more information – www.cambridge.

org/9781107014305
Wagner’s Melodies

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 indispen-
sable place in opera, contemporary theorists were unable even to agree
on a definition for it, let alone formulate a stable basis for teaching it.
In Wagner’s Melodies, David Trippett re-examines Wagner’s central
aesthetic claims. He places 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, 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.

david trippett is Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge

and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His work on Wagner, the history of
aesthetics, and theories of technology has appeared in various academic
publications, and has earned him the Alfred Einstein Award of the
American Musicological Society, and the Donald Tovey Memorial
Prize of the University of Oxford. He has served as guest editor of
Musiktheorie, and is editor and translator of Carl Stumpf’s The Origins
of Music (2012). He also performs regularly as a collaborative pianist.
Wagner’s Melodies
Aesthetics and Materialism in German
Musical Identity

d a v i d tr i p p e t t
cambridge university press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© David Trippett 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
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permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Trippett, David, 1980–
Wagner’s melodies : aesthetics and materialism in German musical identity / David Trippett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-01430-5
1. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Music – 19th
century – Philosophy and aesthetics. 3. Melody. I. Title.
ML410.W13T77 2013
782.1092–dc23
2012034001

ISBN 978-1-107-01430-5 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Paula
 Contents

List of illustrations [page viii]

Acknowledgements [x]
A note on presentation [xii]
List of abbreviations [xiii]

Introduction [1]
1 German melody [12]
2 Melodielehre? [69]
3 Wagner in the melodic workshop [130]
Excursus: Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy [182]
4 Hearing voices: Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and the
Lohengrin “recitatives” [198]
5 Vowels, voices, and “original truth” [280]
6 Wagner’s material expression [330]
Epilogue: Turning off the lights [393]

Appendix A: Books on language in Wagner’s Dresden library [399]

Appendix B: Books on language in Wagner’s Wahnfried library [402]
Select bibliography [408]
Index [439]

vii
 Illustrations

1.1 Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros [Laocoön and his

sons]. Marble copy of the original, from ca. 200 bc; discovered
in the Baths of Trajan in 1506. Musei Vaticani, Museo
Pio-Clementino, Octagon, Laocoön Hall. [page 41]
1.2 Theodor Géricault, A Study of Severed Limbs (1818–19). [56]
1.3 The modest wavy line to indicate Brangäne’s scream
in Wagner’s Orchesterpartitur for Tristan und Isolde,
NA A III h 7, p. 235. [65]
2.1 Emil Grimm, Musikalischer Wahnsinn des 19ten Jahrhundert,
(1851). Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel. [73]
2.2 The internal mechanism for Diederich Nicolaus Winkel’s
Componium (1821). [97]
2.3a–d Friedrich August Kanne’s illustrations of melodic wave
motion in imitation of water, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
68 (1821), 537–38. [106]
3.1 Berlioz’s two-page entry in the Stammbuch of Marie von Sayn-
Wittgenstein, (1855). Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar (GSA
60/Z 170). [177]
3.2 Francesco Hayez, Meditations on the History of Italy / Meditations
on the Old and New Testament (1850), Galleria Civica D’Arte
Moderna E Contemporanea Di Palazzo Forti. [191]
3.3 Antonio Canova, The Three Graces: Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and
Thalia (1815–17). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and
Victoria and Albert Museum, London. [195]
4.1a–c Liszt’s conducting score of Lohengrin, Goethe- und
Schiller-Archiv, Weimar (GSA 60/Z 19). [236]
4.2a–b Wagner’s conducting score for performances of Lohengrin in
Frankfurt am Main on September 12–17, 1862.
Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main (Mus Wf 22). [248]
4.3a–b Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “Fixation Graphique de
la Voix” (1857), Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie
nationale, archives. [258]
viii
 List of illustrations ix

4.4 Louis Köhler’s graphic notation of Goethe’s poem “Kennst

du das Land” from Die Melodie der Sprache (Leipzig:
J. J. Weber, 1853). [262]
4.5 Wagner’s Kompositionsskizze for Lohengrin (showing revisions
in Example 4.10a), NA A II B 2, 1 recto. [269]
6.1 Johannes Müller’s illustration of how a human cadaver can be
manipulated to produce artificial tones. From Müller, Über die
Compensation der physischen Kräfte am menschlichen Stimmorgan
(Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1839), figure 12. [343]
6.2 The emblem for Otto Ule’s journal Die Natur
(1852–1902). [347]
6.3 André Gill’s caricature of Wagner in the newspaper L’Eclipse
(April 18, 1869), frontispiece. [368]
6.4 A comparison of Goethe’s color triangle with Moritz Rapp’s vowel
triangle. [372]
6.5 A Wagnerian “melodic triangle.” [374]
 Acknowledgements

