To this very day German music springs from the depths of the German heart. Almost a thousand years after those singing crusaders, whole companies of young German soldiers in the World War were seen to go over the top with songs on their lips. That the German nation has become as a nation of warriors and musicians is readily understood from its character and history.
The Germans had led the life of hunters, risking their life every day in the trackless Teutonic forests in pursuit of the aurochs; theirs had been the life of warriors who did not know, or shunned, the peasant’s peaceful life. Later their adventures and the rigors of their punishments had far surpassed the general level of medieval cruelty; they had reveled in the destruction of prisoners, gloried in revenge. Must not all this have left one part of the human heart unsatisfied? What outlet was there for the sentiments with which we all are born? Among the Greeks Orpheus and Arion beguiled the wild beasts of land and sea with their music; and whenever music sounded in the Germans’ ears, this warrior people too was shaken to its depths. Indeed, the Germans created their own music, and all the learned explanations that German song is derived from France and the Troubadours pale into insignificance before the fact that from it grew the German folk song and, later on, a music the like of which the world has never heard.
TOWN HALL IN BRESLAU
For those German companions of the French Crusader were but the forerunners of all the Germans, who today still excel all other nations in music. They cannot do without it and play with skill and endeavor in their own homes, which is the sign of the true music-lover. Not even among Bohemians and Hungarians is music fed from such rich springs into so many thousand channels as among the Southern Germans, then as now. Here we are able to see right down to the roots of the German character.
Their history has made the Germans a nation of warriors and musicians. Their military discipline, their passion for commanding and obeying, their Spartan training and frugal life, suddenly flaring into excess and drunkenness—the compulsion to which an entire nation surrendered with such true passion was bound to seek some social outlet, an activity where all that dropped away. Mars relieved by Cupid of his arms, as painted by the great Italians, is a symbol for this need. Yet it was not the rulers who fled from their world of brute force into that of art. It was the people who created enduring works—works that were at their best when the confusion all around was greatest.
Whither else could the German burgher have fled—into what form of the spirit could he have escaped from the all-powerful State? In other lands commoners at an early stage began to take part and distinguish themselves in public affairs; but in Germany participation in government was denied the burgher, who was kept in order or in disorder, as the case might be, by princes and nobles, clerical and secular. Not only in the Middle Ages but down to the nineteenth century the best heads were excluded from the management of public affairs. The talented and cultured citizen turned to business or intellectual pursuits, and in his leisure hours at night he took up a book or violin. His son became a physician; the son of a craftsman, a painter; and the minstrel, who had no sons, or at best illegitimate ones, pursued his playful and tuneful path between the respectable classes, tempting them to try their own hand at singing and versifying.
All the forces that brought the Germans so much trouble when they directed their vision to far-off things and world dominion brought them happiness when they concentrated on music and intellectual endeavor. These flights of fancy from the thralldom of a life of violence have brought forth a wealth of stories about spooks and magic, glimpses into the nether realm which the Germans are so fond of mentioning in their farces and sacred plays.
With part of the people giving themselves up to discoveries in the world of art and intellect, the gap separating them from those who directed the country’s destinies grew even wider. The commoners resigned themselves to the leadership of the nobility and held more and more aloof from politics. The nobility in turn, filled with contempt for this other world it found so incomprehensible, was less and less concerned with matters of the mind. This growing discord in the German character, as expressed in social life, led to a schism, the full force of which is making itself felt to this day.
What we here and hereinafter call the German sense for music is merely a collective term for the immortal works the Germans have offered the world: for all their great art—the Cologne Cathedral, the visions of Grünewald, Goethe’s poems—are musical in an elemental way. Here we are confronted with the greatness that marks their personality—the reverse side of their nebulous drifting character. Across the ages and peoples, their mastery of music offers the purest revelation of their rich endowment.
9
THE POETS and minstrels who enlivened the German Middle Ages, in addition to the architects and creative artisans, were of a worldly mind, loving “Vanity Fair.” The Church turned against them; bishops spoke of buffoons and courtesans when they meant poets and singers; and an abbot of St. Gall who wrote love songs was already reckoned half a heretic.
At first it was only the knights in their castles, constituting the society of the time, who kept singers and poets in addition to their pages, falconers and mistresses. How else were they to dispel the tedium of winter? Between one raid and the next they sat in their gloomy castle halls, blackening with the soot from the pine torches and smoky fireplaces, glad at last to be rid of the crushing weight of their armor. For the hundredth time they related their deeds of valor to each other—how many raven-locked maidens they had ravished in the Holy Land. The women sat farther down in their smaller chamber—for not even the mistress of the manor was asked to sit at the table in honor of a new guest, and the men for the most part kept to themselves.
For the strange contradictions of the German character assigned to the women of the age of chivalry a position midway between slave and goddess. In France at this time women were already sitting with the men at meals, even then paired off and in all likelihood at the small tables at which they are still seen in every French bistro—or were until yesterday. They sat and sipped from the same cup with their squires, cutting their meat for them in turn. But in the German castles women were chattels of the knight, handed over—one might even say, sold—by their fathers after prolonged haggling. Often they were of extremely tender age—Kriemhild was but fifteen when she married—yet their welfare depended on whether they bore healthy sons or merely daughters. “In durance vile,” as the law put it, the husband might sell and even kill them. That this is documented down into the fifteenth century throws a significant light on German history, as does the fact that the Frisians offered human sacrifices into the thirteenth century.
Yet at court and at the tournaments these same women, who had neither freedom nor property nor any rights over their children, were placed in the seat of honor. Homage was paid them, and after the French fashion their silk ribands became the champions’ prize; their signal for mercy was the law of the court; above all, their clothes became the center of attraction for the spectators and the poets too; epics and chronicles are full of long descriptions of their cloaks and hats, down to the manner of their smile.
Yet girls were exclusively destined for marriage, and their abduction and even their love almost never became subjects for song. The knight’s desire turned solely to the wives of other knights, yet these seem to have strictly upheld the honor of their homes and the ideal of monogamy. When Minne, as this higher form of love was called,