According to the "1998 Guinness World Records", who is the most prolific classical composer?

Georg Philipp Telemann ( 24 March 1681 – 25 June 1767) was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost completely self-taught in music, he became a composer against his family's wishes.

Telemann was one of the most prolific major composers of all time. As part of his duties, he wrote a considerable amount of music for educating organists under his direction. This includes 48 chorale preludes and 20 small fugues to accompany his chorale harmonizations for 500 hymns. His works comprise more than 3,000 compositions, half of which have been lost, and most of which have not been performed since the 18th century.

From 1708 to 1750, Telemann composed 1,043 sacred cantatas and 600 overture-suites, and types of concertos for combinations of instruments that no other composer of the time employed. He was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time, and he was compared favorably to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel.

During his lifetime and the latter half of the 18th century, Telemann was immensely popular not only in Germany but also in the rest of Europe.

The first accurate estimate of the number of his works was provided by musicologists only during the 1980s and 1990s, when extensive thematic catalogues were published. Beginning in 1998 the "Guinness Book of World Records" lists Telemann as the most prolific classical composer.