Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation

Rebecca Wagner Oettinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351916363
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Over the first four decades of the Reformation, hundreds of songs written in popular styles and set to well-known tunes appeared across the German territories. These polemical songs included satires on the pope or on Martin Luther, ballads retelling historical events, translations of psalms and musical sermons. They ranged from ditties of one strophe to didactic Lieder of fifty or more. Luther wrote many such songs and this book contends that these songs, and the propagandist ballads they inspired, had a greater effect on the German people than Luther's writings or his sermons. Music was a major force of propaganda in the German Reformation. Rebecca Wagner Oettinger examines a wide selection of songs and the role they played in disseminating Luther's teachings to a largely non-literate population, while simultaneously spreading subversive criticism of Catholicism. These songs formed an intersection for several forces: the comfortable familiarity of popular music, historical theories on the power of music, the educational beliefs of sixteenth-century theologians and the need for sense of community and identity during troubled times. As Oettinger demonstrates, this music, while in itself simple, provides us with a new understanding of what most people in sixteenth-century Germany knew of the Reformation, how they acquired their knowledge and the ways in which they expressed their views about it. With full details of nearly 200 Lieder from this period provided in the second half of the book, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation is both a valuable investigation of music as a political and religious agent and a useful resource for future research.

PART ONE
Music as Propaganda

CHAPTER ONE

Popular Song as a Source for Reformation History

To begin, we will praise

gentle God on high.

He is so high above us

and has had mercy on us

because we were so long in error

[and] the Antichrist confused us.

That is why [they have] erred regarding Luther,

who also will have no rest

until the Antichrist is dead.¹

Around 1523, an anonymous pamphlet circulated containing a contrafactum of a Marian folksong, ‘Von erst so woll wir loben’. Rather than praise Mary, the new version argued in twenty-eight strophes that God had sent Martin Luther to save Christians from the Antichrist, there revealed to be the Roman pope. Although to modern minds it is difficult to imagine such a lengthy political song finding an audience, the contrafactum fitted in well with the musical culture of early modern Germany. Not only did it provide scandalous information, but it did so to a very familiar tune, one that might help it and its messages spread. Music was an important part of the daily lives of the common people, functioning as devotion, news and gossip, and entertainment. Singing and playing were not activities restricted to professional musicians, as evidenced by the hundreds of broadside and pamphlet songs published in the sixteenth century. Because music-making was such an integral part of popular culture, the popular song was a ready-made tool for spreading information. Reformation polemicists quickly pressed it into service, taking advantage of the way song could spread in an illiterate society much more easily than could the printed word.

The task of studying the common folk of the sixteenth century and their music is more difficult than it might seem. Remnants of the popular culture of a bygone day are elusive, to say the least. Simply put, sixteenth-century Germans on the whole did not, indeed could not, read or write, and to a great extent their songs have disappeared. Any information we have about the lives and music of average people necessarily passes to us through literate mediators. By writing chronicles, keeping court records, or copying down songs they heard, these people preserved at least parts of the oral culture of the time. But mediators were not always impartial. Contemporary chroniclers recorded only the events they considered important, and Johan Huizinga rightly complained that court records show only two passions, greed and quarrelsomeness.² ‘Historians never can trust their documents completely’, warns Peter Burke.³ A study of this type must heed Burke’s words, remembering the mediators and their role in preserving popular culture, and being cautious about taking documents at face value. With that in mind, however, modern scholars can use the pamphlets and broadsides containing songs, as well as manuscripts that preserve lyrics, to obtain a unique view of the popular culture of early modern Germany and to learn contemporary opinions of the religious turmoil of the early Reformation.

Perhaps the greatest contribution popular songs can make to our understanding of the Reformation is the more complete and vivid picture they give us of its effects on the daily life of the common folk. Until fairly recently, the culture of the average people in the sixteenth century had received little attention. It has only been in the last twenty-five years that scholars have begun focusing on the lives of average people rather than the nobility. Robert Scribner recognized this surge of interest in popular culture, commenting, ‘Often the historian feels like a lonely swimmer striking out for a distant shore, when he or she is really only being carried by the tide, and arrives to find many other swimmers on the same beach.’⁴ My work is especially indebted to Scribner and particularly to his monograph For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, a detailed study that examines the role of the woodcut illustration in spreading the Reformation to the illiterate. With this study, I hope to find a place on Scribner’s beach by filling one of the gaps in the history of popular culture, that of music and the role it played in the lives of German Christians during the early Reformation.