On finishing his long essay Oper und Drama, Wagner admitted to a friend:
“I have written the last pages of this in a mood I can intelligibly describe to
no one.” On completing the present book, I have some sympathy with
Wagner’s sentiment. But in my case, a raft of kind individuals have greatly
eased and enriched the way. The subject of Wagner’s Melodies has occupied
me for a number of years, and during this time I have benefited from a wide
circle of generous colleagues, friends, and relatives. I owe a debt of gratitude
to all of these individuals for their contributions and input.
In its initial stage, this book began life amid discussion, debate, and vigorous
cross-examination by Alex Rehding, whose dedication to and support of this
project has been unfaltering. He has been a source of encouragement, prompt-
ing, and advice, and hence has been nothing short of Dante’s Virgil to me. I
also thank Carolyn Abbate, whose inspiring ideas and careful reading of
chapters helped direct some of my ideas just when I needed it. And I thank
Daniel Albright for sharing his inimitable gift for opening new intellectual
corridors and for striding down them together with me.
In the later stages of this project, I imposed on the good nature of a number
of colleagues, who generously gave up their time to read one or more chapters.
My thanks go again to Carolyn Abbate, for the generous feedback and insight;
John Deathridge, for the chats and the details; Dana Gooley, for the character-
istically meticulous reading; Allan Keiler, for sharing expert thoughts on
Wagner’s often inexpert linguistics; Robin Holloway, for the conversations
and the common sense; Roger Parker, for encouraging me to leave Germany
once in a while; Matthew Pritchard, for the rapid readings; and my father,
Christopher Trippett, for so much. I am grateful for all the ideas, cautions,
prompts, and provisos, as well as the dexterous turns of phrase and otherwise
helpful thoughts duly shared. Naturally, any remaining infelicities of language
or argument are entirely my own.
At Christ’s College, conversations with colleagues over lunch frequently
prompted further reflection on my topic. I thank particularly the coterie of
humanists, Gavin Alexander, Peter Agocs, David Irving, David Reynolds,
David Sedley, and Carrie Vout. While in and around Cambridge more broadly,
x
 Acknowledgements xi

I have benefited from contact with a range of scholars, some in the virtual
realm, others in person. These include Nicholas Cook, Laurence Dreyfus,
Thomas Grey, Kenneth Hamilton, Monique Ingells, Lewis Lockwood, Barry
Millington, John Rink, Matthias Röder, Nicholas Vazsonyi, Egon Voss, and
Benjamin Walton.
At Cambridge University Press, I am particularly grateful to Vicki Cooper,
for believing in the project and for driving it forward so supportively, to Fleur
Jones and Christina Sarigiannidou, for deftly bringing it to final production, and
to Gwynneth Drabble for her meticulous copy-editing. I also thank the Readers
for their helpful comments. My work would not have been possible without the
assistance of Kristina Unger and Yvonne Jost at the Nationalarchiv der Richard-
Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth, where Gudrun Föttingen was also extremely effi-
cient in procuring materials; Evelyn Liepsch at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv,
Weimar; Sarah Adams, Kerry Masteller, Liza Vick, and Andrew Wilson at
Harvard’s Isham and Loeb libraries; the director and assistants of the
Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv and the Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar;
those of the Bayerischer Staatsbibliothek, Munich, as well as the Städtische
Bibliothek and Universitätsbibliothek, Leipzig. I also acknowledge with gratitude
the financial assistance of the Krupp Foundation (Center for European Studies,
Harvard University), the support of Adams House and the Music Department
at Harvard, as well as that of Christ’s College, Cambridge, the Klassik Stiftung
Weimar, and most recently, the Donald Tovey Memorial Prize from the Faculty
of Music at Oxford University, whose generous support allowed me to acquire
all the required source material for publication.
Finally, this project would never have been completed without the love and
support of my wife, Paula, to whom this book is dedicated. She has listened
critically and supportively, and has shared the burden of late nights, overnights,
and daylong sessions at the desk that have allowed me to complete this project.
For her patience, encouragement, and fortitude I will always be indebted. Our
daughter, Persephone, was born shortly after I completed Chapter 2. It is a
curious measure of time passing that, four chapters on, she is now walking and
talking, and has already helped to teach me anew just how important concise
expression can be.
 A note on presentation

All translations into English are my own unless otherwise stated. In the case of
Richard Wagner’s prose writings, letters, and opera poems, I have worked in
consultation with published translations, where these exist. Since his collected
letters and collected writings are widely available to readers, I do not reproduce
his German text as a matter of course; where particular words or clauses are
idiosyncratic I give these in parentheses in the main text. For clarity, I have
opted to use Wagner’s German titles throughout, for both his operas and his
essays. For all other foreign language sources, I provide the original text in the
footnotes, as this may be harder for readers to come by. To help readers locate
sources with ease, I have chosen to use footnotes rather than the more aestheti-
cally appealing endnote style.

xii
Abbreviations

AmZ Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung

BamZ Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
CT Wagner, Cosima. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries. 2 vols., edited by Martin
Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, translated and introduced by
Geoffrey Skelton. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–80. The
German edition on which this is based is Die Tagebücher Cosima
Wagner. 2 vols. Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1976–77. References are by
date to allow for easy cross-reference between the English and German
editions.
FBfM Fliegende Blätter für Musik
GSA Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv. Klassik Stiftung Weimar
HSS Hanslick, Eduard. Eduard Hanslick – Sämtliche Schriften
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. 6 vols. [to date], edited by Dietmar
Strauß. Vienna: Böhlau, 1990–.
HSW Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Sämtliche Werke. 33 vols., edited by
Bernhard L. Suphan. Hildesheim: Olms, 1994.
ML Wagner, Richard. My Life, translated by Andrew Gray, edited by Mary
Whittall. Cambridge University Press, 1983. This translation is based on
the authoritative German edition Mein Leben, edited by Martin
Gregor-Dellin. Munich: List, 1963.
NA Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth
NZfM Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
PW Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner Prose Works. 8 vols., translated by
William Ashton Ellis. London: Kegan Paul, Tench, Trübner & Co.,
1892–99; reprinted by Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1993–95.
SB Wagner, Richard. Sämtliche Briefe. 34 vols. [projected] Edited by
Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf (vols. 1–5), Hans-Joachim Bauer and
Johannes Forner (vols. 6–8), Klaus Burmeister and Johannes Forner
(vol. 9), Andreas Mielke (vol. 10), Martin Dürrer (vols. 11–13, 16–17),
Andreas Mielke (vols. 14–15, 18), Margaret Jestremski (vol. 19). Leipzig:
Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1967–2000 [vols. 1–9]; Wiesbaden:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 2000– [vols. 10–].

