TELEMANN: ESSERCIZII MUSICI, VOL. 1 - The Aulos Ensemble LINER NOTES

GEORG PHILIPPE

TELEMANN

ESSERCIZIIMUSICAL MUSICI DIVERSIONS VOLUME 1

THE

AULOS ENSEMBLE performed on period instruments

Trio Sonata for Oboe, Violin and Basso Continuo, TWV 42.g5 I. Mesto 02:37 II. Allegro 03:19 III. Andante - Largo - Andante 03:47 IV. Vivace 01:59 Viola da Gamba Sonata in A Minor, TWV 41.a6 I. Largo 03:18 II. Allegro 01:40 III. Soave 02:18 IV. Allegro 02:30 Trio Sonata for Flute, Viola da Gamba and Basso Continuo, TWV 42.h4 I. Largo 01:45 II. Vivace 01:39 III. Dolce 01:33 IV. Vivace 01:57 Violin Sonata in F Major, TWV 41.F4 I. Andante 02:11 II. Allegro 02:12 III. Siciliana 02:16 IV. Allegro 04:05 Oboe Sonata in E Minor, TWV 41.e6 I. Largo 02:28 II. Allegro 01:58 III. Grave 01:33 IV. Vivace 01:39

Trio Sonata for Flute, Oboe and Basso Continuo in D Minor, TWV 42.d4 I. Largo 02:02 II. Allegro 02:01 III. Affetuoso 02:22 IV. Presto 01:46 Harpsichord Suite in C Major, TWV 32.3 I. Largo 02:55 II. Allemanda 03:40 III. Luna 01:58 IV. Corrente 03:07 V. Minuet I - Minuet II 03:11 VI. Giga 02:50 Trio Sonata for Violin, Viola da Gamba and Basso Continuo in D Major, TWV 42.D9 I. Dolce 03:39 II. Presto 01:25 III. Pastorale 01:47 IV. Vivace 02:11 Flute Sonata in G Major, TWV 41.G9 I. Cantabile 01:26 II. Allegro 02:03 III. Affettuoso 01:32 IV. Allegro 01:48 Cello Sonata in D Major, from Der getreue Music-Meister, TWV 41.D6 I. Lento 01:49 II. Allegro 02:46 III. Largo 01:36 IV. Allegro 01:59

THIE AULOS ENSEMBLE Anne Briggs, flauto-traverso Linda Quan, Baroque violin Myron Lutzke, Baroque violincello Marc Schachman, Baroque oboe Charles Sherman, Harpsichord Richard Taruskin, Viola da gamba The Aulos Ensemble performed on instruments from the 17th and 18th centuries in their "original or "unaltered” condition and on exact historial replicas. The pitch used for this recording is A- 415, and tuning differs slightly from equal temperament.

Flauto traverso: copy after Godefroid-Adrien-joseph Rottenburgh, Brussels, ca. 1750 by Gerhard Kowalewsky, Ostbargumfeld, 1980 Oboe: copy after Thomas Stanseby, Sr., ca. 1710 by H.A. Vas Dias, Decatur, Georgia, 1979 Violin: Jacob Stainer, Absam, 1665 Viola da gamba: Kurt Hoyer, Bad Mil lol, 1967 Cello: anonymous German, mid 18th Harpsichord: Zuckermann, designed by Wiliam Hyman and David Way after late 17th-century Flemish models, 1979.

This collection of music from Telemann’s Essercizii Musici first appeared on MHS LP 824898.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach gave this reply to Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who asked him which composers his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, held in high regard: "In his last years he esteerned highly Fux, Caldara, Handel, Keiser, Hasse, both of the Grauns, Telemann, Zelenka, and Benda...ExCept for the first four, he knew all of them personally.

When he was a young man, he saw a great deal of Telemann, who also stood godfather to me. He thought very highly of him, especially his instrumental compositions.

