Georg Philipp Telemann

4 Biography
“Lulli is praised, Corelli has a name: Telemann
alone is above all fame,” rhymed Johann Mattheson
in 1740 in his “Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte,”
in which Telemann, as well as other
prominent composers of his time, is represented
with a detailed account of his life which he
penned himself. Indeed, the Hamburg director of
music, praised here in an exaggerated epigram as
the culmination of the music of France and Italy,
that of Lully and Corelli, had no need to strive to
enhance his reputation in those days. His pre eminent
position in the musical life of northern and
central Germany was undisputed; as a composer
he was at the height of his fame. His reputation
had long spread beyond the country’s borders; his
published works were subscribed to throughout
Europe; in 1737/38 he had enjoyed triumphs
during a stay in Paris. The fact that the successes
of his musical career did not go to his head, and
did not simply fall into his lap, but rather were, to
no small extent, the results of industriousness and
steadiness, deliberation and circumspection, are
made clear in his autobiographies. These observations,
together with the remark, quoted above,
from Mattheson’s “Ehrenpforte” of 1740 and a
revealing autobiography written for Mattheson in
Magdeburger Stadtansicht – Kupferstich aus dem 18. Jahrhundert.
View of Magdeburg – Etching from the 18th century.
1718, together with a brief account in Johann
Gottfried Walther’s “Musicalisches Lexicon”
(1732) are the principal sources for our knowledge
of Telemann’s career up to about 1740.
The most important stations of his life are:
Magdeburg, where Telemann was born on
14 March 1681, Zellerfeld im Harz, Hildesheim,
Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, Frankfurt am Main and
Hamburg. Telemann spent his childhood in
Magdeburg. His father, deacon at the Heilig-Geist
Church, had already died in 1685. The boy demonstrated
musical gifts very early. These were
inherited from his mother, but when the twelveyear-old
boy presented an opera composed by
himself in his native town, his mother worried lest
he should become a “juggler, rope dancer, minstrel,
marmot trainer, etc.” Consequently she tried
by every means to persuade her son to follow a
more respectable profession. Telemann left the
Gymnasium (lycée) at Magdeburg for Zellerfeld –
where he still performed and composed music –
moving from there in 1697 or 1698 to the
Andreanum in Hildesheim, where he at once
wrote music for school plays by the rector Lossius,
and he became church music director at the