The German musician Georg Philipp Telemann, already famous throughout Europe in his day, accepted an invitation from several renowned musicians to visit Paris at the end of 1737. Telemann spent around seven months there. Our concert programme revolves around this journey by the composer from Magdeburg. In the French capital, Telemann came into contact with the most important Parisian musicians of the time, whose compositions reflected the controversial musical situation in France, which was torn between the new and the old style, i.e. between the followers of classicism, personified by Lully, and the new galant music, personified by Rameau.
This clash of mentalities is described in its most important aspects in the highly rhetorical essay by the academician Bollioud-Mermet, ‘De la corruption du goust dans la musique françoise’ (On the corruption of taste in French music). He reduces the causes that, in his opinion, transform taste to three points:
A preference for novelty at the expense of naturalness, an attraction to the difficult and the artificial, and finally, an excessive desire to imitate foreigners, particularly Italians, rather than to perfect national music.
We will delve into this taste, corrupt or not, through Telemann and French composers such as Rameau, Blavet and his disciple Taillart, but also through an arrangement for flute of Corelli's violin sonatas, also published in Paris, and Johann Joachim Quantz, who, like Telemann, was a great admirer of Blavet.