Just when you thought that there can't be anything more to say about Wagner comes the freshest, most learned and imaginative study in years. The title of David Trippett's new book might suggest that it is narrowly about melody. On the contrary, Wagner's concept of melody is a red thread, or washing-line, upon which Trippett pegs a vast array of subjects: the aesthetics of musical expression, the history of melodic pedagogy, Wagner's creative process, singers and voices, philology and physiology, media theory, the history of technology, and even music for video games. Trippett has a commanding knowledge of Wagner's theoretical writings, Wagner scholarship, Wagner's music and his compositional sketches. Wagner himself has a presence too, with his talk of digestive ailments and ice-bath cures, and his astute correspondence with acolytes and critics. Despite the book's enormous discursive scope, it makes time for sharp cinematic close-ups, so that the reader often feels he or she is standing behind the composer's shoulder. And the camera frequently pans out to reveal the bigger picture of the nineteenth-century debate between idealism and materialism. Indeed, the book's animating genius is Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011), the most influential media theorist since Marshall McLuhan. Whereas McLuhan famously decreed that media were extensions of human capability, Kittler contended that media followed their own autonomous rules, holding that epistemology was beholden to technology, and effectively removing the ‘human’ from the humanities. Although Kittler is cited only sporadically, his imprint is felt in Trippett's methodology of embedding his subject within ‘discourse networks’, complex and overlapping constellations of texts and ideas.Footnote ¹ It is also present in the contextualizing of Wagner within the history of technology (Kittler's passing comment that Aristotle had the scientific materials to create Edison's phonograph, only lacking scientific ‘immaterials’, a ‘science of the soul’, dissolves technology into discourse, flipping scientific ‘evolution’ back onto itself).Footnote ² Trippett also echoes Kittler's style of playful allusiveness. It is extraordinary how often a bit of arcana can light up conventional wisdom and deliver galvanic jolts of insight and pleasure to the reader, as when property law illuminates Wagner's anxiety of melodic influence, or pre-Edisonian experiments in voice recording shed light on Wagner's struggles to notate recitatives in Lohengrin.

The book's six chapters are cast in two big, quasi-Wagnerian ‘waves’, akin perhaps to a poetic-dramatic period. Chapters 1–3 treat melody proper, the term as it is conventionally conceived, and progress smoothly from aesthetics through pedagogy to case studies in ‘Wagner's workshop’. Trippett mines the many faults and cracks in this terrain. ‘Melody’ denoted in equal measure a plastic, schematic and thus teachable, linear gestalt; and conversely a metaphor for imagination, creativity, expression and the fluidity of formal process as a whole. Chapter 2 is a rich and intricate discussion of the major melodic treatises of the time, by Reicha, A.B. Marx, Lobe and others. Wagner's ostensibly ‘ugly’ and fragmentary lines fell foul of this melodic culture, pointing instead to an ethos of individual characteristic expression. The mainstream seems to have been Italianate plasticity, yet the paradoxical thrust of Chapter 3 is the astonishing influence exerted upon Wagner by Bellini, who Trippett suggests, after Ludwig Holtmeier, may have been as seminal for Wagner as Vivaldi was for Bach. There is a wonderfully revealing close reading of Wagner's 1839 re-composition of Bellini's aria, ‘Norma il predisse, o Druidi’, and the tight comparison with Bellini's original ‘Ah del Tebro’ nicely profiles his stylistic originality (such that it was at that time) against his stylistic debt (pp. 160–81). One particular debt is to a common Bellini melodic formula, a sequence of four unison chromatic minims, which features in both arias. A lot of bricks are made from this hay, underpinning (after Holtmeier) the shift from Ottocento Italian opera's ‘melodic chromaticism’ to Wagner's burgeoning ‘harmonic chromaticism’, and indeed the ultimate source for the Tristan motif, the formula's ne plus ultra. This left-of-field gambit is delicious in the best Kittleresque tradition. But the moment one begins to ponder it, then all sorts of other possible German or French sources for Tristan's chromaticism hove back into memory (sources exhaustively chronicled in the vast literature on Tristan), including bits of Schumann or Chopin, the slow movement of Beethoven's op. 101, and the Bach C-sharp Minor Prelude, WTC I, with which Wagner was obsessed (p. 203). On the other hand, some Kittleresque shock-tactics become increasingly plausible on reflection, as in the juxtaposition of melodic theft with property law. Trippett unearths some rare gems, such as Wilhelm Tappert's Wandernde Melodien of 1868, whose pronouncements – ‘there are no music police’ (p. 141) – indicate that melody really was thought of as an abstraction of property (just as it is today in the legal wranglings of the popular-music industry). The discourse networks build up very convincingly to explain Wagner's neurotic doubt about his stylistic originality, and the protest-too-much rhetoric of his critical writings as ‘exaggeration that conceals an insecurity’ about his debts to other composers (p. 143). What Wagner's rhetoric of creative originality conceals, chiefly, is that his practice was not that far out of line after all with mid-nineteenth-century model-based pedagogy; and the aesthetic shift from idealist inspiration to the mechanical graft of the dawning materialist age.

