Quartet for flute (or violin), violin, viola and continuo.
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Among Telemann’s extensive catalogue of music are several sub-genres involving multiple instruments with basso continuo. The seventy works he wrote scoring three instruments might conveniently be described as ‘quadri’, and this certainly avoids confusion with the ‘quartet’ of the later eighteenth century which utilised four equal parts without basso continuo.
The present quartet in G major, TWV 43:G5 first appeared in Telemann’s Quatrième livre de Quatuors, published in Paris during the 1750s. These followed the success of his Nouveaux quatuors en six suites (the so-called ‘Paris’ quartets), and in some way catered for the French market with the inclusion of a flute in the scoring. However, the flute writing Quatrième livre is far less idiomatic and the works are Italian concertos in all but name. The current edition is taken from a manuscript copy in the collection of the Dresden Hofkapelle known as Schrank II (Cabinet II) which comprises a large number of instrumental music associated with the Dresden court in the early eighteenth century.