In the first few decades after the war, musical life in Bohemia and Moravia reflected the social, religious and, to some extent, linguistic tensions that characterised the renewed constitutions [Verneuerte Landesordnung] of 1627 and 1628. We have very little idea of the true nature of secular peasant music in seventeenth-century Bohemia or Moravia, but we do have many examples from the non-conformist traditions of rural church music and through these sources, aspects of continuity and change can be more readily observed.

There was no indigenous, specifically ‘Austrian’, style of church music before the Thirty Years War, and musical style followed the pattern of the rest of Austrian courtly culture more generally, relying heavily on importing or adapting Italian idioms and styles. The style that emerged at Austrian courts after the war was essentially Italian, not only in style and form, but often in content and implementation as well. The visual aspect of the Counter-Reformation project in the Austrian crown lands was largely executed by Italian artists and most of the top musical appointments in Vienna were occupied by Italians.

The ethos behind the baroque style cultivated in greater Austria, as Evans so neatly articulates, ‘drew on illusion and allusion; it strove desperately for completeness; it longed for medieval reassurance’. Furthermore, it sought ‘the same synthesis and reconciliation of opposites, employing the same contrived vocabulary of metaphor to baffle and amaze’, and ‘indulged the same tendency toward the antiquarian and the obscure.’