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