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The Transmission of the Secular Songs of the Monk

David Murray

The label “Monk of Salzburg” is probably a cipher for more than one member of the archiepiscopal court of Salzburg. Although composed under the auspices of Archbishop Pilgrim II of Salzburg, who ruled 1365-1396 (on Pilgrim, see » Ch. Salzburg under Archbishop Pilgrim II), the Monk’s secular songs are almost entirely transmitted in manuscripts from the first half and middle of the fifteenth century.[5] By far the most important source for the Monk’s secular songs is the Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift, A-Wn Cod. 2856 (on which see » A. SL Die Notation der “Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift”).[6] Here almost 90 folios (three-quarters of the song collection that is sandwiched between legal texts and Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur) are devoted to fifty-three songs by the Monk, and only four of the secular songs are not recorded in it. In contrast to the extensive and scattered transmission of the religious songs, this most important witness to the secular songs was most likely produced alongside three other major witnesses in the Salzburg region in the mid-fifteenth century.[7] D, as the manuscript is known, is known to have been in the collection of the Salzburg goldsmith Peter Spörl in 1465, around a decade after its probable date of production. The scattered transmission of the Monk of Salzburg songs is considerable, and new concordances continue to appear, such as the one in » A-Wn Cod. 5455 (discussed by Marc Lewon: “A-Wn Cod 5455, fol. 180v – German “Tenors” from Vienna University” in: Musikleben–Supplement).

[5] See also » B. Geistliche Lieder des Mönchs von Salzburg. Possibly the only fourteenth-century witness to the secular songs is the manuscript, » D-BAs Msc Astr 4, which transmits the New Year song Mein traut gesell, mein höchster hort (W6).

[6] See the facsimile Heger (Hrsg.) 1968.

[7] On the manuscript workshop, whose location remains unidentified, see März 1999, 68–69, and before him Wachinger 1989, 78–80. The other manuscripts thought to have been produced there are: A (» D-Mbs Cgm 715); B (» D-Mbs Cgm 1115) and E (» A-Wn Cod. 4696, the so-called “Lambacher Liederhandschrift”).

[1] Edition: März 1999. März gives a complete edition of the text and music of the secular songs as well as extensive commentary and interpretations for every piece. His edition is also valuable for reproducing ill-accessible manuscript sources. “W” numbers in the following refer to this edition.

[2] For the religious songs, see the edition Spechtler 1972 for the text. “G” numbers in the following refer to this edition. Spechtler’s edition should be used alongside the corrections proposed in Wachinger 1989. For the music of the religious songs, see Waechter 2004.

[3] On these refrain songs, which Christoph März labelled “Virelai/Ballade”, see März 1999, 19–30, and Lewon 2018, 223–225.

[4] See Lewon 2018, 225.

[5] See also » B. Geistliche Lieder des Mönchs von Salzburg. Possibly the only fourteenth-century witness to the secular songs is the manuscript, » D-BAs Msc Astr 4, which transmits the New Year song Mein traut gesell, mein höchster hort (W6).

[6] See the facsimile Heger (Hrsg.) 1968.

[7] On the manuscript workshop, whose location remains unidentified, see März 1999, 68–69, and before him Wachinger 1989, 78–80. The other manuscripts thought to have been produced there are: A (» D-Mbs Cgm 715); B (» D-Mbs Cgm 1115) and E (» A-Wn Cod. 4696, the so-called “Lambacher Liederhandschrift”).

[8] On an instance where the Monk’s songs were adopted in a less informal polyphonic context, see Welker 1984/1985, on the use of the Monk’s Taghorn (W2) as a tenor for a two-part setting of the ‘Veni rerum conditor’ in the St Emmeram codex, » D-Mbs Clm 14274.

[9] On the shift in the discourse on love in German lyric during the earlier fourteenth century, see Janota 2007.

[10] On the Puchheim dynasty, which flourished into the eighteenth century, see Tepperberg 1978.

[12] The best account of Archbishop Pilgrim’s life is still Klein 1937/1938.

[13] On the office of Hauptmann, see Spechtler 1963, 176–177.

[14] On Georg, see Klein u. a. 1952, 42.

[16] Mayr 1924, 12.

[17] On Pilgrim as the Monk, see Petzsch 1984, 23–24. Romuald Bauerreiß, by contrast, proposed the Abbot of St Peter’s Abbey, Johannes Rozzes to have been the Monk. See Baurreiß 1934, 204–20.

[18] For an introduction to the ballade, see Fallows 1998 and Graf 1998; on the virelai see Hirschberg u. a. 1998, Sp. 1711-1722. On the mixed forms in the Monk corpus, see most recently Lewon 2018, 222-224.

[19] On Salzburg’s literary connections with Prague, see Janota 2007, 27, and Spechtler 2001. For the political interactions between the power centres, see Klein 1972/73, 44–60 and Klein 1934.

[23] Knapp 2004, 468-469.

[24] Compare Willaert 1994 on the uses of song in the narrative texts of Guillaume de Machaut. An earlier Germanic example for the embedding of song in narrative is the Frauendienst of Ulrich von Liechtenstein (†1276).

[25] The model for the Monk’s song was first discovered by Christoph März; see März 1980/81. Ju ich jag was copied in score format on a parchment sheet (A-MB Man. cart. 10: see März 1999), which was originally part of a Tora manuscript, stolen apparently during the Vienna persecution of Jews in 1421. See Strohm 2014 (with fig. 4); » J. Aggressionen und Angste. Judenhass. 

[26] On the chace as a genre, see Newes 1987, and Kügle 1997, esp. Chap. 3. On the Monk’s relationship to Romance models, März 2005.

[28] Kügle 1997, 65–66 and 75–79.

[29] Bent 1990, 224.

[30] On the reception of the Monk corpus at St Emmeram’s in Regensburg, see Welker 1984/85.

[31] On this, see Kesting 1973.

[33] See Zimmerman 1995, 314–316.

[34] On the musical culture of Neustift, see Peintner 2001.

[35] On this see März 2005, 160-61.

[36] Santifaller 1924, 520-21.


Empfohlene Zitierweise:
David Murray: “The secular songs of the monk of Salzburg”, in: Musikleben des Spätmittelalters in der Region Österreich <https://musical-life.net/essays/secular-songs-monk-salzburg> (2016).