LIED. – A vernacular German song that arose, in the centuries following the year 1000, with the development of individual national languages. It assumed various denominations according to its character: as an aristocratic art form: Kunstlied; as a church song: Kirchenlied; as a folk song: Volkslied; as a student song: Studentenlied; as a national traditional song: Vaterlandslied; as a children’s song: Kinderlied.
The Lied is generally a love song (Minnesänger, Meistersinger, etc., down to the modern artistic Lied of contemporary composers), but of great importance too is the religious or spiritual Lied: geistliches Lied, whose origins lie in the typical form of the Geistlieder, songs of the flagellants, which flourished at the end of the 13th century, with features 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). These are spiritual lauds in Old High German that invoke Christ and the Madonna, praying for mercy and protection at the hour of death, for sins committed, for the final judgment, etc. In the following century, after the intense development of the Geistlied, occasioned by the processions of penitents during the plague epidemic of 1348, songs with more subdued tones and more sentimental phrases began to flourish, still in the religious sphere: true and proper geistliche Lieder, which soon spread throughout Germany and neighboring countries, opening the door to a rich range of influences from neighboring artistic currents (the Low Countries, France, Italy).
Among the oldest melodies of geistliche Lieder are to be noted: Christ ist erstanden (= Christ is risen); 13th century, other melodies based on German traditions of sequences and liturgical hymns as well as spiritual adaptations, such as the composition by Isaak: Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen, transformed into the chorale O Welt ich muss dich lassen, etc. The geistliche Lied, which until then had been used outside the liturgy because it was in the vernacular, was taken up by Luther precisely for this reason and made a fundamental element of the Protestant divine service. Soon, and especially after the invention of printing, extensive collections of geistliche Lieder were compiled, both monodic and polyphonic, whose melodies have greatly inspired composers of all ages to draw from them inspiration and valuable thematic materials.