rssHalf of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them. - T.S. Eliot
2010, July 13
The Thirty Years War - Wilson
Thirty-five years before Bach was born, the Thirty Years War ended.
Still working on Cantata 21, I came across this book, apparently the first "definitive" history written since 1938. Here are a few quotes from the book:
p 5 The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars.
p 6 Public opinion surveys carried out in the 1960s revealed that Germans placed the Thirty Years War as their country's greatest disaster ahead of both world wars, the Holocaust and the Black Death.
p6 ...even in the twenty-first century, German authors could assert that 'never before and also never since, not even during the horrors of the bombing during the Second World War, was the land so devastated and the people so tortured' as between 1618 and 1648.
In the last two chapters, Wilson threads his way through the controversies regarding the effects of the war on population, culture and the economy, and the changing perspectives of people who experienced the war versus those who wrote about the war during later eras.
p 480 War, and its accompanying horrors of plague and famine, encouraged a sense of living in what one contemporary called an 'iron century' of exceptional hardship. The Silesian poet Gryphius wrote of the pointlessness of human existence. The human body was just a 'house of grim pain' and an 'arena of bitter fear filled with keen sorrow.'
I hear echos of these sentiments in the language of many parts of the cantatas.
References
Reviews on Amazon.com
Peter Wilson's Thirty Years War on GoogleBooks
Thirty Years War, 1618-1648
A political picture of the war, with a great interactive map