Shortly after New Year's in 1751, Georg Philipp Telemann received a package accompanied by this letter:

My dear Sir, I was on the verge of leaving the Hague to come back to London when your delightful letter was delivered to me...I was deeply touched by your warm expressions of friendship. Your thoughtfulness and fame have made too great an impression on my heart and soul for me not to respond to your kindness. Be assured that you will always find in me the same sincerity and boundless respect. Thank you for the copy of your fine treatise on the system of intervals which you were so kind as to send along with your letter; it is worthy of your efforts and scholarship. I send my congratulations on the perfect health with which you are blessed at your rather advanced age, and from the bot of my heart I wish you continued good

fortune for the years to come. If your passion for exotic plants and the like can prolong your days and sustain that natural love of life that you have always had, l offer to contribute to it with the greatest pleasure.

Therefore, I am making you a present and am sending to you a crate of flowers which connoisseurs of plants assure me are both choice and pleasingly rare. If they weren't with me, you shall have, at the very least, the best plants that are available in the whole of England, and the season is still right for them to flower. In any case, you will be the best judge, and I await your verdict on them.

Don't wait a long time to reply, however, since I am with deepest friendship and devotion, My dear Sir, your most humble and obedient servant, George Frideric Handel The good friend of Bach and Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann was about as close to a "Renaissance man" as a composer is likely to be. Virtuoso on almost any instrument he picked up, poet, botanist, musical theorist, mathematician, and impresario, he was also the most successful composer in Germany in his time. Only Johann Adolf Hasse (16991783), court opera composer to the elector of Saxony and king of Poland, and Handel, who had settled in Great Britain in 1712, could challenge his supremacy.

Yet, within 50 years of his death in 1767, Telemann had been just about forgotten. He was remembered only by such music historians like Forkel and Fétis, who dutifully took note of him in their books. Fame truly is a fickle friend, for the very traits that made Telemann such a success contributed to his eclipse. In the long run, it was his bad luck that he wrote so well for the tastes of his time, unlike Bach, who practically against his will and without being aware that he was doing it, wrote for posterity. Only Handel was able to combine both talents, and even he does not enjoy quite the same renown as Sebas tian Bach. So, as taste changed, Telemann's works disappeared into libraries to gather dust until the renaissance of interest in baroque music after World War Il, when they were rediscovered and introduc ed to whole new generations of listeners who welcomed them with open arms, or rather, open ears.

Handel cribbed melodies-and in a couple of instances whole movements -from the compositions of his old friend (The organ Concerto no. 15 and the second movement of the organ Concerto no. 10, op. 7, no. 4, for example, are derived from movements taken from the Tafelmusik), and Sebastian Bach performed cantatas by Telemann on several occasions while Director musices in Leipzig.

Furthermore, at least four of Telemann's cantatas were incorrectly attributed to Bach by 19th-century musicologists and as a result were included in the complete edition of Bach's works published by the Bach Gesellschaft.

Georg Philipp Telemann was a member of an upper middle class family with close ties to the Lutheran church. Both of his grandfathers had been clergymen. So were his father, his elder brother, and his eldest son. Telemann was born on March 14, 1681, in Magdeburg, where his father, Heinrich (1646-1685), was a deacon. After her hus band's death, Maria Haltmeier Telemann (1642-1711) assumed the responsibility of supervising the education of their two sons.

Georg Philipp was eager, bright, and industrious. Asa small child he showed an enthusiasm for music of which his mother heartily disapproved (a curious but perhaps predictable parallel to Handel's childhood!).

Although he was not given any formal musical instruction to speak of, Telemann was encouraged by his teachers at the Altstädtisches Gymnasium and the Domschule in Magdeburg to pursue his musical inclinations. By the time he was 10, he had learned to play the violin, the recorder, the zither, and the various

keyboard instruments. He had also experimented with composing; he wrote arias, motets, and instrumental music. At 12, he started his first opera, Sigismundus, to a libretto by Postel. At this juncture Frau Telemann, who, like Handel's father, wanted her son to be a lawyer, put her foot down.

Supported by the friends who were counseling her on the education of her sons, she took away all of his musical instruments and forbade him to have anything further to do with music, She also packed him off to boar ding school, first at Zellerfeld and then at the Gymnasium Andreanum in Hildesheim, which was a school similar in stature to such New England prep schools as Deerfield, Groton, and St. Paul's today.