Tracking this broad shift towards materialist realism and sensuousness across the book, Chapter 4 instigates a linguistic turn, away from ‘melody proper’ towards the implicit melody of language. Wagner was preoccupied from an early age with the actress and chanteuse Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and he had her in mind for Elsa in Lohengrin. Lacking a conventionally beautiful operatic voice, Schröder-Devrient's declamatory genius opened up for Wagner new possibilities for language to express character and feeling. Wagner's linguistic turn was in many ways a Germanic one, and Trippett re-inserts the philologist Jacob Grimm into the Wagner back-story (pp. 303–29), showing how his ideas prompted Wagner to inscribe emotional content within the sounds of root syllables. ‘Sound’ becomes the watchword for the final chapter, as the material reality of music's sonic manifestation impacts the nervous system of Wagner's listeners. The famous picture on the dust jacket says it all: Wagner is hammering a crotchet into a bleeding ear. It is in the finale of his book that Trippett converges with Kittler's genealogy of sound reproduction and telecommunication, back-projected into pre-Edisonian discourse networks. Wagner is placed cheek-by-jowl with arcane misfires in this technological history. For instance, the Parisian scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who gave a talk on ‘The Graphic Fixation of the Voice’, invented a ‘phonautograph’, which sought to preserve the diction of famous actors by inscribing raw waveforms onto smoke-blackened paper (p. 257). In this capture of minute fluctuations of speech and melody, the Lacanian ‘Real’ (i.e., real sound) makes its debut onto the scientific stage. Trippett strikingly connects Scott de Martinville's experiment with Wagner's struggles to notate expressive nuance in his Lohengrin recitatives, on the back of Louis Köhler's 1853 Die Melodie der Sprache. Köhler, a Wagner acolyte, made grandiose claims in his book about the scientifically verifiable melodies intrinsic to poetic texts, claims dismissed by Wagner himself as foolish, and smashed by Lobe by the knock-down argument that the same words can be re-set by different music, even in the same work (as they are, of course, constantly in Wagner). Wagner's grappling with his evolving, as yet incipient, speech-melody is borne out in Trippett's probing analysis of the sketches to Lohengrin in chapter 4, the work which emerges as the hub for many of the discussions in the book. In chapter 6, it emerges that the ‘true miracle’ of the Lohengrin's swan, which seems to convey the hero hundreds of miles in the blink of an eye, is a metaphor for miracles of technology, such as the coming telephone. The visceral effects of Wagner's sounds are also miraculous: just as the sound of declaimed language bypasses verbal comprehension to create feeling in the listener, sensations would seem to bypass the mind to manipulate directly the listener's nervous system. In the age of Gustav Fechner, the founder of mid-century psychophysics, a fata morgana of materialist aesthetics is that listeners vibrate to the music like strings or membranes, their critical faculties disengaged. Circumspect as ever, Trippett, after Michael Haedelberger, points out the asymmetry in ‘Fechner's Law’ – that ‘while mental change brings about physical change in an individual, “the reverse is not necessarily true”‘ (p. 339). Although Wagner's notion of ‘Gefühl’ blends affective feeling and physiological sensation, the traffic flows mostly in one direction: felt emotion may be evinced through nervous sensations, but nervous sensations don't directly cause how Wagner's music makes us feel. This very helpfully keeps imagination in the listener's driving seat, fending off reductionist attacks on the complex and mediated character of artistic creativity. It is an argument that still resonates today; the melodic waveform images of Köhler and his contemporaries could have been lifted straight out of many current music-psychology journals, especially given the human sciences’ recent affective turn. Wagner's favourite wave metaphor – his ‘recurring image of “rising and sinking saves of melody”‘ – isn't helpful in this regard, as it tantalizes us with the mirage that understanding his music can be as immediate as looking at an emotional seismograph. Chapter 6 begins with the punchy verdict that ‘Oper und Drama is a crash site [between] aesthetic theory and a materialist concern for the senses’ (p. 330). Trippett, like Wagner, walks the tightrope between idealism and materialism, but in the end idealism wins. Like metaphor, idealism flirts with a material referent, but ultimately turns its back on it. Wagner's Melodies is in this respect a gloriously protracted ‘come-on’; Tristan without the B-major consummation. Some readers may find that frustrating, but it is curiously true to Wagner's own ambivalence.

A greater worry, for me, stepping back from Trippett's considerable achievement, is what it says about the present state of Wagner research. There is no gainsaying the brilliance of Trippett's book: it is audacious in design as it is formidable in execution. As an essay in historical hermeneutics, it is one of the most dramatic breakthrough texts since Tomlinson's Music in Renaissance Magic;Footnote ³ a Germanic counterpoise to its Italianate preoccupations (just as Kittler answers Foucault).

The book also presents a discursive flip-side to the neo-Riemannian Wagner we have learned to hear the last 20 years, a miniaturist Wagner shorn of tonal centres or long-range processes, a composer alternately dissolved away into distributed networks (discursive or transformational), or pinned down into splintered fragments. Where is the Wagner of holistic dramatic ideas, the engineer of vast dramatic scenes? The point, surely, is not that the ripples of Wagner's influence (upon him and from him) can be registered in the critical seismographs of discursive networks. The crux, rather, is that Wagner was the greatest discursive networker of all, synthesizing and condensing worlds of meaning in his dramatic ideas. Somehow, we have lost the critical/analytical technology to grasp his poetics and hear the results. Or we have just got bored with yesterday's fashion.