Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity by David Trippett (review)

Abstract

Wagner's Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity. By David Trippett. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xiv, 448 p. ISBN 9781107014305. $110.] Appendices, bibliographic ref- erences, index.David Trippett's Wagner's Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2013) explores cultural circumstances al- lowed Wagner to arrive at his theory of melody as a means of communication and makes [Wagner's] melodies possible in the form they take (p. 11). The project of Wagner's Melodies is to investigate the role of melody within far-reaching realms of nineteenth-century scholarship-from mu- sic theory, philosophy, politics, linguistics, and legal studies to natural and physical sciences-and demonstrate the relation- ships between these strands of discourse and Richard Wagner's aesthetic universe.This is likely one of the first published attempts to draw connections between Wagner's aesthetics of expression and the nineteenth-century world of scientific in- quiry, and the results are fascinating. Quoting Hector Berlioz, Trippett writes in the second chapter of his book, [Melody] is a gift of nature (p. 70). Exploring the natural autogenesis of inspira- tion, Trippett reveals a range of scientific measures undertaken in nineteenth-century Germany to pinpoint the physiological ori- gins of cognition. Many of the sci- entific ventures that Trippett describes in this chapter and elsewhere suggest a trend toward understanding melodic invention as a cognitive rather than occult in- spiration, a real divergence away from the coexistent conception of melody as a result of God's grace (p. 78). Demonstrative of this fascination with the psychology of writing was the invention of the psychograph, a machine that measured inventiveness as nervous electric- ity, i.e. as literalized material thought (p. 101). This device, among others Trippett also describes, was used mid-century as a means of probing into the question where do melodies come from? (p. 93).Though Wagner sometimes seems to re- cede in Trippett's discussions of this and other broad-based issues treated through- out the book, in this section, Trippett even- tually posits that Wagner's seemingly un- conscious creative process was just what practitioners of the psychograph sought to understand (p. 84). Trippett also describes a special fascination among psychologists with the free, creativity es- poused by Wagner's characters in Die Meistersinger and Lohengrin; interestingly, both operas seem to thematize the funda- mental questions of origins that period psychologists sought to understand (p. 93). These operas, then, according to Trippett, are somewhat self-reflexive in that they seem to be constructed according to this of Wagnerian unconscious creativity, while also narrating the method- ological elusiveness of craftsman- ship (p. 93).Trippett addresses Wagner's understand- ing of the origins of his own melodies throughout the book, but provides espe- cially novel insights on this issue in his chapter on the legal challenges the com- poser faced during his lifetime. One of the most interesting aspects of this chapter is Trippett's description of the nineteenth- century impression of musical plagiarism as an un-German act (p. 131). As Trippett demonstrates, Wagner was subject to accu- sations of plagiarism as late as 1870 in the form of both imitation and spe- cific hackwork (p. 131). Much of this chapter reveals the legal repercussions of such accusations, Wagner's responses to his challengers, the veracity of allegations lev- eled against the composer, and the general understanding of musical originality during Wagner's lifetime. Though the chapter is, in many respects, very thorough, the issue of the un-Germanness of musical plagia- rism probably deserves more attention than it receives. …