Music and Popular Culture in Early Modern Germany

To place the songs of the Reformation in context, we must look briefly at the forms that popular-music making took in the sixteenth century. Music was woven into the daily lives of peasants and princes alike, though the styles heard could vary greatly. On one end of the scale, a wealthy ruler might have a chapel full of trained singers, a talented organist and a number of skilled instrumentalists who provided music for dancing. A prince like Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria would hear the best that European composers had to offer in his private chambers, but this music would also occasionally be available to less exalted Bavarians during public feasts.⁵ Likewise, the lowest of peasants was welcome in the cathedrals that supported composers and excellent choirs. Many people would have had some access to choral polyphony, the style best associated with the musical Renaissance, in the churches where they worshipped – if the church had resources enough to hire singers or had clerics talented enough to tackle the music. Some churches were able to provide only plainchant, or ‘Gregorian’ chant, of varying quality. While choral polyphony theoretically was available to any Christian who came to hear it, in reality most people did not live at court or near enough to a well-financed cathedral to hear high-quality choral music regularly. The musical experience of the average people was simpler, and included performances by town instrumentalists, amateur instrumental perform-ance and the singing of vernacular Lieder.

Music was a part of civic as well as religious life. Many cities employed town musicians, especially trumpeters, who provided fanfares and entertainment for civic events and formed guilds for the protection of their trades.⁶ In the early sixteenth century, the development of music printing also promoted a rise in the number of amateur musicians who learned to play an instrument or to sing for their own enjoyment. This music-making, however, required disposable income (for instruments and printed music) and, more importantly, musical literacy. For the majority the music most present in their lives would have been oral vernacular song, either the ditties sung in streets and inns for entertainment, or the medieval German devotional songs that were a part of folk religion and popular piety.

Although this study deals primarily with the reception of polemical song among average, non-educated Germans, it is important to realize that folksong was a universal part of German culture of the time, and was not limited to the lower, less educated classes. Friedrich Blume called the sixteenth-century German folksong an ‘expression of the broadest social strata’, and considered the appropriation of its style for devotional music to be the equivalent to the use of the vernacular in the Reformation.⁷ The adoption of folksongs as models for polyphonic compositions shows that these works had meaning to the upper classes as well, and composers of the day like Heinrich Isaac, Ludwig Senfl and Orlando di Lasso considered these songs to be of musical value. Many German rulers enjoyed hearing arrangements of popular songs, and the same court musicians who composed five-voice motets for noble chapels also created five-voice settings of ‘Ich armer Mann was hab ich tan’ (on a young man who marries an old woman) or ‘Ich stünd an einem Morgen’ (on a pair of lovers taking their leave from each other at dawn).⁸ The wealthy also chose such pieces as entertainment at social events like weddings. Poet Leonhard Engelhardt, for example, created two nuptial versions of the popular song ‘Es wolt ein Jäger jagen’, the first for the wedding of Duke Ludwig of Württemberg and Lady Ursula of the Palatinate in May 1585, the second a year later for the wedding of the ducal adviser Melchior Jaeger.⁹ Many pieces sing the praises of noble rulers, especially reigning emperors, and would have been appropriate as courtly entertainment. While the ruling classes had the means to support more elaborate musical institutions, there are many similarities between the styles of music heard at court and those heard in the streets. Court composers like Senfl did not create their Lieder merely for their own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of their patrons, both the nobility and the less exalted purchasers of their song anthologies. As Peter Burke has pointed out, participation in popular culture was for everyone: commoners, nobility and clergy alike.¹⁰

There were also many similarities between the styles of sacred music heard by different classes of sixteenth-century Germans. Plainchant was the musical foundation of much Roman Catholic liturgical music, and as such it would be heard (even if badly sung) in almost every church on a daily or weekly basis. The vernacular song also had a place in the sacred realm. From the twelfth century, German devotional songs known as Leisen were sung by groups in pilgrimages and processions, and possibly during liturgical services as well.¹¹ Luther’s exhortation was for poets to create sacred songs, but stylistically there is very little difference between a German popular song in the sixteenth century, a sacred Protestant chorale and a Leise. All types of music were monophonic (that is, a single line as opposed to music with multiple voice parts), composed of four to eight lines of poetry, and based on simple musical structures such as the German Bar form (AAB). Most medieval Leisen survive because of their inclusion in Evangelical songbooks alongside new hymns,¹² and many later became models for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part One Music as Propaganda
• Part Two Songs of the Reformation
• Bibliography
• Index of Songs
• Index of Melodies
• Index of Song Composers
• General Index