Brahms was a canny arranger and a very knowing one. He was a true connoisseur of old music and a
virtuoso contrapuntist, perhaps the most history-obsessed composer of the whole history-obsessed century
in which he lived. The technique he employed at the beginning of his arrangement of Schönfelder’s tune—
that of prefiguring the tune’s first entry with preliminary imitations (Vorimitationen in German scholarly
jargon) at the octave and the fifth—was one he picked up from the actual practice of sixteenth-century
composers, especially Ludwig Sennfl.
Sennfl, whom we already know as the author of a magnificent tribute to Josquin des Prez, was the
great master of the Tenorlied. He kept the German music presses rolling, publishing more than 250 such
songs by the time of his death in 1543. In keeping with the side of him that we have already observed,
Sennfl strove to bring this peculiarly German genre into the international mainstream of music as he knew
it, which really meant reconciling it with the style and technique of Josquin, the “universal” paragon. He
wrote Tenorlieder that subjected familiar tunes to bizarrely inventive manipulation, the way Flemish
composers treated Mass tenors: by canon, by inversion, in quodlibets (“whatnots,” name-that-tune
medleys or contrapuntal combinations), in contrasting modes, whatever. Even when not showing off,
Sennfl fashioned his Tenorlieder with a “Netherlandish” finesse, and that ultimately meant integrating the
texture.
Nowhere is this more the case than in Lust hab ich ghabt zuer Musica (Ex. 17-6), Sennfl’s clever
autobiography in song. It is all about his apprenticeship at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor with
Henricus (by then known as Heinrich) Isaac, second only to Josquin as international Flemish star; and the
music actively demonstrates the fruits of Sennfl’s learning as described in the text. The text is a tour de
force in its own right. The initials of its twelve stanzas are an acrostic of the composer’s name. (It is from
this acrostic that we know he spelled his name “Sennfl,” rather than “Senfl,” as given in most sources of
his work and in most modern reference books.) The tune, plainly a newly invented Hofweise, is cast in the
retrospective ballad or “Bar” form of the Minnesingers, with its repeated opening phrase (all that our
limited space allows Ex. 17-6 to display). But the opening of the song obviously apes the ars perfecta
motet with an elaborate point of “Vorimitation,” in which the actual entrance of the tune sounds at first like
just one voice out of four.
The tune itself is a little odd, a little contrived. It literally turns the Palestrina ideal of recovered
motion on its head, what with its funny downward skip of a fifth after a step, outlining a major sixth that
must then be laboriously recovered by stepwise ascent. A systematic stepwise ascent of a sixth, of course,