page_title: Walther von der Vogelweide
section_title: Assessment
hierarchical_section_title: Walther von der Vogelweide / Assessment
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Das Waltherdenkmal von Heinrich Natter in Bozen stellt Walther von der Vogelweide dar, Ausschnitt ohne Sockel
context_page_description: Walther von der Vogelweide was a Minnesänger, who composed and performed love-songs and political songs in Middle High German. Walther has been described as greatest German lyrical poet before Goethe; his hundred or so love-songs are widely regarded as the pinnacle of Minnesang, the medieval German love lyric, and his innovations breathed new life into the tradition of courtly love. He is also the first political poet writing in German, with a considerable body of encomium, satire, invective, and moralising.
  Little is known about his life, but he was a travelling singer who performed for patrons at various princely courts in Germany. He is particularly associated with the Babenberg court in Vienna. Later in life he was given a small fief by the future Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.
  His work was widely celebrated in his time and in succeeding generations—for the Meistersingers he was a songwriter to emulate—and this is reflected in the exceptional preservation of his work in 32 manuscripts from all parts of the High German area. The largest single collection is found in the Codex Manesse, which includes around 90% of his known songs.
context_section_description: A contemporary assessment of Walther's songs comes from Gottfried von Strassburg, who, unlike modern commentators, was able to evaluate Walther's achievements as composer and performer, and who, writing in the first decade of the 13th century, proposed him as the "leader" of the Minnesänger after the death of Reinmar.
  Grove Music Online evaluates Walther's work as follows:
  He is regarded as one of the most outstanding and innovative authors of his generation... His poetic oeuvre is the most varied of his time,... and his poetry treats a number of subjects, adopting frequently contradictory positions. In his work he freed Minnesang from the traditional patterns of motifs and restricting social function and transformed it into genuinely experienced and yet universally valid love-poetry.
  Will Hasty's evaluation of the love songs is that:
  Walther's main contribution to the German love lyric was to increase the range of roles that could be adopted by the singer and his beloved, and to lend the depiction of the experience of love new immediacy and vibrancy.
  Of the political works, Hasty concludes that:
  In Walther's political and didactic poetry we again observe a consummately versatile poetic voice, one which finds new ways to give artistic expression to experience despite the constraints of the taste of audiences and patrons and by the authority of literary conventions.
caption: Monument to Walther von der Vogelweide in Bozen from 1889
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