Their songs were also accompanied with music. There was a severe set of rules regulating the poetical and musical contests; and the Guild spread over all Germany; the last vestige of it did not disappear until as recently as 1839.
But while this stultified mode of music was going on in Nuremberg, a truer musical plant was growing beside it: at this time the Volks-lied (folk song) took its rise in Germany.
The first form of the volks-lied was religious, and it was of a simplicity which adapted it to the wants of the people. The pedantry of the Meister-singers had an excellent effect upon this class of composition, for it added counterpoint and harmony (even if driven to excess) to a class of music which was able to bear it.
Another order of music was that connected with the miracle plays, where scriptural events were represented upon the stage, with music. Much of this music was taken bodily from the ecclesiastical chants of the period.
With the commencement of the reformation, the music of Germany was lifted to a very elevated sphere, in being applied to the stately chorals which came into general use, through the efforts of Luther, who himself composed some of them. Luther had a most musical nature, which left its imprint upon his whole epoch.
It is related of him, that he spent the largest part of the night before he appeared to define his doctrines before the Diet of Worms, playing on his lute, in order to give composure and firmness to his thoughts.
He ranked music next to theology, and said:—“I am not ashamed to acknowledge, that next to divinity there is no study which I prize so highly as that of music.”
With the reformation, the epoch of modern music may be said to begin. Of course there was both crudity and pedantry in the art, but the Meister-singers, although they yet existed centuries later, had ceased to exert an influence.
There are but few curious facts, which are not generally known, from that age, to our own. Yet we think a brief sketch of the growth of some branches of our music, will not be uninteresting to the general reader, even if the facts have lost the relish of novelty.