"Maya Homburger plays a baroque violin and she emphasises the formal clarity of each movement, deploying strong and clear phrasing with a voice-like purity of tone..."
— BBC music magazine
GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681 – 1767)
12 FANTASIES FOR UNACCOMPANIED VIOLIN, TWV 40:14 – 25
Posterity has judged the leading German composer of the first half of the eighteenth century to have been Bach. But during their lifetime, the name of Telemann was far more widely known. Bach was respected as a fine player and judge of organs and a skilled contrapuntist; but Telemann’s music was far more widely circulated. Much of it was published, and his reputation spread to France and England.
He was born in Magdeburg into a clerical family. Music was part of his education, but when, at the age of twelve, he wrote his first opera, his mother (his father had died in 1685) was worried that his prowess would distract from more serious studies and sent him away to school. He was fortunate in finding masters that encouraged music along with the more formal academic discipli- nes, and by 1701, when he went to Leipzig University to study law, he was a fully-trained musician. There, he directed the music at the opera house and founded the Collegium Musicum, a concert giving body which was later to be directed by Bach. In 1705, he went to Sorau (now Zary in Poland) to take charge of the court music; he then moved to Eisenach (where he would have met Bach, whose cousin was organist there) and, in 1712, to Frankfurt. In 1721, he was invited to become director of music at the Johanneum, the grammar school, and to take charge of the music in the five main churches in Hamburg – a position similar to the one soon to be vacant at Leipzig. Despite the problems with the Town Council, he stayed there until his death. He did, however, apply for the position at Leipzig in 1722 and was the first choice of the Council there, but he declined it (the application was probably a way of enhancing his position in Hamburg), and Bach eventually got the job. The connection between Telemann and Bach continued even after their death; Telemann was the godfather of C. P. E. Bach, and it may well have been Telemann’s recommendation that eased the way to his godson becoming his successor.
Telemann was soon forgotten. In 1784, Johann Adam Hiller published a biographical dictio- nary of contemporary composers, mostly German, 20 pages are devoted to J. S. Bach, 29 to Handel; there are articles on Adlung, F. Benda, Büler, Fasch, Gebel, C. H. Graun and others; but Telemann is barely mentioned. A century or so later, he was still a figure of minimal historical importance: in 1902, the relevant volume of The Oxford History of Music only names him casually among other minor German composers: Mattheson is given far more attention. Revival came, partly from the German inter-war Hausmusik movement, when his instrumental music was called on as repertoire for amateur players, and partly from the post-war growth of chamber orchestras encouraged by the invention of the LP and the expansion of radio music programmes to specialise in baroque music.
Telemann has the reputation for having written uncountable quantities of music for all sorts of instruments. True, throughout his long life he was extremely prolific, with several hundred concertos and suites to his name. To have written 46 Passions may seem excessive; but, at a time when new music was fashionable, writing one for each year of his employment at Hamburg sho- wed a proper respect for his duties; at Leipzig, Bach was much less conscientious and three (or perhaps five) Passions sufficed for his whole time there from 1723 to 1750. But, apart from the vast numbers of Telemann’s cantatas, when broken down into categories, the quantities are quite small. For keyboard there are some fugues, chorale preludes, fantasies, suites and miscellaneous dances; there is a sonata for gamba (a set of 12 Fantasies has not survived), a set of 12 Fantasies for unac- companied flute and the 12 works on this disc.
He published the violin Fantasies in 1735. No copy of the original edition survives, though the title page still exists, wrongly attached to the only existing copy of the Fantasies for Flute. Fortuna- tely, a manuscript in Berlin has a set entitled “XII Fantasie per il Violino senza Basso. A[nn]o 1735”. No composer is named, but there is no doubt that they are the Telemann set.
