Good Material, Bad Science and Ugly Melody: Tash Siddiqui grapples with a dauntingly intellectual study of Wagner’s melodic praxis

Review of David Trippett, Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 83–7.

‘What does all this have to do with Wagner?’ asks David Trippett on page 191 of his formidable account of Wagner’s Melodies. Readers who – musicological machete in hand – have traversed the dense thickets of Trippett’s prose and made it thus far may be forgiven if they, once or twice, have asked themselves the same question. Despite the title, Wagner’s Melodies is emphatically not a 21st-century guide to Wagner’s melodic material along the lines of Ernest Newman’s Wagner Nights. Paradoxically, Trippett poses his question in one of those rare sections of his book where Wagner is placed centre stage, a penetrating ‘excursus’ on Bellini and Wagner’s Italy which is one of the book’s highlights.