Passacaglia

Although the music of Georg Philipp Telemann has deservedly been enjoying a revival over the past thirty years, it is only relatively recently that his contribution to the musical life of the middle class, music-loving bourgeoisie of his native country has been fully realised. In our current thriving climate of musical activity we perhaps take for granted two of the very things which Telemann helped to establish - one, the existence of regular public concerts, and two, the general availability of printed music for use in the home. For until the early c18th, musical activity in northern Europe was mostly restricted to church, court or opera, with little opportunity for the average city dweller to experience live performance, or have access to sheet music suitable for amatuer players.

From Telemann’s early student days in Leipzig, his eagerness to extend music to a wider audience led to the establishment of the first public concerts there, held by the collegia musica in the town’s coffee houses - places where students, philosophers and musicians could gather and socialise in a convivial atmosphere. Later Telemann instigated similar concerts in Hamburg and Frankfurt, all frequently including works that he wrote exclusively for the public domain. In Leipzig the coffee concerts continued throughout the eighteenth century under the directorship of amongst others, JS Bach, as the contemporary critic LC Mizler suggests in his Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek of 1736:
.“... the public musical Concerts or Assemblies that are held here [in Leipzig] weekly are still flourishing steadily. The one is conducted by Mr Johann Sebastian Bach, Capellmeister to the Court of Weissenfels and Musik-Direcktor at the Thomas-Kirche and Nicolai-Kirche in this city, and is held ... once a week in Zimmermann’s coffeehouse in the Cather-Strasse ....

The participants in these musical concerts are chiefly the students here, and there are always good musicians amongst them, so that sometimes they become, as is known, famous virtuosos. Any musician is permitted to make himself publicly heard at these musical concerts, and most often, too, there are such listeners as know how to judge the qualities of an able musician.”
(Quoted from The Bach Reader, Ed. David & Mendel, London 1966)

No doubt Telemann’s engaging personality played a part in securing the phenomenal success he achieved in his lifetime. A keen sense of business acumen led him to establish his own publishing house in Hamburg, which between 1724 and 1740 printed 43 of his works; moreover, he had a natural flair for communication, preferring to write essentially melodic, accessible music for his public in preference to the learned style of his forbears. Ultimately this was a formula which, then as now, found favour with his patrons, who flocked to buy and listen to his music. This is all the more remarkable for a musician who was essentially self-taught. In fact, an account of his childhood keyboard lessons makes for amusing reading:
’Unfortunately I fell into the hands of an organist who frightened me with German organ tablature which he played as stiffly as his grandfather probably had, from whom he had inherited it. But my mind was already haunted by more lively tunes than I heard here. So I parted from him after a fortnight of agony, and since then I have never again tried to be taught anything in music.’
(Telemann: Autobiography, published in Mattheson’s Grundlage Einer Ehrenpforte Hamburg 1740)

Telemann’s entrepreneurial years in Hamburg after 1721 were particularly successful. As well as his duties as Kantor of the Johanneum and musical director of Hamburg’s five most important churches, he was director of the city opera from 1722 and established the city’s first public concerts. His desire to encourage public and amateur use of his music is borne out by the frequent inclusion of performance instructions and advice with each new work. His innovative fortnightly periodical Der Gertreue Music-Meister (1728-9) was essentially a collection pieces, or ‘lessons’, released in instalments. There were pieces ‘for almost all current instruments’, featuring his own works as well as those by significant contemporaries, including JS Bach. Amongst the fifty works printed in its year-long life span, six specify recorders and four viola da gamba, with many offering various alternative clefs for performance on different instruments. The engaging Trio Sonata in C major for two recorders and continuo is one such piece, with its suggested alternative instruments being flutes or violins. Opening with a French-style overture and scene-setting Andante, the sonata continues with series of five musical cameos depicting courageous women of the ancient Classical world: Xantippe, the long suffering and endlessly nagging wife of the philosopher Socrates; Lucretia the noble and virtuous wife of Collatinus, raped by the son of the King of Rome; Corinna, the fiery-tempered, self-willed mistress of the poet Ovid; Clelia, hostage of Porsena and the Etruscans and heroine of the siege of Rome who escaped by swimming down the Tiber; and Dido, the passionate Queen of Carthage, whose love for the unattainable Aeneas drove her to suicide. The Sonata in D major for viola da gamba and continuo also appears in Der Gertreue Music-Meister; this beautiful work attests to Telemann’s remarkable understanding of the qualities of the instruments for which he wrote, offering the gamba both haunting melodies and vigorous, lively allegros which show off the instrument’s solo capability.

The Duo in D minor (1727) from a set of six sonatas for two unaccompanied flutes published in Hamburg is another work for which alternative instrumentations are possible. The pieces transfer easily to recorders and offer real technical challenges to the performers as well as displaying some remarkable textural effects for the listener.
© Annabel Knight 2001