t was no accident that the idea to write an opera based on material from the 30 Year's War occured to the composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann in the years 1934/35. Almost 300 years after that war which for Germany was a devastating and traumatic historical event, Hartmann saw himself living in a time also threatened by war and destruction; with this powerful material he wanted to pose an answer to the period in which he lived and to suggest an alternate and opposing position.

Because Hartmann wanted to connect "Simplicius" with a humanistic protest against war and brutality, he arranged the piece not as an opera with a plot, but as a series of tableaux with a layer of textual and musical commentary. Hartmann's musical language in "Simplicius Simplicissimus" underscores the character of the work as a parable, as epic theater in the Brechtian sense. "Simplicius Simplicissimus" is one of the most impressive testimonies of the resistance against the dictatorship of the National Socialism in Germany.