Bernardo Bellotto known as Canaletto (1722-1780) |
The Heart of Europe and the Early Modern Music of the West: a Musicological Electrocardiogram
The past two centuries have been particularly unkind to Central Europe: a succession of wars, long occupations, partitions and imposed ideologies have left the countries in this perilous corridor radically changed. A cursory glance at maps of Poland, from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, through the German, Russian and Austrian partitions, to its reemergence in the twentieth century and its current state, determined at the end of the Second World War, reveals the severity of the territorial shifts and points to the range of political and cultural systems imposed upon Poland by a succession of foreign governments.