dulce bellum inexpertis

About the composition

The Residentie Bach Choir selected the composer Bram Kortekaas from among all Dutch composers who have graduated in the past fifteen years. As the text, the pacifist pamphlet Dulce bellum inexpertis by the Dutch thinker Desiderius Erasmus was chosen. It is a secular text in Latin against war, which fits perfectly with The Hague, the city of peace and justice. In it, Erasmus outlines what he sees as the deceptive ideas about war in his time and sets against them his own pacifist theories based on the Gospel. “Everyone who knows what war is abhors it. There is nothing worse and nothing that should be avoided more. War is inhuman and unchristian,” he states. The text was chosen before the full-scale war in Ukraine. This conflict makes Erasmus’s text about the misery of war even more meaningful and relevant.