Preface -- Prelude: Music - A Philosophico-Semiotic Approach -- Chapter 1. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music -- 1.1 "Being" in music (Ontology) -- 1.2 The subject -- 1.3 Me (Moi) and Self (Soi) in music -- 1.4 Towards music analysis -- 1.5 Results -- Part I. THE CLASSICAL STYLE -- Chapter 2. Mozart, or, the Idea of a Continuous Avant-garde -- 2.1 What is the avant-garde? -- 2.2 Between individual and society -- or, How the Moi and Soi of the composer meet -- 2.4 The freedom and necessity of composing -- Chapter 3. Existential and Transcendental Analysis of Music -- 3.1 More on analysis -- 3.2 From modalities to metamodalities -- 3.3 Some theoretical results -- 3.4 Observations on the Beethovenian discourse -- 3.5 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 7 in E flat major, 1st movement: An exercise in existential analysis -- Chapter 4. Listening to Beethoven: Universal or National, Classic or Romantic? -- 4.1 The performer's Beethoven -- 4.2 British common sense -- 4.3 Music as conceptual activity -- 4.4 Adorno as pre-semiotician -- 4.5 And intonations -- Part II. The Romantic Era -- Chapter 5. The irony of romanticism -- 5.1 Irony as part of Romantic ideology -- Chapter 6. "ein leiser Ton gezogen ...": Robert Schumann's Fantasie in C major (op. 17) in the light of existential semiotics -- 6.1 Introduction -- 6.2 Genesis -- 6.3 From modes of being to the Z model and its temporalization -- 6.4 Levels of musical signification in the Fantasie -- 6.5 Existential tones of the Fantasie? -- Chapter 7. Brahms and the "Lyric I": A Hermeneutic Sign Analysis -- 7.1 Introduction -- 7.2 Semantics: Basic oppositions -- 7.3 "Instrumentation" of the poetic language -- 7.4 Musical paradigms -- 7.5 Interpretation - Four musical-poetic situations -- Chapter 8. Brünnhilde's Choice.

or, a Journey into Wagnerian Semiosis: Intuitions and Hypotheses -- 8.1 Introduction -- 8.2 Wagner's early operas -- 8.3 The Nibelungen Ring -- 8.4 Some remarks on the later operas -- Chapter 9. Do Wagner's leitmotifs have a system? -- 9.1 Leitmotif diagrams -- 9.2 Systematization in terms of content -- 9.3 Music-analytic point of view -- 9.4 Semiotic approach -- Part III. Rhetorics and Synaesthesias -- Chapter 10. Proust and Wagner -- 10.1 Wagner in Proust's Correspondence -- 10.2 Wagner in Proust's writings and novel -- 10.3 Proust and musicians -- 10.4 Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947) -- 10.5 The presence of Wagner in À la recherche du temps perdu -- 10.6 Species of narration -- 10.7 Ekphrasis and levels of texts -- Chapter 11. Rhetoric and Musical Discourse -- 11.1 Rhetoric as Speech Act -- 11.2 The Classics -- 11.3 Applications to music -- 11.4 Rhetoric through the ages -- Chapter 12. The semiosis of light in music: from synaesthesias to narratives -- 12.1 Introduction -- 12.2 Bases for synaesthesias -- 12.3 Synaesthesias in artistic practices -- 12.4 Is it possible to measure timbre? -- 12.5 Semiotics of light -- 12.6 Theory of light in music -- 12.7 Light in music: Examples and analyses from music history -- Chapter 13. The implicit musical semiotics of Marcel Proust -- 13.1 Toward new areas of sign theory -- 13.2 Music at the salon of Madame Verdurin -- 13.3 The Proustian "musical model": A Greimassian explication -- 13.4 Semiotic analysis: Proust's description of a soirée at Madame Verdurin's -- Chapter 14. M. K. Čiurlionis and the interrelationships of arts -- 14.1 Analysis -- Chapter 15. Čiurlionis, Sibelius and Nietzsche: Three profiles and interpretations -- 15.1 Narrative space -- 15.2 Painted sonatas -- 15.3 Sibelius - Synaesthetician -- 15.4 ... and Nietzsche.

15.5 Conclusion: Toward existential and transcendental semiotic interpretations -- Part IV. In the Slavonic World -- Chapter 16. An essay on Russian music -- 16.1 Emergent Russian qualities in music history -- 16.2 Glinka -- 16.3 Rimsky-Korsakov -- 16.4 Tchaikovsky -- 16.5 Rachmaninov -- 16.6 Shostakovitch -- 16.7 Semiotic interpretation -- Chapter 17. The stylistic development of a composer as a cognition of the musicologist: Bohuslav Martinů -- 17.1 Orientation to the style of Martinů -- 17.2 Fourth Symphony -- Postlude I -- Chapter 18. Do Semantic Aspects of Music Have a Notation? -- Postlude II -- Chapter 19. Music - Superior Communication -- 19.1 Music and medicine: Some reflections -- 19.2 Transcendence and nonlinear communication -- Glossary of Terms -- Bibliography -- Index of persons and musical works.