Frauenlob [Heinrich von Meissen]

(b ?c1260; d Mainz, 29 Nov 1318). German Minnesinger. Little is known of his life beyond what can be conjectured from his songs. His lament on the death of Konrad von Würzburg (d 1287) locates him in time, his Central German dialect in place. According to the Würzburg songbook (compiled c1350) he came from Meissen, and he may have received a musical training at the chapel of Margrave Heinrich of Meissen (d 1288), himself a Minnesinger. Frauenlob praised nobles from principalities as far apart as Denmark and Carinthia (Kärnten, Austria), though he may not have visited the territories of all those he praised. He appears to have had close links with the Přemysl court at Prague, where he met his (presumed) patron Peter von Aspelt, who was to become bishop of Mainz in 1306. At Frauenlob's funeral his coffin was accompanied by women lamenting, allegedly in recognition of his many songs in praise of womanhood. His tombstone in Mainz Cathedral was destroyed in 1774, but its inscription has been preserved. Later generations of Meistersinger claimed Frauenlob as a founding father, attributing to him more than three times as many Töne (see Ton, (i)) as the ten he is known to have composed; for centuries they also wrote new texts to his melodies. A major but controversial task of the edition by Stackmann and Bertau (1981) was to exclude the ‘pseudo-Frauenlob’ material, some of which remains unedited (for a full listing of Spruch texts and melodies ascribed to Frauenlob see Brunner and Wachinger).

Frauenlob's huge influence on his contemporaries was due to his musical prowess as much as to the extravagantly recondite texture of his poetry. He is the only singer to have the distinction of being portrayed twice by the illustrator of the Manessische Liederhandschrift (D-HEu Pal.germ.848), once as director of a group of nine instrumentalists (f.399; for illustration see Minnesang, fig.2) and once as the instructor of a younger singer, Regenbogen (f.381). However, while the texts have been subjected to intense literary scrutiny in recent years, the melodies have not received corresponding attention, and discussion of the relationship between the two has largely been absent.

Frauenlob composed in the three genres of 13th-century German singers: Minnelied, Leich and Spruch. The melodies to the love songs have been lost, but reliable 14th-century transcriptions in Messine notation survive for his three Leichs and for five of the ten Spruchtöne; the Kolmarer Liederhandschrift (D-Mbs Cgm 4997) contains three more, but in unreliable versions. As each Spruch melody could be re-used indefinitely for new religious and political contexts, these melodies had the widest influence and distribution. Stackmann's critical edition identifies 122 ‘genuine’ Frauenlob stanzas in the Langer Ton, his most important melody (ex.1); but it was also used for about 200 other surviving stanzas.

The Spruch melodies (all in canzone form) follow the late 13th-century fashion for composing long stanzas. In Frauenlob's case this length gives rise to phrases of considerable scope and complexity, since he did not rely on the repetition of melodic sections (for example the addition of a third Stollen at the end of the stanza) as much as his contemporaries did. Instead, Frauenlob shaped each Ton dynamically by using a delayed, systematic rise (steig/ascensus) towards and descent (val/descensus) from the highest note in the ambitus. The point in the Abgesang at which the highest note is reached defines the individual character of each Ton. It also constitutes the point of greatest emotional emphasis in the text, which the singer/author usually reserved for the statements that he wanted to stress. This technique was used by earlier singers (notably Stolle and Wernher) and by contemporaries (Rumelant), but with Frauenlob, whose use of a gradualis ascensus in the Langer Ton was admired by Johann von Neumarkt (?1364), it is more consistent and deliberate (ex.1). In one Ton, the Würgendrüssel, the rise and fall covers a range of almost two octaves.

The three Leichs push the formal possibilities of the genre to new limits. Like earlier Leichs, Frauenlob's Marienleich (in which the singer first praises the Virgin Mary, then adopts her persona himself) is organized in paired stanzas (versicles) of which two groups (versicles 5–7 and 13–15; 8 and 16) use recurring melodies that divide the work up into two main sections, a doppelter Cursus. But the listener is distracted from the higher structure by individual versicles of unprecedented length (up to 40 lines, compared with the norm of eight lines) and strophic intricacy. Their cyclical arrangement according to the eight modes (2½ cycles) helps convey an overall structure and gives the Leich a liturgical feel that sets it apart from the others. This is a fitting medium for Frauenlob's strange ideas – the distractingly sensual depiction of Mary's erotic encounters with God is legitimized by their concealed higher meanings – and the work, undoubtedly Frauenlob's masterpiece, has been compared to a gothic cathedral.

