Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen, 1567, was compiled and published by
Johann Leisentrit, a Roman Catholic priest who from 1559 to the time of
his death in 1586, was Dean at the Cathedral of St. Peter's in Bautzen,
a town in southeastern Germany. His hymnbook appeared in three complete
editions (1567, 1573, 1584), and in abridged editions in 1575, 1576, and
1589. By adapting the vernacular hymn, a genre created by Protestant
reformers, Leisentrit hoped to bring back to the "true church"
(wahrglaubiger Christlicher Kirchen) those who had defected to
Lutheranism. This was a formidable ambition because his diocese was
located adjacent to the Moravian-Bohemian regions where the Protestant
movement was born and remained vital. Containing approximately 260 texts
set to 175 notated melodies, many borrowed from Protestant sources and
adapted to serve Roman Catholic objectives, Leisentrit's book was the
second Catholic hymnbook to be published in the sixteenth century. It
surpassed its Protestant and Catholic precursors in scope and provided a
model for the profusion of hymnbooks of numerous confessions that
appeared in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Wetzel
and Heitmeyer present their study in two parts: The first comprises six
contextual chapters that survey earlier German achievements in hymnody,
provide analyses of the texts and music in Leisentrit's book, and assess
his achievement within the volatile environment of the Counter
Reformation. The second gives the melodies in modern notation along with
the first stanzas of the texts; provides detailed concordances and
references to sources that identify textual and musical provenances; and
concludes with six appendixes to facilitate scholarly cross-references.
Fourteen of the seventy wood engravings from Leisentrit's book, many of
which are visual representations of the prevailing confessional
conflicts, are given in enlarged reproductions. The authors provide the
only comprehensive study in English of a unique religious figure and his
efforts to achieve confessional reconciliation in the decades following
the Council of Trent. They add to a more accurate interpretation of the
relationship between Lutherans and Catholics in the sixteenth century
and support the hypothesis that some Lutherans remained more
liturgically formal than their Catholic contemporaries.
