Wanning is today most noted for being "the first Protestant composer to write cycles of
de tempore motets for the whole church year," and his work inspired a number of later composers to create similar cycles of
Evangelienmotetten or
Spruchmotetten. He composed over 100 motets in Latin, published between 1580 and 1590. Wanning was also the author of the first known musical
epithalamium – a poem written for a newlywed bride heading to the marital bedchamber for the first time. It is thought to have been created as a gift for the bride and groom to whom it is dedicated. The groom's father-in-law was a prominent Danzig theologian and rector of the Church of St. Barbara, and was also a music lover whom Wanning is likely to have known through his contacts with the city's social elite. He may have been composed it as a service to a friend. It may not have been his first venture into wedding music, as some of his motets may also have been intended for this purpose. Seven of the twenty-four works in his
Sacrae cantiones of 1580 are settings of texts from the
Song of Songs and two of the other motets relate to marriage. One of them,
A Domino egressa est res ista, may have been written in connection with the wedding in 1579 of Constantin Ferber and Elisabeth Hacken. Ferber was the youngest son of the then Mayor of Danzig, Wanning's patron. He wrote a second epithalamium that was published in 1596 for a bride and groom who were married in
Leipzig in
Saxony. This may have been commissioned by
Georg Knoff, the owner of one of the largest collections of music prints in Europe at that time. Wanning had been on a six-year break in creative activity – by then he was suffering persistent health problems – and the epithalamium was the first work published since his final motet collection,
Sacrae cantiones quinque et sex voces, was published in Venice in 1590. It was also the only example in his career as a composer of using a German rather than Latin text, in this case an extract from the
Wisdom of Sirach. This was probably due to the preferences of the Leipzigers but may also have reflected the increasing preference among composers of wedding music to use German texts. ==List of published works==