EN
The introduction of the Lutheran faith in the area of Ducal Prussia, Livonia and Royal Prussia in the sixteenth century gave impetus to the development of local religious song-writing in German. The greatest number of such songs comes from Koenigsberg. In the 1540s and 1550s, these were mainly written by Johannes and Paul Kugelmann, musicians at the court of Duke Albrecht, and from the end of the 1570s by Johannes Eccard, one of the most prolific composers of this genre, employed at the cappella of Margrave Georg Friedrich. In the sixteenth-century Gdansk, German polyphony was a marginal phenomenon in the local artistic output. Two first songs of this type were written by Franciscus de Rivulo in about 1560, but during the next 80 years such compositions remained sporadic. In Riga, toward the end of the sixteenth century, German religious polyphony was being composed by Paulus Bucenus who, apart from songs, also wrote Masses using the German language, clearly in accordance with the instructions of the local 'Kirchenordnung'.