Cover -- Half-title -- Series-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Musical examples -- Preface -- Chapter outline -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Wagner and his sources -- Wagner, Hegel, and Hegel's Aesthetics -- Wagner as dilettante -- Theory versus practice -- The Hellenization of politics -- Art and scholarship -- Part I: Epic -- 1 Introduction: what is epic? -- Hegel on epic -- Wagner on epic -- 2 Retrospective narrative and the epic process -- Odysseus' telltale scar -- Siegfried's epic wound -- Epic theory vs. epic practice -- Previous solutions to "the great paradox" -- A new solution to the paradox -- 3 The orchestral narrator and elementary epic -- Definitions of an orchestral narrator -- How do leitmotifs signify? -- The spatialization of music -- Epithets, epigraphs, and leitmotifs -- 4 Spiritual and factual realities in epic -- Didactic poetry and Das Rheingold -- Cosmogony and theogony -- Humanization and Hellenization Part I: Brünnhilde as Hermes -- Humanization and Hellenization Part II: Siegmund as epic hero -- The Romantic hero and the emergence of lyric -- Part II: Lyric -- 5 Introduction: what is lyric? -- Hegel on lyric -- Wagner on lyric -- 6 Orpheus and lyric liberation -- Dramma per musica or lyrica per musica? -- The benefits of lyric for the operatic genre, audience, and artist -- The unproblematic role of lyric in Siegfried -- Lyric individuation through nature -- Lyric time and experience -- 7 First-person opera and lyric identity -- Who speaks in lyric poetry? -- The intersection of personal and national identity in Pindar -- The intersection of personal and national identity in Wagner -- 8 Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy -- The political state and the state of nature -- Siegfried as Bildungsoper -- Fafner's and Siegfried's racial ambiguity -- Snake eyes.

German lyric + French theater = the rebirth of Greek tragedy as music drama -- A bad case of writer's block? -- Part III: Drama -- 9 Introduction: what is drama? -- Hegel on drama -- Wagner on drama -- 10 Opera and tragedy -- Whats wrong with Götterdämmerung? -- The impossibility of re-creating Greek tragedy -- The viability of Hellenized drama in Germany -- Dramatic transplanting in Götterdämmerung -- 11 Opera and comedy -- The evolution and de-evolution of the chorus -- Hagen as Franco-Jewish choir master -- Parody as a bridge between the human and the divine -- 12 Resolution and ambiguity in comedy and tragedy -- The ending is only the beginning -- Tragic reconciliation -- New Comic closure -- Wagner and ambiguity -- Epilogue: Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies -- Event time and symbolic time -- Set time -- Appendices: Wagner's primary and secondary sources -- Introduction -- Appendix A: Wagner's primary sources -- Aeschylus -- Aristophanes -- Aristotle -- Demosthenes -- Euripides -- Herodotus -- Homer -- Lucian -- Ovid -- Plato -- Plutarch -- Polybius -- Sophocles -- Tacitus -- Thucydides -- Virgil -- Xenophon -- Appendix B: Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew personally -- Apel, Johann August -- Curtius, Ernst and Wolfgang Helbig -- Kochly, Hermann -- Lehrs, Samuel -- Marbach, Oswald -- Mommsen, Theodor -- Nagelsbach, Carl F. -- Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm -- Ritschl, Friedrich -- Rohde, Erwin -- Sillig, Julius -- Stein, Heinrich von -- Wagner, Adolf -- Weiss, Christian Hermann -- Wolzogen, Hans von -- Appendix C: Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation or by reading -- Creuzer, Georg Friedrich -- Droysen, Johann Gustav -- Duncker, Max -- Finlay, George -- Frantz, Constantin -- Gibbon, Edward -- Grote, George -- Hermann, Gottfried -- Hullmann, Karl Dietrich -- Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim -- Moritz, Karl Philipp.

Muller, Karl Otfried -- Niebuhr, Barthold Georg -- Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von -- Schlegel, Friedrich -- Sismondi, Jean Charles -- Voss, Johann Heinrich -- Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb -- Wieland, Christoph Martin -- Willamovitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von -- Winckelmann, Johann Joachim -- Notes -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Epilogue -- Appendices -- Appendix A -- Appendix B -- Appendix C -- Bibliography -- Index.