Luther did not directly build upon the Latin hymns, although he did translate a few of them, but on the popular songs and hymns that were current in his day. Since the eleventh century vernacular hymns and religious songs had been in private use. The Gregorian rule that Scripture psalms and canticles only should be sung in public services had been strictly enforced in the monasteries and larger centers; but even there the proses and sequences had been allowed—in Latin, of course. The first hymns sung in the common speech were enlargements of the short responses allowed the people, “Kyrie eleison” and “Christe eleison” being surviving Greek phrases which were used as refrains to the stanzas of the hymns. They were called “Leisen,” or “Leichen.” Our English word “lay” is a derivative from the same source. Many of these “Leisen” mingled German and Latin words.
Back of the wrong conception of the way of salvation and the fanaticism expressed in self-torture, the Flagellant Monks of the later medieval period had an intensity of conviction and a selfless devotion that inevitably found expression in song. Bands of them made pilgrimages through Christian lands in processions, singing hymns to Mary and her Son in the common speech, little recking that they were helping to fertilize the soil from which should spring the Great Reformation.
When King Conrad was anointed in 1024, our information is that “joyfully they marched, the clergy singing in Latin, the people in German, each after his own fashion”, but this was not a church service, it was a festival procession.
Vernacular hymns became more and more numerous during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The troubadours and minnesingers could not but stimulate their production, furnishing the metrical and rhythmical models and no small part of the hymns themselves, especially those glorifying the divine motherhood of Mary. The monks, the custodians of the literary and scholarly product of this age, had no motive for making a record of these hymns, much less of their tunes, for which, indeed, no adequate system of notation existed; hence but little of this popular hymnody survives. It was not until Gutenberg brought in the age of printing that some of it was handed down to us.[1]
The great mystic, John Tauler (1290-1361), a Dominican monk of Strassburg, and others, wrote hymns of profound personal religious experience that were widely sung. John Huss of Prague (1369-1415), the renowned Bohemian martyr, wrote hymns in both Czech and Latin. In 1501 and 1505 Czech hymnbooks were issued, the first congregational hymnbooks in the vernacular, the latter containing no less than four hundred hymns, while Luther’s first collection, in 1524, nineteen years later, contained only eight.
It will be seen that the foundations of vernacular singing by the people, with popular tunes, had been laid, deep and wide, foundations on which Luther could later build his German hymnody. In almost every particular he had been anticipated by the Bohemian reformers, in vernacular hymns and psalms, in the use of the people’s tunes, in the revision of hymns current among the Catholics—by discarding their worship of Mary and the saints—in the emphasis placed on music as a vehicle for conveying Gospel truths and for the intensifying of the needed propaganda.
In France, in England and Scotland, in the Netherlands, the same impulses were felt. The fullness of the times had been prepared, and the great protagonist and organizer of the spiritual revolt against the hierarchy of Rome made of the hymn, which the ecclesiastical builders had rejected, one of the cornerstones of the new Church.
II. LUTHER’S RELATION TO GERMAN HYMNODY
Luther’s objective in regard to the hymn was entirely different from that of these representatives of traditional worship. He did not have in mind the perfecting of a liturgical service on the lines of ecclesiastical tradition, but the spiritual edification of the mass of the people whom the liturgic monks had been ignoring. While too appreciative of the Latin liturgy to cast aside psalms and canticles, as well as sequences, he rejected them as models for his hymns, and his creative impulse made the more appealing and practical folk songs his basis of form and spirit.
Luther was a great lover of poetry and music. In his youth he went about singing in the streets and in private homes. He knew both the popular and the churchly music and was well prepared for his future post of liaison officer between the Latin and the coming German hymnody.