The first music periodical was written and published every two weeks by Georg Philipp Telemann for amateur musicians. Der getreue Music-Meister (The faithful music master) contained 70 compositions in 25 lessons of 4 pages each. Ever the practical business man, Telemann proclaims on the title page that Der getreue Music-Meister covers “all genres of music … for different voice parts and almost all common instruments”. Many of the pieces are designed to work on different instruments, and to keep people hooked, some were serialized across several issues! Telemann adds to the pleasure in his lessons with a number of character pieces: one of my favorites is the trio sonata TWV42:C1 in which several movements are named after a woman from classical civilization. If you can’t quite remember who Xanthippe, Lucretia, Clelia or Corinna are, you could perhaps guess something about them from Telemann’s lively musical depictions, but there’s no doubt when it comes to the final movement for Dido, in which a lament alternates with flickering flames of sixteenth notes. Here is what I found on Wikipedia about Dido: When the new city of Carthage had been established and become prosperous, Iarbas demanded Dido for his wife or he would make war on Carthage. Still, she preferred to stay faithful to her first husband and after creating a ceremonial funeral pyre and sacrificing many victims to his spirit in pretense that this was a final honoring of her first husband in preparation for marriage to Iarbas, Dido ascended the pyre, announced that she would go to her husband as they desired, and then slew herself with her sword. After this self-sacrifice Dido was deified and worshiped as long as Carthage endured. Yikes! Aeneas recounting the Trojan War to Dido, a painting by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. This scene is taken from Virgil's Aeneid, where Dido falls in love with, only to be left by, the Trojan hero Aeneas.
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Formerly a successful software engineer and then Mathematics instructor, I am now retired and keep busy as an amateur musician of early music. Archives
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