1. Wagner and the problematics of "absolute music" in the nineteenth century: Ideas of absolute music ; Questions of autonomy ; Content and/or/as form ; Absolute music and "ideas: a new determinacy?
2. Beethoven reception and the hermeneutic impulse: "poetic ideas" and new forms: Beethoven's "poetic ideas": notes on the genesis of a critical tradition ; Poetics, heroics, funérailles ; Fear of the Fifth: the uncanniness of instrumental speech ; Beethoven's "sketches" (poetic intentions and musical consequences)
3. Engendering music drama: Opera and Drama and its metaphors: Metaphors of gender, and others; Natural sciences: reproductive biology and a theory of "evolution"; Music mastered, poetic reason (nearly) seduced: allegory and antithesis
4. The "poetic-musical period" and the "evolution" of Wagnerian form: Periode and Entwicklung ; "Evolving" period-complexes and Wagner's evolution: three dialogues
5. Endless melodies: Wagner and his critics around 1860 (Wagner's melody
all or none?) ;

Melody, origins, and utopias of regression (melody as the origin of speech and poetry in Opera and Drama) ; Melody as form
6. Motives and motivations: leitmotif and "symphonic" drama: Warum? (motives to musical form) ; The birth of the music drama from the "labor-pains of program music" ; Motif, motive, Motiv: dramatic motivations and "symphonic form" ; Delirium and death as transgressive motives: "dramatic symphony" and "symphonic drama" ; Dénouements (motivic threads, dramatic plots, musical knots and resolutions).