The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering – and so, perhaps, does musicology. It is indeed striking that music historians, admittedly quite reluctant fully to engage with the idea of Enlightenment, are beginning to grasp its practical musical implications precisely at a time when the core values inherited from it are being deeply challenged on an intellectual and political level across the world. Recent studies of the Enlightenment have attempted to move beyond a text-based intellectual history focusing mainly on canonic discourses and idea systems in order to gain a pan-European understanding of the phenomenon, adopting in the process a more anthropological perspective on material culture, institutional history, constellations of actors, configurations of public spaces and modes of social interaction.

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Telemann's death in 1767 proved a tempting occasion to build on these developments, taking as a starting-point the passionate description of Hamburg in a 1723 letter from the composer to his Frankfurt friend Johann Friedrich von Uffenbach, in which Telemann explicitly links the vibrant musical life of the Hanseatic city with its social structure and mercantile bustle. He wrote: ‘Was inzwischen die Music dort Bergunter gehet, das klettert sie hier hinauf; und glaube ich nicht, daß irgendwo ein solcher Ort, als Hamburg, zu finden, der den Geist eines in dieser Wissenschaft Arbeitenden mehr aufmuntern kann.’ (Whereas music meanwhile goes downhill there, here it is on the rise; and I do not believe that any place can be found that encourages the spirit of one working in this science more than Hamburg; Hans Grosse and Hans Rudolf Jung, eds, Briefwechsel: Sämtliche erreichbare Briefe von und an Telemann (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1972), 213; trans. in Steven Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann's Instrumental Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 335.) Revisiting Telemann's career and output within the social and urban framework of the Enlightenment was also a way to catch up with recent developments in Mattheson and Hamburg research, which have greatly enhanced our knowledge of musical activities in the region. This two-day conference, held at the University of Heidelberg and funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, was organized by Inga Mai Groote (Universität Heidelberg) and me (Louis Delpech, Universität Heidelberg). Nine papers covering a wide range of topics spanned Telemann's entire career and explored his relationships with the various cosmopolitan urban elites that were quintessential to the Enlightenment.

An important question raised during the conference was the extent to which self-awareness among individual and institutional actors determined their actions. Susan Richter (Universität Heidelberg) explored Hamburg in the 1720s as a creative milieu, investigating the particular blend of self-assertion, civic virtue and cultural creativity so typical of the city. Hamburg's 1712 constitution was described by Montesquieu as the paragon of the esprit de modération, and was programmatically illustrated on some public facades and echoed in contemporary publications. It also enhanced the city's independence within the Holy Roman Empire and socially promoted values such as continuity, order and rationality, enlisting the arts to an extraordinary degree in defining the city's identity and its political life. All this led to a kind of patriotism unknown in other imperial and Hanseatic cities.

At the other end of the spectrum, Laurenz Lütteken (Universität Zürich) addressed Telemann's multifaceted self-positioning during his lifetime. Pointing to the wildly contrasting judgments of Telemann during the twentieth century, ranging from an unduly inflated yet mediocre Stakhanovite to a rediscovered star of the DDR and hit of the baroque music industry, Lütteken adopted a more measured view of Telemann as an ‘adaptable composer’ (‘Der angepasste Komponist’), taking up a Heidelberg tradition initiated by Ludwig Finscher in his inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt in 1969. Lütteken examined Telemann's biography along five lines of enquiry: urbanity, literariness, elegance, publicity and effect. This sensible portrait opened new perspectives on Telemann's working habits, revealing him as not only a highly adaptable composer, but ultimately a thoughtful one (‘Der nachdenkliche Komponist’).

