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Telemann: Suite et Concertos

Georg Philipp Telemann

Les Boréades
Francis Colpron
Manfred Kraemer
Hélène Plouffe
Margaret Little
Marguerite Schabas
Susie Napper
Isabelle Bozzini
Pierre Cartier
Eric Milnes

• Prix Opus 1999-2000: meilleur disque de l’année

In his three autobiographies written at different times in his career—at the request of Johann Mattheson and Gottfried Walther, who needed information for their theoretical works—Telemann describes his early training: he first received instruction in the rudiments of Latin, poetry and music theory from the Kantor Benedikt Christiani at a local school in his home town of Magdeburg. Then, impatient and curious of all that concerned the art of sounds, and refusing to be trained by an old-school organist who wanted to teach him organ tablature, he vied essentially for himself, studying any music he could get his hands on, composing his first opera by the age of 12, all this in defiance of his mother’s will—he was 4 years old when his father died. But it is the grasp of instruments that most interested him, and he tells us: “I might have become a more skilful instrumentalist had I not been sparked by the desire to gain knowledge of—apart from keyboard instruments, the violin and the recorder—the oboe, transverse flute, chalumeau, viola da gamba, etc…. even the contrabass and the bass trombone.” This practical knowledge of various instruments is one of the most important keys to understanding Telemann’s art as well as the nature of his output.

His aesthetics aims above all at bringing pleasure to the performer and listener alike. Indeed, he considers that “a composition whose lines are filled with tricky things, namely quantities of difficult passages, is almost always a chore to play, often evidenced by the wincing musicians”, adding that “he who indulges the many, fares better than he who writes for the precious few”. Telemann deems it necessary to give “each instrument that which suites it” while “exploiting the potential of each to the utmost”. Although his instrumental music is not exempt of quick and perilous runs, it avoids the acrobatic virtuosity that was the mainstay of many Italian violinists, proposing, rather, passages whose difficulties are adapted to the technique of each instrument. Moreover, abandoning the usual instrumental functions that were at the time tied up with more or less precise symbolism or linked with circumstances of court life, Telemann uses all the instruments, mixing them, combining them or setting them in dialogue in order to take advantage of their individual sound qualities. In this, he proves to be entirely modern.

His concertos are no exception. Apart from Vivaldi, Telemann is the musician who offers the greatest variety in the choice and distribution of soloists. Structurally, however, the concertos most often adopt the four alternating slow and fast movements of the sonata da chiesa; only his violin concertos generally embrace the three-movement vivaldian model. In fact, Telemann seems more inspired by Torelli, Corelli and Albinoni than by the Red Priest—as is the case with Bach in his Brandenburg Concertos. In the concertos with several soloists, the concertante parts are not so much set off from the rest of the orchestra by a clearly outlined discourse as they are by a marked awareness of tone colour. Indeed, Telemann rarely follows suit to Vivaldi’s newly-established practices: the solo passages are not chiefly opposed to or distinguished from the orchestral ritornellos and tutti sections through purely virtuosic means, and the orchestra often intervenes in the elaboration of their material. Paradoxically, Telemann’s concertos in these respects seem to pertain to chamber music forms, this quite apart from the fact that, as in the sonata, some of their movements are in two repeated sections whilst certain slow movements are accompanied solely by the basso continuo—also common practice in Vivaldi.

The variety and freedom that characterize Telemann’s concerto output arise from a peculiar blend on his part of formal archaism and modernity. The latter is apparent in the easy-flowing melodies and the cleverness of rhythmic interplay, instrumental combinations and dialogues. While the Concerto in A minor for recorder and viola da gamba—perhaps the first to use the gamba as a soloist—is typical of Telemann’s output, the Concerto a 6 in E minor adopts an unusual cast, both in the layout of its movements as in its instrumentation. The transverse flute intervenes in only three of the five movements, and when two alto parts occupy the middle register—another old-fashioned feature, five-part string writing having been common in seventeenth-century Germany—the principal violin occasionally abandons its orchestral role to play solo passages or to parley with the flute.

