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In Germany, Italian opera, early introduced, long remained fashionable. Native dramatic tastes, once fostered by minnesingers and strolling players, were kept alive by the "singspiel," or song-play, composed of spoken dialogue and popular song, which furnished the actual beginnings of German national music drama.
One of the most valuable, the Manessian Code of the Swabian Minnesingers, was left in Paris, where it had been concealed. Blucher expired, in 1819, on his estate in Silesia.
Prominent among this popular literature were the love-songs of the Minnesingers, the epics drawn from mediæval traditionary versions of the legend of Troy, of the career of Alexander the Great, and, to come to more recent times, to legends of Charles the Great and his Court, of Arthur and the Holy Grail, the Nibelungenlied in its present form, and Gudrun.
He must be faithful to his lady and be ready to defend her person and her honor at all costs. Everywhere he must be the champion of the right against injustice and oppression. In short, chivalry was the Christianized profession of arms. The Germans also made their contribution to the literature of chivalry. The German poets of the thirteenth century are called minnesingers.
There he suffered many privations, and passed many melancholy days; and all that he went through sometimes soured his temper, sometimes saddened him, till strength and mind seemed failing. How different were the world and mankind from what he had fancied them in his childhood! What were now to him Minnesingers' poems and songs? They were gall and wormwood.
Ciullo d' Alcamo, flourishing about 1190, is the only Italian-writing poet absolutely contemporaneous with the earlier and better trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers; and he is also the only one who resembles them very closely. Between Ciullo d' Alcamo and his successors there is some gap of time, and a corresponding want of gradation.
Adam and Eve standing under a tree, she, with the apple in her hand; the patriarch Abraham, with a tree growing out of his body, and his descendants sitting owl-like upon its branches; ladies with flowing locks of gold; knights in armour, with most fantastic, long-toed shoes; jousts and tournaments; and Minnesingers, and lovers, whose heads reach to the towers, where their ladies sit; and all so angular, so simple, so childlike, all in such simple attitudes, with such great eyes, and holding up such long, lank fingers!
They fight till set of sun, and then slacken their armour to waft a ballad to their beloved by moonlight, covered with stains of battle as they are, and weary! 'What a girl! Minnesingers! Yes; I know stories of those Minnesingers. They came to the castle Margarita, a bead of thy cross is broken. I will attend to it. Wear the pearl one till I mend this.
Dietmar von Aist, one of the earliest minnesingers, who flourished in the latter half of the twelfth century has, for instance, the Provençal alba theme. Two lovers part at daybreak, when awakened by a bird on the linden: if the theme is Provençal, the simplicity of the poet's treatment is extremely fresh and natural.
But chivalry was now in all its glory, and it continued to supply armies for the Holy Land. Poetry more than religion inspired the Third Crusade. The knights and their retainers listened with delight to the martial and amatory strains of the ministrels, minnesingers, and troubadors.
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