(Ger.: ‘day song’).
A German strophic song announcing or praising the break of day, cultivated notably by Minnesinger in the late Middle Ages and strongly influenced by the Provençal Alba, which dealt with similar subjects. Early polyphonic examples include one attributed to the Monk of Salzburg in the Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift, in which the lower part is the song of a nightwatchman while the upper part is a trumpet prelude followed by a dialogue between parting lovers. Wolfram von Eschenbach and Oswald von Wolkenstein are other important composers of Tagelieder. The tradition of the Tagelied was eventually incorporated into German folksong and especially into popular hymns, as in Philipp Nicolai's 16th-century chorale Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. It was revived by Wagner in the warning ‘Habet acht! Schon weicht dem Tag die Nacht’, with which Brangäne wakes the lovers in Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde.
See Lied, §I.
H. Ohling: Das deutsche Tagelied vom Mittelalter bis zum Ausgang der Renaissance (diss., U. of Cologne, 1938)
B. Stäblein: ‘Eine Hymnusmelodie als Vorlage einer provenzalischen Alba’, Miscelánea en homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés (Barcelona, 1958–61), ii, 889–94
A.T. Hatto: ‘Das Tagelied in der Weltliteratur’, DVLG, xxxvi (1962), 489–506