Blurring stereotypes : 'Aus dem Leben eines Tonkünstlers' as a medium of Italian musical character around 1800

How can music history help us understand the establishment of national character? This article discusses a prosaic text by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz as a medium for implementing stereotypical ideas of "the Italian" in German music historiography and, thereby, in public consciousness. It shows how particular musical qualities of the story's fictional protagonists are blurred with ideas of national character. Against this background, the predominant reception of the author Rochlitz in the realm of German music historiography can be reevaluated from a more transnational scholarly perspective. Key to this reassessment is investigation into the categories of fictional and musical characters with regard to notions of both "the German" and "the Italian."