came from the German far east.
By the print period Tenorlieder were more often newly composed songs than settings of traditional
Liedweisen. The one printed in Ex. 17-4 comes from Peter Schöffer’s first Liederbuch (Mainz, 1513), the
third set of printed part books to see the light in Germany. Its very curious history recommends it for
inclusion in a history book like this, rather than one, say, on a more famous tune or by a more famous
composer. The shapely, stately tune is evidently a Hofweise, a newly composed melody in a courtly,
vaguely Minnesingerish style. About the composer, Jörg Schönfelder, all that is known is that he may have
been a member of the court chapel choir in Stuttgart (since other songs in the same book are by known
members of that choir).
Peter Schöffer did not include any attributions in his original print. (The authorship of its contents,
where known, was determined by comparison with other sources.) Therefore, when the young Johannes
Brahms came upon the book in the early 1860s (when on the lookout, as a struggling choir director in
Vienna, for “a cappella” material that would not require the hiring of any extra musicians) he mistook its
contents for folk songs, then the object of a craze in romantic-nationalist Europe. Struck by the stately
beauty of Schönfelder’s melody, he made it the first item in a collection of Deutsche Volkslieder, German
folk songs for mixed chorus dedicated to his Vienna choir and published in 1864 (Ex. 17-5). Brahms
placed the tune where tunes went in the nineteenth century (that is, on top), and considerably enriched the
harmony and the contrapuntal texture, but the melody is Schönfelder’s exactly, precluding the possibility
that the tune was in fact a folk song in oral circulation rather than an old Hofweise that Brahms found in its
actual printed source.
EX. 17-4 “Josquin Dascanio,” El Grillo, mm. 1–21