Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

Minnelieder were songs composed by Minnesinger—singers of Minne, German for courtly love. The
earliest Minnesinger assumed to have made up their own melodies were those who, in the early thirteenth
century, began composing in new and specifically German meters that required them. The important name
in this generation was that of the Austrian Walther von der Vogelweide (d. ca. 1230), regarded both by his
contemporaries and by his successors as the preeminent master of Minnesang, the German medieval
lyric. His poetry survives abundantly in many manuscripts, but only one contemporaneous source contains
a complete melody attributed to him—the famous crusader song Allererst lebe ich mir werde (“Only now
do I live in dignity”), called the Palästinalied (“Palestine song;” Ex. 4-13). It was evidently composed in
1224 or 1225, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, of the German house of Hohenstaufen, was
conscripting an army to lead on a much-postponed Crusade.

EX. 4-13    Walther von der Vogelweide, Palästinalied

Its melody, a “rounded bar” in which the last line is set to the ending phrase of the initial pair, has
been compared both to a melody by the troubadour Jaufre Rudel and to the Gregorian hymn Te Joseph
celebrent (for the feast of St. Joseph the Workman, Mary’s husband). One does not have to call it a
contrafactum of either of these in order to recognize its derivation from the common fund of “Dorian”
melody on which anyone who heard and sang chant in church, and who aspired to a lofty style, would
surely have drawn.

The knightly Minnesinger cultivated three main genres, all more or less directly adapted from the
Romance vernacular tradition. The narrative Leich derived directly from the French lai. The Lied was the
equivalent of the canso or chanson courtoise, and like its Romance counterparts it encompassed an
important subgenre, the Tagelied (daybreak song), equivalent to the troubadour alba (aube in French).
Finally, there was the Spruch. The word means a “saying,” and the genre encompassed many of the same
topics as did the Provençal sirventes and tenso and their French equivalents (though the Minnesinger did
not use dialogue form): praise of patron, complaint at base behavior, political commentary and satire,
moral precept, poetic craft. Many moralizing Sprüche are in single stanzas and have the character of sung