Norton, 1999) and the text book Romantic Music (W.W. Norton, 1984). Carlotta Sorba is Associate professor of Contemporary History and Cultural History at the University of Padua (Italy). She has worked intensively around theatre, music and society in nineteenth-century Europe. She is the author of Teatri. L'Italia del melodramma nell'et del Risorgimento, Bologna 2001 and the editor of Il secolo del teatro. Spettacoli e spettacolarit nell'Ottocento europeo, "Memoria e ricerca", 29, 2008. Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He also serves as Associate Editor of The Musical Quarterly and The Opera Quarterly, and was a member of the Cornell University Department of History between 1988 and 2005. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as the Berlin Prize from the American Academy, Berlin, and has published Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Cornell University Press, 2000), and Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and 19th- Century Music Princeton University Press, 2004). Philipp Ther took his PhD in history at Free University in Berlin(1997) and teaches presently European history at the European University Institute in Florence. Among his publications are: In der Mitte der Gesellschaft. Operntheater in Zentraleuropa 1815-1914, Vienna (Oldenbourg, 2006). A revised English version of the book is forthcoming in 2010 under the title Under the Spell of Nations. Opera Theatres in