Freiburger Barockorchester

Born in Magdeburg to a Lutheran deacon who died in 1685, Georg Philipp Telemann grew up with his mother solely responsible for raising him and his two siblings. Remarkable musical talent emerged early, yet Puritan Lutherans temporarily deterred his mother by predicting that music would reduce him to no more than “a clown, a tightrope walker or a marmot-trainer.” He continued private study against her initial resistance until she allowed lessons with the respected Kantor Benedict Christiani at the Old City School. Apart from limited early exposure to tablature notation, Telemann taught himself to play the flute, violin, viola da gamba, oboe, trombone, double bass, and multiple keyboard instruments.

He began composing in childhood and completed the opera Sigismundus by age twelve. Sent to Zellerfeld in 1694, he later decided at twenty to pursue law in Leipzig; an encounter in Halle with sixteen-year-old Georg Friedrich Handel nevertheless drew him back to music. In Leipzig he supplied cantatas to a local church and swiftly became a local celebrity. Named director of the Leipzig Opera in 1702, he created four operas for the company during the next three years. Early career moves brought abrupt professional and personal shifts: he served three years as Kapellmeister in Sorau (now in Poland) starting in 1705 before taking the post at the Eisenach court from 1708 to 1712. In 1712 he moved to Frankfurt as Kapellmeister at the Church of the Barefoot Friars and director of municipal music. His 1709 marriage to Amalie Eberlin ended when she died in childbirth after one year; he married Maria Katharina Textor in 1714, whose gambling losses prompted Hamburg citizens to raise funds to avert bankruptcy, after which she abandoned him for a Swedish military officer.

His opera Der geduldige Socrates received its Hamburg premiere in 1721, the year city authorities appointed him Kantor of the Johanneum and musical director of the principal churches. The posts required two cantatas each Sunday, a fresh Passion setting every year, and music for numerous liturgical and civic functions, all of which he supplied while also directing the Hamburg Opera from 1722 until its closure in 1738.

Telemann ranked among the first composers to concentrate on publishing his own music, personally preparing and selling at least forty early editions. Several achieved broad circulation across Europe, among them Der Getreue Musik Meister (1728), Musique de Table (or Tafelmusik, 1733), and 6 Concerts et 6 Suites (1734). Composition slowed from the 1740s to roughly 1755 as he turned to music theory, though he produced several oratorios in the mid-1750s, including Donnerode (1756), Das befreite Israel (1759), and Die Auferstehung und Himmelfährt Jesu (1760). He died at age eighty-six in 1767.

During his lifetime Telemann was viewed as Germany’s leading composer, and his standing endured briefly afterward until it yielded to the rising prominence of his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach. His output, possibly the largest of any classical composer, comprises portions of at least thirty-one cantata cycles plus numerous operas, concertos, oratorios, songs, civic and sacred pieces, passions, orchestral suites, and extensive chamber music. Although some works disappeared, most survive, their sheer quantity creating difficulties for scholars and performers. Renewed attention did not begin until the 1920s, yet it has since expanded rapidly, so that in the twenty-first century more of Telemann’s music is performed, known, understood, and examined than at any previous time.