ABSTRACT
After consideration of the songs of Martin Opitz and Paul Fleming the major song-books of the mid-seventeenth century have been examined in diachronic mode, i.e. historically, within the three regions of our study, although in passing comparisons between regions have been made when possible. The all-German model for the secular solo song is the slender corpus of song-texts by Opitz; they must have been known by the mid-1620s. Love-songs are the most common and popular form of song-writing, and the new vogue proved a flexible vehicle, allowing the intellectual debates of Opitz and Fleming or protestations of devotion from Johann Rist and Simon Dach. Song-writers like Greilinger from Bavaria and Stieler from Thuringia found a congenial place to publish song-books in Hamburg. As Opitz said, songs are poems specially suitable for music; the 'free and happy spirit' that they require benefits from the stimulus of live or recorded performance.
