Wolfgang Caspar Printz was one of several late-seventeenth-century novelists who captured in their works a sense of contemporary life. Printz, like Johann Beer and Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, experienced the life he wrote about; in his case it was that of a musician in the service of the military, the city-dwelling middle class, and the court.

Printz was born on 10 October 1641 in Waldthurn, a small town in the southern Palatinate not far from the Czech border; his father was a former military officer, a forester, and, later, a tax collector. In 1649, under pressure from the Counter-Reformation, the Lutheran Printz family moved to Vohenstrauss, a town under the control of the Lutheran Duke von Sultzbach. In Vohenstrauss he studied under several recognized musicians, including Wilhelm Stöckel and Andreas Paul von der Heyd. In 1654 he attended the Latin gymnasium in Weiden, a city not far from his...