As a composer whose unusually long career traversed multiple historical epochs, from the 1690s to the 1760s, Georg Philipp Telemann maintained a complex relationship with the musical past. On the one hand, he had a healthy respect for much music of the previous generation, such as Arcangelo Corelli’s sonatas, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s operas, and Agostino Steffani’s duets. On the other, he was deeply ambivalent about “ancient” music and musicians, criticizing what he saw as impoverished melodies, contrapuntal excesses, and a rejection of whatever was new. His artistic responses to old music reveal yet a third perspective, that of a composer at pains to bring outmoded musical idioms into a meaningful dialogue with more modern ones. In exploring this last perspective here, I consider a number of Telemann’s vocal works in which archaic and modern styles are set beside each other, sometimes in the same movement. Two works in particular, church cantatas composed in Frankfurt during the period 1717–21, demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as rhetorically powerful tools for communicating a theological message. At the same time, they allow us an opportunity to pull the curtain back a bit further on the composer’s historical consciousness.

Keith Chapin has argued persuasively that Telemann’s ideas about old versus new music were shaped early on by the literature he was exposed to as a schoolboy by the learned Caspar Calvör at Zellerfeld, later by the particular form of galant behavior promoted by Christian Thomasius at Leipzig University, and ultimately by the French Querelle of the Ancients and Moderns. In his own works, the composer followed Thomasius’s galant middle path by combining a modern compositional idiom that emphasized singing melodies with an ancient habitus that stressed exercising good judgment, by selecting appropriate compositional models, and by maintaining autonomy from tradition.Footnote ¹ Telemann fashioned himself as a Modern in his autobiographical essays and correspondence by dismissing what he saw as the contrapuntal pedantry and melodic emptiness of the Ancients, as represented by his former colleague at the Sorau court, the composer and writer Wolfgang Caspar Printz (1641–1717). He recalled, in 1740, engaging the sixty-something Printz around 1705 in discussions about melody, in which the older musician “wailed bitterly about the melodic excesses of contemporary composers” while the twenty-something Telemann “laughed at the unmelodic artificiality of the old composers.”Footnote ²

Perhaps Telemann was again thinking of Printz and those of his ilk when, in a letter to Johann Mattheson of November 18, 1717, he praised his correspondent’s championing of modern music as set out in the second part of Das Beschützte Orchestre (Hamburg, 1717): “I cannot but approve of both your intentions, the first of which is to make plain the false shine of the ancients and to chastise their capricious idolizing of themselves and condemning of the present age.”Footnote ³ In Das Neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg, 1713), Mattheson had criticized what he viewed as the music-theoretical pedantry of Athanasius Kircher (1601–80) in the Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650); now, in Das Beschützte Orchestre, he was responding to Johann Heinrich Buttstett (1666–1727), an Ancient of more recent vintage who had come to Kircher’s defense in Ut, mi, sol, re, fa, la, tota Musica et Harmonia Aeterna (Erfurt, 1716). Thus Telemann inserted himself, however briefly, into a dispute over a universal, mathematical-speculative conception of music (Kircher/Buttstett) versus one that was more pragmatic, empirical, and sensualist (Mattheson).Footnote ⁴

Telemann’s most extended discussion of ancient versus modern music occurs in his first autobiographical essay, dated September 10, 1718 – that is, less than a year after his letter to Mattheson. Writing about his school years at the Andreanum Gymnasium in Hildesheim (1697–1701), Telemann recalled that

The “newer German and Italian masters” worth emulating are evidently the composers that Telemann mentions in his 1740 autobiographical essay as having provided him with models for church and instrumental music: Corelli, Steffani, Antonio Caldara, and Johann Rosenmüller.Footnote ⁶ Whereas the first three composers were Telemann’s older contemporaries (Steffani was just eleven years his senior), Rosenmüller (1619–84) belonged to a different era entirely. And since Rosenmüller was also a full generation older than Printz, it is evident that the latter’s “ancient” status was not strictly a function of his age.

