In terms of artifice, Telemann’s “musical idyll” Der May (ca. 1760), to a text by Karl Wilhelm Ramler, ranks far behind the composer’s other works from this time. Most aspects of the music are entirely regular, and they are embedded in harmonic progressions that hardly exceed simple cadential relations. In this sense, Der May reflects aesthetic discussions among German writers in the 1750s and 1760s about widely disseminated and translated poetry such as Salomon Gessner’s “Idyllen” of 1756. Among contemporary theorists, Johann Abraham Sulzer and Johann Christoph Gottsched describe the distance separating literary idylls and social reality as one of the genre’s constitutive features. Idylls can thus serve as a tool of self-assurance in an increasingly complex modernity where acceleration, secularization, and scientification lead to a widely experienced dichotomy between complexity and simplicity. In applying the concept of “othering” to analyze the multiple modernities of the 1760s, I ask whether Telemann’s Der May can be regarded as an alternative to the modernity of its time; that is, as a conceptually “postmodern” work.

Telemann’s 1756 vocal composition Der grosse Name Gottes, commonly called Donner-Ode, is based on the poetic paraphrase of Psalms 8 and 29 by J. A. Cramer. Both the poetry and Telemann’s music convey the sense of the sublime that was a prominent theme in late eighteenth-century aesthetics. Whether or not the work was a response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, its theology is in accord with an orthodox Lutheran belief in God’s providence and omnipotence. While it was written late in Telemann’s life, the ideas are continuous with the early influence of physico-theologians, who regarded the natural world as part of a divine plan in which even destructive events such as storms and earthquakes had a benevolent purpose. Hamburg was a strong center for physico-theology in the early eighteenth century, and Telemann was personally connected with several adherents of this direction of thought, among whom the best known is Barthold Heinrich Brockes.