xiii
xiv List of abbreviations

SLRW Wagner, Richard. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner. Edited and

translated by Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer. London and
Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1987.
SS Liszt, Franz. Sämtliche Schriften. 9 vols. [projected] Detlef Altenburg
general editor, edited by Rainer Kleinertz (vol. 1), Detlef Altenburg
(vols. 3–4), Dorothea Redepenning and Britta Schilling (vol. 5).
Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1989–.
SSD Wagner, Richard. Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols.
Volks-Ausgabe (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel and C. F. W. Siegel
[R. Linnemann], 1911 [vol. 1–12], 1914 [13–16]). English translation by
W. Ashton Ellis. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works.
SW Wagner, Richard. Sämtliche Werke. 31 vols. [projected] Egon Voss
general editor. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne / Schott Musik International,
1970–.
TMW The Musical World
WWV Deathridge, John, Carl Dahlhaus, Martin Geck, Egon Voss, and
Isolde Vetter (eds.). Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis: Verzeichnis der
musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen. Mainz,
London, New York, Tokyo: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1986.
 Introduction

“Let us slander melody!” Nietzsche cried. “Nothing is more dangerous than

a beautiful melody . . . Let us dare to be ugly, my friends! Wagner dared!”1
Written five years after Wagner’s death, this was hardly an enviable epitaph
for a composer of opera. Nietzsche’s barb paraphrased the widely held view
that the master of Bayreuth could not write melodies as such. It was a grave
accusation. Music without melody was simply unthinkable for nineteenth-
century aesthetics, like an opera staged without singers, or a language
spoken without vowels. It was oxymoronic. And with it, Wagner’s credi-
bility was effectively being hollowed out to reveal a void at the center of his
creative métier, for there was no strain of exaggeration when, in 1864, the
Leipzig Thomaskantor Moritz Hauptmann dubbed melody simply the
“alpha and omega of music.”2
Yet against a hailstorm of criticism, Wagner agreed wholeheartedly with
this view. “Music’s only form is melody” he claimed while in exile at the age of
forty-seven, “it is not even conceivable without melody.”3 Of the few genuine
neologisms that the composer introduced in his extensive writings, “endless
melody” (unendliche Melodie) perhaps best reflects this privileged status. But,
coined in 1860, the term was also defensive: Wagner was anticipating the
critical reception of his works in Paris, and arguably deployed it in response to
the European-wide suspicion that his melodies were less than real – some-
thing of a fairy tale. The Danish author Hans Christian Andersen is one such
critic4 and, if we read literary texts and criticism as parallel discursive realms
that offer ideas a different local habitation, the early reception of music

1
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and
Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 244.
2
Moritz Hauptmann to Carl Kossmaly, September 9, 1864, Leipzig, in The Letters of a Leipzig
Cantor, trans. A. D. Coleridge (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1892), 2: 249.
3
SSD 7: 125. Cf. PW 3: 333.
4
After attending performances of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin in Weimar, Andersen described the
central flaw consistently in his diary: “Tannhäuser (May 29, 1852): the music competent, but lacking
in melody . . . Lohengrin (June 5, 1852): well written, and the music is grand, but without melody – a
barren tree without blossoms or fruit.” Hans Christian Andersen, Dagbøger 1825–75, eds. Kåre Olsen
and H. Topsøe-Jensen, 12 vols. (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/G.E.C. Gad,
1971–76), 4: 85, 89. For a full investigation of Andersen’s musical leanings see Anna Harwell Celenza,
Hans Christian Andersen and Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 1
2 Introduction

drama’s thematic fabric has much in common with Andersen’s story of the
Emperor’s New Clothes (1837), where an unusually beautiful cloth of silk and
gold thread is apparently woven into an imperial costume with unprece-
dented industry and extravagance. The resulting gown is said to be magnif-
icent. But the “magic property” of the fabric is its invisibility to idiots or those
unequal to their office: a patently false claim that ridicules all pretenders once
the fraud is exposed.5
Wagner himself understood the criticism only too well:
The only thing the public seeks in opera, melodies, melodies – were downright not
forthcoming in my operas; no, nothing but the most boring recitatives, the most
incomprehensible musical gallimathias . . . To say that a piece of music has no
melody can only mean: the musician has failed to create a form that grips and stirs
our feeling; a statement that simply announces the composer’s lack of talent, his
want of originality.6

