LIED. – A song in the German vernacular that arose, in the first centuries after the year 1000, with the development of the individual national languages. It assumed various designations according to whether it had the character of an aristocratic art form: Kunstlied; of a Church song: Kirchenlied; of a popular song: Folhslied; of a student song: Studentenlied; of a traditional national song: Vaterlandslied; of a children’s song: 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 its origins lies the characteristic form of the Geisslerlieder, songs of the flagellants, which flourished at the end of the thirteenth 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 laude in Old German that invoke Christ and the Madonna, praying for mercy and protection at the hour of death, for sins committed, for the Last Judgment, etc. In the following century, after the vigorous development of the Geisslerlied, prompted by penitential processions on the occasion of the plague epidemic of 1348, songs of more subdued coloring and more sentimental phrases began to flourish, still in the religious sphere: true geistliche Lieder, which soon spread throughout Germany and the neighboring countries, opening the way to a rich range of influences from nearby artistic currents (the Netherlands, France, Italy).
Among the oldest melodies of geistliche Lieder are to be remembered: Christ ist erstanden (“Christ is risen”; thirteenth century), other melodies based on German traditions of sequences and liturgical hymns, as well as spiritual contrafacta, such as Isaak’s composition Innsbruch, ich muss dich lassen, transformed into the chorale O Welt ich muss dich lassen, etc. The geistliches L., which until then had been used outside the liturgy because it was in the vernacular, was adopted by Luther, precisely for this reason, as a fundamental element of Protestant divine worship. Soon, and especially after the invention of printing, extensive collections of geistliche
Lieder—both monodic and polyphonic—were compiled; composers of all periods drew extensively on their melodies for inspiration and valuable thematic material.