Vom Umgang mit Telemanns Werk einst und jetzt

Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the best-known and best-regarded composers in the 18th century, a fact borne out by previously unknown documents from Frankfurt am Main, Strasbourg and Schleiz, but he sank largely into oblivion after his death. But there is evidence of an unbroken Telemann tradition carried by organists and cantors until the mid-19th century, which offers a musical practitioners’ counterpart to the far-reaching tradition in that era of a pejorative image of Telemann. At the beginning of the 20th century Arnold Schoenberg and Max Schneider revived the spread of Telemann’s work.