Tannhäuser of the song contest at Wartburg. So for Wagner (as earlier, it should be added, for the
eighteenth-century poet Goethe), the Meistersinger, too, stood for a united German nation and a rallying
point for nationalism, the more so since the Meistersinger were “democratic” burghers, not nobles,
therefore progressive from the nineteenth-century point of view.
FIG. 4-10 The Minnesinger Heinrich von Meissen, known as Frauenlob (“praiser of women”), one of the many magnificent
illuminations in the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (“Great Heidelberg Song Manuscript”), an early fourteenth-century
collection of German song texts. The noble courtly singer is shown directing or admonishing from on high a group of plebeian
Spielleute (“player folk”), playing or holding a variety of recognizable instruments like the fiddle, the shawm (the conical oboe-
like instrument being raised aloft), and drums. Whether such an orchestra ever accompanied Minnesang is debatable. The
depiction might rather imply the relative social standing of musicians and musical genres.
Just how anachronistic this view really was can be seen at the end of Wagner’s opera, when Hans
Sachs sings his famous, thrilling (and for some by now perhaps somewhat chilling) hymn to die heil’ge
deutsche Kunst (holy German art) with its call to keep it deutsch und echt (German and pure) against the
threat of “base alien domination” (falscher wälscher Majestät). The notion of a German nation—and, by
extension, of a German art—was foreign to the thinking of the Meistersinger, let alone the Minnesinger.
Both Germany and (as we have already seen) France were many nations, not one. Larger political entities
—the Holy Roman Empire or its Carolingian predecessor, to say nothing of the earlier Roman empire on
which both were modeled—were multinational abstractions. They were not nations at all by any modern
definition (and nations, as we now conceive of them, have only a modern definition).
Political and social allegiance, under conditions of feudalism, was dynastic and personal, not national
or collective. When Western Europe did act collectively, as in the Crusades, it was in the name of
religious, not political, unity. The major European division by this time was likewise religious, not
political: the schism between the Eastern and Western Christian churches, brewing since the ninth century,
became formal and final in 1054, with the excommunication of the patriarch of Constantinople by Pope
Leo IX. The followers of Eastern Orthodoxy, cut off from Western Europe not only by their allegiance to
Constantinople but, later, by centuries of Turkish and Mongol political domination, will not rejoin the
history of literate art music in the West until the eighteenth century—that is, not until the modern notion of
the secular nation state was born.
Thus, while kings and their vassals went to war against one another frequently, nations (as we think of
them) never fought with or resisted other nations. Most literate Europeans were polyglot and owed no
primary allegiance to a mother tongue. (If they had a linguistic allegiance, it was, as Christians or as
scholars, to Latin; and local dialects—mother tongues—were often scorned by the literate as “low.”)