For several years now, the biennial Boston Early Music Festival has catered to audiences living too far west to attend the festival events in Boston. This has taken the form of a run-out to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington of a chamber opera production—something far easier to manage than the Festival’s featured full-scale opera. This year Reiner’s Octavia once more called for large stage sets, elaborate costumes, a substantial chorus and large cast of soloists. The chamber operas of the period could be accommodated in a decent sized room without much stagecraft, few costumes, and a minimal cast. The Baroque orchestra accompanying the performance may also be smaller than the ensembles used for performances in the major opera houses of the day.

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) was among the best-known composers in his day, though like most Baroque composers, he was largely forgotten in the romantic era. The development of the long-playing record in the mid-20^th century brought many such composers back to prominence, especially Vivaldi with the sudden popularity of The Four Seasons, and Telemann with an apparently endless string of instrumental works. But in both these cases, the recovery of their music in the modern era still overlooked, for many years, the vast amount of their sacred and secular vocal music, including operas, and cantatas.

Telemann came from a family of university-educated men, and he became one himself, though not before revealing a striking gift for music. Along with lessons on harpsichord and organ, he taught himself violin, recorder, and zither by the age of 12, the year in which he wrote an opera, Sigismundus. Concerned about the path his life was taking, his widowed mother confiscated his instruments and denied him further involvement with music. But later schooling brought him further opportunities to add musical practice to his learned studies. At the age of 20, he entered the University of Leipzig to study law. His musical skill was quickly discovered. He took over a student collegium musicum, composed at least four operas there, and occasionally appeared on stage as a singer.  

In 1721 he moved to Hamburg, where he lived for the remaining 46 years of his life and entered the “most productive stage” of his life (according to Steven Zohn in The New Grove)—and that is a considerable understatement. Just to catalogue all his works in the Telemann Werke Verzeichnis (TWV) requires three substantial volumes (two cataloguing all the vocal works, and one for the instrumental music). His total output is nothing short of mind-boggling, running to more than 1900 church cantatas (plus a large number for which only the text survives), for starters. For 46 years he composed an annual Passion setting for Good Friday services in Hamburg. Over 100 orchestral suites survive, not to mention solo concertos, double concertos, and other instrumental works. And, according to his two autobiographies, he apparently composed some fifty operas, but only about half survive.      

The performance at the Mahaiwe Center on Friday night was made up of two Telemann works, a comic opera and a solo cantata, presented in an intertwined way. The opera, Pimpinone (TWV 21:15) calls for two singing characters and a mime representing the commedia dell’arte figure of Arlecchino (Harlequin), an inveterate, but wordless, prankster. The evening was filled out by a solo cantata, Ino (TWV 20:41) for soprano alone, though for this production, Arlecchino was given a silent part to play.

Pimpinone is identified as an intermezzo, which suggests that it is designed to be performed in the middle of something else. This was a common tradition in the Baroque era, when the three acts of a serious opera would alternate with the two acts of a comic intermezzo, much simpler, usually for just two singers, as a change of pace—and probably as a way of covering the changing of elaborate Baroque stage sets during the two intermissions of a three-act opera (the standard number of acts in Italy). The most famous intermezzo of the period was Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, which came eight years after Telemann’s work.

Pimpinone debuted in the Gänsemarkt (Goose Market) Theater in Hamburg on September 17, 1725. During the course of several productions, it had one of two subtitles, “The unequal marriage” or “The power-seeking chambermaid.” Telemann composed it to a libretto by J. P. Praetorius based on an earlier Italian libretto by Pietro Pariati. The two singing characters are a wealthy older man, Pimpinone (the Italian word pimpinella refers to the flower, pimpernel, but the suffix -one suggests something rather gross or vulgar) is a bachelor generally content with his life. His chambermaid is called Vespetta (“little wasp”), suggesting her sharp wit. Over the course of three acts, Vespetta persuades Pimpinone to hire her as his chambermaid. Delighted with her work, he agrees to marry her with a large dowry. Finally, she breaks her earlier promise to be a demure, homebody and not to go out enjoying herself with her friends.  She reminds him that if she is forced to leave him through his rules, the dowry belongs to her, and she will take it with her.

