German Secular Song-books of the Mid-seventeenth Century: An Examination of the Texts in Collections of Songs Published in the German-language Area Between 1624 and 1660

An Examination of the Texts in Collections of Songs Published in the German-language Area Between 1624 and 1660

Anthony J. Harper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138726086
• eBook ISBN: 9781351752480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2003. The secular song of the 17th century represents a relatively neglected area of German culture. In this book, Anthony J. Harper first studies the songs of the two great models of the time, Martin Opitz and Paul Fleming, following this with an analysis of the song-books and collections from three regions: the North-East, Central Germany, and the North. The procedure is thus both historical and geographical. The texts of these songs are examined in relation to structural principles, thematic range and stylistic treatment. Harper establishes common features and regional variations of this genre, which involves love-poetry, songs of manners with colourful portrayals of everyday life, and comic songs in a lower stylistic register. Particular attention is paid to the work of Albert and Dach in Konigsberg, Finckelthaus, Schirmer, Krieger and Schoch in Leipzig and Dresden, and Rist, Voigtlander, Zesen, Greflinger and Stieler in the Hamburg region. Where appropriate, the book assesses the role of musical settings, while not seeking to offer technical insights into musical matters. Of value to scholars of German literature, this study should also be of interest to musicologists working on the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The secular song of the seventeenth century represents a relatively neglected area of German culture. The presence in it of subtle variations, occasional eroticism, sometimes boisterous humour, rhythmic sparkle and colourful variety of everyday pictures makes it difficult to understand why this should be so. But literary historians dealing with the lyric have tended to look to the agonized spirituality of a Gryphius or a Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg as representing the best that the century has to offer, also to longer ethical poetry in Alexandrines on burning topics of the time such as Martin Opitz's TrostGedichte in Widerwertigkeit deß Krieges. In the prose genre there is the genius of a Grimmelshausen with his novel Simplicissimus to admire. Music historians, it is clear from the secondary literature, have wished to examine the riches of German religious music, for example by Heinrich Schütz, the most famous composer of the century, and his successors down to Johann Sebastian Bach. Another recent focus has been on the Pietist song from the later seventeenth century onwards. In the secular song musical scholarship has tended to hold its fire for the huge explosion of talent in the art-song from the later eighteenth century onwards, with Schubert and his successors as the centre of attention. Of course there are exceptions to this generalized picture but in essence it has remained the situation until today. This is in no way to denigrate the impressive scholarship which the sacred music and the religious, didactic and ethical literature of the seventeenth century have generated. Those who admire the richness of German literature and culture, however, will point to a wider range of achievement than that which has hitherto been investigated to any notable extent. Richard Hinton Thomas has succinctly summarized the direction in which the secular song takes us:¹

Poetry, in fact, spoke with two voices. With its public voice it proclaimed exalted truths about existence, about the majesty of God and the death of Kings. With its private voice it sang of homelier themes, of everyday joys and sorrows, of love true and false ... and it was in poetry of this kind that the baroque continuo lied found its textual basis.

This is an indication of the nature of the secular song that we shall be pursuing here.

Nor should the artistry of the poets, composers and song-writers who created the secular songs of the century be underrated; Harold Jantz's words about the art of Kaspar Stieler can stand, mutatis mutandis, for the talents of many others during the period:²

Those earnest souls who feel that graceful sophistication is synonymous with light superficiality, prefer to turn to the more 'significant' poets, the problematic agonizers, the stormy ecstatics, the internalists of turgid depth and brooding portentousness ... It would be a pity, however, if obscurity were equated with depth, if an author who just simply is elegant without pretense were therefore neglected.

Music scholars have also written in the same spirit as Jantz, for example Wolfgang Suppan who has pointed to the rich variety in the song life of the period.³ Although the secular song did not represent the most prestigious form of its time, nor one of those in which the poet would be most likely to achieve fama, it was not one which excused casual or sloppy workmanship, as the main body of this study will, it is hoped, amply demonstrate.

Overview, structure and scope of this study

The title, and particularly the subtitle, of this study give a clear indication of its scope. The period over which German secular song-writing is to be examined runs from 1624, the year of publication of Martin Opitz's treatise Das Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, until 1660.⁴ The latter is a date of convenience; it so happens that two substantial works were published in that year, Kaspar Stieler's Geharnschte Venus and Johann Georg Schoch's Lust= und Blumen=Garten.⁵ The date can also, however, be taken as a convenient watershed between the developments in the simple strophic song in the earlier years of the century and the increasing popularity later in the century of more complex song-forms such as the aria and the cantata. In other words the date highlights a move away from a strophic pattern with a repeated melody towards the principle of through-composition which ultimately was to find its fullest expression in the art-song of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

After a clarification of methodology, a survey of problems in examining song-books from this period and an overview of critical literature, our analysis continues by taking three areas as case-studies for the secular song: first, Königsberg and the north-east, secondly, central Germany, and thirdly, Hamburg and the north. The texts of representative works of writers from these areas are studied in respect of structural principles, thematic range and stylistic treatment. The aim is to evaluate them historically, in the development of German poetry of the century, and geographically, through comparison and contrast. The book concludes with a description of what has been established in the course of the investigation, an enumeration of outstanding problems and desiderata and a reminder of the rich cultural heritage of this relatively neglected area of literature.

At the outset it should be emphasized that the qualifications of the author are in the analysis and history of literature, not music. The study does not therefore pretend to offer any new critique or technical insights into musical matters, although those already established by music historians are utilized and the role of the musical settings is evaluated.

