LIED. - A song in the German vernacular that arose, in the first centuries after the year 1000, with the development of the individual national idioms. It assumed various names, according to whether it had the character of an aristocratic art form: Kunstlied; of a Church song: Kirchenlied; of a folk song: Volkslied; of a student song: Studentenlied; of a traditional national song: Vaterlandslied; of a song for children: Kinderlied.
The L. is generally a love song (Minesinger, Meistersinger, etc., down to the modern artistic L. of contemporary composers), but the religious or spiritual L. is also of great importance: geistliches L., at whose origins lies the typical form of the Geisslerlieder, songs of the flagellants, which flourished at the end of the 13th century, with characteristics akin to those of the Italian lauda, owing to the spread of the movement of the Disciplinati from Italy to the rest of Europe (southern Germany, Alsace, Bohemia, France, England). They are spiritual lauds in Old German that invoke Christ and the Madonna, praying for mercy and protection for the hour of death, for sins committed, for the final judgment, etc. In the following century, after the intense development of the Geisslerlied, due to the penitential processions on the occasion of the plague epidemic of 1348, there began, still in the religious sphere, to flourish songs with softer tints and more sentimental phrases: either true geistliche Lieder, which quickly spread throughout Germany and the neighboring countries, opening the doors to a rich range of influences from the nearby artistic currents (Netherlands, France, Italy).
Among the oldest melodies of geistliche Lieder should be remembered: Christ ist erstanden ("Christ is risen"; 13th century), other melodies on German traditions of sequences and liturgical hymns as well as spiritual adaptations, such as Isaak's composition: Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen, transformed into the chorale O Welt ich muss dich lassen, etc. The geistliches L., which until then had been of extraliturgical use because it was in the vernacular, was adopted by Luther, precisely for this reason, as a fundamental element of Protestant divine service. Very soon, and especially after the invention of printing, extensive collections were made of geistliche
Lieder, both monodic and polyphonic, from whose melodies composers of all periods drew widely for inspiration and precious thematic material.
Bibliography6 works
Luisa Cervelli