Geistliches Singen und Spielen (Full Score, hardback)

Telemann Geistliches Singen und Spielen (Full Score, hardback)

Music for the church based on texts by Erdmann Neumeister
New Year to Esto mihi and the Purification of Mary

Volume 67 of the Telemann Musical Works contains the cantatas for New Year to Esto mihi and the Purification of Mary based on texts from the annual cycle “Geistliches Singen und Spielen” by Erdmann Neumeister.  Following the publication of a first segment from this annual cycle in 2004 (Telemann Musical Works, 39, ed. by Ute Poetzsch-Seban; 1st Advent to Sunday after Christmas), this volume marks the beginning of a unique project in the series: this annual cycle, which was groundbreaking for Protestant church cantatas and exceptional in the work of Telemann and Neumeister, is being edited in its entirety in a total of seven volumes.

Neumeister's poems, in which he consistently combined the aria and recitative components from opera and secular cantata for the first time with biblical sayings (dicta) and chorales, were set to music by Telemann in Eisenach for the church year 1710/11.  In Frankfurt, the composer created new settings, possibly also additions. Due to the extraordinarily widespread reception of these works – which also includes Telemann's reuse of several cantatas in Hamburg – the source situation poses a great challenge, not least because the original Eisenach compositions can often no longer be clearly identified.

The foreword to volume 67 provides a broad basis for the sources – texts as well as music – and for specific questions of performance practice, on which the subsequent volumes can draw.  It also contains an edition of the texts of the cantatas published in this volume and in volume 39.

With his intense poetry, which combines a deep theological penetration of the respective themes with great poetic mastery, Neumeister provided Telemann with a perfect template.  The cantatas presented here show a correspondingly broad musical spectrum, ranging from a display of splendour and grandiose counterpoint through haunting recitatives and the seriousness of the chorales right to the most diverse forms of arias.  Here, and in all seven volumes of the large-scale Telemann Musical Works project, there is a huge musical treasure to discover and unearth anew.

- Georg Philipp Telemann Musical Works, Volume 67

- Format 33,0 x 26,0 cm