Like all Baroque operas (and intermezzi), the work is made up of da capo arias alternating with recitatives, except at the ends of acts when both singers join in a duet. Throughout the lively give and take, Arlecchino appears in various guises to add to the fun. The singers sounded simply splendid. Bass-baritone Christian Immler not only had a fine, virile voice as the love-struck Pimpinone, but he also used a deliciously funny falsetto in a scene in which he parodies an argument between himself and his chambermaid/wife, alternating both voices deliciously. Danielle Reutter-Harrah captured the lively wit of Vespetta, transforming from her early charm and modesty that wins Pimpinone to self-willed wife once she has become mistress of the household. Arlecchino does not sing, but his masked role, delightfully played by Marie-Natalie Lacoursière, makes Arlecchino a playful intermediary between the stage and the audience, thus increasing the humor of the plot.

Surprised the intermezzo ran to three acts. Most such works were designed to fit in the two intermissions of a three-act serious opera. But a three-act intermezzo suggests its linkage to the intermissions of a five-act opera, common enough in France, but I don’t know a single Italian opera of the period that could accommodate it. Still, we know that Telemann wrote it for an Italian opera—Tamerlano, by his buddy Handel. (Telemann produced a number of Handel’s operas in Hamburg, thereby contributing considerably to his fame in northern Europe.) However they arranged the intermezzi in the performance, Pimpinone became popular enough that Telemann wrote a sequel in 1727. Unfortunately the music of Die Amours der Vespetta has been lost.

To fill out the hour-long comic intermezzo, someone had a brilliant idea: Reverse the normal procedure by making the comic opera the “main” element and placing a serious cantata, divided into two parts, as the diversifying element. Composers wrote solo cantatas by the hundreds during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. They usually had the same form as an operatic scene in which a character explains the situation in recitative, reacts in an aria. Some change is explained in a central recitative, motivating a dramatically different aria to close. These cantatas could be regarded as a sort of chamber opera, performed with little or no scenery, and emphasizing the vocal agility of the singer for whom it was written. The “plot,” such as it was, was almost always drawn from familiar mythological situations, obviating unnecessary explanations to the audience (except today, when so many of the traditional myths have been forgotten).

For purposes of the cantata, and especially the division into two “intermezzi,” Ion is divided into a dramatic opening half in which Ino is fleeing with her infant son from her husband, King Athamas, who, driven mad by Juno, has already killed their older son. Desperately she leaps into the sea, though her son Melicertes is torn from her arms. She implores the gods of the sea to return him. The mime Arlecchino (now clad in sea-blue and carrying a trident, return Melicertes, to the sound of tritons and nereids.

In the celebratory second half of the cantata is celebratory, the divinities of the sea elevate Ino and her son to immortality. Neptune appears in his chariot and Ino vows to thank him forever.

The “action” of the cantata exists solely in Telemann’s music and in the stunning voice of Amanda Forsythe, costumed as if she were singing in an 18^th-century theater, suggesting the action that has passed, but mostly through her vocal drama and some subtle movement. From this kind of emphasis on vocal brilliance, the the solo cantata became such a popular genre and Italian (or Italianate) voices held such sway.

Of course, the front-of-stage work of the singers required, and received, a splendid orchestral support from the members of the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble, consisting of 12 strings (4-3-2-2-1), pairs of flutes and natural horns, and continuo (harpsichord, archlute, and Baroque guitar). The overall direction of the ensemble was by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, with Robert Mealy as concertmaster. Stage direction by Gilbert Blin and Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière brought the dramas—both comic and intense—vividly to life. A wildly enthusiastic audience expressed its satisfaction of this brief return to the early 18^th century and the amazing und sehr geehrte Herr Telemann

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.