Preface

Music and Sound

Imagining the sound

Romantic paradoxes: the absent melody

Classical and Romantic pedal

Conception and realization

Tone color and structure

Fragments

Renewal

The Fragment as Romantic form

Open and closed

Words and music

The emancipation of musical language

Experimental endings and cyclical forms

Ruins

Disorders

Quotations and memories

Absence: the melody suppressed

Mountains and Song Cycles

Horn calls

Landscape and music

Landscape and the double time scale

Mountains as ruins

Landscape and memory

Music and memory

Landscape and death: Schubert

The unfinished workings of the past

Song cycles without words

Formal Interlude

Mediants

Four-bar phrases

Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

Poetic inspiration and craft

Counterpoint and the single line

Narrative form: the ballade

Changes of mode

Italian opera and J. S. Bach

Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Keyboard exercises

Virtuosity and decoration (salon music?)

Morbid intensity

Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Folk music?

Rubato

Modal harmony?

Mazurka as Romantic form

The late mazurkas

Freedom and tradition

Liszt: On Creation as Performance

Disreputable greatness

Die Lorelei: the distraction of influence

The Sonata: the distraction of respectability

The invention of Romantic piano sound: the Etudes

Conception and realization

The masks of Liszt

Recomposing: Sonnet no. 104

Self-Portrait as Don Juan

Berlioz: Liberation from the Central European Tradition

Blind idolaters and perfidious critics

Tradition and eccentricity: the idée fixe

Chord color and counterpoint

Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scène d'amour"

Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch

Mastering Beethoven

Transforming Classicism

Classical form and modern sensibility

Religion in the concert hall

Romantic Opera: Politics, Trash, and High Art

Politics and melodrama

Popular art

Bellini

Meyerbeer

Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal

The irrational

The inspiration of Beethoven and Clara Wieck

The inspiration of E.T.A. Hoffmann

Out of phase

Lyric intensity

Failure and triumph

Index of Names and Works