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October 2004 Program Notes
A Sumptuous Table: Tafelmusik II
by Mary Burke
We have previously remarked upon Georg Philipp Telemann's myriad artistic achievements: the sheer volume of his output; his inventive instrumentation; his easy and adroit touch with various styles and genres; and his sensitivity to the particular qualities of individual instruments. Tonight's concert, however, makes a good occasion to talk about an equally remarkable achievement: Telemann actually made a pretty good living in music.
Musicians generally, and composers in particular, have been a famously underpaid lot for centuries. Even in an age when it was possible to have a regular, full-time job providing music for a church or a royal court, practitioners of the trade tended to live uncomfortably close to the poverty line, if not well south of it. Many composers had to supplement their wages by copying music, taking outside commissions, or giving private lessons, if their employers permitted them to do so. These jobbing composers might receive plentiful accolades and perhaps the occasional monetary bonus, but they rarely lived in luxury.
Those men clearly lacked Telemann's particular combination of manic energy and business acumen. Unlike the stereotypical head-in-the-clouds artistic type, Telemann was a very practical person who could handle his career and business affairs quite efficiently. He understood the concept of leverage centuries before it became a business buzzword. By his mid-thirties, headhunters from various cities and courts were already trying to hire him away, and Telemann used these offers to pressure his current employers into raising his salary. While he was the Stadtkantor (city music director) of Hamburg, for example, the church elders complained bitterly about his involvement in opera productions, which they considered unseemly (opera being a well-known cause of "lasciviousness"). Telemann went off and auditioned for the post of Kantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig; the committee unanimously voted to offer him the post, which Telemann then casually mentioned to his bosses in Hamburg. They quickly agreed to give him a goodish raise, and he stayed on (the Thomaskirche job eventually went to the committee's third choice, a workmanlike fellow named Bach). Some years earlier, as city music director of Frankfurt, he had used much the same tactic to secure a raise; however, he used that extra money to hire additional musicians for his more ambitious projects.
Like many other composers, Telemann took on outside commissions apart from his assigned duties to bring in extra money; like a fair number of them, he published many of his own works; like very few of them, he even engraved the plates himself. Engraving is not a skill one acquires casually, requiring as it does an array of special tools, a steady hand, and the ability to think backwards (since the plate must be a mirror image of the printed page). However, the effort of learning it proved worthwhile for any composer interested in self-publishing, because it saved him the expense of hiring someone else to prepare his work for printing. Telemann was in good company here; J.S. Bach engraved several of his own works, with the help of son Carl Philipp Emanuel, as did Kuhnau and Graupner. (Leclair did the next best thing by marrying an engraver, but was later murdered with one of her tools—not a good return on investment.)
Telemann published several dozen of his own works between 1715 and 1740, including Der getreue Musik-Meister (The Faithful Music Master), the first music periodical in Germany. Established in 1728 in collaboration with J.V. Görner, it was a small biweekly magazine that contained assorted pieces aimed primarily at reasonably skilled amateurs in search of enjoyable music to play at home. Telemann wrote (and engraved) most of the music himself, but sometimes included pieces by other noted composers of the day. Always bearing his target market in mind, Telemann provided tuneful yet substantial music that was largely free of major technical hurdles; many pieces were easily playable on any of several instruments, which increased the number of potential buyers.
He did not actually invent copyright law (although he undoubtedly would have), but he did know its value, and did what he could to protect his own rights as an author. When he traveled to Paris in 1737, he succeeded in obtaining a royal privilège, which gave him the exclusive right to publish his own music in France; this was a wise move, because several printers there were putting out pirated editions of his music. At home in Hamburg, he engaged in a number of legal disputes with the city council over intellectual property, arguing that the author of a work should have more rights to it than the printer. He succeeded in his first suit in 1722, but over the next 25 years would have to fight it out with the city several more times. In the end, Telemann won out, and regained exclusive publication rights to his music. His years in law school finally paid off.
With some eighteen years of publishing experience behind him, Telemann announced an ambitious new project for 1733: "a great instrumental work called Musique de Table," according to the Hamburg newspapers, which would appear in three installments, and would have the subscribers' names listed on the cover. The success of this collection demonstrates his genius for marketing and publicity; the music, of course, speaks for itself.
Considering the enormous amount of time Telemann must have spent in writing his thousands of pieces, one might imagine that he led a comparatively isolated life. Quite the contrary! In his professional life, he had somehow managed to cultivate a gigantic network of acquaintances all over Europe. Many he had actually met during his travels and residences in various parts of Germany and Poland; others he knew via correspondence, for in addition to being a composer, performer, teacher, music director, publisher, engraver, poet, theorist, and father of ten, Telemann also worked for several years as a "corresponding agent" to the Saxe-Weimar court in Eisenach (a former employer), compiling news from a small army of contacts all over northern Europe.
Whether he accumulated all these contacts out of sheer gregariousness or for more pragmatic reasons, they certainly came in handy when he was soliciting subscriptions for Musique de Table. Telemann asked his agents, friends, and colleagues to spread the word, which they did to great effect. This marketing campaign, aided by Telemann's considerable reputation, brought in over 200 subscribers, including luminaries like Handel and Quantz. Between the subscriptions and subsequent purchases (which were priced higher), Musique de Table proved extremely profitable.
And the buyers were not disappointed. The edition was beautiful to look at (Telemann did not engrave the plates himself, but did supervise the process) and the music equally delightful to play or to hear. The work was published in three installments, called productions, each of which was structured the same way: opening and closing sections for the full seven-part ensemble, with an intervening concerto and chamber sonatas in various configurations. The instrumentation and overall tone vary from one production to the next; after the rather genteel, flute dominated first production, the second adopts a brighter sound with the use of trumpet and oboe and its Italianate writing for the violins.
Telemann once said of Musique de Table, "I do hope this work will one day contribute to my fame." The enduring popularity of this music must surely have exceeded his wildest dreams.
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