Musical Reflections of the Past

Beyond these writings, we must turn to Telemann’s music to get a better read on his stance toward the Ancients. It is well established that he treats musical archaism as a topic in some of his instrumental works. Among the sonatas and concertos from the opening years of the eighteenth century, use of this topic takes the form of slow, imitative first movements in the stile antico.Footnote ⁷ Such curious transfers to instrumental ensemble of a style associated primarily with vocal music, and secondarily with keyboard music, raise a number of questions. Was the aim to encourage a sense of seriousness, tradition, or timelessness, as was a common motivation behind deploying the stile antico in vocal works? Should we understand this archaic topic as related to what musicians of the time called the “strict,” “bound,” “fugal,” or “elaborate” style, and which today is often referred to as the “learned” style in the context of late eighteenth-century studies?Footnote ⁸ Or was it intended mainly to amplify the eclecticism of Telemann’s own “mixed taste,” which also encompassed the current national idioms of France, Italy, and Poland? The possibility of incorporating the stile antico into sonatas and concertos may have occurred to Telemann already during his university years in Leipzig, where tower music (Turmmusik) played by the Stadtpfeifer included fugues in this antique idiom.Footnote ⁹

Telemann’s more mature instrumental works set old and new musical styles beside each other in ways that can seem almost postmodern in their self-consciousness. Thus the Ouverture des nations anciennes et modernes, TWV 55:G4, represents the historical and present-day peoples of Germany, Sweden, and Denmark by pairing “ancient” and “modern” dances; the Sonates corellisantes (Hamburg, 1735) effect an almost neoclassic stylistic rapprochement between the venerable Corellian style and a more au courant galant language; the VI Ouvertures à 4 ou 6 (Hamburg, 1736) juxtapose Lulliste and galant conceptions of the overture-suite, as if to sum up the history of the genre; Telemanns Canones à 2, 3, 4 (Hamburg, 1735) and XIIX Canons mélodieux (Paris, 1738) superimpose the galant style on canons, the strictest form of imitative counterpoint; and the three-movement sinfonia, TWV Anh. 50:1, written to introduce an otherwise lost serenata for the 1765 centennial celebration of Hamburg’s Commerce Deputation (TVWV 24:4), represents “Die alte Welt” (the old world), the “mittlere Welt” (the middle world), and the “jüngere Welt” (the young world) through contrasting styles.Footnote ¹⁰ All of these works invite us to contemplate differences, similarities, and compatibilities between ancient and modern styles.

Less familiar are instances in which Telemann references archaic musical styles in vocal works, where the text may or may not be a motivating factor. Unsurprisingly, the stile antico also makes appearances here, as in the eleven missae breves based on chorale melodies (TVWV 9:1–11) and in various church cantatas. But the idiom also turns up in more unexpected contexts, for example in the chorus “Unsere Seele ist gebeugt zur Erden” (Our soul is bowed down to the dust; Psalm 44.25–26) from the late Passion oratorio Der Tod Jesu, TVWV 5:6. Here, the Renaissance-style polyphony makes for a stark contrast with the surrounding galant movements. One can imagine that younger listeners at the oratorio’s first performances, in Hamburg and Berlin during 1755–1756, might have regarded the stile antico as a historically - based style whose history had all but run its course. If, as seems likely, Telemann turned to it in “Unsere Seele ist gebeugt zur Erden” as a means of suggesting timelessness and tradition (a particularly ancient text set in a particularly ancient style), he nevertheless effects a striking transformation of the idiom by introducing forward-looking, dissonant harmonies that are utterly foreign to it. This occurs during the course of a point of imitation that dominates the chorus and sets the second line: “O wehe, daß wir so gesündig[e]t haben!” (O woe, that we have sinned so!). That the admission of sin should be highlighted by dissonance and emphasized through textual and musical repetition is not in itself remarkable. But the transformation of a “classic,” emotionally restrained mode of musical expression into one that is disquietingly modern in its Empfindsamkeit is striking. Thus Telemann has it both ways, as it were, managing to appear simultaneously as an Ancient and a Modern by extending the expressive boundaries of a time-honored style.

Especially interesting for our purposes are Telemann’s references elsewhere to a slightly more modern vocal idiom: a stilo ecclesiastico harkening back to the mid-seventeenth century and that, paradoxically, may have seemed more obsolete to listeners in the early eighteenth century than the Palestrina-based stile antico. This is the church style associated with Heinrich Schütz and his younger contemporaries, strong echoes of which may be heard in the sacred concertos Telemann composed in Hildesheim and Leipzig at the turn of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ Later, in works written for Eisenach, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, he invoked seventeenth-century style and scoring to reinforce the text’s dramatic or theological message.

