Wagner's Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity

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

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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.

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Trippett's book is more intellectual history than musicology or music criticism ... Reporting at length on the results of his research into the state of certain sciences in Wagner's time while not losing sight of the composer's own tortuous engagement with language and melody, as well as with singers (Schroeder-Devriernt) and composers (Bellini and Liszt), Trippett has no difficulty in laying bare the paradox that is the work of art as material reality

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