 1678. Under Reinhard Keiser, it achieved international prominence during the years 1703–6, luring the young Handel there to undertake an apprenticeship with Keiser and Mattheson. Telemann had been drawn to opera since childhood, and was doubtless attracted to Hamburg's lively opera scene.
Despite the esteem in which composers and intellectuals held the genre, opera had to struggle for survival in Protestant Germany. Central to the problem was the often adamant opposition to musical theater by conservative members of the clergy.
The Hamburg opera tried to dampen this hostility by producing pieces with plots drawn from the Bible. More generally, there was a lack of cultural affinity for the classical literatures that were at the core of opera in Italy and France. Nor did Renaissance Germany produce a body of humanist epics (like Orlando Furioso) from which to derive libretti.
Ultimately, passion music and oratorio better suited the German baroque temperament. Courtly patronage was hard to come by, because the aristocracy preferred to import Italian singers and violinists to perform in their own private theatricals. Finally, touring Italian companies offered stiff competition to the local enterprises. It was for this reason that the Hamburg opera was finally forced to close its doors in 1738.
As Kantor of the Johanneum, Telemann was expressly forbidden by the city council to have anything to do with the opera. In 1722, he outmaneuvered the council by threatening to accept Leipzig's offer of the kantorship of the Thomaskirche, that position having been made vacant by the death of the unfortunate Kuhnau. The Hamburg council responded by insisting that Telemann honor their contract, but looked the other way when Telemann took over the directorship of the opera.
Telemann played a vital role in every aspect of music in Hamburg. The scholar Martin Ruhnke has pointed out that Telemann's unique genius lay in his vision of what a "true music-master" could be in Protestant Germany. Most notably, he broke down old barriers that kept church musicians from participating in opera, and transformed the collegium musicum into a semi-professional organization that performed publicly, anticipating the function of the classical symphony orchestra.
If Telemann was guilty of some opportunism in his youth, his streak of idealism widened with age. It is clear that he honestly believed in the virtue of music as a presence in everyday life and in the joys of musical amateurism. It was his intention to provide accessible music for church and for the home; he understood that his primary public was an educated middle class rather than a courtly elite. To this end he produced hundreds of chamber works, many of them of very fine quality.
Our program is derived from this repertoire. These pieces show evidence of the extremely high level of amateurism in eighteenth-century Germany. It is also important to remember that Telemann's compositional philosophy was thoroughly grounded in neoclassical rhetorical principles that emphasized clarity and simplicity of speech over ornament of thought or grammar.
Much responsibility for the creation of affect was placed in the hands of the orator/performer. This is particularly true of Telemann's chamber works: the composer has provided the performer with ample imaginative space that it is his or her job to furnish with collaborative ideas.
These compositional principles were brilliantly set forth by Telemann's colleague and contemporary, Johann Mattheson (1681–1764), in Der volkommene Kapellmeister (1739). Mattheson was the last and most coherent of a long line of musical rhetoricians stretching back to the late sixteenth century and unique to Lutheran Germany.
From the time of Heinrich Schütz onwards, baroque German vocal music, and even some instrumental music, was constructed on rhetorical models; Telemann's solo instrumental works not infrequently include recitatives. Mattheson's writings in particular furnish us today with valuable insights into the esthetics of Lutheran cantatas, and the musical architecture of Bach's passion music.
Telemann was the most prolific and widely respected composer in eighteenth-century Protestant Germany. His passionate and generous enthusiasm for music-making justly earned him his reputation. Today he is often held accountable for not being J.S. Bach. With Bach held up as a model, Telemann can seem prolix and superficial. Certainly Telemann was no contrapuntalist, but that was not his aim. To be fairly assessed, his ideals as well as his limitations must be taken into account.
—Mary Springfels
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