Elaine Kelly is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Edinburgh. She is co-editor, together with Amy Wlodarski, of Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture (2013). Her research has been published in journals such as 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

"[Kelly] maps new territory while leaving room for more focused studies to generate a more detailed portrait of the era. The volume is a noteworthy contribution to the understanding of the politics of classical music in Germany in the second half of the 20th century. Recommended." --Choice

"Explores how a society is defined by its culture and its choices on what parts of that culture reach canonical status." --The Beethoven Journal

"This book is a significant study." --Classical Net

"The musical world in the GDR has been the focus of sustained scholarly attention in recent years, and Elaine Kelly's book makes a valuable contribution to this growing body of work. She offers an insightful examination of the place of the nineteenth-century musical canon in the context of the GDR, and in doing so makes useful observations on the East German variant of socialism more generally. Kelly makes effective use of a wide range of sources, including official state documents, musicological writings, and press reviews, as well as musical works themselves. She places herself in the broad consensus of recent GDR scholarship, which blurs the line between state and society, emphasizes the negotiated nature of power relations, and sees the East German dictatorship as a nuanced one."--German Studies Review