Wagner's melodies

This dissertation examines Richard Wagner's engagement with the concept of melody. From the mid-1840s, Wagner was lambasted for lacking the ability to compose melody, but by 1850 he had placed the expressive power of melody decisively at the center of his musical Weltanschauung. In doing so he was criticized vociferously for seeking to cover up his deficiency with exaggerated claims for his all-pervasive melodic prowess, resulting in stinging labels such as "Wagner-enemy of melody." This disjuncture is indicative of the intractable problems theorists had in defining melody during the nineteenth century. Figures such as A. Reicha and A. B. Marx admitted they were simply unable to formulate an adequate basis for melodic pedagogy owing to mutable musical tastes, contradictory models of genius, and the adoption of melody by speculative philosophers as a monstrance par excellence. In short, "melody" had become a radically over-determined concept and hence one that was dauntingly unstable. The only solution proved to be the objectification of melodic expression, i.e. a shift toward the materialist view of subjectivity, but even here a majority of critics judged attempts at pedagogy to have failed. Against the dominance of an Italian bel canto aesthetic, I argue that melody as a compositional category was a problem for German musical identity during the Vormärz, and that the project of nation building was implicit in the search for an adequate melodic theory. Owing to Wagner's status as the poster boy of Germany's Melodielosigkeit, he became a focal point in this discourse. He sought to avoid the earlier difficulties of melodic theory by redefining melody as a linguistic concept in the absence of normative music theory.

This move was not entirely unprecedented: the burgeoning discipline of German Philologie (historical linguistics) gave voice to the most profound explosion of a national historical imagination in the story of European nationalism, and Wagner effectively came of age during its emergence as a mainstay of language studies, the implications of which few commentators have taken seriously. Precisely the physiology of speech-sounds qua melody led to a fully materialist reading of melodic expression, resulting in a kind of double vision where sound itself was both the property of aesthetic speculation and acoustic scrutiny, both transcendent and real physical vibrations. While Wagner himself resisted the perspective of the natural sciences, I interrogate this parallax perspective, and argue that the primacy he accords to the human voice as arbiter of melodic expression points finally to his position at the apex of an inheritance of melodrama.