What, then, was the problem? How could the central figure of nineteenth-
century German opera have acquired an abiding reputation as an unmelo-
dic pretender? For us today, such questions exaggerate Wagner’s fragility as
a cultural icon, and are deceptive in this sense. Against the metaphysics of
transcendence in the libretto to Tristan und Isolde, completed shortly before
this frank admission, Wagner would seem to be taunting his contemporary
critics openly: “Friends! Look! / Do you not feel and see it? / Can it be that I
alone / Hear this tune sounding . . . so wondrously and softly around me?”7
But the historical question remains: if he believed music was inseparable
from the concept of melody, why were his melodies invisible – adapting
Andersen’s tale – to so many “idiots”?
In fact, we owe this assessment of Wagner to reactionary criticism that
responded to his three major Zurich essays as much as his operas.8 What is
at stake in the discourse of melodic theory are differing understandings of
the very fabric of opera itself, i.e. the mechanism of vocal expression
through which emotion was thought to communicate between performing
artist and sentient observer. This is the platform on which I shall investigate
discourses about melody during the nineteenth century. In performance,
melody becomes a medium: a channel of communication that maintains the

5
Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s new clothes” [1837], The Complete Fairy Tales and
Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 77–81.
6
SSD 7: 116, 125. Cf. PW 3: 324, 333.
7
See Isolde’s transfiguration: “Freunde! Seht! / Fühlt und seht ihr’s nicht? / Hör ich nur / diese
Weise, / die so wunder-/voll und leise/ . . . um mich klinget?” Tristan und Isolde, act 3, scene 3.
8
Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849), Oper und Drama (1851).
 Introduction 3

presence of numerous sensual stimuli in the transmission of a message.

Quite what that message is, and how it came to assert itself over a listener’s
consciousness, prompted a good deal of speculation – and correspondingly
few concrete answers – throughout the middle decades of the century.
The appeal of simply taking pleasure in melody’s expressivity was never
endangered, of course. In 1833, Schumann wryly invoked a chess analogy to
reflect the disproportionate prominence melodic expression continued to
have for dilettante listeners when compared to its formal dependence on
harmonic structure: “The queen (melody) has the greatest power, but the
king (harmony) decides the game.”9 Given its preeminence for listeners of
all stripes, it may be no wonder that melody was such a problem for
aesthetic and compositional theory at the time. Precisely because it was
granted the freedom to express what language could not, melody became
dauntingly indefinable, instilling anxiety in composers and theorists alike.
The assumption that it could represent a seismographic register of emo-
tional expression, and that melodic invention simply resided in the realm of
the genius went hand in hand with accusations of melodic poverty in
contemporary music, and of outright failure in contemporary theory. Two
interconnected but conflicting forces perpetuated this situation. On the one
hand, popular acclaim for melodic beauty was tied to its prestige as a
product of nature; since it symbolized a fragment of a unified but unknow-
ably magnificent and inscrutable cosmos, it was easily co-opted within the
autopoietic system of Naturphilosphie, reinforcing Friedrich Schelling’s
belief that “the system of nature is at the same time the system of our
mind.”10 On the other hand, the profound interest this inspired in the study
of melody as the calling card of the natural genius led to attempts to probe
and examine precisely that whose prestige depended on not being under-
stood. The inhibiting factor for melodic theory, in other words, was con-
tained in the very desire to understand melody.

9
“Die Königin (Melodie) hat die höchste Gewalt, aber den Ausschlag gibt immer der König
(Harmonie).” Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig,
2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914), 1: 20. Translation taken from Robert Schumann,
On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolff (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1983), 40.
10
F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. E. E. Harris and P. Heath (Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 30. In relation to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, autopoiesis refers to the
circularity of a closed system as such, where no information passes between the system and its
environment, and where the system’s aim – were we, via cybernetics, to attribute agency to a
system of ideas – is to perpetuate the organization of ideas that define it as a system. See
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of
the Living (Dordrecht: D. Riedel, 1980), and later, Niklaus Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
4 Introduction

The specific problem from the musical-theoretical side of this divide was
not lack of theorists, it was a shifting ground of musical style coupled to the
fact that prominent philosophers co-opted melody as a special category.
There was no shortage of would-be music theorists in Germany; yet while a
relatively large number of treatises on harmony were published during the
course of the century, only a handful of German writers of any stature
engaged with the concept of melodic pedagogy at length. (It is indicative
that Franz Brendel’s landmark competition in 1859 to celebrate the fiftieth
issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik solicited entries on “the transforma-
tion and progress of harmony” rather than melody.)11 Approaches to
melody were far from unimportant, but they failed to secure a tractable
basis for analytical scrutiny, and therefore tended to be shunned in the
public arena as partial or provisional.
Consider the first melodic treatise of the century: when the theorist and
pedagogue Anton Reicha published his Traité de mélodie in 1814, boldly
delimiting it to his consideration of phrasal metrical structure, François-
Josef Fétis sneered that he “has not even touched upon the laws of melody in
connection with tonality, modulation, harmony and aesthetics,” concluding
that “a good treatise on melody is yet to be written.”12 As it happens, the
complaint was old. Similar calls for adequate Melodik had been voiced since
Johann Mattheson’s Kern melodischer Wissenschafft in 1737; even a year
after Wagner’s death, Friedrich von Hausegger still opined that “unfortu-
nately, no one has taken the trouble to determine the laws of melodic
composition in quite the same way as with harmony,”13 and as late as
1945, Paul Hindemith would preface his discussion of melody by observing
what was by now the “astounding fact that instruction in composition has
never developed a theory of melody.”14 Even Hegel took a swipe at music
theorists in 1830 when confessing his partial knowledge of “the rules of
composition” in relation to melodic theory, protesting that “from real
scholars and practicing musicians . . . we seldom hear anything definitive

