proverbs. These seem to go back to an indigenous German tradition not directly related to Romance
models.
As with the work of the trouvères, the art of Minnesang underwent a “popularization” over the course
of the thirteenth century, involving what looks like assimilation of unwritten folk models (though one can
never be sure). The first signs can be detected in the work of the knight and crusader Neidhardt von
Reuenthal (d. ca. 1250), who despite his lofty social standing specialized in dance songs, divided into
two subgenres: Sumerlieder (summer songs) for outdoor dancing and Winderlieder (winter songs) for
indoor dancing. Like the French chansons de toile, they begin by setting a scene: in Neidhardt’s case (as
perhaps in some folk tradition on which he may have drawn) the scenes they set invariably had to do with
nature and with seasonal weather. The ensuing narrative poem often departs from courtly subject matter,
and very much departs from courtly tone and diction, lapsing into a sort of dialect and using blunt or even
downright coarse language.
Neidhardt’s work was exceedingly popular. He had legions of imitators. Some are known by name,
and at least one of these names, that of a thirteenth-century Bavarian poet-singer who called himself der
Tannhäuser, was restored to fame in the nineteenth century thanks to Richard Wagner, who made him the
title character of an opera. Many more are anonymous; their works have been collected by modern
scholars under the charming rubric “Pseudo-Neidhardt.” The folksy and hilarious Meienzit (“In
Maytime”; Ex. 4-14) is a work by a latter-day (early fourteenth-century) Pseudo-Neidhardter. Its melody,
like many folk melodies, is “gapped.” By diatonic reckoning it lacks a sixth degree (and the second
degree is clearly an auxiliary degree, used only in the Dorian cadence formula). The tune is so simple, in
fact, that it is more to be looked upon as a “tone” (Ton in German), a reciting formula in which every third
phrase is varied to give a whiff of the old courtly aab stanza. But the melody itself seems no more courtly
than does the gross behavior of “hairy Hildemar,” a boorish knight who, as the poem goes on to relate,
plays an embarrassing practical joke on the poet’s lady.
EX. 4-14 Anon. (“Pseudo-Neidhardt”), Meienzit