'Palastinalied' or 'Palestinalied', the 'Palestine Song', performed by Hugues Cuenod, tenor, on a Westminster long-play disc, number XWN18848, issued in 1959; and a parody of it, 'Alte Clamat Epicurus', from the Carmina Burana manuscript, performed by the Clemencic Consort, recorded by Harmonia Mundi, France, and issued in the United States on a Musical Heritage Society long-play disc, number MHS3471, in 1976.
The 'Palestine Song' is a Crusader hymn, composed by Walther von der Vogelweide to support the Fifth Crusade, 1217-1221. The opening stanza, sung here, in Middle High German, can be translated,
"Now for the first time do I live
since my sinful eyes can see
the beauteous land and hallowed soil
which every man must honor.
Now what I prayed for has happened:
I have come to the city
where God as a man walked."
'Alte Clamat Epicurus' is one of a treasury of poems, many intended to be sung, contained in the Carmina Burana, or Songs of Benediktbeuren (after the monastery where the manuscript was found), dating from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. The poems encompass a wide range of emotions and situations, including parody, indeed mockery, of religious belief. 'Alte Clamat Epicurus' was deliberately set to Vogelweide's melody; the opening stanza translates,
"Epicurus cries aloud:
The belly will be my god.
Such a god the gullet seeks,
his temple is the kitchen
where heavenly odors abound."
Both these performances are probably as authentic as possible. Hugues Cuenod's career really began when Nadia Boulanger, appreciating that his vocal style was ideally suited to early music, asked him to illustrate her lectures; he subsequently made an intensive study of such music. Rene Clemencic, as a researcher, instrumental soloist, and director of the Consort bearing his name, has striven, in his own words, "to render the music only as it can be reconstructed in terms of the original manuscript."