11
The full proposal of Brendel’s competition reads: “Erklärende Erläuterung und musikalisch-
theoretische Begründung der durch die neuesten Kunstschöpferungen bewirkten Umgestaltung
und Weiterbildung der Harmonik.” Brendel, “Zur Eröffnung des 50. Bandes der Zeitschrift,”
NZfM 50 (1859), 1.
12
François-Josef Fétis’ Traité élémentaire de musique (Brussels, 1831–32), reproduced in
Biographie universelle (Paris, 1863), 7: 203.
13
“Man hat sich leider noch nicht die Mühe gegeben, die Gesetze der Melodik in gleich
eingehender Weise zu ermitteln, wie die der Harmonik.” Friedrich von Hausegger, “Die Musik
als Ausdruck,” Bayreuther Blätter 10 (1884), 311.
14
Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, trans. Arthur Mendel, 2 vols., revised edn.
(New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1941–45) 1: 175.
 Introduction 5

and detailed on these matters.”15 But Vormärz music theorists were not
negligent (as Hegel and Hausegger suggest), they were in an impossibly
conflicted position, and given the degree of negative melodic criticism
within German language journals and newspapers, this context of uncer-
tainty only underscores Wagner’s audacity in placing melodic theory at the
center of a vision for opera in Oper und Drama (1851), the longest and most
conceptually detailed of his theoretical essays.
Yet the significance of this single publication for Wagner’s reception
arguably belies its diachronic context. Wagner’s life spanned nearly three
quarters of a century in which considerable changes took place in the
conception of musical sound. When he was born in Leipzig, an idealist
metaphysics could still claim music as the metaphor of transcendence,
something conceptual, disembodied and intangible; by his death, promi-
nent figures within the natural sciences had argued that the entire basis of
musical expression was explicable through mechanisms of sensation: in
electrical nervous impulses and obedient muscular contractions. While
this study of debates and tensions over melody cannot survey the breadth
of the century in all its discursive richness, it is precisely an axis of idealist
and materialist epistemologies that will structure my approach.
At the mid-century, materialism was less a new philosophy than a revival
of an old one, one which Friedrich Lange in 1865 traced back to Democritus’
belief in a world composed of physically indivisible atoms. Such a view quite
literally anchored the present in the past, for Democritus’ atoms could be
neither created nor destroyed. They were responsible for all change and
variety, governed by physical “cause and necessity,” and constituted all that
exists, including the soul as the seat of being and the essence of life, which –
incidentally – “consists of fine, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire.”16 As
Lange’s genealogy revealed, nineteenth-century materialism also gave priority
to matter over spirit, and shared with Democritus’ atomism a view of matter
that was conceived exclusively as material but with the crucial caveat (drawn
from Newtonian physics) that it is subject to physical forces which regulate
the mechanisms by which we perceive our environment. Occurring in the
afterglow of Hegelian idealism, this latter outlook was typically cast nega-
tively: as the rejection of an idealist worldview, the overthrowing of presump-
tive hypotheses based on disembodied or metaphysical prime causes. It is
perhaps prudent to point out that this – the rejection of of idealism – is also a

15
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarenden Press,
1998), 2: 930.
16
Friedrich Albert Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance [1865],
3 vols., 2nd edn., trans. E. C. Thomas (London: Trubner & Co., 1877–81), 1: 19–36, here 28.
6 Introduction

recurring stance I have adopted in this book with the intention of gaining
perspective within the structures of knowledge that link contemporary
criticism, literature, scientific thinking, and university curricula.
In Wagner’s case, though he never attended university, his writings from
Paris (1839–42) onward illustrate that he was an idealist by inclination (he
would dismiss Lange’s readership as “ignoramuses” in 1878, while in the same
breath branding Humboldt and Helmholtz “Schopenhauerian ‘donkeys’”).17
Against the drift among German academic writers towards a materialist
philosophy, then, Wagner’s formative years ensured that he never fully
embraced materialist doctrine; they were years spent rather traditionally,
absorbing – among other things – lengthy runs of Italian opera (as I explore
in Chapter 3). In fact, while still an aspiring composer racked with insecurity
over his artistic originality and prospects, he cited Norma as one of his favorite
operas during the 1830s; the Italian flavor, though marginalized by an entire
scholarly tradition following Hans von Wolzogen and Carl Friedrich
Glasenapp in the late nineteenth century, plays an ever-present role in
Wagner’s aesthetics of expression, and can help to account for the unresolved
tensions surrounding materialism in his writings. If Italy was the seat of song,
and “music is not even thinkable without melody,” it is unsurprising that a key
concept for Wagner, that of Sinnlichkeit or sensuality (the aesthetic counterpart
to pleasurable physical sensation), derives in large part from his engagement
with the Italian tradition. Yet, at first glance, the ideology of Germany as a
Kulturnation which Wagner courted so explicitly after 1842 through language
as well as literary myth fails to mesh with this reading of his Italianate
sensibility, an incongruity I explore in the short Excursus following
Chapter 3. Moreover, ever since Rousseau’s polemical appraisal of Italian
melody in his Lettre sur la musique française (1753), melody had come to be
understood principally as a vocal phenomenon among non-German critics,
with language a latent presence. It was with the voice’s innate semiotic capacity
in mind that Wagner effectively adopted the Mediterranean priority of vocal
melody over “pure” instrumental lines, declaring the voice “the organ to which
our music exclusively owes its being.”18 This swept aside earlier German claims
for instrumental melody, where purposively imprecise expression had
pointed – for idealists – to a higher conceptual world accessible through the
imagination (E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “wondrous realm of the infinite” [“das
wundervolle Reich des Unendlichen”]). Whereas a disagreement over mere
melodic style might be considered insignificant, stylistic difference linked to
language and its voices could readily be interpreted in terms of broader debates

