Telemann’s numerous compositions for the Christmas season reflect important changes in the understanding and celebration of the feast day throughout his prolific career. The early Christmas cantatas are influenced by an understanding of the feast that combined Lutheran mysticism with a language emphasizing the personal relationship between Christ and the believer through the physical/corporeal as well as emotional concepts: love, heart, desire, and so on. Telemann transferred this language to musical compositions featuring highly emotional melodic lines, often employing musical topi (such as sigh figures) that were familiar from pietist songs and operatic love arias. In his later works, especially in the cantata Die Hirten bei der Krippe to a text by Ramler, the focus shifts from personal emotionality to a divine encounter in nature. The pastoral sphere, influenced by the physico-theology of the time, replaces love arias from the earlier works. This chapter traces developments both in Telemann’s music and in theological discourse around the middle of the eighteenth century. It is not the understanding of Christmas that changes but rather the communicative function of emotion and affect both transforms and shifts throughout Telemann’s lifetime.

On the evidence of manuscript sources, Telemann’s recitative notation in church cantatas falls into three phases that correspond to stylistic developments. In his early cantatas (1710 – ca. 1724), the composer uses mainly delayed notation for cadences, nondelayed notation appearing only when the continuo has a chord change directly following a cadence. After the Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst cycle (1725–26), cadence notation is standardized to the nondelayed type. But delayed notation appears again in the 1750s. A revealing case study is furnished by a group of cantatas from the Schubart-Jahrgang (1731–32) and their abbreviated versions published in the Fortsetzung des Harmonischen Gottes-Dienstes (1731–32). For the full versions of the cantatas, we have only Johann Balthasar König’s manuscripts from Frankfurt am Main (1741–42), and these, curiously enough, display the delayed notational practice that predates the Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst. By contrast, the Fortsetzung versions of the cantatas include only the newer, nondelayed notation. Thus the readings of the König manuscripts can be shown to reflect his practice rather than the composer’s.

As is well known, Telemann was godfather to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who eventually succeeded Telemann in his position at Hamburg. Telemann may have been equally significant for Emanuel’s father Johann Sebastian, serving as a professional role model and providing models for composition. In particular, Telemann’s “Eisenach” cantata Jahrgang of 1710–11 could have been a crucial spur toward Bach’s first essays in the new type of church cantata which he began composing at Weimar circa 1714. Telemann’s later nomination as allgemeiner Capellmeister for the Ernestine Saxon duchies formalized his position as the dominant musical figure in the region while Bach was at Weimar. Musical sources as well as stylistic parallels suggest that, during this formative period, Bach composed vocal as well as instrumental works in emulation of examples by Telemann.