sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it!"
His ablest musical compositions date from the last years of his life, when he was more than eighty years of age.[1] In 1767, the year of his death, he published yet another theoretical work and wrote a Passion. He died in Hamburg on the 25th June, 1767, overburdened with years and with glory. He was more than eighty-six years of age.
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Let us sum up this long career and seek to determine its principal outlines. Whatever our opinion of the quality of his work, it is impossible not to be struck by its phenomenal quantity,[2] and the prodigious vitality of a man who, from his tenth to his eighty-sixth year, wrote music with indefatigable joy and enthusiasm without prejudice to a hundred other occupations.
From first to last this vitality remained fresh and enthusiastic. What is so unusual in Telemann is that at no moment of his life did he begin to grow old and conservative; he was always advancing, with youth. We have seen that at the very beginning of his career he was attracted by the new art—the art of melody—and did not conceal his antipathy for "fossils."
- ↑ Such are the two cantatas published by Herr Schneider: Der Tag des Gerichts (1761 or 1762) and Ino (1765).
- ↑ Even Telemann's admirers made certain reservations, during his lifetime, as regards his abnormal productivity, which was without limits and without respite. Händel used to say, jestingly, that Telemann would write a piece of church music as quickly as one writes a letter. Graun wrote to Telemann in 1752: "I cannot agree with your saying: 'There is nothing new to be discovered in melody.' In the majority of French composers I certainly believe that melody is indeed exhausted, but not in a Telemann, if only he would not wear himself out by writing too much!" And Ebeling said, in 1778: "He would have been greater if he had not written with such facility, and with such incredible immoderation."
