| 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 idee fixe | |
| Chord color and counterpoint | |
| Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scene 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 | |
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