Choralbearbeitungen by Ute Poetzsch (review)

Over the past thirty years or so, scholarship on Georg Philipp Telemann’s vocal music has experienced such significant discoveries and insightful inquiries that even relatively recent and frequently used reference materials are increasingly obsolete. Indeed, much of Werner Menke’s Thematisches Verzeichnis der Vokalwerke von Georg Philipp Telemann(2 vols., 2d ed. [Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1988]), a standard reference work found in most music libraries, has been deemed erroneous in light of more recent findings. Thanks in large part to the newest critical editions of the Telemann Musikalsiche Werke(especially those since the mid-1990s that have focused primarily on vocal works) and several newly uncovered source materials, we are finally and gradually reaching a point where Telemann’s music can be more fully understood.

A fine example of this new wave of Telemann scholarship is Ute Poetzsch’s critical edition of five chorale settings composed between the mid-1740s and 1754: Christus, der ist mein LebenTVWV 1:138; Du, o schönes WeltgebäudeTVWV 1:394; Ich bin ja, Herr, in deiner MachtTVWV 1:822; Jesu, meine FreudeTVWV 1:970; and Jesus, meine ZuversichtTVWV 1:984. The edition (which is the second of the Telemann Musikalische Werketo include an English translation of its preface) includes a substantial essay that addresses several issues regarding these works, including their genesis, genre, textual sources, dissemination, and performance practice. The extensive critical report meticulously describes all known surviving manuscript sources, now held in libraries in Berlin, Schwerin, Gdańsk, London, Aarhus, and Copenhagen. (Menke’s catalog omits the sources in Aarhus, Copenhagen, and one of the sources in Schwerin.) The edition also contains a fair number of facsimiles of primary materials, such as autographs, manuscript copies, hymnals, and church-music librettos—which, as described below, have been particularly important in correcting the long-assumed performance history of these works.

Poetzsch devotes a considerable portion of her prefatory essay to the generic labeling of these pieces, particularly since there has been little consensus between the eighteenth-century source materials (where they are often labeled as “Lied” or “Choral”) and the modern-day literature, where these pieces have traditionally been included along with church cantatas, as is the case in Menke’s Verzeichnis(vol. 1: Cantaten zum gottesdienstlichen Gebrauch) and a recording of the works (Telemann, Danziger Choralkantaten, Rheinische Kantorei, and Das Kleine Konzert, cond. Hermann Max, Capriccio 10853 [2000], CD). Although these works contain many of the musical styles associated with the Neumeister-type sacred cantata, and were performed interchangeably with that kind of concerted music in church services, Poetzsch is careful to identify these five works as chorale arrangements ( Choralbear -beitungen), since the composer sets every verse of the hymns, and their chorale melodies are consistently featured as a cantus firmus in each movement. This approach is different from many of the so-called chorale cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and others, since the librettists of these works occasionally paraphrased hymn stanzas, and their respective chorale tunes were not always present.

Before this edition, Telemann scholars and enthusiasts have widely assumed that all five of these works were commissioned as a set by church musicians in Danzig, and that Telemann composed them especially for that city in 1754, along with a St. Matthew Passion. Reasons for this association include the handwritten note “ist nach Danzig gemacht” on three of the manuscript materials created under Telemann’s supervision, the date 1754 on one of the manuscripts (thus linking it to the year of the St. Matthew Passion for Danzig), general stylistic similarities between the works, and the Danzig autograph manuscript for one of the pieces ( Ich bin ja, Herr, in deiner MachtTVWV 1:822), currently held at the Polska Akademia...