Oswald von Wolkenstein

Oswald von Wolkenstein was a poet, composer and diplomat from the nobility of Tyrol, active at the turn from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance. He wrote in German, and his work is central to understanding secular song and poetry in the German-speaking lands of the early fifteenth century.

He was born around 1376 or 1377 at Schöneck Castle in the Pustertal, in what is now South Tyrol, and died in Merano in 1445. As a younger son he had no claim to the family's main inheritance, so he spent his youth as a squire to a travelling knight, a role that took him across Europe and as far as the Eastern Mediterranean. The experience gave him several languages and, later, a career as a diplomat serving the Tyrolean counts and the emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg.

His life was shaped by long disputes over property, above all with the family of Martin Jäger over Hauenstein Castle, and by political quarrels that led to several imprisonments. Amid these conflicts he composed songs that often drew on events he claimed to have witnessed. Travel, religion and brothels recur as his main subjects, and his love poetry centres on Anna Hausmann, to whom he continued writing even after her marriage.

Most of his songs are monophonic, though he also wrote polyphonic pieces of high quality. His legacy lies in joining personal experience with the song form, making him one of the first German-language authors to place his own voice at the centre of his verse. The manuscripts he commissioned at Neustift Monastery are the main source through which his work survives.