But, as hard as she tried, Maria Telemann couldn't stop her younger son from pursuing his passion for music. Support and encouragement came from members of the faculties of the very schools to which Telemann's mother sent him to keep him away from music. Caspar Calvoer, the superintendent of the school at Zellerfeld, and Johann Christoph, the rector of the Gymnasium Andreanum, both spotted his innate talent and encouraged the enthusiastic boy, who excelled in all his other subjects as well. With affection and gratitude, Telemann remembered their kindness and support for the rest of his life.

By studying the works of the best-known composers of the time Telemann taught himself composition. “The models I chose were movements by Steffani, Rosenmüller, Corelli, and Caldara, so that I could prepare myself for future endeavors in both sacred and secular music. Not a day went by that I did not try my hand at writing both. On special feast days, at all masses, and on many other occasions as well, I visited the neighboring courts of Hannover and Brunswick in order to hear the musical establishments perform; this gave me the chance to absorb both the French and the theatrical methods of com position. More importantly, however, I learned more about the Italian style of composition and how to distinguish it from the French." He also learned to play "the oboe, the transverse flute, the chalumeau [the ancestor of the modern clarinet), the viola da gamba, and even the double bass and the bass trombone.

After graduating from the Gymnasium Andreanum, Telemann made an honest attempt to comply with his mothers wishes and entered the University of Leipzig. He intended to put music aside and concentrate on becoming a lawyer. It was not to be. On his first day at school he found that his roommate was music fanatic who had brought with him both music and

instruments. Initially Telemann tried to ignore the whole business, but his roommate accidentally came across one of Telemann's psalm settings, and without saying a word arranged for a performance of this motet in the Thomaskirche the following Sunday. A member of the town council was so impressed by what he heard that he commissioned Telemann to write works to be performed in the Thomaskirche every other Sunday.

There was no turning back. Telemann jumped into the musical life of Leipzig with both feet, keeping up with his courses at the University all the while. He started the collegium musicum, an extracurricular student musical organization that presented concerts on a regular basis. It survived Telemann's departure from the city, was directed by Bach for several seasons more than 25 years later, and was one of the precursors of the internationally renowned Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. For the Leipzig Theatre Telemann composed operas, and he served for a while as organist of the Neue Kirche, where he saw to it that the services included concerted sacred music performed by members of the collegium musicum. His success and stick-to-it iveness were great enough to cause some hostility, however. The city's Director musices, Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722), resented Telemann and referred to him acerbically as an "operator."

Kuhnau's irritation had its origins in the simple fact that Telemann's projects were wreaking havoc with the established customs of official musical life in Leipzig. For instance, the collegium musicum members who played for Telemann in the Neue Kirche on Sundays had previously made up a pool of musicians from which Kuhnau had drawn additional performers for his cantata performances in the Thomaskirche and the Nicolaikirche. Once Telemann began to siphon off these players, Kuhnau could no longer be certain of their availability.

But what was worse to Kuhnau was the erosion of his authority and his prerogatives as Director musices that was the inevitable bN product of Telemann's innovations and projects. "As the city director of music, Kuhnau was responsible for the music in all the Leipzig churches, and until this time he had been able to decide what was or was not possible with the available resources....On several occasions Kuhnau petitoned [the city council) against Telemann's infringement of his rights...and complained bitterely about the students who flocked to join Telemann and no longer supported Kuhnau in providing music for the church services. Even after Telemann had left Leipzig, the leaders of the students' collegium musicum still held on to the organist's post at the Neukirche; and to the end of his life Kuhnau inveighed against what he considered to be the illegal

activities of the students, trying in vain to reassert his original rights." Ironically, the shift of power that Telemann began was to cause problems years later for his good friend Sebastian Bach, who also had to fight against incur sions on his official prerogatives as Director musices of the city of Leipzig after he succeeded Kuhnau in 1723. Once she saw how successful her son was as a professional musi cian, Telemann's mother relented and gave him her consent to pursue a career in music, secure in the knowledge that he had not only proved his worth but also that the value of his achievements had been recognized by the powers that were. Telemann's first job was as Kapellmeister to Count Erdmann von Promnitz, a Prussian junker who lived in Sorau (now Zary), a town in Brandenburg between Frankfurt an der Oder and Breslau in what is now Western Poland. Telemannn stayed in the service of this enlightened but somewhat despotic nobleman for beween two and four years, depending on whether one chooses to believe Telemann's own recollections or the suriviving of ficial court documents.