17 18
CT (June 12, 1878). SSD 4: 4. Cf PW 2: 122. Emphasis added.
 Introduction 7

over nationhood, particularly when allied to text-as-Nationalsprache. In this

respect the horizon against which the nineteenth-century melodic discourse
unfolds becomes overtly rather than merely implicitly political.
When Germany was finally unified in 1871, Wagner could look back on
six decades of ambivalent nationalism, reflecting upon the famous
Germanist Jacob Grimm: “of course, Grimm [in 1848] had given up all
hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him).”19 Since the late
eighteenth century, liberal commentators from Johann Gottfried Herder to
Theodor Mundt had spelled out an ideology of nationhood that valued
linguistic unity above all, placing the sonority, syntax, and history of a
common tongue at the center of a project for national identity. The familiar
fallibility in this case is that the search for a persuasive identity in the present
was predicated on the assumption of a lost autochthony that could only be
reclaimed by drawing on the historical past. Indo-European philologists
such as Grimm and Franz Bopp were able to make astonishing claims for
etymological certainties in this respect, but the project of philology
also aspired to uncover the history of verbal sounds. This exercise in
historical imagination – a putative archeology of historical utterances –
effectively claimed to be holding a microphone to the Germanen or pre-
medieval German Goths (the earliest Germanic tribe to employ a written
literary language), simulating a kind of recording technology sensitized to
cultural need. Quite how a text vocalized in melody became synonymous
with national identity is a peculiarly German story.20 Particularly within
Saxony and Prussia, the search for meaningful melodic content was defined,
in opposition to French and Italian operatic melody, and relatively few
composers pursued explicit links between music and German identity.
But Wagner was unequivocal in viewing melody as a signifier of the national
condition: “the national tendencies of melodic practice are so telling” he
explained, freely connecting melodic form to social identity and political
institutions.21 However daring Wagner’s semiotics may have appeared in

19
CT (June 7, 1873).
20
While links between the tonal elements of language and its signifiers of (national) identity
received a powerful framework in the work of Indo-European philologists, as I explore in
Chapter 5, the broader context for the association of German self-identity with musical traditions
is set out with enviable lucidity by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter in “Germans as the ‘People
of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,” Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate
and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–35. See also Applegate’s
pioneering study, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley & Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990), and more recently, Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-
Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
21
SSD 3: 259. Cf. PW 2: 50. Emphasis added.
8 Introduction

1851, German commentators on vocal-melodic sounds had already opened

wide a hermeneutic door. Hence the ensuing variety of interpretations of
melodies often had little to do with music theory, but reflected correspond-
ingly different epistemologies of sound that hinged between the aesthetic
and the acoustic, between psychological reflection and somatic reflex.
Amid this expansion of “melody,” the German quest for securely
grounded melodic content was principally driven by one question: can
melodic sounds carry a meaning that is intuitively comprehensible
(gefühlsverständlich)? Brendel put this one way when he defined modern
music’s “developmental law” in 1852 as an increasing “particularity of
expression.”22 Wagner put it slightly differently, however, emphasizing a
cognitive process that governs “understanding.” Indeed, for a time during
the mid-century Wagner consistently defined his artistic aims as the avoid-
ance of “misunderstanding” (in criticism) by accessing the listener’s senso-
rium directly (in performance).23 The belief that certain vocal-melodic
sounds could not fail to be understood in their moment of delivery intrigued
both aestheticians and their colleagues in the life sciences. The broken
whimpering of a tearful utterance would seem unmistakable in the human
empathy it elicits. Likewise the mimetic portrait of sexual desire in Tristan.
But these primal vocalic sounds have more patterned, less characteristic
cousins. Rossini’s periodic phrase structures and standardized accompani-
ments famously disappointed Wagner for their lack of character (even if
illustrating how a “pleasing” melodic line could serve as an amulet against
criticism). The other side of the coin, however, is Wagner’s incessant
interest in performance aesthetics within these fixed lines – how such
intervallic shapes are delivered. A pragmatist in matters of stage production,
he complained throughout his life of inept singing and acting, notably citing
this as a reason for what he took to be the poor reception of his vocal lines in
Lohengrin when Liszt conducted the premiere in 1850. Was the reception
solely down to the modest standard of the theater? The dull singers? Such
questions raise the larger matter of why Wagner’s vocal lines were so
seemingly dependent on the singers’ performances, a topic discussed in
Chapter 4. One tantalizing hope for getting around this dependence on
performers was to hit upon uniquely shaped phrases or interval structures
that might establish a natural basis for expression, one effectively tending
towards qualia (inherent properties of our mental lives perceived as lived

