Spangenberg 1545 and the Lutheran Liturgical Tradition

In the course of the Lutheran Missal Project, the contents of around 40 missals and other liturgical books will be catalogued. To paraphrase George Orwell, every one of these missals is unique, but some are more unique than others. This description is particularly apt in the case of one of the books in question: Cantiones ecclesiasticae/Kirchengesenge Deudsch.

Cantiones/Kirchengesenge (simply referred to in the project as “Spangenberg 1545”), while not a proper missal, is the first missal-type book produced by Lutherans after the Reformation. It was compiled by Johann Spangenberg (1484–1550), a pastor at St. Blasius’ Church in Nordhausen (part of the diocese of Mainz, governed by the Mainz missals of 1482 and 1517). The volume was published by Michael Lotter in Magdeburg (in a separate diocese with its own missal, Magdeburg 1503), possibly because Georg Rhau, the famous printer of Lutheran liturgical music, was overcommitted and could not take on another project. While in Nordhausen, Spangenberg founded the Latin school at St. Blasius, and he would have needed a volume with chants for the choirboys to sing at Mass. It is likely that this was an impetus for compiling his volume.

The most interesting characteristic of Spangenberg 1545 is that it is actually two separate books bound together in a single volume: Cantiones ecclesiasticae comes first, followed by Kirchengesenge Deudsch. Each book has its own title page, preface, and table of contents:

Both books contain the order of Mass, propers for the year, hymns, collects, and so forth. Kirchengesenge even restarts with folio 1, instead of continuing the numeration begun by Cantiones. However, Cantiones is written entirely in Latin, and Kirchengesenge is written entirely in German. In fact, Kirchengesenge is largely the same book as Cantiones, simply translated into German, even considering the titles (“ecclesiastical songs” vs. “German church songs,” the latter implying that the same elements were simply carried over from Latin into German). The nature of the volume provides a fascinating insight into how Luther’s reforms of the Mass—the Formula missae for Latin masses and the Deutsche Messe for German masses—were received by the second generation of Lutherans.

In both Cantiones and Kirchengesenge, the Ordinary is not provided on its own as in other missals, but is rather worked into the order for Advent 1, which order becomes the example for the rest of the liturgical year. So the order for Advent 1 contains virtually the entire Ordinary (even including the Gloria in excelsis, which may have been sung during Advent, or at least on Advent 1!). It is instructive to see how the orders differ from one another between Cantiones and Kirchengesenge:

Spangenberg 1545 is notable for being the first published source in which the text O Lamm Gottes, unschüldig is paired with the tune that became its universal mate (in a rather robust rhythmic variant to boot):

Likewise, Luther’s All Ehr und Lob soll Gottes sein appears in Kirchengesenge’s order for Easter, versus the Gregorian Gloria upon which the melody is based in Cantiones’s order for Easter (the images here are pictured opposite one another for the sake of comparison, but are not so in the volume):

While Advent 1 gives everything the celebrant would need to conduct the mass, the orders for the majority of other days omit almost everything except the lessons, and many end with an indication to the effect of “do everything else as on the First Sunday of Advent,” as in this folio from Lent 1 in Cantiones:

In an interesting turn of events, the volume presents what we in the twenty-first century might consider shortcomings. Namely, it doesn’t contain everything one would expect to see in a complete missal. For example, Holy Week is missing entirely: no service orders appear between Palmarum and Easter Day. The selection of chorales is very slim: the only chorale for the entire season of Advent is Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland—admittedly an extremely important one, but the implication is that the congregation sings that and nothing else all season. Likewise, the propers are lacking: there are no Introits given in Advent except for Ad te levavi on Advent 1; and once Trinity season gets going, the volume provides nothing but Epistles and Gospels—there is nary even a collect to be found in the entire season:

It appears that in order to conduct a liturgical year’s worth of masses, the priest and choir would need additional books (likely the aforementioned Mainz missal would have filled this need, although that’s a matter for another blog post). But, this might simply be anachronistic: it stands to reason that if the volume were perceived to be incomplete in his context, Spangenberg wouldn’t have published it in the way he did, or would at least have mentioned it in one of the prefaces. And indeed, Spangenberg’s contemporaries apparently didn’t receive the volume as incomplete—far from it, because it was printed four times in 1545, with no items added and one item (Illibata mente sana, the Sequence for the Visitation) actually removed in the second printing.

It is particularly interesting to consider Spangenberg 1545 as a reflection of the uni-lingual nature of the earliest Lutheran liturgy. Luther’s intention was that the Deutsche Messe would serve rural parishes that lacked a choir to sing the Latin chants—effectively, a Latin school with boys—and that in more well-to-do parishes coupled with a school, the Latin Mass would continue, following his Formula missae or something like it. And it appears that this was more or less the case. Though Cantiones and Kirchengesenge are in the same volume, since they are foliated separately it would have been inelegant to flip between them to e.g. sing the Gloria in German but intone the Collect in Latin. Subsequent Lutheran volumes imply a similar segregation of German and Latin Masses, such as Lucas Lossius’ Psalmodia (1553 and several later editions, all Latin) and Franz Eler’s Cantica sacra (1588, mostly Latin with some German hymns thrown in at the back). No other such volume, however, mimics Spangenberg 1545 in comprising two separate books, the second a translation of the first.

But as the years wore on, the Latin and German Masses became more and more intertwined. By the eighteenth century, the Mass in larger cities like Hamburg incorporated both German and Latin elements, sometimes even the same item duplicated in each language. The implications of that development on liturgy and music are fascinating, but outside the scope of the Lutheran Missal Project, and they will have to wait for another day…