Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 – 1767) was a German
Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost
completely self-taught in music, he became a composer
against his family's wishes. After studying in
Magdeburg, Zellerfeld, and Hildesheim, Telemann entered
the University of Leipzig to study law, but eventually
settled on a career in music. He held important
positions in Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt
before settling in Hamburg in 1721, where he became
musical director of that city's ...(+)
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 – 1767) was a German
Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost
completely self-taught in music, he became a composer
against his family's wishes. After studying in
Magdeburg, Zellerfeld, and Hildesheim, Telemann entered
the University of Leipzig to study law, but eventually
settled on a career in music. He held important
positions in Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt
before settling in Hamburg in 1721, where he became
musical director of that city's five main churches.
While Telemann's career prospered, his personal life
was always troubled: his first wife died less than two
years after their marriage, and his second wife had
extramarital affairs and accumulated a large gambling
debt before leaving him. He is one of the most prolific
composers in history, at least in terms of surviving
oeuvre. He was considered by his contemporaries to be
one of the leading German composers of the time, and he
was compared favourably both to his friend Johann
Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and
namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George
Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally. As
part of his duties, he wrote a considerable amount of
music for educating organists under his direction. This
includes 48 chorale preludes and 20 small fugues (modal
fugues) to accompany his chorale harmonisations for 500
hymns. His music incorporates French, Italian, and
German national styles, and he was at times even
influenced by Polish popular music. He remained at the
forefront of all new musical tendencies, and his music
stands as an important link between the late Baroque
and early Classical styles. The Telemann Museum in
Hamburg is dedicated to him.
Telemann was one of the most prolific major composers
of all time: his all-encompassing oeuvre comprises more
than 3,000 compositions, half of which have been lost,
and most of which have not been performed since the
18th century. From 1708 to 1750, Telemann composed
1,043 sacred cantatas and 600 overture-suites, and
types of concertos for combinations of instruments that
no other composer of the time employed. The first
accurate estimate of the number of his works was
provided by musicologists only during the 1980s and
1990s, when extensive thematic catalogues were
published. During his lifetime and the latter half of
the 18th century, Telemann was very highly regarded by
colleagues and critics alike. Numerous theorists
(Marpurg, Mattheson, Quantz, and Scheibe, among others)
cited his works as models, and major composers such as
J. S. Bach and Handel bought and studied his published
works. He was immensely popular not only in Germany but
also in the rest of Europe: orders for editions of
Telemann's music came from France, Italy, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavian countries,
Switzerland, and Spain. It was only in the early 19th
century that his popularity came to a sudden halt. Most
lexicographers started dismissing him as a "polygraph"
who composed too many works, a Vielschreiber for whom
quantity came before quality. Such views were
influenced by an account of Telemann's music by
Christoph Daniel Ebeling, a late-18th-century critic
who in fact praised Telemann's music and made only
passing critical remarks of his productivity. After the
Bach revival, Telemann's works were judged as inferior
to Bach's and lacking in deep religious feeling. For
example, by 1911, the Encyclopædia Britannica lacked
an article about Telemann, and in one of its few
mentions of him referred to "the vastly inferior work
of lesser composers such as Telemann" in comparison to
Handel and Bach.
Particularly striking examples of such judgements were
produced by noted Bach biographers Philipp Spitta and
Albert Schweitzer, who criticized Telemann's cantatas
and then praised works they thought were composed by
Bach, but which were composed by Telemann. The last
performance of a substantial work by Telemann (Der Tod
Jesu) occurred in 1832, and it was not until the 20th
century that his music started being performed again.
The revival of interest in Telemann began in the first
decades of the 20th century and culminated in the
Bärenreiter critical edition of the 1950s. Today each
of Telemann's works is usually given a TWV number,
which stands for Telemann-Werke-Verzeichnis (Telemann
Works Catalogue).
Telemann's music was one of the driving forces behind
the late Baroque and the early Classical styles.
Starting in the 1710s he became one of the creators and
foremost exponents of the so-called German mixed style,
an amalgam of German, French, Italian and Polish
styles. Over the years, his music gradually changed and
started incorporating more and more elements of the
galant style, but he never completely adopted the
ideals of the nascent Classical era: Telemann's style
remained contrapuntally and harmonically complex, and
already in 1751 he dismissed much contemporary music as
too simplistic. Composers he influenced musically
included pupils of J.S. Bach in Leipzig, such as
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach and
Johann Friedrich Agricola, as well as those composers
who performed under his direction in Leipzig (Christoph
Graupner, Johann David Heinichen and Johann Georg
Pisendel), composers of the Berlin lieder school, and
finally, his numerous pupils, none of whom, however,
became major composers.
Equally important for the history of music were
Telemann's publishing activities. By pursuing exclusive
publication rights for his works, he set one of the
most important early precedents for regarding music as
the intellectual property of the composer. The same
attitude informed his public concerts, where Telemann
would frequently perform music originally composed for
ceremonies attended only by a select few members of the
upper class.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Philipp_Telemann).
Although originally written for Viola da Gamba, Strings
& Continuo, I created this Interpretation of the Sonata
in A Minor (TWV 41:a6) for Oboe & Strings (2 Violins,
Viola & Cello).
PARTITION