THE early seventeenth century has generally been viewed as a period of intense polarization and conflict for Germany and central Europe. Historians speak of an Age of Confessionalization, during which the three principal confessions—Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism—elaborated their separate professions of faith and thereby developed distinct ideologies and cultures. Most German states became confessional, embracing a single religion and regarding toleration as dangerous and destabilizing. Church and state joined forces to define and enforce correct belief and behavior through education, propaganda, and censorship. In this process, music, like the other arts, became both an instrument and an object of the confessional states’ social disciplining.

Following the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, armed conflict as well as differing ideologies shaped the cultivation of music at many institutions throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The hostilities, which began in Bohemia in 1618, spread to the rest of the Empire, and eventually involved all the major powers in Europe, bringing Germany to the brink of total anarchy. Technological advancements in the manufacture of firearms and enormous increases in the size of armies gave rise to unprecedented slaughter and destruction. Armies lived off the land : cities were sacked, villages destroyed, peasants tortured and murdered. Agriculture foundered ; starvation and disease followed. Germany lost thirty to forty percent of its population.

The circumstances Heinrich Schütz encountered at the electoral court in Dresden, where from 1614 he served as organist and music director, demonstrate the horrible consequences the hostilities could have for musicians and the institutions that supported them. At the time of Schutz's arrival in the Saxon capital, the Hofkapelle had 27 members (16 singers and 11 instrumentalists), a number that increased slightly in subsequent years. Following Saxony's entry into the war in 1631, however, the situation at court deteriorated dramatically, and between 1634 and 1639 the number of musicians dropped from 30 to 10. By 1641 war, plague, and unpaid salaries had reduced the Kapelle to a state that, in Schütz's own words, resembled “a patient in the throes of death.”