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Category: Sacred music

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Music in Time of Pestilence, Part Two

Posted by: Paul Sommerfeld

The concluding part of this two-part survey of music and disease looks at examples that arose from pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries, including: works by Stephen Foster and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel written in the wake of a series of cholera outbreaks, and the sometimes curiously lighthearted musical response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Music in Time of Pestilence, Part One

Posted by: Paul Sommerfeld

Part one of this two-part survey of musical responses to past pandemics focuses on sacred music from the years that the Black Death ravaged medieval Europe. Texts such as the Stella Celi Extirpavit and Recordare Domine illustrate the penitence and fear of the wrath of God that prevailed until the Enlightenment.