When Wagner’s Sachs warns against wälscher Majestät, “foreign domination,” the nation he (that is,
Wagner) had above all in mind was France, the nation against which Germany was about to fight a war in
1868, and against which the German Romantics had been waging esthetic war for a century. How far this
attitude applied in medieval Germany can be judged from the fact that the whole “holy German art” of the
Minnesinger was knowingly and cheerfully borrowed from the French. The meaning of the French artistic
legacy to the Germans had to do with its courtliness, not its nationality. That courtliness, at the outset at
least, was indeed next to godliness, and it encompassed all nations that valued it.
WHAT IS AN ANACHRONISM?
The point to ponder about Minnesang and Meistergesang is their longevity, not their putative national
character. The original appropriation from France was made not very long after the French had
appropriated the art of Languedoc. By the end of the twelfth century all three linguistic branches of the
courtly song tradition were thriving side by side and did not differ greatly from one another. By the end of
the thirteenth century, the troubadours were a memory, and the trouvères, having been absorbed into the
urban confréries, were singing pop songs at puys and (in the person of Adam de la Halle) making contact
with the clerical and university arts of polyphonic composition.
FIG. 4-11 Oswald von Wolkenstein, as depicted in a manuscript at the University Library of Innsbruck, Austria, one of two
fifteenth-century collections of his works.
Adam de la Halle, as it happened, had a close German counterpart in the latterday Minnesinger
Oswald von Wolkenstein, a knight and imperial emissary from the Tyrol region in the Austrian Alps. Like
Adam, he is regarded as the last of his line. Like Adam, he composed in a wide range of genres, both
narrative (including the autobiographical masterpiece Es fuegt sich, “It so befell me... ”) and lyric. Again
like Adam, Oswald supervised the collection of his complete works, grouped by genres, into valuable
retrospective manuscripts. Yet again like Adam, Oswald (alone among his breed) dabbled in polyphonic
composition, mainly in the dance-derived formes fixes, and in so doing proclaimed his knowledgeable
love of French song: many of his polyphonic settings (like many of the earliest Minnelieder) were
contrafacta of French originals. (The best known of these is Oswald’s Der May, a summer-song with
imitation bird calls, modeled on a virelai with bird calls by a French contemporary named Vaillant.)