The Romantic generation

• 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