Meistergesang

Meistergesang, or Meistersang, a form of poetry set to music and sung solo and unaccompanied by members of guilds of Meistersinger. The music descended from Gregorian chant and other sources, and the poems adhered to the triple structure of Minnesang, but laid down that a song (Bar) must consist of three strophes. Meistergesang was both spiritual and secular. The religious poetry was sung at the Singschule held in church; the worldly songs accompanied the ensuing celebration in the tavern (Zechsingen). The lay themes were anecdotal (analogous to the Schwank), historical, legendary, or even classical (e.g. Ovid).

Meistergesang originated possibly in lay participation in ecclesiastical music, and developed in the course of the 15th c., but its origins are not fully clear. A school of Meistersinger appears first to have arisen in Mainz, followed by Worms and Strasburg. From Mainz Meistergesang spread eastward in the 16th c. through cities of Swabia (Nördlingen, Ulm, Rothenburg/Tauber, Augsburg), and of Franconia (Nuremberg). Its furthest extension was to Silesia (Görlitz, Breslau) and Upper Austria. Further schools arose in Freiburg/Breisgau, Colmar, Frankfurt, and Eßlingen.

The Meistersinger were Bürger and for the most part respected master craftsmen. The Singschule, which conformed to strict rules, is perceptibly descended from the medieval disputation, even to the sitting posture of the singer. One or more ‘Merker’ judged the singer. The location in a consecrated building reinforced the gravity of the proceedings. Strict rules (Tabulatur) governed the composition of the song, and at first only tunes (Töne) of twelve medieval singers might be used. Hans Folz, however, breached this tradition at Nuremberg (after failing to do so in Worms) and throughout the 16th c. the composition of a new ‘Ton’, as well as poem, was required of a candidate for the title Meister. The tunes were distinguished by fanciful names, e.g. ‘spitzige Trunkschuh-Weise’, ‘schreckliche Donnerweise’, etc. Apart from this the Meistergesang underwent virtually no development. The strictly esoteric nature of the guilds (which forbade public performance or the printing of Meisterlieder) and the extreme rigidity of the Tabulatur condemned the form to sterility. The best-known Meistersinger, apart from Folz, were Hans Sachs, Lienhard Nunnenbeck and Benedikt von Watt, both in Nuremberg in the 16th c., Onophrius Schwarzenbach (fl. c.1550) and Johannes Spreng in Augsburg, and Adam Puschman and Georg Hager in Breslau. The enclosed nature of the proceedings prevented these masters from influencing in any important degree the development of German poetry. Their heyday was the first half of the 16th c., but they continued into the 19th c.; the date of the dissolution of the last school in Memmingen (Bavaria) has been given by various authorities as 1852, 1875, and 1880. This chronological uncertainty underlines the obscurity into which the activity had lapsed.

In Die Meistersinger R. Wagner gives a partly amusing and partly endearing re-creation of the Nuremberg school, which, however, inflates its contemporary prestige.