Music in Early Modern Germany

Summary

Steven Saunders

Music in Early Modern Germany Resounded from courtyards, city walls, and village squares and was heard in church, chapel, chamber, and theater. It accompanied activities as diverse as coronations, banquets, weddings, funerals, tournaments, military campaigns, theatrical productions, hunting expeditions, school instruction, dancing, social singing, and public and private religious observances. Music served as entertainment, liturgical and devotional aid, educational tool, and instrument of political representation, and its sonic patterns conveyed messages concerning social standing, confessional creed, and political allegiance. Music and the literary texts that it made audible formed more than a sonic backdrop to daily activity; they gave voice to — indeed shaped — many of the ideals and aspirations of early modern life.

Defining Early Modern Germany Musically

The autonomy that characterized territories within the Holy Roman Empire contributed to an oft-remarked cultural fragmentation that has militated against viewing early modern German music as a whole. The social and institutional bases for music and music making at the secular courts, with their need for grandeur and public representation, were quite different from those in the Reichsstädte (imperial cities), for example, and these, in turn, diverged from the requirements at centers ruled by ecclesiastics. Moreover, the Reformation led to two distinct, if often overlapping, traditions of sacred composition. Such diversity created musical genres that were less quintessentially German than courtly (Italian opera, madrigal, chamber duet), civic (Meistergesang, continuo lied), or Protestant (chorale-based composition).

Dynastic intermarriage, the itinerant character of secular courts, and shifting political allegiances likewise ensured that composers, performers, and music from France, Flanders, Italy, England, and Central Europe were dispersed throughout Germany. Art music in early modern Germany was often in a language other than German and frequently composed or performed by imported musicians. Thus Orlando de Lassus (1532–94), the Dutch Kapellmeister, or chapel master, at the Bavarian court, arguably the most influential “German” composer of the sixteenth-century, published works with texts in French, Italian, and Latin, turning to German compositions only late in his career.