Genealogies of Music and Memory

The history of music is most often written as a sequence of composers and works. But a richer understanding of the music of the past may be obtained by also considering the afterlives of a composer's works. This book asks how the stage works of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) were cultivated in nineteenth-century Paris, and concludes that although the composer was not represented formally on the stage until 1859, his music was known from a wide range of musical and literary environments.