In two vocal works of the 1720s, these invocations take the form of musical winks at the listener. The earlier of these is the cantata Ich halte aber dafür, TVWV 1:840, first performed in Frankfurt on the sixth Sunday after Easter (Exaudi Sunday) in 1721 as part of the second Concerten-Jahrgang (also known as the Neues Lied) to librettos by Gottfried Simonis.Footnote ¹² The cantata’s text contrasts evil present time with God’s eternal time, and Telemann responds to the only reference to past time, an observation in the first aria that “the old God still lives” (“Der alte Gott ist noch am Leben”), by including an obbligato cornetto – an “old” instrument belonging more to the past than the present, and which he rarely featured in this way.Footnote ¹³ In fact, this “trumpet aria” is the only movement in the cantata to feature an obbligato instrument, which further highlights the outmoded scoring. A similar effect occurs in Telemann’s serenata for the centennial celebration of the Hamburg Admiralty, Unschätzbarer Vorwurf erkenntlicher Sinnen, TVWV 24:1 (1723). Here the allegorical character Mercurius sings an aria that begins with the text “When heaven and earth grow old, when the flaming stars finally turn cold, may your peace grow old” (“Wann Himmel und Erde veralten, wann endlich die Flammen der Sterne erkalten, veralte deine Ruh”). In a fleetingly humorous gesture, Telemann highlights the concluding phrase “veralte deine Ruh” by way of a mid-baroque cadential formula ending with a Picardy third.

How might listeners of the time have reacted to these modest mixtures of ancient and modern styles? In 1721 Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel, a twenty-five-year-old former theology student who had studied at Leipzig University, published a little book about the church music of his day. Among his concerns was the musical taste of the average congregant, whom he found to be either surprised or scandalized by anything more newfangled than a motet pounded out by that prolific seventeenth-century tunesmith Andreas Hammerschmidt (1611/1612–75):

Scheibel strongly advocated the newer, theatrical type of church cantata then being composed in the more cosmopolitan German cities and courts, and he pointed to Telemann as one of its leading exponents. Four years later, in a lengthy preface to his first annual cycle of church cantata librettos (dedicated to Mattheson and Telemann), Scheibel condemned old-fashioned church music in terms that echo those in Telemann’s 1718 autobiography:

The tyrannical “Utremifasolitten” are no doubt ancients such as Buttstett (author of Ut, mi, sol, re, fa, la, tota Musica et Harmonia Aeterna), whom Mattheson had vanquished some years earlier.

Scheibel’s claim that many people preferred “old-fashioned and simple” church music holds some water, for both Friderich Erhardt Niedt (writing ca. 1706–8) and Johann Mattheson (writing in 1739) noted with disapproval that Hammerschmidt’s motets were still heard in village churches well into the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁶ Nor was such ancient music confined to the hinterlands: For much of the eighteenth century, the Leipzig Thomasschule’s first, second, and third choirs regularly sang late sixteenth-century motets by German and Italian composers, as published in Erdhard Bodenschatz’s two-volume anthology Florilegium Portense (1603 and 1621).Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, Johann Sebastian Bach occasionally performed sacred vocal works by Sebastian Knüpfer and other seventeenth-century composers.Footnote ¹⁸ Whether Telemann also performed the church music of preceding generations in Eisenach, Frankfurt, and Hamburg is presently unknown, but it seems clear that products of the musical past were very much present in the experiences of many eighteenth-century churchgoers in Protestant Germany.