22
Brendel, Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen
Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: Hinze, 1852), 338.
23
SSD 4: 243. Cf. PW 3: 283.
 Introduction 9

experience, e.g. the whiteness of snow, the taste of liquorice, the consonance
of perfect intervals). These aspirations entered the melodic discourse under
the auspices of musical character, specifically, melody that was deemed
charakteristisch. But like shot in game or sand in clams, gritty contortions
of melodic line strewn throughout an opera were evidently hard to listen to,
as Wagner’s critics found ever new ways to explain.
For Nietzsche, the quest to find meaning in every sound merely desensi-
tized listeners to a bombastic kind of music with “much greater volume,
much greater ‘noise’.” This resulted in a twofold trend, he continued, in
which a minority were “ever more attuned to ‘what it means’” while the vast
majority subsisted with dulled and weakened senses, leading to a physio-
logically inevitable appreciation of “the basely sensual.”24 Polemics aside,
the possibility that a physiological explanation for how we perceive emotion
might be attainable fired the imagination of researchers as diverse as Rudolf
Hermann Lotze and Gustav Fechner. Accordingly, the historical belief in a
“science of feeling” crystallizes towards the end of this study, and underpins
the discursive network I trace in Chapter 6; it brought about uneasy com-
promises between monistic and old-school Cartesian doctrines, where the
body’s response to melody is no longer a literary metaphor (a phenomenon
rapidly caricatured as a soul reduced to mere cerebral convulsion). While
the opera house and the laboratory were quite separate spaces, curiosity
about the potential of applied science established a conduit between the two
in the writings of musical scientists and scientifically minded musicians, and
audiences’ critical reactions to melodic “stimuli” became something of a
proving ground for physiological evidence about what was effective and
ineffective in melody. Indeed, while the later field of experimental psychol-
ogy and its associated empiricism emerged in Germany during the heyday
of Wagnerism, many of its tenets are traceable earlier in the composer’s
reception, and it is indicative that the inauguration of psychophysics as a
quantitative approach to mind–body relations is roughly coeval with this
quasi-scientific reception of Wagner’s music.25
Initially, the category of melodic expression most susceptible to this kind of
explication was Klangfarbe (sound color), which promised to link the sonor-
ities of instruments and voices directly to one another. But discussions
of sound color soon raised the question as to whether “color” – like the
body – was merely metaphorical, or whether in fact the literary comparison

24
Nietzsche, Human all too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern and Paul
V. Cohn (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2008), 123.
25
See Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1860).
10 Introduction

of light and sound concealed a shattering literalism: a single, natural spectrum

of wave forms whose differing lengths would determine whether pitch fre-
quencies or colors are perceived. Fanciful though such theories turned out to
be, the attractiveness of a scientific explication of melodic expression con-
tinued to besiege the imagination of writers, thinkers, and scientific research-
ers well into the twentieth century. In the margin alongside his list of the four
“most fundamental features of melody,” Arnold Schoenberg scribbled “what
is water? H2O,” emphatically suggesting the possibility of getting at the
essence of something – an objective knowledge of melody’s elemental proper-
ties seemingly available to those with a mind to access them empirically.26
And the mystique of melody’s natural power survives comfortably into the
digital age of videogame music, motivating figures such as Koji Kondo to
explain that “for me it’s the art of creating that one main melody that is
the primary goal behind music composition.”27 Coming from the composer
of Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers, this illustrates the longevity
of melody’s appeal, for – oddly enough – Kondo’s statement has a certain
amount in common with Wagner’s critical reception of Rossini 150 years
earlier, wherein the popularity of a melodic line “that slips into your ear,
although you don’t know why, and that you sing to yourself, without knowing
why” dominates all other compositional parameters.28
Remaining in the twentieth century, the suspicion that physical and
chemical laws could explain what music theory could not finds perhaps its
most fantastical outlet in the literary imagination rather than Wagner recep-
tion per se. Gilbert Lister, the fictional neuroscientist in Arthur C. Clarke’s tale
of The Ultimate Melody (1957), seeks out a tune that fits perfectly with “the
fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain.”29 After researching the
properties of all available hit tunes, he succeeds – we learn – and is promptly
reduced to a catatonic state in which an endless melody monopolizes his brain
function. A cautionary narrator explains why the resulting theme is so lethal:
“it would form an endless ring in the memory circuits of the mind. It would go
round and round forever, obliterating all other thoughts.”30 Needless to say,
Clarke’s modernist inversion of the hope for applied biologism, whether
through a hit tune or a musical texture definitively saturated in melody – i.e.

26
Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique and Art of its Presentation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 180.
27
See Koji Kondo, “Interview with a legend” at http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/772/772299p2.html.
28
SSD 3: 252. Cf. PW 2: 42.
29
Arthur C. Clarke, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Gollancz, 2001), 581–86,
here 583.
30
Ibid., 585.
 Introduction 11

