With over 3,800 works to his name, Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the most prolific composers of the eighteenth century. This high number is both boon and bane: it offers a bulk of material for practical musicians and numerous research possibilities for the academic community, but makes it hard to get a complete overview of all the works that he wrote, even for Telemann scholars. Thus the pioneering work of Werner Menke and Martin Ruhnke, who collected information on all of Telemann’s works, cannot be underestimated. Between 1982 and 1999 they published the following work catalogues: Werner Menke, Thematisches Verzeichnis der Vokalwerke von Georg Philipp Telemann, two volumes (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982–1983), with the first volume republished in an enlarged edition in 1988 and the second volume reissued in an unchanged reprint in 1995; and Martin Ruhnke, Georg Philipp Telemann: Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke. Telemann-Werkverzeichnis (TWV), Instrumentalwerke, three volumes (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984–1999).
Today, however, these catalogues need to be revised, because much new information, many new sources, various misattributions and so on have been found. Moreover, about three hundred new works have been discovered but are not yet catalogued, and discoveries are still being made. Telemann’s work corpus must thus be considered a very dynamic one. It is possible that it will not achieve a status that can be described as ‘finalized’ in the near future. And here the advantages of the digital medium come into play: a digital medium enables us to react flexibly to the continuously changing corpus. It helps us to bring order to the works through categorizations, the use of keywords and new approaches such as the ordering of cantatas into cycles reflecting the liturgical year. It enables us to show relationships between works, whether collections of printed items or manuscripts, work complexes such as the so-called Kapitänsmusiken, which consist of a serenata and an oratorio, or compositional interrelationships (for example, musical models of a work or borrowings). It offers very convenient search functions to help us explore this enormous corpus, and much more besides.
In 2022 the Zentrum für Telemann-Pflege und -Forschung (Telemann-Zentrum) began to establish just such a digital work catalogue. (On its genesis see Carsten Lange and Berthold Over, ‘Wege zu Telemann “digital”: Das Telemann-Werkverzeichnis und MerMEld – ein Werkstattbericht’, Die Tonkunst 18/1 (2024), 16–24, and Berthold Over, ‘Wege zu Telemann digital: Aspekte eines neuen digitalen Verzeichnisses der Werke Georg Philipp Telemanns’, Der forschende Musicus# 1 (2024), 32–35.) The collaborating partner for the technical and conceptual aspects of the project was and still is the Centre for Digital Music Documentation (CDMD) of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz (see https://cdmd.adwmainz.de). The basis for the catalogue was ideal: all the works had already been captured in Excel lists and were thus available in electronic form. These Excel lists, which contain information additional to that found in the printed catalogues by Menke and Ruhnke, were established and used by the scholars of the Telemann-Zentrum as working material. New findings have been added and numerous corrections have been made. But although the lists already presented much new information, they could not be considered exhaustive and valid data. Too many entries were not up to date, were incorrect or more generally showed an older state of knowledge. This is because the data taken from Menke’s and Ruhnke’s catalogues could only partially be checked in a systematic way and, sometimes, the Excel lists simply served as ‘electronic memoranda’.
Nevertheless, after having been reviewed to ensure consistency, the lists became the sources for a digital database. The tool being used is MerMEId (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data), open-source software especially programmed for the needs of work catalogues of composers by the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, in 2010 (see https://mermeid.edirom.de/about.html). For nine years it was maintained by the library, but since 2020 it has been in the hands of the MerMEId community. Currently, the CDMD in Mainz is running a three-year project aiming to enlarge and improve the tool (MerMEIding to the Future – Ein Community-basiertes Nachhaltigkeitsvorhaben für qualitativ hochwertige Metadaten in der digitalen Musikwissenschaft (project manager: Kristina Richts-Matthaei)). Since 2010 many work catalogues have been made with MerMEId, such as the ones for Carl Nielsen (www.kb.dk/dcm/cnw/navigation.xq), Nils W. Gade (www.kb.dk/dcm/nwgw/navigation.xq), Johann Adolph Scheibe (www.kb.dk/dcm/schw/navigation.xq), Giuseppe Tartini (http://catalog.discovertartini.eu/dcm/gt/navigation.xq), Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (www.bach-digital.de), Franz Schubert (www.oeaw.ac.at/de/acdh/forschung/musikwissenschaft/ressourcen/plattformen/schubert-digital), Anton Bruckner (www.bruckner-online.at/?page_id=1588) and Gustav Mahler (www.gustav-mahler.org/mahler-online).
