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For the last few decades, historiography, considered as the central discipline of musicology, has explored new directions and sought inspiration for further research, consequently redefining the fundamental premises of historical musicology. This is especially true with regard to the concept of music history as the work of great individuals and the domain of artistic works, resulting from either tradition or new inventions. The validity of global and universal perspectives has been questioned, and researchers have emphasized the need to focus on local realities and day-to-day musical life. Another key topic in this ongoing debate is the (im)possibility of writing an “objective” historical narrative. The methodological foundations of the traditional Western model of music historiography have been deconstructed – a process which has revealed its profound and purely one-sided ideological profile.This publication deals with the history of music as a way of representing historical memory and as an instrument of shaping society's present. It introduces selected European historiographic concepts created outside the “official” mainstream of Western historiography. The contributions to this volume not only demonstrate the cultural diversity of the conventions in which music history is narrated, but also reveal their ideological and political determinants. As such, the book represents fascinating reading for anyone interested in the mechanisms that shape notions of the musical past, which for many nations in Central and Eastern Europe is also a key element of their identity.

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.