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The Deaths and Sufferings of the Innocent

Although every historical period has distinct characteristics, artists, musicians, and writers often pursue common themes over time as humans are fascinated with similar ideas. The portrayal of death and suffering has been favored throughout history in different art forms as it channels emotions within both the authors and the receivers. This essay will discuss the painting Guernica by Modern artist Pablo Picasso, A Modest Proposal by Rococo satirist Jonathan Swift, and the Lied "Erlkönig" by Romantic composer Franz Schubert on how they illustrated deaths and sufferings of different innocent beings.

Guernica is a painting commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to display at the Paris Expo as a statement to confront the rise of fascist power in Spain. Though classically trained like all the great artists who preceded him, Picasso painted Guernica in Cubist planes to illustrate dismembered bodies and the disparity in the air after the Nazis aerial-bombed the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. Although the Basque Country has had a history of conflicts with the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, it is heartbreaking that Franco would allow other Axis powers to perform such a brutal bombing in his home territory. Picasso attempted to express his abhorrence of the military caste that "sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death" through this painting.

A Modest Proposal proposed a solution through bitter satire to the poverty and suffering of the poor in Ireland: to sacrifice children of the poor as meat on the dinner table of the rich. The essay by Swift discussed the death of the poor in two situations. First, Swift explicitly depicted death in the context of poverty in Ireland -- the poor were dying every day from cold and famine. On the other hand, Swift implied the concept when he evaluates the viability of serving their children as meat in the market. He suggested different culinary methods to handle the "meat," a go-to-market strategy to sell it and sustain the business, and the number of servings a child could provide. With a disturbing, self-righteous solution that would lead to killing thousands of children, Swift pointed out the disastrous consequence of solely relying on reasoning to solve human problems.

"Erlkönig", or Erl-King by Schubert, is a Lied based on a poem about a young boy seized by a creepy supernatural being. Schubert composed a rising pitch for the boy's vocal as his hysteria grew. When the narrator revealed that the child was dead, piano accompaniment from both hands came to a complete stop. Schubert created the first composition of "Erlkönig" in 1815, the first year of peace after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1814. Schubert was probably keenly aware of the political happenings at the time and might have seen the compromise made by the European powers nothing more than the feeble attempts of the father comforting his child under attack. Schubert's adaptation of "Erlkönig" represented popular supernatural forces in Romantic folktales, emphasizing the death and suffering of the innocent child by contrasting yet unifying musical elements.

Guernica, A Modest Proposal, and "Erlkönig" depicted the deaths and sufferings of the innocent: the citizens in Guernica, the poor in A Modest Proposal, and the child in "Erlkönig". It is fascinating that they left the audience with different sentiments: powerlessness in A Modest Proposal, horror in "Erlkönig", and devastation in Guernica.