Eisenhand

I’ll be there

by David Fallows

The claim that Oswald was ‘perhaps the most important poet writing in the German language between Walther von der Vogelweide and Goethe’ has been repeated often enough to have reached the status of cliché. Quite a few of his 132 surviving poems outstay their welcome or seem self-indulgent in their virtuosity; but there are enough poems that seriously sparkle.

On the other hand, his musical reputation has fallen steadily as the number of identified borrowings rose from six in 1924 to its present total of fifteen. Thus, now nearly half of the thirty-seven polyphonic songs in his manuscripts use polyphony that demonstrably originated earlier and with texts in other languages. But when he used polyphony composed by others, he almost certainly did not intend to pass it off as his own. His art in those cases was to be perceived as the art of contrafactum, of devising new texts for well-loved music. No deception was intended; and it seems fair to suggest that nobody was deceived (until the advent of modern musicology).