At the same time, we may presume that the steady diet of modern church music consumed by Telemann’s and Bach’s audiences from about 1710 onward acclimated many ears to its operatic qualities, the protestations of some writers notwithstanding.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1725, Scheibel doubted that people in Lower Saxony and Hamburg would agree with the “entirely ludicrous” and “plainly silly” proposition that “the old, poor manner of making music in church is better than the new, artful one.”Footnote ²⁰ As Bach famously remarked in his “Short But Most Necessary Draft for a Well-Appointed Church Music” of 1730, “the state of music is quite different from what it was, since our artistry has increased very much, and the taste has changed astonishingly, and accordingly the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears.”Footnote ²¹ Now, Bach was angling for more and better musicians for his Leipzig performances of motets and cantatas, so he had good reason to play up the new style’s increased demands on performing ensembles. But it is telling that he expressed no interest in performing the works of his predecessor as Thomaskantor, Johann Kuhnau; at least, the town council made no offer to purchase music from Kuhnau’s widow.Footnote ²²

Although we cannot know how readily Telemann’s Frankfurt and Hamburg audiences were able to distinguish between old and new styles, it is not difficult to imagine more alert listeners sensing the alterity of a cornetto used in place of a trumpet or the incongruity of a “hammersmith”-like cadence, especially when aligned with a text referring explicitly to something old. Many in Eisenach and Frankfurt would surely have noticed how the cantatas for the first Sunday in Advent in both of Telemann’s Geistliches Singen und Spielen cycles, Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (TVWV 1:1177, 1710; 1:1174, 1717), open with an abrupt stylistic shift from old (a motet movement in the stile antico) to new (an up-to-date da capo aria).Footnote ²³ They may also have recognized the way in which many cantatas of the second Concerten-Jahrgang invoke the sacred concerto by commencing with a sectional dictum (marked “Allabreve”) that concludes with a vocal fugue.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, at least some of Bach’s Leipzig listeners are bound to have appreciated the antique patina of the first movement of Es ist nichts Gesundes an meinem Leibe, BWV 25 (for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity in 1723), with its brass choir of cornetto and three trombones intoning a chorale melody against a double fugue in the voices and an ostinato figure in the strings; and of the chorale motet that opens Christum wir sollen loben schon, BWV 121 (for the second day of Christmas in 1724), scored with the same type of brass choir.Footnote ²⁵

Temporality and Theology in Two Church Cantatas

Two of Telemann’s Frankfurt cantatas are exceptional for the extent to which they embrace the dichotomy between old and new styles, using music of the ancients to explicate the scriptural texts on which they are based. We turn first to the extended musical pun that opens another installment of the second Concerten-Jahrgang, Sehet an die Exempel der Alten (Look to the examples of the ancients), TVWV 1:1259, first performed in Frankfurt on the second Sunday after Epiphany in 1721.Footnote ²⁶ The movement’s text is a dictum based on the apocryphal Book of Ecclesiasticus (also known as the Wisdom of Sirach), 2.10:

Telemann’s “Allabreve” setting follows the sectional plan mentioned above in connection with the cycle’s opening dicta. But here he seizes upon the text’s first sentence to transport us to the “ancient” world in a most direct way, for the music of this little sacred concerto sounds at least a half-century out of date. As the excerpts in Example 1.1 make clear, the movement does not traffic in the stile antico, but instead delivers a clever, spot-on parody of the German mid-baroque style: The music’s modal orientation, archaic cadential formulas, brass choir of cornetto and three trombones, and strongly rhetorical text declamation in the first section for bass soloist all mark it as something Other, that is, not of the eighteenth century.

(Frankfurt: Habsburger Verlag, 2004)

Example 1.1 Sehet an die Exempel der Alten, TVWV 1:1259, movement 1, mm. 26–49 (1a–d) and 79–90 (2a–b). After Georg Philipp Telemann, Sehet an die Exempel der Alten, Frankfurter Telemann-Ausgabe, vol. 37, ed. Arno Paduch and Eric F. Fiedler

Yet for all its seeming fidelity to seventeenth-century musical language, Telemann’s sacred concerto is, in fact, a simulacrum of ancient music – an exaggerated, even distorted version of the real thing that, like any good caricature, conveys some measure of truth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the decidedly unmelodic writing for the bass soloist and the stilted, meandering quality of the subject in the ensuing fugue for full ensemble. With the deck stacked in this way, we might well be inclined to agree with Telemann that the first section contains “nary a drop of melody” – at least, not by the standards of 1721 – and that the dry fugue “counterpoints in curls” but is ultimately “naked in invention.” This may be music to remind us of the ancients, but it is hardly a model worthy of emulation by moderns, the composer seems to say.Footnote ²⁷

