Word: 1770s
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Werther's suicide for the love of Lotte inspired an epidemic of self-immolation in Germany in the 1770s, but history does not repeat itself in Lucio. True, he is in despair-life in Fascist Italy is intolerable and Beate refuses to sleep with him-but he is seeking ways to survive. Beate, on the other hand, wants to "carry despair to its logical conclusion, suicide." Their encounter, Lucio observes, had not been love, but death at first sight. Beate yearns for a suicide pact with Lucio that would be modeled on what she regards as an ideal death...
Throughout its 300-year history, the Paris Opera has probably boasted more foibles than any other company-and, given the vicissitudes of the average opera company, that is saying a lot. Back in the 1770s, when it got ready to put on Gluck's landmark opera Orfeo and Euridice, 18th century male-chauvinist Parisians balked at having a male contralto play the hero, considering that an affront to their manhood; poor Gluck had to rewrite the part for tenor. In the 19th century, even a Wagner or a Verdi had to include a ballet in his opera or risk...
...fact, during the 1770s saints were scarcely visible and holiness was rare. Some good and heroic activities were performed by frail, errant and often irreligious people. Certainly, multitudes of decent folk led conventionally moral lives. But a second look at the past will be jolting to those who think that sexual waywardness and permissiveness are recent inventions. Public figures could keep mistresses and acknowledge their illegitimate children-as Benjamin Franklin did-without losing their good names or even their reputations as moralists. George Washington had to chase Philadelphia prostitutes from Valley Forge. In New York 500 "ladies of pleasure" kept...
Surely, then, we would argue, if the behavior of our forefathers was not impeccable, at least they were more religious than we. Not necessarily. For whatever that means, church membership in the 1770s was actually much lower than it is today -only 6% or 8% of the population by most estimates. The religious Great Awakening of the middle third of the century had given way to a big sleep, and pastors looking for Congregationalists or Presbyterians complained that they found only "nothingarians" or "anythingarians." "The Revolutionary era was a period of decline for American Christianity as a whole," writes Yale...
Thus it is not possible to say that in practice the people of the 1770s were more virtuous than we. No one knows how to measure morality with precision; historians have no evidence that the human raw material has changed since, say, the Stone Age. It is none the less true that the founding generation had certain values and advantages we lack today...