Georg Philipp Telemann

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries German composer Georg Philipp Telemann was thought of as a poor man’s J.S. Bach, a reliable tunesmith lacking his contemporary’s spiritual profundity. Then the historically informed performance movement of the 1960s began getting its teeth into Telemann’s music, revealing the razor-sharp imagination he brought to timbre and coloration. The four-hour collection of pieces titled Tafelmusik (1733) bursts with stimulating combinations of instruments, most of which he could play himself. Telemann did humor, too, as his contemporary Bach generally did not. In the Alster Overture swans, crows, frogs, and shepherds are all playfully depicted. Telemann also wrote an enormous amount of church music, which by his death in 1767 had made him the most celebrated composer in Europe. The Brockes-Passion (1716) in particular impresses with its affecting vocal writing and devotional feeling. But the real treasures of his output lie in his purely instrumental compositions, which as a pioneering self-publisher he disseminated widely. Boundlessly inventive and entertaining, they are among the most companionable music written in the 18th century.