Today Telemann’s send-up comes across as humorous for those in the know, but I suspect that it may have struck some of his Frankfurt listeners as even more bizarre, for the seventeenth-century repertory it references was rapidly passing out of living memory in 1721. Ulrich Konrad makes a similar point about Donna Elvira’s little baroque-style aria “Ah fuggi il traditor” (from Act I of Mozart’s Don Giovanni), which is un-classically saturated with dotted rhythms – the same device, incidentally, that Telemann uses to suggest antiquity in the Ouverture des nations anciennes et modernes. Konrad views this aria as placing an “emphasis on the strange” in the context of the opera as a whole, and in fact, early critics found this number virtually incomprehensible.Footnote ²⁸ As with Telemann’s nod toward the ancients in Sehet an die Exempel der Alten, it is possible to hear the aria as a simulacrum of late baroque style, exaggerated just enough to make Donna Elvira seem slightly ridiculous.

A more sophisticated, if less humorous, use of a seventeenth-century musical idiom marks the dialogue cantata Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe (Hear me when I call), TVWV 1:459, a setting of a libretto by Erdmann Neumeister that was first heard in Eisenach and Frankfurt on Rogation Sunday (the fifth Sunday after Easter) in 1717, as part of the first Concerten-Jahrgang (or Harmonisches Zion).Footnote ²⁹ Written just prior to Telemann’s letter to Mattheson and the 1718 autobiography, the cantata casts a doubting, disconsolate Christian as a musical Ancient and the consoling Jesus as a Modern, a contrast vividly highlighted by text, musical style, and instrumentation.Footnote ³⁰ The constellation of meanings generated by these interacting parameters will repay a close reading of the work.

As shown in Table 1.1, the first six movements of Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe may be understood as a series of four dialogues in which the Christian and Jesus speak separately in alternation (movements 1–4), and then together (movements 5–6). The function of the first four movements as a pair of dialogues is underscored by their sharp differences in affect, musical style, scoring, and tonality. To take this last aspect as an example, the Christian’s two arias (movements 1 and 3) are in A minor with strong modal inflections, whereas Jesus’s arias (movements 2 and 4) are both firmly tonal and in the relative or parallel major (see the indications of keys in the table). In the culminating face-to-face dialogues (movements 5 and 6), the inevitable resolution of the Christian’s crisis of faith is mirrored by a reconciliation of all these differences – though, as we shall see, both resolution and reconciliation ultimately remain incomplete.

The first dialogue consists of two dicta set as brief, through-composed arias. This in itself is remarkable, for although cantatas of both Concerten-Jahrgänge normally begin with a dictum, Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe is the only one to commence with two.Footnote ³¹ The Christian’s words come from the first verse of Psalm 4: “ERhöre mich / wenn ich rufe / GOtt meiner Gerechtigkeit / der du mich tröstest in Angst / sei mir gnädig / und erhöre mein Gebet.” (“Answer me when I call, God of my right, you who consoles me in my fear, be gracious to me and hear my prayer.”).Footnote ³² Like the bass in Sehet an die Exempel der Alten, he sings to the accompaniment of an oldfangled brass choir, here consisting of cornetto and two trombones doubled by strings. The music has something of the antique severity of the openings to Bach’s cantatas BWV 25 and 121, with an appropriately polyphonic (though only lightly imitative) texture that includes a stodgy chain of suspensions in the opening ritornello. The vocal melody, anticipated by the cornetto and doubling violins during the ritornello, features a narrow ambitus and mostly stepwise motion; its relentlessly descending profile contributes to the dismal mood (Example 1.2). Even the Christian’s tortured calls, starting on a sustained e’ and gradually rising through f’ to a high point of g’, seem to stall out and require the aid of the instruments to complete their ascent to a’’ and b♭’’ (displaced by an octave in mm. 17 and 20, not shown in the example).

