The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini

Historiography, Analysis, Criticism

Nicholas Mathew, Benjamin Walton

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780521768054
• eBook ISBN:
  9781107595705
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Pleasure in history
• Part I The age of Beethoven and Rossini?
• 1 Dahlhaus’s Beethoven-Rossini Stildualismus: lingering legacies of the text-event dichotomy
• 2 Beethoven, Rossini – and others
• 3 Heilige Trias, Stildualismus, Beethoven: on the limits of nineteenth-century Germanic music historiography
• 4 Rossini and Beethoven in the reception of Schubert
• Part II Senses of place
• 5 Two styles in 1830s London: “The form and order of a perspicuous unity”
• 6 Looking north: Carlo Soliva and the two styles south of the Alps
• 7 “More German than Beethoven”: Rossini’s Zelmira and Italian style
• 8 On being there in 1824
• Part III Rehearings
• 9 Making overtures
• 10 Beethoven dances: Prometheus and his creatures in Vienna and Milan
• 11 Rossinian repetitions
• Part IV Crossing musical cultures
• 12 Very much of this world: Beethoven, Rossini, and the historiography of modernity
• 13 Schopenhauer and Rossinian universality: on the Italianate in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music
• 14 Elements of disorder: appealing Beethoven vs. Rossini
• 15 Role reversal: Rossini and Beethoven in early biopics
• List of works cited
• Index