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Sleeve Notes
Folksongs were more important to the Germans than to people of most other countries. Strangely enough, the obvious term Volkslied was coined as late as 1773, by the German poet and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, after the songs themselves had circulated for many hundred years. They were a great creative stimulus for German composers, forceful antidote against the overwhelming influence of Italian music which had all of Europe north of the Alps infatuated by its brilliance and clarity.
The first collection of old anonymous German folksongs dates back to 1471; their origin in unknown. The bearded Bavarian on the cover of this record suggests what the people must have been like who sang them for the first time, perhaps in front of the hearth, or working the fields, or serenading. Whoever they were, they must have had a strong creative force to improvise an indestructible little opus which overshadowed their identity. The songs were handed down orally, from one generation to the next. In Germany an important factor in their dissemination were the travelling musicians who sang at fairs, in taverns, or at some public celebration, and sold verses on separate sheets of paper to the audience who sang with them until they knew the tunes by heart. The folksongs never became obsolete. The melodies underwent gradual metamorphosis in centuries of oral transmission and the words were adapted to the changing vernacular. But what remained unchanged were the simplicity of melody, rhyme and rhythm, the perennial popular philosophy, and the typically German inclination toward tuneful, meditative sentiment.
The folksongs, thus, were "written by the people," as the great German poet Ludwig Uhland said. Yet in the 18th and 19th centuries many songs written by poets and composers of renown, in simple rhyme and set to a simple melody, were adopted as folksongs by virtue of their topical or emotional appeal. Zu Augsburg steht ein hohes Haus (There's a tall building in Augsburg), the second song on this record, by Justinus Kerner and A. Knab, is an example of this type of folksong.
The songs in this collection come from various lands in which Germans have lived, but they all have a common denominator: local patriotism, love and pride of the homeland, of its nature, towns, and folks. One of the songs, No. 9, glorifies northern Switzerland; another, No. 13, the Austrian province of Styria. No. 14 pictures the mood of as distant a land as Bessarabia which has seen many a ruler come and go since German peasants migrated to the fertile Eastern steppes, always preserving their traditions. Nos. 6 and 7 picture the natural and architectural beauty of Regensburg, the ancient Romans' proud Ratisbon which to reach by boat you have to brave the whirls of the Danube, while No. 11 glorifies the bridge of Koblenz on the Rhine. The colorful sampling, sung by the Albert Greiner Chorus under Joseph Lautenbacher takes us through centuries of indestructible popular lore.
Ann M. Lingg