Rosetti's early life remains shrouded in obscurity. Even the most basic facts surrounding his identity and the date and place of his birth have been open to multiple interpretations. Until recently, it was believed that Rosetti was born Anton Rösler in Bohemia and that he later Italianized his name. This assumption was based on a biographical account that appeared in Ernst Ludwig Gerber's Neues historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler in 1812–14. Gerber's information, modified from the first edition of his dictionary published more than two decades earlier, was accepted by later commentators with-out question. The composer's first modern biographer, Oskar Kaul, recounted Gerber's interpretation, and subsequently it was passed on in the work of others, including my own earlier writings. Newly uncovered information, however, challenges Gerber's account, and requires that the issue be reconsidered.

Shortly after Rosetti's death, Heinrich Bossler's journal, Musikalische Korrespondenz, carried a short commentary on the composer entitled “Noch etwas von Rosetti.” Although not signed, this article was probably written by Bossler himself and for that reason assumes added authority, as he was known to have been a close personal friend of the composer. The purpose of Bossler's piece was to correct a widely held misunderstanding about the composer's name that had found its way into a report published in an earlier issue of the journal. Bossler makes the assertion that although Rosetti was born in Bohemia, he “was never called Rößler, but rather Rosetti from birth.”