« À la racine de l’effondrement de l’Occident, il y a une crise culturelle et identitaire. L’Occident ne sait plus qui il est, parce qu’il ne sait plus et ne veut pas savoir qui l’a façonné, qui l’a constitué, tel qu’il a été et tel qu’il est. De nombreux pays ignorent aujourd’hui leur histoire. Cette autoasphyxie conduit naturellement à une décadence qui ouvre la voie à de nouvelles civilisations barbares. »
"When the ci-hitty gets into a bu-hoys sy-hist-em, he loses his a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry." So intones W.C. Fields in his Yukon-based Victorian absurdist two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). However, if the city you lived in was Salzburg, Austria, the idea of "a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry" was a popular one, and Salzburg's court composer Johann Michael Haydn paid tribute to it through these two little "Abbey operettas" written not for a civic theater, but for the theater at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Haydn's singspiel Die Hochzeit auf der Alm (The Wedding on the Alpine Pasture, 1763) was intended as a mere opener to Salzburg scribbler Florian Reichssiegel's ponderous five-act Latin tragedy Pietas conjugalis in Sigismundo et Maria; however, it was the singspiel that won the day.