The goal of the Telemann-Ausgabe (TA) has always been to present scholarly editions of important and characteristic works from Georg Philipp Telemann's vast and still hard-to-assess oeuvre, with proper scope devoted to representative groups of works and periods from his artistic career. Before 2010 the edition focused strongly on Telemann's operas and vocal masterpieces such as the Brockes Passion (tvwv5:1), the Seliges Erwägen (tvwv5:2), the seventy-first Psalm, Deus judicium tuum (tvwv7:7), Der Tod Jesu (tvwv5:6), Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu (tvwv6:6) and the Auszüge aus Klopstocks Messias (tvwv6:4), together with selected volumes of occasional music and chamber cantatas.
The funding of the TA by the Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften having ended after fifty volumes in 2010, a new funding model had to be established that would allow publication to continue from 2011 until at least 2020. The TA is now organized as a joint project of Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle-Wittenberg and the city of Magdeburg, and receives support from the resources of the Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft Sachsen-Anhalt. Funding for the editorial office, including staff, is borne by the city of Magdeburg. The Musicology Department of Martin-Luther-Universität and the Zentrum für Telemann-Pflege und -Forschung in Magdeburg function as governing institutions. General Editors are Wolfgang Hirschmann and Carsten Lange; a newly created Board of Editorial Advisers consists of Jürgen Neubacher, Brit Reipsch, Walter Werbeck and Steven Zohn. The managing editor continues to be Ute Poetzsch.
The new series concentrates on Telemann's annual cycles of sacred cantatas (Jahrgänge), and hence on the central repertoire of Lutheran church music during the first half of the eighteenth century. It reflects important achievements in Telemann research since the 1990s that have allowed the reconstruction of over thirty cycles, some incomplete, of seventy-two pieces linked with the Proper of the Lutheran service for all Sundays and feast days of the church year. Among Telemann's five printed cycles, the TA published Der Harmonische Gottesdienst of 1726 early on (volumes 2–5), and has recently issued the Auszug der Arien of 1727 (volume 57); another volume with excerpts from the Musicalisches Lob Gottes in der Gemeine des Herrn (1743–1744) is planned. (The Fortsetzung des Harmonischen Gottesdienstes of 1731 has been edited by Jeanne Swack (Albany, CA: PRB, 1996–2006).)
Before 2010 TA editions of Telemann's cycles transmitted in manuscript copies encompassed a selection of early church compositions (volume 36) and contiguous sections from the Geistliches Singen und Spielen (1710–1711 and 1717–1718; volume 39), the Französischer Jahrgang (1714–1715; volume 40) and the Stolbergischer or Berndt-Jahrgang (1736–1737; volume 48). Already available within the new series are selections of twelve cantatas each from the Concerten-Jahrgang (1716–1717 and 1720–1721; volume 51), the Jahrgang ohne Recitativ (1724–1725; volume 55) and the Jahrgang nach Texten von Tobias Heinrich Schubart (1731–1732, the model cantatas for the Fortsetzung des Harmonischen Gottesdienstes; volume 49), as well as five vocal chorale settings from the 1740s (volume 60). In 2017 the TA will issue volumes with cantatas from the Sicilianischer Jahrgang (?1720–1721), the Harmonisches Lob Gottes (1726–1727, the model cantatas for the Auszug der Arien) and the Oratorischer Jahrgang nach Texten von Albrecht Jakob Zell (1730–1731), in addition to a second volume of church inauguration music (the first having appeared as volume 35).
These editions of Telemann's church music will be accompanied by a first volume of the Telemann-Repertorium: Vokalwerke, a catalogue that will re-order Telemann's cantatas chronologically. In the end, the editors of the TA hope that Telemann's cantata cycles will be recognized collectively as the most influential and widely disseminated contribution to Lutheran church music from the first half of the eighteenth century – something well worth contemplating with regard to 2017, a jubilee year for both the Lutheran Reformation (1517) and Telemann (who died in 1767), and which will see the first scholarly conference in the USA devoted to the composer.
