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Updated: June 28, 2025
Besides these, we had the celebrated band of Moscow-musiks, the seventy-seven Transylvanian trumpeters, and the famous Bohemian Minnesingers; with all the leading artists of London, Paris, the Continent, and the rest of Europe. I leave you to fancy what a splendid triumph for the British Washerwoman's Home was to come off on that day.
John felt a singular lightness of heart, and, despite the forbidding glare of Suzanne, who was in the last cart, he spoke to Julie. "It's too fine a morning for battle," he said in English. "Let's pretend that we're a company of troubadours, minnesingers, jongleurs, acrobats and what not, going from one great castle to another." "I suppose Antoine there is the chief acrobat?"
At the minstrel contest he enters into the lists with the other Minnesingers, and, impelled by a reckless audacity and the subtle influence of Venus, sings of the attractions of sensual pleasures. Walter, of the Vogelweide, replies with a song to virtue. Tannhäuser breaks out in renewed sensual strains, and a quarrel ensues.
The Teutonic antiquities contain many songs of the Minnesingers, in which he is invested with all the qualities of mind and heart and body that can adorn the knight; but one fault is imputed to him ambition. His subjects almost worshipped him, and his power is said to have been built upon their hearts.
Why so? The sense of this comes home to me most powerfully whenever I think of mediæval poetry and mediæval painting. The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers, what are they to our feelings?
Yet they find no mean rivals in the private chambers of the queen, decorated in an analogous style, but entirely devoted to the poets of her own land. The Minnesingers occupy her first apartments, but the brilliant saloon is worthy of Wieland, whose Oberon forms it frieze; while the bedchamber gleams with the beautiful forms and pensive incidents of Goethe's esoteric pen.
In the thirteenth century the national epic appeared, but was soon neglected for the foreign legends and sentimental verses of the romancists and minnesingers. In the eighteenth century, when Lessing had made a path for original genius by clearing away French pedantry and affectation, there appeared some hope of a revival of true national literature.
One of the most important, characteristic, and artistically charming categories of mediæval love lyrics is that comprising the Provençal serena and alba, with their counterparts in the langue d'oil, and the so-called Wachtlieder of the minnesingers; and this category of love poetry may be defined as the drama, in four acts, of illicit love.
And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, like the old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of them to sing. Character? I know not how much variety of character there may be between birds of the same species but between species and species the variety is endless, and is shown as I fondly believe in the difference of their notes.
The plot was taken from an old German tradition, which centres about the castle where the landgraves of the thirteenth century instituted peaceful contests between the Minnesingers and knightly poets. Near this castle towers the Venusberg, a dreary elevation, which, according to popular tradition, was inhabited by Holda, the goddess of Spring.
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