Ole Andreas Lindeman

Thomas Tellefsen's first piano teacher was Ole Andreas Lindeman (1769−1857), organist at the Church of Our Lady (Vår Frue kirke). Lindeman had received a good musical training from the composer and organist Israel Gottlieb Wernicke, a Norwegian emigrant in Copenhagen. Lindeman passed on his interest in the music of Bach and his predecessors to his pupils, both through practical music making and through studying treatises of the great music theorists of the eighteenth century. As a student of Lindeman, Thomas Tellefsen was able to profit from his teacher's immense knowledge and gain a wide-ranging and thorough education. Tellefsen's abiding interest in Baroque music can easily be traced back to the traditions in which he grew up.

In 1789, Lindeman left for Copenhagen to study law, remaining there for ten years. His academic pursuits had to give way to his love for music, and in 1799 Lindeman returned to Trondheim as an organist and one of the best educated musicians in Norway. His musical studies in Copenhagen resulted in a legacy which was extraordinary for the time. Lindeman encountered the Bach tradition from the first decades after the death of Johann Sebastian, and although the Leipzig cantor and his music fell into almost complete oblivion, becoming unknown even to music aficionados, knowledge of Bach’s music was considered among trained musicians to be a mark of seriousness and lofty qualifications. Ole Andreas Lindeman left numerous handwritten manuscript books with compositions by Johann Sebastian and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Philipp Kirnberger and many other composers writing in the Bach tradition. He used their works in his lessons in Trondheim, and his pupils learnt about the music of Bach long before interest in the latter’s music was rekindled in Europe during the 1830s and 1840s. At the same time, Lindeman was a keen observer of contemporary trends and well versed in fashionable music of the time. Thus by the turn of the century his repertoire included piano concertos by Mozart, and by the mid 1830s he knew Chopin’s Concerto in E minor.