Frontmatter --;Contents --;Preface --;Prelude: Music --;A Philosophico-Semiotic Approach --;Chapter 1. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music --;Part I. THE CLASSICAL STYLE --;Chapter 2. Mozart, or, the Idea of a Continuous Avant-garde --;Chapter 3. Existential and Transcendental Analysis of Music --;Chapter 4. Listening to Beethoven: Universal or National, Classic or Romantic? --;Part II. The Romantic Era --;Chapter 5. The irony of romanticism --;Chapter 6." ... ein leiser Ton gezogen ... ": Robert Schumann's Fantasie in C major (op. 17) in the light of existential semiotics --;Chapter 7. Brahms and the "Lyric I": A Hermeneutic Sign Analysis --;Chapter 8. Brünnhilde's Choice; or, a Journey into Wagnerian Semiosis: Intuitions and Hypotheses --;Chapter 9. Do Wagner's leitmotifs have a system? --;Part III. Rhetorics and Synaesthesias --;Chapter 10. Proust and Wagner --;Chapter 11. Rhetoric and Musical Discourse --;Chapter 12. The semiosis of light in music: from synaesthesias to narratives --;Chapter 13. The implicit musical semiotics of Marcel Proust --;Chapter 14. M.K. Čiurlionis and the interrelationships of arts --;Chapter 15. Čiurlionis, Sibelius and Nietzsche: Three profiles and interpretations --;Part IV. In the Slavonic World --;Chapter 16. An essay on Russian music --;Chapter 17. The stylistic development of a composer as a cognition of the musicologist: Bohuslav Martinů --;Postlude I --;Chapter 18. Do Semantic Aspects of Music Have a Notation? --;Postlude II --;Chapter 19. Music --;Superior Communication --;Glossary of Terms --;Bibliography --;Index of persons and musical works.
Music intrudes to our most intimate subjectivity, thus making it a privileged field to which so-called "existential semiotics", a new theory and philosophy developed by the author himself, may be applied.