PROLOGUE: An Unlikely Genre : The Rise of the Symphony -- 1 CHAPTER ONE: Listening with Imagination : The Revolution in Aesthetics ; From Kant to Hoffmann ; Idealism and the Changing Perception of Perception ; Idealism and the New Aesthetics of Listening -- CHAPTER TWO: Listening as Thinking: From Rhetoric to Philosophy ; Listening in a Rhetorical Framework ; Listening in a Philosophical Framework ; Art as Philosophy -- CHAPTER THREE: Listening to Truth: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony ; The Infinite Sublime ; History as Knowing ; The Synthesis of Conscious and Unconscious ; Organic Coherence ; Beyond the Sublime -- CHAPTER FOUR: Listening to the Aesthetic State: Cosmopolitanism ; The Communal Voice of the Symphony ; The Imperatives of Individual and Social Synthesis ; The State as Organism ; Schiller's Idea of the Aesthetic State ; Goethe's Pedagogical Province -- CHAPTER FIVE: Listening to the German State : Nationalism ; German Nationalism ; The Symphony as a "German" Genre ; The Performance Politics of the Music Festival ; The Symphony as Democracy -- EPILOGUE: Listening to Form : The Refuge of Absolute Music

Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, this work draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources - philosophical, literary, political, and musical - to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first. It is a reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening

Dawson