Although Telemann and his compatriots were seduced by the concerto as early as the turn of the seventeenth century, the orchestral genre par excellence in Germany at the time was the ‘French overture’. This term designated at once the overture as such—consisting of a slow section in dotted rhythm followed by a quick fugato—and the ensuing suite of varied dance and character pieces of indeterminate number, so arranged as to favour contrasts in rhythm and tempo. In his Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (1713), Mattheson is of the opinion that “although the Italians put themselves to great expense with their concertos, which are, to be sure, of surpassing beauty, a French overture is yet worthy to be placed above all these works.” Thus, German composers were divided between the Italian and French styles; they were still scarcely aware of their own particular genius, but gradually the urge arose to write in an original idiom. The first step on the path to a national style consisted in mixing foreign influences, and Telemann was northern Germany’s leading force in bringing about this fusion of Italian and French styles. As Nikolaus Harnoncourt aptly puts it, “Telemann was at home in all styles, possessing a supreme mastery of both the French and Italian modes (regarded at the time as virtually contradictory) in their purest forms as well as all the intermediate stages in their coalescence.” And to achieve this alloy when writing a French suite or an Italian sonata or concerto, German composers always integrated elements from the “enemy” style, to use Harnoncourt’s expression.

Hence, Telemann’s concertos have a French feel about them, both in their sound texture and in the rhythm of certain movements sometimes recalling that of the overture (the dotted rhythm in the first movement of the Concerto in A minor for recorder and viola da gamba), sometimes that of the dance. Inversely, several of his overtures bring a solo instrument into play, such as the recorder in the Overture in A minor, a work which incidentally presents itself as the twin sister to Bach’s Overture in B minor for transverse flute. After having spun out the first movement’s fugue subject in three extended episodes, the soloist goes on either to play in alternation with the orchestra, as in the paired dances, or to converse with it in true concerto movements, as in the Air à l’Italien.

But the fusion of styles, for Telemann at least, also included the folk music with which he had become acquainted during his travels, and whose rhythms and instrumentation fascinated him. Between 1705 and 1708, while in the service of Count Erdman von Promnitz at Sorau (now Zary, in Poland), Telemann accompanied his employer to Krakow and to Pless, in Upper Silesia, where he admired the “barbaric beauty” of Polish, Moravian and Hanakian music. Several years later, he admitted: “There is much that is good in this music, if one knows how to make use of it, [and] it has served me well, even for many serious compositions: I wrote grand concertos and some trios in this style, that I then dressed in Italian clothes by alternating adagio and allegro.” The final movements to many Telemann concertos, written in a lilting binary rhythm, bear witness to this influence, as in the Concerto in A minor for recorder and viola da gamba.

Telemann’s instrumental works are extremely difficult to date precisely. He left several hundred French overtures and dozens of concertos, written for the court at Sorau and the collegia musica at Eisenach, Leipzig and Frankfurt during the first decades of the eighteenth century. A large portion of this production, including the three works on the present disc, is to be found in various manuscripts preserved at the Darmstadt library. This collection seems to have been assembled by Christoph Graupner, Kapellmeister to the Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt, a friend and great admirer of Telemann.

The composition of his concertos apparently cost Telemann quite some trouble, going by what he tells in one of his autobiographies; indeed, he writes that they did not “come naturally” and that they were not as well wrought as he would have hoped. With all due respect, we beg to differ. Not only did his concertos contribute in their age to define the German musical style and to usher in a national artistic identity, but also, we still have the opportunity of appreciating their elegance, ingenuity and vitality. This part of his instrumental output even comes across today as the most interesting of Telemann’s achievements; what is more, his concertos, across the centuries, still afford us real pleasure, as he had so wished.

— © François Filiatrault 1999
Translation: Jacques-André Houle