In the context of Bohemia and Moravia, music history has inherited a strange legacy from literary history. I use the plural ‘narratives’ at the start of the book to highlight the fact that there is no single national narrative, but rather several competing ones, written along linguistic, religious, confessional and, later, geographical lines. These are not stable concepts and the determining factors of ‘nation’, real and imagined, changed over time. So when eighteenth-century writers describe Bohemian patriotism, it would be anachronistic to apply this to the same idea of ‘nation’ understood amongst the Hussites, for example. Certainly, up to the second half of the eighteenth century, one common strand in the idea of the Czech nation is language. But even within this stream of historical narrative, there are diverting and competing rivulets. However, a ‘Czech’ identity was clearly observed in the literature of the time—usually described in contrast to a German one. After the Thirty Years War these identities became even more complicated. It remains possible sometimes to clearly identify one from the other (and this certainly happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), but in other cases the distinction is impossible and-or of little use to the historian. In the context of cities and at many courts, the two, the German and the Czech, were too close together for too long to be easily or usefully separated from one another—especially in Prague.