POPULARIZATION, THEN AND SINCE
The other way in which we know Neidhardt’s songs were popular is that some of them have actually
become folk songs. That is, they have rejoined the oral tradition, and were unwittingly collected (in
considerably altered form, of course, but still recognizable) by the early folklorists of the German
Romantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with this, Neidhardt himself became
a folk hero, acclaimed in legend (by storytellers unaware of his noble rank) as the leader of peasant
revolts. Tannhäuser, too, became a figure of legend; the tall tale about his dalliance with Venus and his
pilgrimage to Rome, traceable to the fourteenth century, was memorialized as a major plot ingredient of
Wagner’s opera of 1845. (Walther von der Vogelweide makes an appearance in the opera too, as does
Wolfram von Eschenbach, more an epic poet than a Minnesinger, from whose Parzival Wagner would
draw plot ingredients for his next opera, Lohengrin, and for Parsifal, his last one.)
As these references to Wagner and to early folklore collectors suggest, the art of the Minnesingers
greatly appealed to the German artists and art historians of the nineteenth century, a time when
progressive thinkers were striving to unite the German nation. The earliest German vernacular poetry and
its music became an important symbol of German nationhood, and a rallying point for German
nationalists.
So, too, a bit later, did the Latin versus settings by the wandering poet-musicians who called
themselves goliards.(The name may derive from the Latin gula, “gullet,” suggesting gluttony; or from the
biblical Goliath, suggesting brawn). These were impecunious, unattached monks and scholars, learned
mendicants and itinerant teachers, who loved using the language of the Roman classics and the church to
entertain themselves not just with serious religious or mythological poems but also with hymns to the
pleasures of youthful flesh—drinking, feasting, gambling, roistering, and (especially) lechery, the best
theme of all with which to satirize the lofty motifs of Minnesang.
An especially large collection of some two hundred goliardic poems (about onequarter with old-
fashioned staffless neumes) is found in an early thirteenth-century manuscript from the environs of
Munich. Long housed in a Benedictine abbey called Benediktbeuren, it was published in 1847 under the
title Carmina burana (“Songs of Beuren”). Even though much of the manuscript’s contents can be traced
back to French sources (and a few concordances with French manuscripts with staff notation enable the
deciphering of a few of its melodies), and although it contains much serious religious poetry (including
two impressive “liturgical dramas”), the bawdy Latin songs in the Carmina burana became for romantic
nationalists of a later age another trophy of native German genius, flaunted especially during the period of
the Third Reich (1933–45), when German nationalism, under the by-name of National Socialism,
achieved its most extreme manifestation. A cantata called Carmina burana (1937), with rousing music set
to boisterous verses from the Benediktbeuren manuscript by Carl Orff (1895–1982), was heavily
promoted by the National Socialist regime at a time when it was engaged in a strenuous propaganda battle
with the Christian churches of Germany. The Carmina burana verses, with their glorification of youth
culture and their neo-paganism, effectively epitomized the “New Germany.” This was a blatant case of
appropriation after the fact, of course, but it is now part of the history of the Carmina burana, and
therefore part of its meaning. No appropriation, however, is ever complete or conclusive. Since the fall of
the Third Reich, Orff’s Carmina burana has retained a place in the standard choral-orchestral repertory.
Audiences now respond more directly, and perhaps more innocently, to its message of springtime
pleasures and renewal.