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  • Telemann, der musikalische Maler: Telemann-Kompositionen im Notenarchiv der Singakademie zu Berlin
  • Jeanne Swack
Telemann, der musikalische Maler: Telemann-Kompositionen im Notenarchiv der Singakademie zu Berlin Ed. by Carsten Lange and Brit Reipsch. pp. 487. Telemann Konferenzberichte, 15. (Olms, Hildesheim, Zurich, NY, 2010. €78. ISBN 978-3-487-14336-1.)

The series of international conferences on Telemann’s music organized and sponsored periodically by the Telemann-Zentrum in Magdeburg, Germany, has long provided a forum for the presentation of recent research on the music of Telemann and his contemporaries. Each conference has focused on a specific theme. The volume at hand, representing the revised essays presented at the conference in March 2004, is unusual in encompassing two themes: Telemann, the Musical Painter; and the Telemann Compositions in the Music Archive of the Berlin Singakademie, the large collection best known for containing numerous works of the Bach family. The collection was presumed lost after the Second World War, but resurfaced in Kiev in 1999 after the end of the Cold War, and was subsequently returned to the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. The twenty-two essays in the collection, all in German, are not divided evenly, but reflect preference at the conference for the first topic; seventeen essays treat some aspect of tone painting, other types of text expression, or musical symbolism, and five discuss the Singakademie collections. Telemann was known in his time as a composer especially adept at vivid depiction of imagery in the texts he set (some of which he even wrote himself), and there is no shortage of material.

As with any conference report on a fairly narrow set of topics, there is bound to be some overlap among the papers, and that is certainly the case for some of the essays presented here, although each author brings an individual angle to the chosen themes. Not all of the papers deal directly with Telemann’s music, but rather treat similar issues in the music of his contemporaries, or address broader aesthetic issues, in this case having to do with changing views of imitative music and the hierarchy of music and visual arts at various points during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or [End Page 231] over longer stretches of time). The volume was edited by Carsten Lange and Brit Reipsch of the Telemann-Zentrum, both of whom also provided essays. The editing is generally fine, with some exceptions noted below and a few unnoticed typographical errors (such as the mis-spelling of ‘Albinoni’ in the table of contents).

Telemannn research has long been centred in Germany, and most of the scholars whose works are presented here are German, with some representation from the USA and UK. Probably the most interesting articles from the section of the book on expression and tone painting are those treating historical/theoretical writings on text expression and the ability of music to evoke visual imagery or the imitation of nature. Wolfgang Ruf, in ‘Malen und Ausdrücken in der Musikaesthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts’, provides a concise overview of changing aesthetics and the hierarchy of music within the arts, focusing especially on influential writings from England and France. Taking as his starting point the supplement to Mattheson’s Neu-eröffnete Orchestre (1713), which poses the question of the relative status of music vis-à-vis painting, Ruf briefly summarizes the origins of the argument in polemical writings on rhetoric and art in the Renaissance before continuing with a discussion of expression by such writers as Du Bos, Batteux, Harris, and Avison, concluding that French and English criticism was based on three principles: that music and painting were seen as related arts, both deriving their models to some degree from rhetoric, that one art could borrow means of expression from another, and that each was capable of imitation of subjects drawn from outside of itself.

Joachim Kremer’s article, ‘Johann Matthesons Vergleich der Malerei mit der Musik im “Neu-Eröffneten Orchestre”’, begins as well with the same passage in Mattheson’s supplement and also traces some of the historical background behind it, but focuses primarily on German sources and Mattheson’s discussion of the origins and power of music, which centres initially on the...

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