There is an inherent contradiction between the normal late Baroque style, based on a balance of treble and bass, and music for a single melodic line. One of the finest 17th -century examples, Biber’s Passacaglia minimises the problem by using a simple bass which the listener can easily imagine even when it is not present. Later composers took greater advantage of the listener’s ability to extrapolate a harmonic background, even if it is only hinted at by the notes that are actually played. Perhaps it is not coincidental that it was at this period that Rameau revolutionised harmonic theory with a new system which depended on identifying chords by their hypothetical bass: a chord of (from bottom upwards) E G C is not, as in figured-bass theory, a 6 – 3 chord on E but an inversion of the C major chord.
Just as Bach included two types of works in the set of what he called Solos for unaccompanied violin (modern editions inexplicably avoid this general title), so Telemann’s set has two types of Fantasy. In a catalogue of his publications, he distinguishes them as “6 mit Fugen, 6 aber Galanterien sind”. The types are not as clearly distinguished as Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, but the first six are more contrapuntal and more archaic in style than the second six, which are lighter, more ex- trovert and more galant.
A question which exercises musical philosophers is “what is a musical work?” Leaving aside the problem of whether it is what is on the page, what the composer imagined, what the performer is conveying or what the listener apprehends, there is a more practical matter of whether this disc contains twelve discrete and unrelated items or whether there is some continuity and relationship that makes the set an entity apart from convenience of packaging (both to Telemann as publisher and Maya Recordings as the producer of the CD). In Telemann’s time, it was normal for publicati- ons to contain a dozen or half a dozen works. Very often, each is in a different key, and some composers seem to have made a conscious attempt to secure some pattern within a publication. Sometimes they go further, and put the works into a meaningful key sequence. The ultimate key- dominated arrangement is Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. It is extremely unlikely that Telemann could write each of these 12 Fantasies in, with one exception, a different key without deliberately intending to do so. The number of keys in normal use in his time was quite limited, and the nature of the violin itself makes some keys easier than others, especially when double-stopping is required. The key used twice, D major, is the one which, at a time when the use of open strings was normal, falls most comfortably on the hands and produces the greatest resonance from the instrument. Otherwise the principle of collocation seems to have been to provide the maximum contrast.
Johann Mattheson (1671 – 1764) spent his life in Hamburg and was well-known to Telemann, who directed the music at his funeral. In 1713 he included in his Das neu-eröffnete Orchester a list of keys and their associated emotions. He stresses that such associations were affected by the various human complexions (referring back to ancient belief that the passions were dominated by the amount of earthy, airy, fiery and watery elements in the body), and his suggestions were not intended to be universally valid. So the following is offered for comparison rather than to imply what Telemann might have intended his music to mean.
1. B flat major: diverting, magnificent, or dainty.
2. G major: demonstrative and rhetorical, but suitable for both the serious and the gay.
3. F minor: tenderness and calm, or a profundity near despair; a black, helpless melancholy that at times will provoke the listener to horror or a shudder.
4. D major: sharp and headstrong, merry, warlike, animated.
5. A major: brillant, but also complaining and sad passions; especially suited to the violin.
6. E minor: pensive, sad, not merry even when quick.
7. E flat major: serious, sad, bitterly hostile to all sensuality.
8. E major: hopeless love, despairing sadness.
9. B minor: bizarre, morose and melancholic.
10. D major: as 4.
11. F major: like a handsome person with bonne grace.
12. A minor: plaintive and resigned; suitable for instrumental music.
Whether these indications are relevant and helpful depends on the composer’s, the performer’s and the listener’s temperaments.
— Clifford Bartlett, 1993
credits
released October 1, 1993
Maya Homburger: baroque violin (Antonio dalla Costa, Treviso 1740)
Recorded by Nicholas Parker 30.8 — 2.9 1993 in the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Great Tew Oxfordshire. Produced by Nicholas Parker and Barry Guy. Digital mastering by Tony Bridge at Fine Splice, London. Cover art by Fred Hellier, a large painting photographed by John Pasmore. Design by Craig Quainton. Text by Clifford Bartlett.
Barry Guy and Maya Homburger founded Maya Recordings in 1991 to take care of their desires to document the various projects
that occupy their musical lives. So unusually
you will find Jazz and improvised musics alongside baroque masterpieces....more
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