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

ISBN-13: 9781107014305 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 464 str.

David Trippett

Opis

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."

Recenzje

'Thoroughly original … Trippett reconstructs a polyphonic, virtual dialogue between diverse disciplines, from physics via chemistry to medicine, in which Wagner appears as a virtual rather than real participant, though one to be taken seriously … The book is an enormously illuminating study of discursive contexts from Wagner's theory and practice that reveals the intriguing proximity of Wagner's experiments to the materialist epistemology of contemporary natural science.' Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, translated from Wagnerspectrum

Spis treści

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.