A basic tenet of literary studies is that aesthetic structures are politically significant because they represent an artist's response to the political implications of cultural codes with which the recipient of the modern work is also acquainted. This tenet provides the basis for the ideological associations attending the appearance of music in the modern German narrative. With this understanding of the arts as involved in often unacknowledged ideological forces within a culture, Marc Weiner attempts to bridge a gap between the recent rewarding infusion of modern cultural and literary theory in musicology, the most recent and politically insightful examinations of narrative structures in the modern novel, and the methodologically conservative area of musical-literary relations in Germanic studies.