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February 2003 Program Notes
Music for a Baroque Feast
by Mary Burke
In the early editions of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Telemann rated only a few paragraphs. The latest edition, drawing on the much more comprehensive scholarship of intervening decades, runs to twelve action-packed pages, and that's not even counting the list of his works. Most normal humans don't make it through the entire entry, however—they collapse after a page or so, crushed under the weight of his endless achievements and a sudden feeling of inadequacy.
In truth, Telemann deserves superstar status based on his compositions alone; but his further accomplishments as a poet, publisher, engraver, marketer, news correspondent, director, librettist, teacher, and theoretician elevate him to the realm of superheroes.
One of the few skills that Telemann apparently did NOT master is cooking, which may be some consolation to us lesser mortals.* However, he did provide us with the next best thing to food: delightful banquet music to accompany it.
Music for dining already had a long and honorable history by the time Telemann published his Musique de Table in 1733. The genre designation of Tafelmusik (table music or banquet music), as this collection is also commonly called, dates to the 16th century. Royal courts and aristocratic households typically maintained a staff of musicians, both performers and composers, to provide music for every kind of occasion, from mundane activities like getting dressed or going to bed (e.g. Couperin's Trios pour le Coucher du Roy) to grand fêtes. Historians have found the item "Dinner Pieces" listed in household inventories, a category that encompassed a variety of vocal and instrumental works used for the purpose. Many collections of light, pleasant music for dining appeared in print all over Europe (and particularly in Germany) during the 17th century, indicating that there was plenty of demand for it; this was definitely a boon to the court composers, as it saved them a great deal of time that would otherwise have been spent in turning out dinner music of their own. Two of the more famous collections, Biber's Mensa Sonora and Schein's Banchetto Musicale, have become popular as concert music today.
As one might expect, music for feasts was ideally rather simple, tuneful, and amusing, not requiring intense concentration from either performers or listeners. An administrator in Dresden once advised Heinrich Schütz that the ensemble should be fairly small, and should "not make much pomp and show, but pleasing music in various manners." According to the custom of individual courts, there might be music all the way through the meal, or only between courses and afterward. In either case, deep and demanding music would obviously have been wasted on an audience with the twin distractions of food and society.
Telemann had undoubtedly written his share of Tafelmusik by the time he assembled the three Musique de Table suites, or productions, as he called them. His employment contract as Kapellmeister in Eisenach stated that he was to provide music for "normal banqueting purposes" as well as special celebrations, and his later position as Stadtkantor for the city of Hamburg also included this requirement. However, the Musique de Table was not necessarily conceived for actual banquet use; from the first, Telemann intended it for publication and a mass audience (to the extent that the educated and wealthy music-buying elite could be considered a mass audience). The title of the work may have been nothing more than a marketing ploy—a title with more pizzazz than, say, "Another Enormous Chamber Music Collection by Herr Telemann." Certainly these delightful pieces deserve to shine on their own, rather than serve as an accompaniment to someone else's party.
To boost sales of this ambitious (and expensive) three-part collection, Telemann industriously promoted the work among potential subscribers. He placed an advertisement in the Hamburg newspaper, announcing that the Musique de Table would be available soon, and promising subscribers that their names would be printed on the cover. He also engaged in strenuous networking, spreading the word to his enormous circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues all over Europe. All this marketing paid off handsomely, as he rounded up over 200 subscribers from Spain to Norway; among them were such luminaries as Pisendel, Quantz, Blavet, and Handel, who even borrowed material from the collection to incorporate into his own works.
Each of the three productions consists of a sequence of chamber music pieces in varied configurations: an overture-suite for the full ensemble, followed by a quartet, a concerto, a trio, a solo, and finally a single-movement conclusion, also for the full ensemble. The components of each set are united by key relationships, featured solo instruments, and a blend of contrasting yet compatible styles. The overture-suites and conclusions are written in the French style; the suite in the first production, for example, is the classic Lullian sequence of a tripartite overture followed by dance movements and character pieces. The intervening pieces follow Italian chamber music models, but are written in Telemann's own "international" style that blends the best qualities of German, French, Italian, and Polish music into a vibrant and graceful voice. This music may never have been performed with a banquet, but it certainly goes down as smoothly as a fine glass of claret.
*This may not be strictly true. I can only say that at present there is no solid evidence that he DID know how to cook. For all we know, someone will turn up proof next week that he published a dozen cookbooks under an alias.
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