The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini Historiography, Analysis, Criticism

Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' – a symbolic duo, who represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast was to shape the composition, performance, reception and historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogue with each other, with the aim of unpicking the origins, consequences and fallacies of the opposition between the two composers and what they came to represent. In fifteen chapters, contributors explore topics ranging from the concert lives of early nineteenth-century capitals to the mythmaking of early cinema, and from the close analysis of individual works by Beethoven and Rossini to the cultural politics of nineteenth-century music histories.

Introduction: pleasure in history Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton; Part I. The Age of Beethoven and Rossini?: 1. Dahlhaus's Beethoven-Rossini Stildualismus: lingering legacies of the text event dichotomy James Hepokoski; 2. Beethoven, Rossini - and others James Webster; 3. Heilige Trias, Stildualismus, Beethoven: the limits of nineteenth-century Germanic music historiography Gundula Kreuzer; 4. Rossini and Beethoven in the reception of Schubert Suzannah Clark; Part II. Senses of Place: 5. Two styles in 1830s London: 'the form and order of a perspicuous unity' Roger Parker; 6. Looking north: Carlo Soliva and the two styles south of the Alps Martin Deasy; 7. 'More German than Beethoven': Rossini's Zelmira and Italian style Benjamin Walton; 8. On being there in 1824 Nicholas Mathew; Part III. Rehearings: 9. Making overtures Scott Burnham; 10. Beethoven dances: Prometheus and his creatures in Vienna and Milan Mary Ann Smart; 11. Rossinian repetitions Emanuele Senici; Part IV. Crossing Musical Cultures: 12. Very much of this world: Beethoven, Rossini and the historiography of modernity Julian Johnson; 13. Schopenhauer and Rossinian universality: on the Italianate in Schopenhauer's metaphysics of music Yael Braunschweig; 14. Elements of disorder: appealing Beethoven vs Rossini John Deathridge; 15. Role reversal: Rossini and Beethoven in early biopics Richard Will.

Nicholas Mathew is a professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Political Beethoven (2013) and has published articles in, among others, Musical Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Music, 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and the volume Engaging Haydn (edited by Richard Will and Mary Hunter, 2012). He is currently editor, with W. Dean Sutcliffe, of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music.
Benjamin Walton is a Senior University Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is the author of Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (2007), and is currently writing a book about the spread of opera beyond Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.