Even though MerMEId is by now quite a mature tool, several challenges still had to be met. To name just a few: the tool is more suitable for music of the nineteenth century that conforms to the traditional ‘work concept’, which sees the work as an immutable object born from the genius of the composer. Works that do not conform well to that theory cannot easily be mapped. Telemann’s practice of offering alternative, ad libitum and colla parte scorings cannot be entered at all. Future developments must allow for the structured input of all such alternative, ad libitum and colla parte instruments so as to make it possible to search for all the various scoring alternatives. Moreover, the existence of numerous sources – sometimes more than ten musical and textual sources exist for a work – requires a clear grouping of the sources in order to gain a better overview. This is done in our project not via MerMEId, but by means of keywords in the user interface.
Whilst MerMEId does offer a user interface, the Telemann-Zentrum decided to programme a new one that forms part of a ‘Telemann Portal’ (www.telemannportal.de, yet to go live). In the long run, this will include not only the work catalogue, but also editions of the composer’s letters, autobiographical materials and poems as well as other documents. Another sub-area is already integrated into the portal: a database of the chorales Telemann used in his cantatas and other church music. There are separate data sets for each chorale, containing information on the sources or composers of the melodies and on the authors of the chorale texts, as well as references to the works that incorporate them.
The review of Telemann’s roughly 3,800 works is a long-term project and a task which will last for decades. At present, about two hundred have been reviewed based on information taken from the published volumes (now sixty-seven) of Telemann’s works (Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1953–)). These works are cantatas from the cycles Concerten-Jahrgang, Französischer Jahrgang, Geistliches Singen und Spielen 1, Jahrgang ohne Recitativ, Oratorischer Jahrgang, Schubart-Jahrgang, Sicilianischer Jahrgang and Stolbergischer Jahrgang. All the cantatas that form the Musicalisches Lob Gottes have been fully entered, but more detailed descriptions of the sources can be found only for those already published in the Telemann-Ausgabe. Telemann’s Musique de table and Fantaisies pour la basse de violle have also been reviewed. The academic value of the forewords and critical reports contained in the editions already published is beyond question, but they could be revised in the light of information from source materials that have since been unearthed. This is mainly because a great many library holdings, databases and publications are now accessible digitally, and a more systematic search can be undertaken much more easily than was previously the case. Movements, musical incipits, sources and performances, amongst other types of items, have been added for the works already reviewed. Musical incipits are set in MEI and provided with Plaine & Easie Code so that they can be looked up once a search tool has been integrated. Besides information on their provenance, the title and, of course, their location, the sources section contains a classification into musical and textual categories as well as main (‘Hauptquelle’) and lost sources (‘Verloren’), links to RISM entries and other databases (for example, VD18, a database of German text sources of the eighteenth century; see https://vd18.gbv.de/viewer/index/) and, where relevant, digital facsimiles.
Because the quality of information in the database is not yet consistent, data sets that have been revised will be published with all the data available, and those that have not been revised will be shown with basic data only. They are marked ‘Vorläufiger Datensatz’ (provisional data set) to signal that not all information is visible and that the data set still needs revision. Basic data normally comprise title, alternative and original titles, identifiers (tvwv or twv number, cantata cycle, references to other work catalogues such as the bwv), librettist/lyricist (with links to authoritative files), work status (‘authentic’, ‘doubtful’, ‘misattribution’, ‘cannot be ascertained’), liturgical allocation and comments. A major task for the next decades will be to work on the missing data such as date of composition, scoring, movements, sources, performances, literature and editions.
There are three reasons for our strategy of publishing the database with differing depths of information (full data versus basic data):
1. The alternative strategy of publishing only full data entries would be inefficient. Around two hundred works could be searched, but c3,600 would be ‘non-existent’ during the slow process of their being entered over the next decades, until the work catalogue was completed. Given the small portion of Telemann’s works that have been fully entered to date, it would raise the question of whether such a catalogue would ultimately be used at all.
2. In a catalogue of full entries, c300 newly found ‘deest’ (unclassified) works would be excluded – even though they are of significant interest to Telemann scholars.
3. The complete database already offers the assembly of cantata cycles, collections and work complexes as well as very efficient ways of searching the entire corpus, which are not feasible in the case of the published catalogues.
In our eyes, the advantages offered by including all the data sets clearly outweigh the reduced data depth of most of the current entries in the digital catalogue of Telemann’s works.
All in all, by producing the Telemann Portal and the digital work catalogue, the Telemann-Zentrum hopes to foster work on the composer by the academic community, to offer practical musicians a tool with which to look for compositions they can perform and to present reliable information for all those interested in Telemann.
