Wagner's Melodies Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity

Since the 1840s, critics have lambasted Wagner for lacking the ability to compose melody. But for him, melody was fundamental - 'music's only form'. This incongruity testifies to the surprising difficulties during the nineteenth century of conceptualizing melody. Despite its indispensable place in opera, contemporary theorists were unable even to agree on a definition for it. In Wagner's Melodies, David Trippett re-examines Wagner's central aesthetic claims, placing the composer's ideas about melody in the context of the scientific discourse of his age: from the emergence of the natural sciences and historical linguistics to sources about music's stimulation of the body and inventions for 'automatic' composition. Interweaving a rich variety of material from the history of science, music theory, music criticism, private correspondence and court reports, Trippett uncovers a new and controversial discourse that placed melody at the apex of artistic self-consciousness and generated problems of urgent dimensions for German music aesthetics.

Introduction; 1. German melody; 2. Melodielehre?; 3. Wagner in the melodic workshop; 4. Hearing voices: Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and the Lohengrin 'Recitatives'; 5. Vowels, voices, and 'original truth'; 6. Wagner's material expression; Excursus: Bellini's Sinnlichkeit and Wagner's Italy.

David Trippett is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge. His work on Wagner's music and reception, the history of aesthetics and theories of technology has appeared in various journals including 19th-Century Music, the Journal of Musicology, Musiktheorie, the Cambridge Opera Journal and The Musical Quarterly, and has earned him the Alfred Einstein award of the American Musicological Society. He has also edited and translated texts in music history, including most recently Carl Stumpf's The Origins of Music (2012), and he performs regularly as a collaborative pianist, having given concerts throughout Europe and on both coasts of the USA.