Hermann Poetzlinger

Born in or near Bayreuth around 1420, Hermann Poetzlinger was a member of an Upper Franconian family that had risen in social status through the fourteenth century, partly through the patronage of the margraves of Brandenburg. He became a priest, a scholar and a schoolteacher. Having been ordained, he served at various times as priest of the parishes of Auerbach, Erbendorf, Neuhausen (near Landshut) and Gebenbach, and was a canon of the collegiate church of the Holy Spirit at Essing (in the Altmühltal). Between 1436 and 1439 he studied the liberal arts at the University of Vienna, where he obtained a BA degree, and by 1448 he had become master of the school run by the Benedictine monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg. He remained attached to the monastery and to the town of Regensburg for the rest of his life, apart from a short period (perhaps two years) of further study at the University of Leipzig, beginning in the winter of 1456/57. Towards the end of his life (he died on 20 March 1469) he exchanged most of his worldly goods for a precaria (prebend) at St. Emmeram, which enabled him to spend his last years living under their shelter in a house next to the school at which he had taught.

Most schoolmasters of the early fifteenth century have disappeared from history without trace. What has preserved Poetzlinger’s memory to this day is a combination of four factors. First, he collected a large personal library of more than a hundred manuscripts that contain many of the principal scholarly (i. e. mostly theological) texts of his day, but also include one that has extraordinary musical significance. Secondly, these manuscripts formed part of his donation to the monastery of St. Emmeram in return for his care in old age. Thirdly, the library of this monastery had unusually good fortune in remaining more or less intact until the present day (it is now part of the Bavarian State Library). And fourthly, a librarian of the monastery around the turn of the fifteenth century, Dionysius Menger, wrote a very detailed catalogue of the monastery library, which helps to identify most of the manuscripts that belonged to Poetzlinger. The survival of a substantial personal library from the early fifteenth century provides us with an unusual glimpse into the scholarly culture of the period.

Poetzlinger’s music book (now » D-Mbs Clm 14274), known as the „St. Emmeram Codex“, is one of the most important sources of late-medieval polyphonic music to have survived from Central Europe. It contains nearly 250 pieces of music, including works by many of the leading composers of the time, such as Francesco Landini, Guillaume Du Fay, Gilles Binchois, John Dunstaple and Leonel Power, as well as others by composers whose reputation was more local, such as Hermann Edlerawer (» G. Hermann Edlerawer; » Abb. Edlerawer in D-Mbs Clm 14274), Rudolf Volkhardt von Häringen (» C. Musiktheorie) and Peter Schweikl. Many of these works are otherwise unknown, and would therefore have been lost to us if it had not been for Poetzlinger. The same is even more true of most of the anonymous music that forms the bulk of the collection, some of which can be shown to have come from Bohemia, or at least to have been well known there. Much of the music in the first two of the three sections of the manuscript was copied by Poetzlinger himself, apparently during and immediately after his time as a student at Vienna, though he was substantially helped in the second section by another scribe whose hand can also be identified in some of Poetzlinger’s text manuscripts from c.1439, including his bible. The third and latest section of the manuscript was added by Wolfgang Chranekker, who was organist at St. Wolfgang am Abersee in 1441, but is also documented as a chaplain at the altar of Corpus Christi in the church of St. Ulrich, Regensburg, in 1448 (» C. Organisten und Kopisten).

As schoolmaster at St. Emmeram, Poetzlinger would have been responsible for teaching the boys not only to read and write Latin, but also to sing, in order to be able to participate on occasion in the liturgy in the monastery church. This would have involved primarily the singing of plainsong, but the survival of his collection of mostly polyphonic music may suggest that he also taught this repertory to his students. He may, for example, have taught them to sing the upper (discantus) parts of such music while he and his assistant sang the lower (tenor and contratenor) parts. (In many cases, however, the contratenor parts were not copied into his manuscript, even in cases where they are known to have existed, so two-part performance might have been the norm.) Whether the boys (or, indeed, the monks) then proceeded to perform such music in the monastery church or elsewhere is unknown. The fact that such practice was explicitly forbidden by the Melk Reformers who visited St. Emmeram in 1452 (see also » A. Melker Reform) at least raises the intriguing possibility that it may have taken place before that time. This is not to forget, however, that the main part of the manuscript originated in Viennese university circles, possibly involving musicians active at the Bürgerschule and Kantorei of St. Stephan (» G. Hermann Edlerawer). The existence of Poetzlinger’s music book also raises the question of whether it might have been normal practice for schoolmasters (or students expecting to become schoolmasters) at the time to compile such collections of polyphony, especially since a number of other such books – including » I-TRbc 87 part II, I-TRbc 88, I-TRbc 89, I-TRbc 90, I-TRbc 91, » D-Mbs Mus. Hs. 3154 and » D-Mbs Clm 5023 – that seem to have originated with schoolmasters (H. Battre, Johannes Wiser, Peter Schrott, Nikolaus Leopold and Johannes Greis, respectively) have survived from this general period.