The structure of the other two Leichs has yet to be satisfactorily explained; both use shorter versicles and correspondingly simpler melodies, some of these recurring at wide intervals in a way that suggests there was originally some kind of overall sectioning (Bertau, 1980–81, suspects hidden polyphony). Compared with the ‘visionary’ melodies of the Marienleich, those of the devotional Kreuzleich seem to rely heavily (and innovatively) on exclamatory expression, even word-painting. The discursive Minneleich (treating themes of love, alchemy and the male imagination) favours a terser melodic style reminiscent of Meister Alexander's Minneleich, which is echoed in versicles 20–21.

WORKS

leichs

töne

list includes all unedited 14th-century MSS with music; excludes ‘pseudo-Frauenlob’ melodies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Pfannmüller: Frauenlobs Marienleich (Strasbourg, 1913)

K. Plenio: ‘Strophik von Frauenlobs Marienleich’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, xxxix (1914), 290–319

W.F. Kirsch: Frauenlobs Kreuzleich (Dillingen, 1930)

J. Klapper: ‘Frauenlobfragmente’, Festschrift Theodor Siebs zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. W. Steller (Breslau, 1933), 69–88

H. Thomas: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung der Spruchdichtung Frauenlobs (Leipzig, 1939/R)

K.H. Bertau: Untersuchungen zur geistlichen Dichtung Frauenlobs (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1954)

K.H. Bertau and R. Stephan: ‘Wenig beachtete Frauenlobfragmente’, ZDADL, lxxxvi (1955–6), 302–20

K.H. Bertau: Sangverslyrik: über Gestalt und Geschichtlichkeit mittelhochdeutscher Lyrik am Beispiel des Leichs (Göttingen, 1964)

K.H. Bertau: ‘Wenig beachtete Frauenlobfragmente (II)’, ZDADL, xciii (1964), 215–26

H. Thomas: ‘John of Neumarkt and Heinrich Frauenlob’, Mediaeval German Studies Presented to Frederick Norman (London, 1965/R), 247–54

H. Brunner: Die alten Meister: Studien zu Überlieferung und Rezeption der mittelhochdeutschen Sangspruchdichter im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1975)

K. Stackmann: ‘Frauenlob’, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. K. Ruh and others (Berlin, 2/1977–)

K. Bertau: ‘Einige Gedanken zur poetisch-musikalischen Struktur und zu einer historischen Folgeerscheinung der Krypto-Polyphonie im ‘Minneleich’ des Heinrich Frauenlob’, Jb der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft, i (1980–81), 139–59

H. Gröchenig and others: ‘Ein neues Fragment aus Frauenlobs Kreuzleich’, ZDADL, cxiii (1984), 246–86

H. Brunner and B. Wachinger, eds.: Repertorium der Sangsprüche und Meisterlieder des 12. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, i (Tübingen, 1994), iii (1986)

C. März: Frauenlobs Marienleich: Untersuchungen zur spätmittelalterlichen Monodie (Erlangen, 1987)

T. Bein: Sus hup sich ganzer liebe vrevel: Studien zu Frauenlobs Minneleich (Frankfurt, 1988)

C. März: ‘Zum musikalischen Stil in Frauenlobs Kreuzleich’, Wolfram-Studien, x (1988), 125–34

M. Shields: ‘Zum melodischen Aufbau des Marienleichs’, Wolfram-Studien, x (1988), 117–24

J. Rettelbach: Variation – Derivation – Imitation: Untersuchungen zu den Tönen der Sangspruchdichter und Meistersinger (Tübingen, 1993)

S. Köbele: ‘“Reine” Abstraktion? Spekulative Tendenzen in Frauenlobs Lied 1’, ZDADL, cxxiii (1994), 377–408

A. Diehr: ‘Mediale Doppelgestalt: Text und Melodie in Frauenlobs Minneleich’, Jb der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft, x (1998), 93–110

MICHAEL SHIELDS