David Lewin taught composition at UC Berkeley and at SUNY Stony Brook, and later taught music theory at Yale and Harvard Universities. His music-theoretic writings include many articles and two previous books: Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (1987), and Musical Form and Transformation (1993). He was the recipient of honorary degrees from the University of Chicago and from the New England Conservatory of Music for his work in music theory.

• 1.: Figaro's Mistakes


• 2.: Musical analysis as stage direction


• 3.: Crudel! perchè finora . . .


• Postscript.


• Section II


• Introduction.


• 4.: Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception


• 5.: Auf dem Flusse: Image and Background in a Schubert Song


• 6.: Ihr Bild


• Section III


• Introduction


• 7.: Clara Schumann's Setting of "Ich stand"


• 8.: R. Schumann's Anfangs wollt' ich: A study in Phrygian and modern minor


• 9.: Auf einer Burg (In a fortress)


• Section IV


• Introduction


• 10.: Amfortas's Prayer to Titurel and the Role of D in Parsifal: The Tonal Spaces of the Drama and the Enharmonic Cb/B


• 11.: Some Notes on Analyzing Wagner: The Ring and Parsifal


• 12.: Tristan-well-made-play and theater of passion; the teleology of functional tonality and the self-propagation of transformational atonality


• Section V


• 13.: Die Schwestern


• Section VI


• Introduction.


• 14.: Women's Voices and the Fundamental Bass


• 15.: Toward the Analysis of a Schoenberg Song (Op. 15, No. XI)


• 16.: A Way into Schoenberg's Opus 15, Number 7


• 17.: Vocal Meter in Schoenberg's Atonal Music, with a Note on a Serial Haupstimme


• 18.: Moses und Aron: Some General Remarks, and Analytic Notes for Act I, Scene 1


• Section VII


• Introduction.


• 19.: Some Problems and Resources of Music Theory

Throughout his career, David Lewin laboured to make even the most abstract theory speak to the experience of the ordinary listener. This book combines many of Lewin's classic articles on song and opera with newly drafted chapters on songs of Brahms, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Milton Babbitt. Bound together by Lewin's cogent insight, the resulting collection constitutes a major statement concerning the methodological problems associated with interpretationof texted music.