III
Germany, at this time, was hardly behind France in civilization and refinement of manners. It was natural, then, that the courtly song should find its way into Germany. In South Germany—Bavaria and Swabia—the indigenous folk-song continued to dominate. But in the northern provinces the influence of the Trouvères was strongly felt by way of Flanders and the Lower Rhine. The noble singers here called themselves Minnesinger—or ‘Singers of Love.’ Their songs are almost as pure and refined in artistic structure as those of Provence, but their subject matter is more earnest and scholarly. In place of the fanciful courtly compliments paid by the southern French singers to their ladies, we find that deep and sincere reverence for womanhood which Tacitus noted among the German barbarians and which continued through the centuries.
The lyrical songs of the Minnesingers were divided into three classes: the Lied, or song; the Lerch, or lay; and the Spruch, or proverb. The difference, musically, was mainly a matter of form, rigid laws governing the formation of the strophes. The Lied was the mostly purely lyrical of the three. The Lerch was more general in subject-matter, partaking sometimes of the narrative. The Spruch was essentially one of the German proverbs which so richly fill the language even to this day, but it was usually developed to make a somewhat lengthy stanza. The central idea of the proverb, its simile or its ethical substance, would be repeated and enlarged upon, becoming lyrical in character though retaining the idiomatic directness and simplicity of the original. Thus the Minnesong tended to keep a homely character which the Provençal lay never had.
Among the famous Minnesingers (who were also poets in the modern sense) were Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. Both are familiar to all lovers of Wagner. The former is one of the chief characters in the opera Tannhäuser. He appears as the pure lover of Elizabeth, in contrast to Tannhäuser, whose sensual and pagan character is shown by his affair with the unholy goddess Venus. In the second act of the opera is shown one of the tournaments of song which were characteristic of the age. Tannhäuser, Wolfram, and others, sing the praises of love, each revealing his personal character in the attitude he takes toward the great passion. Wolfram is the genuine Minnesinger, idealizing the object of his devotion, insisting upon her divinity (her likeness to the Virgin Mary), and upon the fleshless, unsensual nature of love in its true estate. One gathers, also, from a hearing of the opera, that he was a typical Minnesinger in that his song was something of a bore. Certainly the Minnesongs, in their ambling lengthiness, would bring sleepiness to a modern audience. But Wolfram, we must remember, was not only a courtly minstrel, but a great epic poet, one of the great figures in German literature.
Walther von der Vogelweide, perhaps the most inspired lyricist of his time, figures by name in Die Meistersinger. Walther, the hero, candidate for the degree of Meistersinger, is asked who taught him his art. He replies that he learned it from Walther von der Vogelweide and from the birds. This causes the Mastersingers to shake their heads, for inspiration has little part in their formal music.
The last of the Minnesingers, and one of the most famous, was Heinrich von Meissen, called Frauenlob—‘Praiser of Women.’ His songs were so ardent in their idealization of womanhood that it is related how the women of Mayence, when the singer died, bore him to his grave and poured over it, mingled with their tears, the richest of Rhenish wines.
Not a few of the songs of the Troubadours, Trouvères, and Minnesingers have been preserved to us and have been deciphered with great care by students. It seems certain that the decipherings are in the main correct. The songs are well worthy of study. Naumann, in his ‘History of Music,’ gives four harmonized according to modern principles. Unlike any of the church music of the time, these songs are in the modern major scale. They are, probably, the earliest melodies preserved to us which seem to have an affinity with modern music. All music preceding them, as all the church music following them for at least two centuries, sounds strange to our ears; we cannot grasp it, much less enjoy it, without making a conscious allowance for its seemingly outlandish construction. But the songs of the courtly minstrels might almost have been written by Schumann or Brahms. It is possible, of course, that they have been somewhat modernized in transcription. But the fact remains that they are predominantly in the modern major scale and that their turns of phrase show a feeling for melody as such in a way never revealed by the church composers until after Palestrina’s time.
The loveliness of these songs grows on one. We must, perhaps, make a preliminary allowance for the length of their lines and for a certain aimlessness which seems to reside in the melody. The musicians of the time did not feel accent and metre so strongly as we do and the regular sing-song of contrasting lines (which sometimes mars modern lyrics) was hardly felt in their songs. They flow lightly and smoothly; their phrases are distinguished by a pause rather than by a system of balancing and contrasting. They must be delivered with the utmost repose, in transparent flowing tones that never betray the breath behind them. There must be hardly any accentuation and very slight use of dynamics. Artistic construction, in the more rigid modern sense, is not to be found in them; they have no ‘climax point,’ obviously prepared, with passages leading ‘up to’ and ‘down from’ it. They are rather like the softest breeze in the morning of a sunny summer day. They breathe the spirit of the following lovely verses by Walther von der Vogelweide:
‘Love is neither man nor woman,
Soul it hath not, nor yet body,
And no earthly sign or token;
Though the tongue of man hath named it,
Never mortal eye hath seen it.
Yet without it can no creature
Win Heaven’s pitying grace and favor;
Nor where love is will there linger
Aught of fraud or baseness ever;
To the traitor, the false-hearted,
Love hath come not, cometh never.’
But a profound change was coming over society, which wiped out all vestiges of chivalric song. The complete failure of the Crusades was one of the obvious blows dealt the institution of Chivalry. The religious upheavals against the dominance of the church of Rome—those of the Hussites in Bohemia, in the fifteenth century; of the Lutherans in Germany and of the English under Henry VIII in the sixteenth—these, apart from their religious aspect, denoted a spirited rising of the populace to self-consciousness and concerted action. The spread of knowledge and intellectual curiosity established lines of communication all over Europe and diminished the importance of the courts as centres of culture. With this came a growth of manufacture and commerce which raised to importance people very different from the gentle Minnesingers. In the Germany of the sixteenth century the mercantile middle class came to be of social importance, and around them grew up a new art of song.