Frauenlob

Heinrich von Meissen, known as Frauenlob, was a German Minnesinger born around 1260 and who died in Mainz on 29 November 1318. He belongs to the tradition of thirteenth-century court singers, from whom both poetry and, to a lesser extent, melody have survived. Very little more is known about his life than can be deduced from his own songs.

His verses allow us to place him in time: he lamented the death of Konrad von Würzburg, which occurred in 1287, and his Central German dialect locates him geographically. According to the Würzburg songbook, compiled around 1350, he came from Meissen, and he may have received his musical training in the chapel of Margrave Heinrich of Meissen, himself a poet-singer, who died in 1288. His songs praise nobles from territories as distant as Denmark and Carinthia, although there is no certainty that he visited all of them. He appears to have maintained close ties with the court of the Přemysls in Prague, where he came into contact with the man who was probably his patron, Peter von Aspelt, who would become Archbishop of Mainz in 1306.

After his death, according to an uncertain tradition, his bier was accompanied by women lamenting his loss, in recognition of his many songs in honour of womanhood. His gravestone in Mainz Cathedral was destroyed in 1774, although its inscription has survived.

His influence was considerable. Later Meistersinger regarded him as a founding father and attributed to him more than three times the number of melodies (Töne) that he is known to have composed, ten in total. For centuries they wrote new texts to his melodies. The edition by Stackmann and Bertau (1981) had as its principal task the separation of material belonging to the so-called 'pseudo-Frauenlob', part of which remains unedited.

His surviving melodies belong to the three genres he cultivated: the Minnelied, the Leich and the Spruch. Those of his love songs have been lost, but fourteenth-century transcriptions in Meissen notation survive for three Leiche and for five of his ten Sprüche. His melodic technique, based on a progressive rise and fall towards the highest note, is especially evident in the Langer Ton, his most important melody.

The Marienleich, considered by scholars his masterpiece, combines stanzas of unusual length and is organised according to the eight modes, with a liturgical character that sets it apart from the rest. Through his legacy, Frauenlob is remembered as a key figure of German musical poetry of his time, admired both by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations.