New Perspectives on Telemann’s Instrumental Music at the Dresden Electoral Court

One of the most important subrepertories in the Dresden electoral Hofkapelle’s extensive music collection, filed for decades in “Schranck No: II” of the Catholic court church, is a group of 171 manuscripts transmitting at least 149 different instrumental works by Georg Philipp Telemann. Its significance has long been recognized, for among extant eighteenth-century collections of the composer’s sonatas, concertos, and suites, only that of the Darmstadt Hofkapelle is larger. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Dresden Telemann manuscripts were the subject of several source-critical studies by Ortrun Landmann, Manfred Fechner and myself focusing on copyists and paper types – investigations that deepened our understanding of how the composer’s music was acquired and performed by Germany’s most illustrious Hofkapelle.1 But this rich corpus has not been examined in its entirety for some years now. The present essay’s purpose, then, is to reassess the manuscripts in light of recent research into the wider “Schrank II” repertory by Landmann2 and scholars associated with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project “Die Instrumentalmusik der Dresdner Hofkapelle zur Zeit der sächsisch-polnischen Union. Erschließung, Digitalisierung und Internetpräsentation” (2008–2011). After taking a holistic view of the Dresden Telemann collection (a perspective lacking since Landmann’s landmark study of 1983), I shall consider the significance of several recently discovered sources and revisit the status of an anonymous scribe known in the literature as Dresden “Schreiber P”. An overview of the Dresden Telemann repertory is provided in Table 1, which arranges the manuscripts into four broad chronological groups (labelled A through D) based on our present