(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2015)

Example 1.2 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 1, mm. 1–14. After Georg Philipp Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang: Zwölf Kirchenmusiken von Rogate bis zum 6. Sonntag nach Trinitatis nach Texten von Erdmann Neumeister, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51, ed. Maik Richter

In the second half of this dialogue, Jesus consoles the Christian in a more modern-sounding aria based on the day’s Gospel reading (John 16.23): “Warrlich, warrlich / ich sage euch / so ihr den Vater etwas bitten werdet in meinem Nahmen / so wird Ers euch geben” (“Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask the Father something in my name, he will give it to you”). Paralleling the textual shift from Old to New Testament are a number of significant musical transformations. In addition to a turn from minor to major mode, the old-fashioned brass choir is replaced by à la mode oboes, the texture becomes predominantly homophonic, and the more transparent instrumental accompaniment (violins and oboes in unison with a viola part closely tied to the vocal and instrumental bass lines) sounds modern and theatrical. Jesus has no need to wait for a long ritornello before speaking, so he utters an unaccompanied and consoling “wahrlich, wahrlich” before the instruments join in. The Christian’s aria had opened with pleadingly rising gestures, but Jesus now begins with an arpeggiated descent through an octave, as if to respond to the former’s wails from on high. Instead of the Christian’s drooping melodic lines, we hear sequences featuring upward motion based on joyful dactylic rhythms introduced by the oboes and violins. And in place of the Christian’s syllabic declamation, Jesus sings melismas, notably in canonic imitation with a solo oboe at the words “So wird er’s euch geben” (Example 1.3).

Example 1.3 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 2, mm. 1–11. After Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51

Paired in the second dialogue is a chorale-based aria for the Christian and a dance-based one for Jesus. Following on from the Old Testament and New Testament texts of the cantata’s first two movements, the chorale (heard as a textless melody) now introduces a third chronological layer of salvation history.Footnote ³³ The dialogue’s arias differ not only in their affective and stylistic content, but also in their temporality: The Christian operates within a linear time frame governed by the through-composed chorale melody, whereas Jesus’s time is cyclic thanks to the roundedness of da capo form, which in this context might be heard as suggestive of heavenly eternity. The same temporal contrast underlies the “Zeit und Ewigkeit” distinction in contemporaneous sermons focusing on how the travail of personal time gives way to the joy of eternity.Footnote ³⁴

We now find the Christian at an emotional low point, expressing his need with teary eyes:

His misery is given vivid expression by the brass choir, which intones a melody associated with Bartholomäus Ringwaldt’s sixteenth-century chorale text “Herr Jesu Christ, ich schrei zu dir” (Jesus Christ, I cry to thee). Neumeister’s aria text is based in part on Ringwaldt’s words.Footnote ³⁵ God’s “light of joy does not yet shine” for the Christian, and it is perhaps this temporal element in the text that suggested to Telemann a spiritually lost soul who is also lost in musical time. The basso ostinato underlying the aria might already have been considered an old-fashioned device in 1717, but in any case, its static rhythmic and melodic content suffices to suggest time suspended, as does the concluding repetition of the aria’s opening sentence. Note that the joyful dactylic rhythms of the previous aria are now reversed in the ostinato, paralleling the reversal of affect. Moreover, the ostinato’s chromatically descending tetrachord, the breathless quality of its frequent rests, and an upward melodic striving in the vocal line that never seems to reach its goal may all be heard as components of a lament topic that gives further voice to the bewailing Christian’s state of mind (Example 1.4).

Example 1.4 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 3, mm. 1–10. After Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51

Jesus’s soothing response returns us to major mode, a more modern musical idiom, and the scoring of oboes and strings:

His dance-like aria begins with a descending tetrachord in the bass, too, but the gesture – now diatonic – may be readily heard as belonging to a chaconne topic, even though it is quickly dispelled in the continuation of what turns out to be a Fortspinnung-type ritornello (Example 1.5). In other words, an emblem of the Christian’s lament now helps signify a theatrical dance, and this subtle transformation demonstrates how easily a tortured descent into confusion and sadness can be redirected through faith to an unobstructed path toward salvation.Footnote ³⁶

Example 1.5 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 4, mm. 1–17. After Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51