But what was worse to Kuhnau was the erosion of his authority and his prerogatives as the Director of musices that was the inevitable by product of Telemann's innovations and projects. "As the city

director of music, Kuhnau was responsible for the music in all the Leipzig churches, and until this time he had been able to decide what was or was not possible with the available resources....On several occasions Kuhnau petitoned [the city council] against Telemann's infringement of his rights...and complained bitterely about the students who flocked to join Telemann and no longer supported Kuhnau in provideing music for the church services. Even after Telemann had left Leipzig, the leaders of the students' collegium musicum still held on to the organist's post at the Neukirche; and to the end of his life Kuhnau inveighed against what he considered to be the illegal activities of the students, trying in vain to reassert his original rights." Ironically, the shift of power that Telemann began was to cause problems years later for his good friend Sebastian Bach, who also had to fight against incur sions on his official prerogatives as Director musices of the city of Leipzig after he succeeded Kuhnau in 1723.

Once she saw how successful her son was as a professional musician, Telemann's mother relented and gave him her consent to pursue a career in music, secure in the knowledge that he had not only proved his worth but also thated his worth but also that the value of his achievements had been recognized by the powers that were. Telemann's first job

was as Kapellmeister to Count Erdmann von Promnitz, a Prussian junker who lived in Sorau (now Zary), a town in Brandenburg between Frankfurt an der Oder and Breslau in what is now Western Poland. Telemannn stayed in the service of this enlightened but somewhat despotic nobleman for beween two and four years, depending on whether one chooses to believe Telemann's own recollections or the surviving official court documents.

During his stay at Sorau, Telemann got to know the Lutheran cleric Erdmann Neumeister (1671-1 756), the cOurt chaplain, who was a leading force in introducing a new brand of sacred cantata, which admitted the use of secco recitatives and da capo arias, forns that had their origins in the opera seria as it had been developed in Italy in the late 17th century. Neumeister wrote his first collection of cantata texts expressly for Telemann, who not only set them but also brought them to the attention of his friend Sebastian Bach, who set his first Neumeister text, "Gleich wie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fallt." BWV 18, in Weimar in 1713.

(This cantata is available on MHS 8021W.) Neumeister and Telemann were to stay close friends for the rest of their lives, and Neumeister, who settled in Hamburg as pastor of the Jacobikirche, played a crucial role in helping Telemann to get his job as that city's Director musices in 1721.

From Sorau, Telemann moved to Eisenach, where he served as both court Kapellmeister and Director musices of the Catharinenkirche. In 1709, he married Amalie Louise Juliane Eberlin, the daughter of the musician and composer Daniel Eberlin and a lady-in-waiting to Count Von Promnitz's wife.

Telemann was deeply in love with his wife, who died of puerperal fever after the birth of their only child, a daughter, in 1711, the same year his mother died. His grief must have been one of the reasons he looked around “a different man." While in Eisenach, Telemann also got to know the court organist in Weimar, Johanr Sebastian Bach, who was to remain a good friend until his death i 1750.

In 1712, Telemann moved to Frankfurt am Main as lmusices and as Kapellmeister at the Barfüsserkirche Soon thereafter, he also became the DR head of the Frauenstein Society a private musical association in Frankfurt am Main that apparent Wanted his services as a composer even more than his services as conductor.

In 1714, Telemann remarried. His marriage to Maria Katharina Teztor. the daughter of one of the clerks of the Frankfurt am Main town council, turned out to be a less than happy one, and he must have pined often for the first wife he had loved so much and who had died so tragically. In 1714, there was also a trip to Weimar where Telemann gladly

performed a service for his friends Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach: he stood godfather to their son Carl Philip Emanuel.

