Music and the Reformation: Germany

I. Introduction

This is Martin Luther. Pictured here, He’s just started a political and religious movement that will flip Europe upside down. More importantly, he going to become one of the most influential 16th century German composers.

Today marks 500 years since Martin Luther famously posted the 95 Theses to the door at the Wittenberg Church, an event most scholars would agree started the Protestant Reformation. An event that would completely change the landscape of Europe both politically and religiously; and also, directly influenced the course of music history. Today, I’d like to look at the events happening behind music history, and how it affected the music being written and the composers who lived in those days.

So, how did this happen? How did one monk from a town in Saxony start all of this? And what does any of this have to do with music. The answer to all of that is a complicated story involving religion, politics, art, and philosophy...and often even the military. Let’s try to unpack it.

Martin Luther’s post wasn’t actually the beginning. There had been precursors throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. This was just the event where the proverbial snowball turned into an avalanche.

In the 14th and 15th Centuries, men like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus began speaking out against the increasing corruption in the Catholic Church. They spoke out against indulgences, purgatory, the inability for priests to marry; and even made a push for church services and the bible to be in the native language of the people and not just Latin. Well, Jan was burned at the stake. Wycliffe died of natural causes, but then the Pope declared him a heretic, banned his writings, and then had his body un-buried and then they burned his bones.

II. Germany Leading Up To The Reformation

Many of the things these men were speaking out against, Martin Luther would later speak out against in 1517. Particularly that of indulgences. Meet Pope Leo X. He was trying to raise money for this brand new, state of the art Basilica he was building, and he was offering time off of Purgatory as an incentive to donate. Leo was also rather involved in the politics of Europe, and was in the process of attempting to unify the northern Italian provinces to the Papal States. But more on that later.

Luther was serving in the town of Wittenberg. Of course, Germany looked a little different then. Here it is. And here it Wittenberg. What we now know as Germany was at the time part of the Holy Roman Empire, which as Voltaire put it was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” It had no official association with the Church, it’s borders didn’t even contain Rome, and was made up of hundreds of smaller kingdoms, whose kings may or may not actually pay attention to the orders of the Emperor. But still it was a noble title, I suppose. But who would want to run such an Empire? A lot of people, actually. As of 1517 it was being “run” by Maximilian I. The empirical system had become rather watered down, as the kings of each of these got together to form the Imperial Diet, which still sounds like what happens when the Emperor wants to lose weight, but I digress. These Kings eventually became powerful enough to start voting for the Emperor. Let’s slow that down. They were voting for emperor. This led to an elaborate bribing process, a game the Habsburgs were very good at winning. Charles V inherits a royal mess after his Grandfather Maximilian I died in 1519. Again, more on that later.

What about 15th century German music? This is a relatively quiet era for the Germans musically. The musical landscape was dominated by the Franco-Flemish school. Certainly, Germany did not have the musical prominence it would later enjoy, but the composers of the 15th century did quite a lot to set up the success of later composers such as Heinrich Schutz, JS Bach, and later the First Viennese School. These Composers were primarily employed by the church or by the state.

Being that there were so many kingdoms, there were a lot of composers that were employed in the courts of these royals. They wrote music based on both folk poetry and court poetry, and were critical to the formation of the German Lieder. These folk melodies were monophonic, strophic songs, meaning that everyone sung the melody, and each verse has the same melody. Composers, such as Adam of Fulda and Paul Hofhaimer, filled out the texture by adding more voices, and making polyphonic, which means every line is of equal importance, and rather independent of the other voices. A great example of a 15th century song is Ach Elslein.

Music of the 15th century was highly influenced by Heinrich Isaac. He was a Franco-Flemish composer, born in the Netherlands, moved to Italy, and then was hired by Maximilian himself to be the court composer of the Holy Roman Empire in 1497. During his time in Italy, he encountered the Italian homophonic style, which he then incorporated into his German Lieder, such as in his song “Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen”. This song is marked by all four voices singing in similar rhythms, with each phrase clearly marked, often by rests; and cadences with full triads rather than just open intervals – often even having clear dominant-tonic motion. This simplistic, yet beautiful writing made his work popular all over Europe. He was a contemporary of Josquin, arguably the most prominent composer of that generation; who was admired by...you got it:

III. Beginnings of the Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther. Which brings us to October 31, 1517. Luther posts his infamous document, having never intended to start his own church, or even leave the Catholic Church, but simply to ask for reform. And perhaps this would have only been, as Pope Leo put it, “a dispute between monks”, had it not been for all of the distractions facing both the Church and the State.

