Aurelius Ambrosius - der Vater des Kirchengesanges

The study of Latin hymns faces a peculiar difficulty. They appear almost exclusively in liturgical monuments; however, these have never considered it their task in the West to pass on the names of the hymn writers to posterity. Thus, the researcher is confronted with an immeasurable number of hymns, from which only rarely, thanks to some incidental remark by a chronicler or other writers, can one song be attributed to this author and another to that one. Once an author writes hymns not for liturgical use but for his own and his readers' literary satisfaction, his fate changes. His songs are then passed down as a literary whole, without getting lost in the vast mass of liturgical works.

The present attempt is renewed regarding one of the most important authors for whom, fortunately, more solid starting points are available than for many others. We possess the explicit, unquestionable testimony of Christian antiquity that it was not Ambrose, but Hilary of Poitiers, who was the first hymn writer of the Latin Church. And yet, it is not St. Hilary, but St. Ambrose who has become the father of Latin and indirectly also of German church music.

This work presents Aurelius Ambrosius, the father of church music. The Publishing House of Sciences publishes historical literature by both well-known and unknown scholarly authors. This makes works that have long been out of print accessible again to interested readers. This book is an unaltered reprint of the original edition from 1893.