Book excerpt: Musicologists have been debating the concept of European national music styles in the Baroque period for nearly 300 years. But what precisely constitutes these so-called French, Italian, and German "tastes"? Furthermore, how do contemporary sources confront this issue and how do they delineate these musical constructs? In his Music for a Mixed Taste (2008), Steven Zohn achieves success in identifying musical tastes in some of Georg Phillip Telemann's instrumental music. However, instrumental music comprises only a portion of Telemann's musical output. My thesis follows Zohn's work by identifying these same national styles in opera: namely, Telemann's Orpheus (Hamburg, 1726), in which the composer sets French, Italian, and German texts to music. I argue that though identifying the interrelation between elements of musical style and the use of specific languages, we will have a better understanding of what Telemann and his contemporaries thought of as national tastes. I will begin my examination by identifying some of the issues surrounding a selection of contemporary treatises, in order explicate the problems and benefits of their use. These sources include Johann Joachim Quantz's Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte zu spielen (1752), two of Telemann's autobiographies (1718 and 1740), and Johann Adolf Scheibe's Critischer Musikus (1737). I will supplement the information provided by these writings with my own analysis in order to clarify their meanings. Next, I will examine a selection of Telemann's other operas with the intention of showing how language can be used for dramatic purposes. Finally, I will conduct a thorough analysis of selections from Orpheus, drawing on conclusions made in the two previous chapters. By drawing on genre-based musical elements and aligning them with texted portions of this opera, Orpheus emerges as a key to national tastes in Baroque music.