Download In his time, Telemann was the most renowned of German musicians

Telemann and Music for A Mixed Taste
an interview with Dr Steven Zohn
A special event occurred for Baroque music fans this year. Music for a Mixed Taste:
Style, Genre and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works by Steven Zohn, Temple
University music historian, Tempesta di Mare friend and flute performer, was published
by Oxford University Press. The first major survey of Georg Phillip Telemann’s works in
a generation and the first ever in English, Music for a Mixed Taste is an important step in
Telemann’s reemergence as one of the major figures of eighteenth-century music.
Zohn shared some thoughts recently by telephone on the occasion of Tempesta’s opening
program, Orchestral Music from Hamburg, which features Telemann’s Concerto in F.
“One of the charming things about the Concerto in F is how the wind section gets a real
workout even though there’s a violin soloist,” Zohn says. “Winds pop in and out of the
textures with little solos here and there. The way he handles winds is almost symphonic;
there may be influence of modern symphonic style.”
“It’s kind of ironic, though,” he continues. “This was one of the first of Telemann’s
concertos to be published in modern times. It’s a major work. It’s been in edition for
almost 80 years, and was recognized early on as something special. Still, there aren’t
many recordings of it.”
Which is one of the blessings and curses of working on Telemann, whose works virtually
disappeared for two centuries to reemerge only relatively recently as one of great
rediscoveries of the Baroque music revival. “I was overwhelmed at times,” says Zohn
about working on the book. “It was great as a music historian to look at a piece, a really
major piece, and realize that nobody has said anything about it before. It’s daunting, but
also a privilege. When you talk about a piece by Bach, for instance, you have to spend a
lot of time thinking about what really a lot of other people have said. Not a problem with
Telemann. Working on Telemann is a lot of fun.”
Research by Zohn and others have illuminated one of the more perplexing issues of
Telemann studies: the sudden and near-total eclipse of his reputation at the end of the
eighteenth century. In his time, Telemann was perhaps Germany’s best-known composer,
fought over by employers, idolized by musicians, praised, published and pirated
throughout Europe. When he died at the happy old age of 86, he must have figured that
his illustrious legacy was pretty much assured. Thirty years later, however, it was rubble.
The former master of Hamburg got written off as an also-ran, Zohn says, chiefly because
of a single, bad review. “It’s really kind of a strange story,” he says. Only three years
after Telemann’s death, a Hamburg literature professor and acquaintance named Ebeling
wrote an article taking Telemann to task for writing so much. “You don’t get many
masterpieces out of polygraphs,” he wrote (referring to overachievers, not lie detection
machines). In context of a generally positive appreciation, this wasn’t a terrible slam.
But as every political speechwriter knows, negatives win elections. This one stuck to
Telemann like glue for centuries, in a kind of whistle-down-the-wind of negativism.
“Ebeling’s description gets taken up be Gerber, who includes it in his dictionary of
musicians, which people consider to be authoritative. And because dictionary writers
plagiarize more than anybody else, it gets picked up by a lot of other German and
English-language dictionaries.”
Telemann’s distinguished body of work had been reduced to a nasty cliché. “By 1890 and
the first edition of the extremely influential Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
you already have a century-long tradition of this kind of hackwork. The original Grove
article, by Alfred Maczewski, is the most venomous of all, and long-lived. I traced it
through all the subsequent issues and found that in 1954, Grove was still using the old
nineteenth-century article with very few changes. It wasn’t until 1980 that Grove
replaced it with a completely new article presenting a very different picture of the
composer.”
Zohn dismisses Ebeling’s problems with Telemann. “The true wonder is not that
Telemann composed more than Bach and Handel put together, but that he composed so
much good—even great—music,” he writes in Music for A Mixed Taste.
As examples, Zohn considers Telemann’s unaccompanied flute Fantasia, along with JS
Bach’s and CPE Bach’s Sonata in A minor, to be the most significant works for
unaccompanied flute before the twentieth century; he notes “magical” effects in the great
chaconne in the Quartet No. 6 in E Minor (Paris Quartets, 1738, to which audience
members who heard Tempesta di Mare’s performance in the December 2006 Les
Conversations Galantes program will happily attest); and about the Concerto in F, to be
played next week, he writes that it is “next to the First Brandenburg Concerto the most
impressive example of the concerto en suite.”
Tasty in any mix.
Steven Zohn
Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works
“Steven Zohn’s excellent and engaging study should put to rest, once and for all, any
view that Telemann was a habitual composer of wallpaper music. Zohn gives us a
comprehensive, nuanced, and discerning picture of the Telemann whose music Bach and
Handel so greatly admired.”--Michael Marissen, Professor of Music, Swarthmore
College, and author of The Social and Religious Designs of Bach’s Brandenburg
Concertos