In his day, old G.P. Telemann was Something Else! He couldn't seem to do anything wrong. His life was just one prestigious appointment after another, including the choirmastership of the Barefoot Church in Frankfurt-am-­Main and all kinds of court posts. He wound up as musical czar of Hamburg, and when the Leipzigers tried to lure him away, the Hamburgers refused to let him go. He seems to have been a lovable person as well as a fine musician. He and Handel had what amounted to a mutual admiration society, and old Bach liked him well enough to have him stand as godfather to little C.P.E. (who eventually succeeded his octagenarian godparent in Hamburg.) He wrote possibly more music than anyone in history; even he had no idea what he had turned out. (Forty-odd Passion settings represent only a small fraction of his total output!) Yet he seems to have found time for performances, rehearsals, travel, magazine publication, and a social and family life. Uncommonly, his music continued to be played for years after his death. He was much better known in his day than Bach, and he was perhaps more widely popular than Handel. Yet when his reputation at last began to fade, it went into almost total eclipse. In my salad days (before our entree in WWII) he was represented in American catalogues by Arthur Fiedler' s recording of the "Don Quichotte" Suite, three songs sung by baritone Ernst Wolff, and a handful of harpsichord pieces played by Ernst Victor Wolff (no relation!), and I suspect the number of people who knew these records was minute. Of course in the Baroque craze of the LP era, Telemann has been "rediscovered" with a vengeance, but nobody, it seems, accuses him of profundity, nor reelevates him to Bachian-Handelian status. And no one, it seems, has bothered to attempt a numerical catalogue to help us poor laymen out of the forest. So what's wrong with Telemann?

I'll tell you what's wrong with Telemann: he was a victim of the French Hype. For centuries the French have been sniffily pretending that they invented Western Civilization, and the rest of us (except maybe the Italian) have stood around like a bunch of yokels believing them. Actually French contributions are mostly surface and borrowed to boot. Manners? Codified by Castiglione, and Italian. La cuisine? Sauce to disguise inferior meat, introduced by the cooks of Catherine de Medici. Fashion? Who knows? Who cares? La gloire? General Petain and chateauxful of pompous bad taste and village memorials to millions of slaugh­tered boys. Painting? Boucher's rubber nudes. Philosophy? Descartes deluded by his own consciousness, and Candide. Music? Strings of little outmoded diddly-poo dances, and psalms consisting of fanfares and drum-rolls. Yet in Telemann's time, the myth of French superiority was so pervasive that every Baron Thunder­ten-Tronkh tried to see just how French he could make his court. The courts to which Telemann was attached were such courts, and when he visited Paris in 1737, he was bugeyed with awe and wonder and never recovered. So he wrote hundreds of French ouverture­ suites and pieces with cute titles beginning with "La" and eschewed profundity, which the French connect with things like sauerbraten and blood-pudding. What saves Tele­mann's music from French superficiality, however, is his natural charm and good humor--commodities not as common in music as one might think.

The C major ouverture suite included here is no stranger to records; Muller-Bruhl recorded it before, in fact. The violin-and-trumpet concerto purports to be a first recording, but I suspect it is the one Ormandy recorded for RCA c. 1968 (discontinued). The piece for the pair of oboes d'amore (lovable vagrants) appears to be a genuine rarity.