Konrad von Würzburg

Konrad von Würzburg (Würzburg, c. 1230 – Basel, 31 August 1287) was, according to the sources, the most prominent and most successful German poet of the late thirteenth century. He came from the burgher class and, after a solid education, earned his living as an itinerant musician before settling in Basel and Strasbourg. He was probably the first minnesinger to live exclusively from his writing, and his urban life allowed him to count patricians, nobles and ecclesiastical lords among his patrons.

His output, some 85,000 lines covering all poetic genres, survives in numerous manuscripts, which attests to the interest it aroused among educated readers. Although he came from the courtly tradition of Gottfried of Strasbourg, he developed a style that was laconic in its language yet rich in imagery, comparisons and erudite arabesques. His knowledge of Latin, theology and law seems to have been considerable. His lyric output comprises 23 songs, among them summer, winter and dawn songs, a sacred and a secular Leich, as well as numerous Sprüche; 51 stanzas are considered authentic. He also cultivated a long allegorical poem, Die Klage der Kunst, and epics such as Engelhard, Partonopier und Meliur and the unfinished Buoch von Troye, although his true strength lay in the short epic and the Versnovelle, with works such as Herzmaere and Otte mit dem Barte.

The musical question is more uncertain. The only early source with a melody attributed to Konrad, the Jena manuscript, offers music very different from that transmitted by the Colmar manuscript, a fifteenth-century source containing most of the surviving melodies. That gap of some two centuries from his era obliges us to doubt: the poetic form is Konrad's, but probably not the music attributed to him. His legacy endures chiefly as a poet, and he was admired by later authors such as Boppe, Frauenlob and Heinrich von Mügeln, as well as by the Meistersinger, who included him among their twelve old masters.