In July, 1721, the municipal authories in Hamburg invited Telemann to become cantor of the Johanneum and Director musices of the cit's five main churches.

After he had obtained his release from his contract with the city of Frankfurt am Main, he moved to Hamburg, where he was installed in his new positions on October 16, 1721. There is a certain irony in this, because, if he had been there the previous year, he might have been alble, together with Erdmann Neumeister, to assure that Sebastian Bach was confirmed in the posi tion of organist of the Jacobikirche.

Telemann's duties in Hamburg were extensive. Besides supervising the music performed in Hamburg's five main churches, he taught and rehearsed the chorister in all aspects of music, including theory and instrumental performance as well as singing.

He conducted seven performances of Passion music each year and acted as impresario for Civic musical events.

Telemann also was involved in musical politics in Hamburg. Like his colleauge Johann Mattheson (1681-1764), he fought for

the admission of women singers into the church choirs, both as choristers and as soloists, a practice then still frowned upon by the old guard Lutheran clergy. Initially the Hamburg civic authorities objected to Telemann's involvement with privately organized public concerts and with the production of operas. In July, 1722, less than a year after his arrival in Hamburg, several members of the city council introduced a motion to the entire council that would have expressly forbidden the cantor of the Johanneum for directing public concerts presented by a private collegium musicum and from participating in the production of operas.

The council members were unaware, however, that Telemann had been invited to succeed his old nemesis Johann Kuhnau as Director musices in Leipzig. Telemann then notified the Hanburg city council that he had accepted an invitation to return to Leipzig, and he asked to be released from his contract, explaining that the job in Leipzíg offered better conditions, contending that the citizenry of Hamburg were not particularly happy with his performance there. After exten sive discussion, the Hamburg council not only refused to release Telemann but also gave him a raise. No further objections were ex pressed against Telemann's involvement with the

presentation of privately organized public concerts and the production of operas, and late in 1722, he actually took over the musical direction of the Hamburg Opera.

On top of all of these day-to-day reponsibilities, Telemann composed vast quantites of music. During his long career he wrote at least 31 jahrgänge (yearly cycles) of cantatas (somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000!), at least 46 settings of the Passion, and innuHe wrote at least 26 operas for the Hamburg Opera in the Gänsemarkt, one of which was an arrangernent of one of Handel's London successes, Ottone, translated, arranged, and adjusted to suit the tastes of Hamburg audiences.

Then there is the instrumental music: 600 ouvertures in the French style, of which the Suite in A minor for recorder, strings, and basso continuo is the most famous, dozens upon dozens of concerti, at least 145 trio sonatas, and countless other pieces of chamber music and Hausmusik, including most of the contents of the musical magazíne he published, called Der getreue Music-Meister. Telemann wrote so much music that he is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific composer of all time.

And still, with all of this activity, Telemann managed to find the time to travel

extensively. He made regular trips to Berlin, where, after 1740, he had the pleasure of seeing his godson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was court clavierist to King Frederick the Great. Telemann spent the winter of 1737-1738 in Paris, a visit that was motivated in part by his determination to minimize the damage to his finances that was being caused by the pirate editions of his music being published in the French capital.

He was deeply impressed by the new style galant, which he adopted and worked into his own compositional style without complaint or dificulty, even though at 56 he had reach ed an age at which a person certainly has the privilege, if not the undeniable right, to become set in his ways.

How did Telemann manage to do all that he did? The answer is that he rarely rested. As he put it, "As far as rest and relaxation are concerned, I've not bothered about them, then or now, owing to a con stitutional antipathy to idleness." Today we would call him a "workaholic." His workaholism was not without its negative side effects, however, and may have been the indirect cause of much of the personal misery that clouded his later years, honor laden though they were.

The German author Lessing recorded the circumstances surrounding the awful scandal Telemann's second wife caused: A plan was set in motion to put on a satirical play with a

plot revolving around Brockes (a Hamburg bureaucrat who wrote a famous Passion libretto set by Handel and Telermann, among many others), Telemann, and the poet Wiechmann. The piece was aimed primarily at Telemann since his wife was unfaithful to him and was having an affair with a Swedish military officer. News of the planned production got out, however, and the performances were forbidden by order of the City Council. Frau Telemann eloped with her lover and left her husband sad dled with a debt of 3,000 thalers, an incredible sum in those days. His friends came to his aid, however, and raised enough money to pay off at least part of this debt.

Although hampered to some extent by cataracts, he wrote an extraor dinary series of oratorios, not the least of which is Der Tag des Gerichts, composed in 1762, when he was 81. These last works have a singular beauty about them and reveal quite clearly that, while the flesh was weak, the spirit was still willing and unflagging. On June 25, 1767, Telemann died, active to the end. How pleased he would have been had he known that on November 3, 1767, his godson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach would be appointed his successor.

The oldest member of his circle, Telemann nevertheless outlived every one of his renowned contemporaries. The death of his old friend Johann Sebastian Bach on July 28, 1750 prompted him to write a lovely eulogy in the form of a sonnet. In 1759, Handel, Telemann's friend of nearly 60 years, died in London; five years later, the last of his old Hamburg cronies, Johann Mattheson, died at the age of 83, leaving Telemann alone among his generation. But he kept on working. Although he had composed less during the years 1740-1755, because he was devoting most of his time to theoretical studies and treatises, the last 12 years of his life were a time of renewed creativity.

The original title page of the Essercizii says it all: Essercizii Musici, Overo Dodeci Soli e Dodeci Trii à diversi strormenti, composti da Giorgio Filippo Telemann, Direttore della Musica in Hamburgo, e che si trovano a presso dell'Autore (Musical Diversions, consisting of twelve Solo and twelve Trio Sonatas for various instruments, compos ed

by G. Ph. Telemann, music director at Hamburg, which the composer himself has published). The collection was the last of a number of self-publication ventures the colossally overworked composer was forced to undertake in order to pay off his wife's debts: samizdat is nothing new. It was issued in 1739, and was aimed at the lucrative

Teri Noel Towe

market created by the burgeoning activity of bourgeois amateur musicians, who, then as now, liked to pass an evening at the keyboard or with violin, recorder, flute, gamba, or oboe in hand (then far more than now, of course, since if there was going to be music in an 18th century home, it would have to be made live, not at the flick of an electronic switch). Each of the instruments just listed is supplied by Telemann with a pair of solo sonatas (or, in the case of the harp sichord, suites). And, so as to promote their sociability, they are also teamed up in practically all possible trio combinations, including the quite unusual one of melodic instrument plus obbligato harpischord Over a bass. The character with which Telemann imbued these sundry Solos and Trios is well captured by the title of a chamber music ailable. A galant composer like Telemann wore his learning andlightly, occasionally affected a pleasing melancholy but never (at least in a chamber piece) went after deep pathos, would count himself successful if his hearers smiled and said, "How pretty." Since such aims seemed paltry to Bach's romantic rediscoverers, Telemann became their perennial whipping boy. But nowadays, it seems, musicians and music lovers have rediscovered the joys of galanterie. Virgil Thomson, writing of his favorite music, called it "as simple as a friendly conversation and in its better moments exactly as poetic and

profound." He was describing the music of Les Six, but he could just as well have been describing the Telemann of the Essercizii.

Trio Sonata no. 3 in G minor for oboe, violin and basso continuo

Like most of the sonatas in the collection, this one is cast in the standard fourmovenment sequence of contrasting tempi, beginning with the slowest and ending with the fastest. The opening movement is in a rather "pathetic" vein (mèsto is Italian for sad). This was the traditional affect of the key of G minor (and so it would remain at least until Mozart wrote his 40th Symphony.)

The third movement is also on the melancholy side. The central Largo is framed with a little mood piece that imitates sighing.

It's not an expression of melancholy, though, so much as it is a prettily sentimental portrait of melancholy.