Another important point of convergence at the conference was the idea of mediation as cultural, social and artistic practice, and as intellectual and social value. Building on Steven Zohn's work on Telemann's instrumental music, Matteo Giuggioli (Universität Zürich) looked at the chamber music as not only a means of bringing together the French and Italian idioms, but also an experiment in musical communication and hybridity. His close analysis of the Quadri (1730) and the Nouveaux Quatuors (1738) revealed two very different approaches to the so-called mixed taste, directed at the two cultural contexts of Hamburg and Paris. In the following discussion, Nicole Schwindt (Musikhochschule Trossingen) suggested that Telemann was floating a model of musical conversation found a few years later in Louis-Gabriel Guillemain's Six Sonates en Quatuor, ou conversations galantes et amusantes (1743).

Dirk Werle (Universität Heidelberg) investigated Telemann's Vier und zwanzig theils ernsthafte, theils scherzende Oden (1741), reflecting on the literary implications of this remarkable, if isolated, anthology. Werle described the volume as a decisive step toward the formal and thematic codification of the genre in the later eighteenth century. To an extraordinary extent, Telemann had access to texts by poets in Hamburg (including Friedrich von Hagedorn, Daniel Stoppe, Johann Mattias Dreyer and Johann Arnold Ebert) that were not published until long afterwards, making him a key figure in the production of textual-musical cycles treating important poetic themes while maintaining a strong ideal of simplicity. Finally, Inga Mai Groote (Universität Heidelberg) considered the Harmonische Gottesdienst as a social experiment in reaching out to a broader audience with sacred cantatas – ‘not only for cantors’, as Mattheson put it, ‘but also for those who ride, sit and walk’.

Several papers also highlighted the role Telemann played in various social or intellectual networks. Extending the geographic scope of the conference, Thierry Favier (Université de Poitiers) explored the cultural and social contexts surrounding the performance of Telemann's instrumental music in eighteenth-century France. The famous lists of subscribers in the Musique de table and the Nouveaux Quatuors, in addition to various sales or library catalogues, reveal some fascinating features about Telemann's amateur French audience. While the Musique de table was bought by a few musicians or musically minded courtiers with very prestigious appointments, the French subscribers to the Nouveaux Quatuors came from much larger circles of the nobility, including princes of the blood, but also from Parisian and provincial elites, the royal administration and the law. Unexpected features emerged in the course of Favier's paper, including a high proportion of subscribers living in Rouen, those who were Freemasons and those having hardly any theological books in their otherwise extensive libraries. Samantha Owens (Victoria University of Wellington) highlighted the many connections between opera houses in Hamburg and Brunswick and the network of composers who had their operas performed in both cities. Composers adapted their works to different social contexts, with the notable exceptions of Caspar Schürmann and Reinhard Keiser, hinting at their possible conflict with Mattheson. Ute Poetzsch (Zentrum für Telemann-Pflege und -Forschung Magdeburg) addressed the question of Telemann's singers for church music in Hamburg, demonstrating the overlap in personnel between the city's opera house and main churches. A close look at the manuscript scores kept in Berlin reveals that Telemann's Oratorischer Jahrgang (also known as the Zellischer Jahrgang) of 1730–1731 made careful use of the opera's vocal resources, assigning individual parts to singers such as Westenholtz, Riemenschneider, Heller, Möhring and others. Finally, my paper (Louis Delpech, Heidelberg Universität) focused on adaptations of French operas on the Hamburg stage during the 1720s, showing how growing criticism of the galant model, a new generation of French performers and Telemann's own productions fostered a novel approach to French operatic genres in the city.

The conference also marked the appearance of a new catalogue in the RISM series: Die Triosonate: Catalogue raisonné der gedruckten Quellen, edited by Ludwig Finscher, Laurenz Lütteken and Inga Mai Groote. The two volumes, published by Henle, are the result of a project initiated by Ludwig Finscher with the support of the Balzan Foundation, and of arduous teamwork over several years at the Universität Zürich. Groote promoted the catalogue as an aid to investigating the trio sonata's emergence as a genre, based on an unprecedented study of its published sources. In a memorable and at times emotional speech, Lütteken reflected on the project and on the musicological legacy of Finscher.