Definitions and distinctions

The simplest definition of a song is that of a text with a melody, the whole thing intended to be sung. Like all such definitions it raises problems in practice. One of these, for seventeenth-century Germany, is the terminology. The modern term 'Lied' could be used, but seems sometimes to have been associated with the popular songs of the common people, something which was distasteful to the majority of the academically educated song-writers of the time.⁶ This already shows that social and cultural considerations are involved in the terminology. Other terms for the song are 'Gesang' and Ode', the latter on its own not usually possessing the connotations of a classical ode at that time, but nevertheless indicating some residue of dignity which the term 'Lied' did not possess. One of the earliest of seventeenth-century collections, Weckherlin's 1618 collection, is entitled Oden und Gesänge and many later writers use one or both of these terms in their titles or subtitles.⁷ The word 'Arie' could also be used simply for a strophic song at this time in the century, as Heinrich Albert's title of 1638 shows; later it begins to acquire something more like its modern meaning of a through-composed, possibly operatic aria. In his Poeterey of 1624 Opitz uses none of these terms but simply refers to 'Lyrica oder getichte die man zur Music sonderlich gebrauchen kan', with an extended definition to which we shall return.⁸ This tells us that song-texts are especially suited to music but not necessarily that they always acquired a musical setting. The presence of a melody might seem to be a sine qua non, but in German poetry and songbooks of the seventeenth century this is anything but the case. Many songs were published without any indication of a melody at all, many more with an indication that they should be sung to an earlier or preceding melody in the volume, and many more with a 'Tonangabe', an indication under the title of the text that it is to be sung to a certain (usually well-known) melody.⁹ So the idea that the song-text is always accompanied by musical notation is untrue, and the presence of such notation alongside the text is more the exception than the rule during the period concerned. This means that statements from a later period, such as Herder's famous 'Das Wesen des Liedes ist Gesang' or Stoljar's reminder of the different methodology needed for the song because of the indispensability of the aural mode for its realization, while they may be true for a later age, are not so directly applicable during our period.¹⁰

What kind of texts, what kind of poetic forms, can be sung? In theory the answer is: many different types of text, many poetic forms, many different lengths of verse-line. There are, for example, sonnets intended for singing, the Sapphic Ode on the classical model could be sung (and more rarely the formal Pindaric Ode), madrigals regularly were sung, poetry in Alexandrines could be set to music.¹¹ But sung sonnets are rare, as are Sapphic Odes, and the formal poem in Alexandrines is usually a lengthy one in couplets reserved for extended pastoral poems, panegyrics and epicedia for the aristocratic and powerful. In practice the vast majority of the songs appearing in the song-books to be examined are simple strophic texts, overwhelmingly of four-, six- or eight-line stanzas, for which, therefore, a relatively brief melody would suffice. Into the bargain, a store of appropriate tunes for the most common stanza-forms was easily available at the time, something to which we shall return.¹² It has been claimed that from Opitz onwards poetry became increasingly confident of its own identity vis-à-vis its accompanying music.¹³

What constitutes a song-book, and should it be distinguished from collections of poetry containing substantial numbers of songs? Here too the simple answer is the exception to the rule. The easy example of a song-book is a volume in which there are a number of texts with musical notation for each one, and no further poetry of any type. An instance would be David Schirmer's 68 poetic texts in his Singende Rosen of 1654, each set to music with a melody by his friend, the theorbo-player and composer Philipp Stolle. This gives us a song-book with 68 songs. Heinrich Albert's Arien, appearing from 1638 to 1650, also contain the musical settings for the multipart and solo songs with texts by different poets; but he himself after all was a composer. Such clear-cut examples of songbooks are, however, rare. Many other works which one would readily describe, or which describe themselves, as song-books, contain a number of other poems, usually epigrams, sometimes also sonnets, at the conclusion of the work; one example among many would be Gottfried Finckelthaus's Deutsche Gesänge of 1640. In the first volume of Opitz's works organized by himself, the Breslau edition of 1625, the songs are grouped together in a separate book and named as such, although in the earliest appearance of his collected poetry, the Teutsche Poemata of 1624 assembled with poems by others and published by his friend Julius Wilhelm Zincgref, a number of these songs had already appeared intermingled with other poetry. Opitz's formal separation of his published poetry, in 1625, into carefully named books was, however, rare in the century. It was followed by Paul Fleming or the latter's editor Adam Olearius, in the editions of his collected works, significantly, because Fleming was conscious of his position as a Humanist scholar; it has been suggested that he, like Opitz, may have understood his songs primarily as book-lyric.¹⁴ This is something of a grey area in criticism; Grijp, writing about the Netherlands, mentions a statement by Camphuysen to the effect that songs could be either sung or read, and refers to an 'alternative reading practice or reading option'.¹⁵ Sometimes a collection of poetry begins with a significant grouping of songs, to be followed by groups of other poetic forms not usually intended for musical performance; this is the case with the large collection of poetry by Johann Georg Schoch, the Blumen=Garten of 1660, where 100 songs are followed by 400 epigrams and 200 sonnets. We are justified in treating the opening section as a collection of songs, while being aware that this can only represent a part of the intendo auctoris. The same applies to the Schimpff= und Ernsthaffte Clio of Ernst Christoph Homburg, which begins with a large sequence of songs, many endowed with a metrical sub-title, which are then followed by epigrams and sonnets. The first collection of 1638 was augmented in 1642 by Homburg on the same pattern. The extens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pan-German Models: Opitz and Fleming
• 3 The North-East
• 4 Central Germany
• 5 Hamburg and the North
• 6 Concluding Review
• Bibliography of Primary Sources
• Bibliography of Reference Works and Secondary Literature
• Index