Leise

(Middle High Ger. Leis).

A devotional, Germanic song stanza in the nature of a refrain, found particularly in the later Middle Ages. Supposedly deriving its name from the words ‘Kyrie eleison’ as they appear repeatedly in the litany, the Leise is normally considered a part of the general category Ruf and is distinguished within that category by being characteristically in a four-line form without musical repeats. The earliest known example is thought to be the 9th-century Freising song to St Peter, Unsar trothîn hât farsalt (D-Mbs Clm 6260, f.158v). In the early stages of specifically German polyphony (beginning with the lost early 15th-century Strasbourg manuscript F-Sm 222) Leisen were often set; other examples include Christ ist erstanden (based on the opening of the sequence Victimae paschali laudes and traced to the mid-12th century) and Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist (based on the sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus and traced to the mid-13th century).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (‘Leisen und Rufe’; V. Mertens) [incl. further bibliography]

H. Teuscher: Christ ist erstanden: stilkritische Studie über die mehrstimmigen Bearbeitungen der Weise von den Anfängen bis 1600 (Kassel, 1930)

J. Riedel: Leisen Formulae: their Polyphonic Settings in the Renaissance and Reformation (diss., U. of Southern California, 1953)

H. Hucke: ‘Die Neumierung des althochdeutschen Petrusliedes’, Organicae voces: Festschrift Joseph Smits van Waesberghe (Amsterdam, 1963), 71–8

DAVID FALLOWS