Georg Philipp Telemann’s family forbade him from making music, so he secretly wrote an entire opera by age twelve and taught himself the flute, oboe, violin, recorder, double bass, and viola da gamba. Sent to Leipzig in 1701 to study law, he was quickly running the municipal opera house and poaching university students from rival cantor Johann Kuhnau. This episode follows his path through Sorau, Eisenach, where he befriended J.S. Bach, and Frankfurt, where grief over his first wife’s death in 1711 pushed him toward Italian influences and the first known concerto written for solo viola.

In Hamburg, Telemann used a job offer from Leipzig as leverage for a pay raise, inadvertently opening the door for Bach to take the Thomaskirche post. When his second wife’s gambling debts exceeded his annual income, he composed his way out of ruin, fought for exclusive publication rights, and organized ticketed public concerts that broke the aristocracy’s grip on music. We also cover his German mixed style, his tulip-bulb correspondence with Handel, the 19th-century critics who dismissed him as a Vielschreiber, and the mid-20th-century revival that restored his reputation.

• How a forbidden childhood produced a self-taught musician free from the rules of the guild system
• The Leipzig-Hamburg salary maneuver that shaped Bach’s career
• How his wife Maria Katharina’s gambling debt forced innovations in copyright and public concerts
• Why 19th-century Bach biographers attacked Telemann, and the pieces they praised as Bach’s that turned out to be his
• Over 3,000 compositions, more than a thousand cantatas, and the half of his output still lost