As we said before, Pope Leo X is also preoccupied with the politics surrounding the Holy Roman Empire. He had unsuccessfully attempted to get the northern Italian provinces to unite with the papal states. He would eventually...sorta...get that through some convoluted political dealings. However, all of this took his attention away from what was happening in Germany. And as his quote from earlier shows, he failed to understand the severity of the situation.

For Charles V, the new Holy Roman Emperor, it would have probably been worth his time to have been paying attention to what was happening in Germany. After Luther posted his theses, many of the nobility in Germany saw this as an opportunity to oppose not only the Pope in Rome, but the Holy Roman Emperor himself. That’s a huge problem for an emperor whose empire is already not really under his control. Not only that, the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t Charles’ only domain. Charles was the Grandson of Maximilian I, which is how he got the Holy Roman Empire in the first place. Maximilian decided to solidify some power by having his son Phillip I, who was heir to Burgundy in France, marry the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who were the monarchs in Spain and even parts of southern Italy. Charles not only inherited all of this land in Europe, but also the vast amount of North and South America that Spain had been colonizing for the last century or so. Between uprisings in the New World, France, and Germany, Charles wasn’t really keen on spending time dealing with a little squabble between monks.

So, the response from the Church and the State was rather slow. Behind the scenes in Germany, Luther’s teachings were gaining in popularity. So, in 1521 the Pope decided he should probably do something about it. The Pope calls a hearing were arguments are presented, he asks Luther to recant his writings. Luther responds to the Pope with “Nah, I’m good. Oh, and also, you’re not infallible.” Here is where Luther is famously quoted as saying “Here I stand, I can do no other.” This of course made the pope very unhappy and he excommunicated Luther.

Later the same year, Charles puts together the Diet of Worms, which again sounds like the absolute worst diet plan ever conceived. Charles seems rather annoyed that he is having to deal with this, but is anyone really ever excited to deal with an insurrection? The Emperor was hoping to expose Luther as a heretic, and put this whole matter to bed so he could get back to dealing with the fact that the Spanish army was torturing the Native Americans in the New World. Luther gave an impassioned speech. He argued that justification is by faith alone, and cannot be earned. He argued for the authority of scripture, as opposed to authority coming from Rome. In the end, the Emperor declared Luther a heretic, made giving him food or shelter illegal, and even said that anyone who killed him wouldn’t be charged with murder. However, Luther’s speech had been so passionate, he had won over many of the crowd. He was smuggled out of town by Frederick III of Saxony who gave him protection.  

In the years following, Luther began his German translation of the Bible. The Holy Roman Empire was split down religious lines between kingdoms, which didn’t make the Pope or Emperor happy. However, some German peasants had seen Luther’s courage and decided to rebel against their rulers in what is now known as the German Peasants Rebellion. This was quickly ended as they were hilariously outnumbered and out-skilled. Shortly after that, the Schmalkadic League was formed as an alliance of Lutheran kingdoms...well, it quickly became political and empirical. After about 20 years of fighting, The Peace of Ausburg was signed in 1555 legally allowing kingdoms to choose their religion: either Catholic or Lutheran.

IV. Music Of The Lutheran Church

With the formation of the Lutheran Church in the late 1520s, many changes were made to church music. Luther, who was a fan of the liturgy, as well as Josquin des Prez, maintained a lot of Catholic elements in the Lutheran Service. However, one major change was the move towards congregational singing. For the last few centuries in the Catholic Church service, the music had been performed during the service exclusively by professional musicians employed by the church. Music had become increasingly complex, and the text, which was still in Latin, had become increasingly unintelligible as composers would place long melismas on single syllables, blurring the text. Composers had been developing this idea of the ars perfecta, which attempted to create the “perfect art”. This led to some beautiful music, but it largely left the congregation out. A number of these problems would be addressed later by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent. This led to perhaps the biggest change in Lutheran Music: the Lutheran Chorale. These chorales, which have their roots in the 15th century German Lieder, were largely homophonic and strophic, and they were to be sung by the congregation. The texts were also in the vernacular. Melodies were taken from folk songs, or sometimes from Gregorian melodies. The theology in these songs often spoke of doctrines that were specifically different from Catholic theology. Many of these doctrinal differences have been codified with the five solas; that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ Jesus alone, by the authority of scripture alone, to the glory of God alone. Perhaps the most famous of these early Lutheran chorales, written by Luther himself: Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott, or in English, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

Of course, the reformation didn’t end here, and it wasn’t limited to Germany. Some scholars argue it didn’t end until 1648, others say it still hasn’t ended. Either way, these events reshaped not only political and religious history, but also music history itself. These events would set the stage for later German composers such as Heinrich Schutz, and even later Johann Sebastian Bach.