Telemann’s Comic Opera Was a Delight. Why Is It Ignored?

In the standard repertoire, comic opera more or less starts with Mozart. Of course, others came before him, but his towering command of the form — the way he fully realizes characters from high and low backgrounds and gives them personal dignity, quirky foibles and exquisite arias — casts a long shadow over all of them.

Still, there’s a two-hander from the first half of the 18th century, a few decades before Mozart’s birth, that anticipates the comic style to come. Pitting a wily maid against a buffoonish master — stock types that Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti would continue to mine for the next 100-plus years — it entertained audiences with its delightful music, relatable characters and reversal of the traditional power dynamics accorded by gender and social station.

This is Georg Philipp Telemann’s “Pimpinone,” from 1725, which came eight years before Pergolesi’s better-known piece with the same premise, “La Serva Padrona,” but is rarely heard today. The Boston Early Music Festival, though, is presenting it in a rare staging at Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, in Great Barrington, Mass., on Friday and Saturday, then at Caramoor in Katonah, N.Y., on Sunday.

“It’s one of those quirks of history that ‘Pimpinone’ hasn’t become a repertory piece, because it really deserves to be,” said Steven Zohn, a Telemann scholar.

“Pimpinone” belongs to a long-obsolete genre of classical music, the intermezzo, a short comedy intended to be broken up and performed between the acts of a dramatic or tragic opera. Its everyday characters have jobs, worry about money and fall prey to gossip, in stark contrast to the noble bearing and life-or-death stakes of the mythological and historical personages of opera seria.