The third dialogue is a lengthy recitative – the only one in the cantata – in which the Christian and Jesus interact with each other directly. Here the Christian learns that he should not pray to God for goods belonging to his own time (“Güter dieser Zeit”), that is, things that are not conducive to salvation and life, but should instead seek richness in faith and eternal blessing (“im Glauben reich, und ewig seelig sey”). Thus, the kind of faith that leads to salvation and blessedness must, among other things, transcend the believer’s time. Although the two characters now sing in a similar idiom, the Christian is accompanied exclusively by the strings and given to impassioned outbursts of arioso, whereas Jesus sings only secco recitative.Footnote ³⁷ This reversal of what one might expect from the characters’ relative status serves to contrast the Christian’s operatic emotions with the simplicity and directness of Jesus’s message. Strikingly, the movement’s joyful ending, an arioso for the Christian, counterpoints in curls: “Nun wohl, mein JESU / wohl! / Was meinen Geist ergötzet, / Und mein Gebeth zum Segen setzet, / Das folgt in deinem Namen. / Dein Warrlich ist mein Ja und Amen.” (“Well then, my Jesus, well! What delights my spirit and turns my prayer to blessing, that follows in your name. Your ‘truly’ is my ‘yes’ and ‘amen.’”). As the Christian references the word “wahrlich” from Jesus’s first aria, the vocal and continuo lines engage in the canonic imitation typical of the cavata, a common ending gambit for recitatives in late seventeenth-century Italian secular cantatas, but which is unusual in Telemann’s works (Example 1.6).Footnote ³⁸ The Christian’s fears may have been allayed by his new understanding of what to seek and expect from God – he confidently ends the movement in Jesus’s key of C major – but he still rejoices as an Ancient, suggesting that the lesson has not yet been fully learned; his faith has not, in fact, transcended his own time.

Example 1.6 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 5, mm. 54–62. After Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51

We might well expect that the cantata’s sixth movement, constituting the fourth and final dialogue, would find the Christian and Jesus having at last reached common musical ground to symbolize the successful culmination of the Christian’s spiritual journey. And in fact, the two share the modern musical space of the da capo aria in the cantata’s only true duet. Yet they inhabit their own distinct territory within this space: The minor-mode A section goes to the Christian, and the major-mode B section to Jesus:

Musically speaking, this is not quite the happy ending that one typically finds in the concluding duets of sacred dialogue cantatas, where the characters of the Christian/Soul and Jesus sing in close imitation or together in parallel thirds and sixths to signify their concord and spiritual merging. One thinks of such reconciliatory gestures in duets among Bach’s dialogue cantatas, such as Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (BWV 21), Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 140), and Erschallet, ihr Lieder (BWV 172). Another duet featuring this kind of joyful unanimity marks the culmination of Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen (BWV 32), which, like Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, commences with separate arias and recitatives for the Soul and Jesus before the two join in a dialogue recitative that sets up the duet.Footnote ³⁹

To be sure, Telemann’s duet does not correspond to what Johann Mattheson described in 1725 as normative: a “concertante” (“concertirend”) texture in which the “two voices proceed imitatively or in a fugal manner” (“beyde Stimmen imitando / oder Fugen-weise / verfahren”).Footnote ⁴⁰ Nor does it conform to the non-concertante duet types he discusses, including those in which the two characters express the same words and those consisting solely of questions and answers. The latter type, presumably involving little or no musical overlap between the two characters, is according to Mattheson more naïve, natural, and affecting than concertante duets.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet “Herr, auf dein Wort verlaß ich mich” does align with Telemann’s later practice in the oratorios of the Schubart-Jahrgang, first performed in Hamburg during the 1731–2 church year. Christoph Stockmeyer aptly refers to the duets of this cycle as “arias ‘split’ between two voices” because the characters seldom sing at the same time.Footnote ⁴² And in fact some duets in da capo form even confine one character to the A section and the other to the B section.Footnote ⁴³

In “Herr, auf dein Wort verlaß ich mich,” this formal plan discontinues the conversational give and take heard in the preceding recitative and returns us to the discrete alternations of the cantata’s opening dialogues. Furthermore, the ancient–modern dichotomy remains in effect: The Christian occupies the contrapuntal realm and is accompanied by the brass choir (with doubling oboes and strings), whereas Jesus presides over a homophonic texture and a pair of obbligato oboes. In fact, the aria’s A section is more rigorously contrapuntal than any of the cantata’s preceding movements. It is a stretto fugue in which each of the ritornellos constitutes a compact, four-voice exposition of a melodically dry subject, the first four notes of which are often heard in augmentation. The central vocal episode is also mainly given over to the subject, as the Christian sings melismas (on “Freuden”) while engaging in an imitative dialogue with the continuo and an obbligato cornetto – a decidedly modern texture paired with an ancient scoring (Example 1.7). The fugue’s learnedness and severity stand in sharp contrast to the less earth-bound and more texturally transparent material of Jesus and his angelic-sounding oboes.Footnote ⁴⁴

