Meistersinger

In the 14th century schools operated at Mainz, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Würzburg, Zürich, and Prague; in the 15th at Augsburg and Nuremberg.

Each guild had various classes of members, ranging from beginners, or Schüler (corresponding to trade apprentices), and Schulfreunde (equivalent to Gesellen or journeymen), to Meister.

Plate, in "Die Kunstausdrücke der Meistersinger",[1] gives a long list of the various features of rhythm and rhyme in this complicated poetry, in all of which can be observed a singular likeness to the technicalities invented by the lesser, and even by the better, poets two centuries earlier in Southern France.

Three times a year, at Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas, special festivals and singing competitions were instituted.

At such competitions or Schulsingen, judges (Merker) were appointed to criticize the competitors and note their offences against the rules of the Tabulatur.

There were four: one watched whether the song was according to the text of the Bible, which lay open before him; the second whether the prosody was correct; the third criticized the rhymes; the fourth the tunes.

Meistersinger traditions lingered in southern Germany as late as the 19th century: a society in Ulm dissolved in 1839; the last school died out at Memmingen in 1875.