Each peri­od had its own weapons against the thought of death – from the Baroque prospect of the after­life to the clas­si­cal order and roman­tic love as the ulti­mate chal­lenger of death. Anna-Lena Perenthaler and Lauriane Follonier illus­trate how this philo­soph­i­cal evo­lu­tion res­onates in sonatas by Beethoven and Mendelssohn and in Schumann’s 5 Stücke im Volkston, which open with a humor­ous ​‘Vanitas Vanitatum’.