Solo Sonata no. 3 in A minor for viola da gamba and basso continuo

The first movement is a typically Italianate blueprint. The composer provides an outline of the melodic contour and leaves it to the player to elaborate it into a piece. No two performances of such a semicom position will be alike. Sometimes it is hard to recognize that they are even based on the same outline. Such practices have passed out of classical music altogether by now. They

thrive in jazz. The second movement has a rather complex polyphonic texture, but it is so thoroughly aerated with galant passagework that one hesitates to call it a fugue.

orchestration only begins with the romantics.

What Stravinsky said about Bach is no less true of Bach's Hamburg colleague: You can smell the resin in his violin parts, taste the reeds the oboes."

Trio Sonata no. 6 in B minor for flute, viola da gamba and basso continuo

Solo Sonata no. 1 in F major for violin and basso continuo

Telemann verges dangerously on the baroque in this Sonata, tempted by the violin's wide range and capacity for passionate virtuosity. It is interesting to compare the third and fourth movements: they are both varieties of the gigue (the Siciliana is a slow type from you guessedwhere), but what a contrast in mood.

Trio Sonata no. 11 in D minor for flute, oboe and basso continuo The fast movements in this Sonata are among the most fugally developed in the set.

The third movement (Affettuoso, full of feeling) once again features the delightfully stylized "sighing" figures that were the galant musician's stock in trade. Suite no. 6 in C major for solo harpsichord This marvelous little Suite captures the flavor of French music to perfection, and makes an ideal foil to all the Italianate sonatas. Telemann's cosmopolitanism was proverbial, but then, all German composers were musical polyglots.

Georg Muffat, an earlier German master,, once actually described the German style of his day as being a combination of all that was best in French and Italian music!

Solo Sonata no. 11 in E minor for oboe and basso continuo Here Telemann is obviously relishing the oboe's incisive articulation. It is a widespread misconception to regard baroque composers as indifferent to the inherent qualities of the instruments they wrote for, or that

Telemann's internationalism comes out amusingly in the names of the dances, which he gives in a fractured mix of French, Italian, and German. Thus he coins a nonexistent Italian eguivalent (Lura) for the French loure, a slow and stately gigue. And he leaves the final letter off the word Minue.

The really memorable movement here is the frisky, syncopated last movement. The conversational aspect of the Trios comes out especially clearly in the rather extended solo passages the flute and gamba trade off.

Trio Sonata no. 10 in D major for violin, viola da gamba and basso continuo

Also French in character is the first movement of this Trio, which is strikingly reminiscent of a somewhat earlier Trio in the same key, and written for the same combination of instruments, by the Parisian composer Boismortier. The second movement, atypically, is the fastest in this Sonata-breathtakingly so. The Pastorale uses drone-bass effects familiar from Vivaldi's Seasons (among countless other works of the kind).

Solo Sonata no. 8 in G major for flute and basso continuo

The opening movement will remind many listeners of the famous Arioso movement from Bach's F minor harpsichord Concerto. In the first Allegro, Telemann shows what wonders he can work with the barest materials: the movement is constructed practically in toto out of scales.

Sonata in D major for violoncello and basso continuo The Essercizii musici contain no solo for the cello. The presence of a cello in each piece is taken for granted, though, in that the cello, together with the harpsichord, forms the ubiquitous basso continuo, without which few baroque-period pieces were complete. In

order to give this unsung hero among instruments a turn in the spotlight, we have included in this recording the spirited cello Sonata from another enterprising Telemann self-publication, Der getreue Music-Meister (The faithful music teacher), which he issued in 25 installments (or lections, as he called them) over the course of the year 1728. It was a kind of musical newspaper to which amateur singers and instrumen talists could subscribe to receive a biweekly bifolium (folded sheet) of pieces to practice. To insure that his customers held on to their subscriptions, Telemann never printed a piece complete in a single issue. The first mevement of the present cello Sonata was included in the fifth lection, the second movement in the sixth; the remaining two came in the seventh installment. This may have been the earliest instance in the West of series of music.

Richard Taruskin

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E S T. 19 6 0 This recording produced by The Aulos Ensemble. ℗ 1984 & © 2024 Heritage Music Royalties.

Additional information about these recordings can be found at our website www.themusicalheritagesociety.com