Example 1.7 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 6, mm. 1–9. After Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51

As in his first aria, Jesus speaks without any instrumental introduction, embarking on a double-motto phrase that is momentarily interrupted by the oboes. The circular arabesques of his melody, imitated by the oboes, offer a visual-aural representation of his open heart (“Gott … schließt sein Hertze … auf”). Once again, his music is modern, artless, and accessible (Example 1.8). Thanks to the da capo, however, the last word is left to the Christian (still counterpointing in curls), whose liminal status of having finally embarked upon a spiritual path to salvation while remaining temporally lost – so far as the music is concerned – is left unresolved by Telemann as an eloquent reminder to the listener that maintaining one’s faith is a continuous, even timeless process.

Example 1.8 Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, TVWV 1:459, movement 6, mm. 29–35. After Telemann, Concerten-Jahrgang, Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke, vol. 51

The cantata’s final movement, providing an epilogue to the dialogic narrative, is a cantional chorale setting that makes implicit reference to the nexus between time and faith. Its text is the sixteenth and final verse of Georg Grünwald’s 1530 hymn “Kommt her zu mir, spricht Gottes Sohn” (Come to me, says God’s son), based on Matthew 11.28:

But in the hymn’s first and sixth verses, neither of which is included in Neumeister’s libretto nor set by Telemann, we learn that all those who are burdened by sins – the young, old, weak, and ill – may find relief and eternal salvation through God’s holy word before their inevitable death:

Hearing, and perhaps singing along with, the melody of “Kommt her zu mir, spricht Gottes Sohn” may have cued congregants to recall these verses and reflect on how their own lives, from youth to old age, relate to present, future, and eternal time. And it is equally conceivable that Neumeister’s quotation of the hymn’s concluding verse inspired Telemann musically to contrast an “old,” weak, and spiritually ill Christian with a Jesus who embodies both present and everlasting salvation.

As tempting as it is to regard the Christian’s musical language as endearingly behind the times, there may be a darker side to his Ancient identity. The cantata’s placement of quotation marks, as it were, around mid-baroque musical style brings to mind the invocation and disconcerting transformation of the stile antico in “Unsere Seele ist gebeugt zur Erden” from Der Tod Jesu. It also anticipates how late eighteenth-century composers sometimes referenced the idiom of Telemann’s time as a distancing or alienating device. Donna Elvira’s “Ah fuggi il traditor” has already been mentioned in this connection, but the effect is especially pronounced in two well-known pieces of the 1790s: Mozart’s “Song of the Armored Men” (“Der, welcher wandert dies Straße”) from Die Zauberflöte and the Allegretto movement of Haydn’s E-major piano trio, Hob. XV:28. Both use simulacra of late baroque style – including “learned” counterpoint, walking bass lines, and, in Mozart’s case, a Lutheran chorale – to conjure the supernatural, grotesque, or uncanny; the result can still send a chill down our spines.Footnote ⁴⁷ For Mozart’s audiences, the “Song of the Armored Men” must have seemed inscrutable, sounding “the way the hieroglyphics on the pyramid look” onstage.Footnote ⁴⁸ These funhouse-mirror views of the past suggest that the antique musical voice of the Christian in Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe, along with the opening sacred concerto of Sehet an die Exempel der Alten, might be heard not just as oddly quaint, semi-nostalgic, or tongue-in-cheek reminiscences of a bygone era, but also (or instead) as unsettling, gothic, and even ghostly invocations – another layer of meaning perhaps not incompatible with the cantatas’ theological contexts.

In sum, the multivalence of Telemann’s ancient mode in these works can be taken as further evidence of his productive engagement with the past. And it was surely thanks to the knotty timber of this engagement, as outlined at the beginning of this chapter, that such unusual musical fruit could grow in the first place. Even if Telemann held the ancients at arm’s length in his writings, he recognized them as useful partners when placed in musical dialogue with modernity – just as his early polemics with Wolfgang Caspar Printz helped shape his identity as a musical maverick who nevertheless appreciated whence he came.