Songs from this and that country

"It is 1996: a mortar shell explodes, shredding nine Sarajevan citizens, while a Canadian opera singer and others huddle together in horrified solidarity; thirty years earlier: a mother gives birth to a caul baby, a strange child who seems able to will events into being; forty-five years earlier: a young man returns home from the Italian front and his hair has turned snow white; 600 years earlier: a young woman leaves her father, a despot under t...