Wagner’s unendliche Melodie – ultimately renders the project of a science of

melodic expression distinctly ambivalent.
In this book, I ask what cultural circumstances allowed Wagner to arrive
at his theory of melody as a means of communication. Each of the six
chapters interrogates one aspect of the nineteenth-century melodic dis-
course: criticism; pedagogy; originality; voice; language; and sensory
perception. These are presented neither chronologically nor with a sense
of causal progression as such. Rather, they form a sequence of related
tableaux organized around the book’s central focus on Wagner’s melodic
composition. Broadly, Chapters 2–3 concern production; Chapters 1, 4–6
concern reception.
By way of sketching a map to help survey this territory, the principal
topics addressed in each chapter might usefully be summarized as follows:
(1) Wagner’s early reception as a melodist and the pursuit of a specifying
expression etched into intervallic shape; (2) psychological and pedagogical
attempts to understand melodic invention as a cognitive process rather than
occult inspiration; (3) Wagner’s fear of copyright infringement set against
his desire to learn from Bellini by imitation; (4) differing modes of listening
to German singer–actors, and Wagner’s desire to inscribe declamation as a
means of controlling their performance; (5) Wagner’s use of contemporary
philological studies in the German language as a means of rendering vocal
expression more denotative; and (6) materialist readings of melodic expres-
sion, stretched in the imagination of mid-century writers and scientists,
where sound could convey color and ultimately semiotic meaning, becom-
ing, that is, a fully embodied form of communication.
Such ideas were not part of a continuous discursive fabric, but emerged
in clusters of overlapping beliefs, grouped aspirations, and convergent
commentaries. In their terms of reference the discourses remained reflex-
ive (meaning that definitions and concepts that were used to generate the
discourse on melody were made to become part of the discourse gener-
ated), and hence inherently resistant to scrutiny. Yet this reflexivity is
sublated by the concept of melodic form (as a function of expression);
inserting “form” into the discourse had a stabilizing effect, as a kind of
positive data that appears differently in different discursive formulations:
simultaneously a music-theoretical category, a philosophical idea, an
unwritable utterance, embodied sensuality, and a material emblem of
sound waves. This approach to the concept of melody, in short, is neither
substantialist (what Wagner’s melodies are) nor hermeneutic (what they
mean), but critical. I ask what enables Wagner’s cultural position, and
what makes his melodies possible in the form they take.
 1 German melody

PART 1

Monstrance

Melody is the primary and most exquisite thing in music, that which
grasps human sensibility with wonderful magical power.
E. T. A. Hoffmann1

In many ways, melody is the bedrock of nineteenth-century German music

aesthetics. With its poetic claims to human subjectivity and inwardness –
the platform of voice, the soul, the “naked heart”2 – melody would seem an
apt obsession for an age transfixed by concepts of the self: a vehicle
apparently given by “nature” for externalizing that hidden interiority so
prized by idealist philosophy.3 But paradoxically, this dominant feature of
musical style was both its most celebrated and its most problematic aspect.
Far from being a self-evident musical category, melody turns out to be
something of a slippery conceptual problem, one that resists sustained
scrutiny, forever flitting in between definitions, never quite meshing with
any fixed schema of taste or identity.
Such conceptual awkwardness arose partly through German anxieties at
the increasingly elaborate appropriation of melody by writers and thinkers.
Precisely because of its stylistic prominence in the early nineteenth century,
“melody” had gained considerable import in speculative philosophy. As the
most unmistakable part of a musical texture – the instinctive fixation point

1
“Das Erste und Vorzüglichste in der Musik, welches mit wunderbarer Zauberkraft das
menschliche Gemüt ergreift, ist die Melodie.” E. T. A. Hofmann, “Über einen Ausspruch Sachini’s
und über den sogenannten Effekt in der Musik,” E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callot’s
Manier. Werke. 1814 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 444.
2
Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York: Norton, 1995).
3
A range of historical definitions of melody are linked to concepts of nature, from melody as a
natural product – Roger North: “a sort of musick . . . [that] seems to flow from nature” [1710],
cited in Graham Strahle (ed.), An Early Music Dictionary (Cambridge University Press, 2009),
8b – to melody as a more essential part of nature – David Mollison: “this voice of nature” in
12 Melody: The Soul of Music (Glasgow: Courier Office, 1798), 17.
 Monstrance 13

for listeners of all stripes – it became nothing less than a monstrance (Latin:
monstrare, “to reveal”), i.e. the essential demonstration of a philosophical
idea, where the limiting five-lined stave evaporated into the untrammeled
space of the creative imagination. When seen specifically as one of nature’s
organizational secrets – a hidden parabola of forces regulating the archetype
of any linear pattern – melody’s pre-eminent status meant, in short, that the
sound of a single, harmonically rounded, metrically balanced musical line
was adopted as an emblem of man’s integration in the universe, the locus of
slippage between Romantic art and Naturphilosophie (that peculiar mar-
riage of idealism and hard science – linked principally to Schelling – which
asserts a continuum between the perceived organic world and the mind
perceiving it).4 This was a long way from the melodia that Johannes
Burmeister first defined as a linear succession of tones and intervallic
steps in 1601.5 It meant, in practice, that melody became the metaphor of
choice for speculative philosophers to insert as the representative keystone
in their respective systems. Just how daunting, and perhaps irritating, this
situation became for would-be melodists in the mid-century is apparent in
frustrated protests such as: “Why all these authorities anyway? For every
opinion, even the most absurd, there will always be at least one advocate!”6
But if idealist authorities were drawn to melody, how specific were they in
appropriating it?7
Just as the Jena Romantics documented an impulse to transcend the
separation of artistic forms, so they also rendered the once-opaque mirror
between music and philosophy increasingly transparent. In lecture notes
compiled by his students between 1817 and 1829, Hegel – whose influence
during the Vormärz is hard to overestimate – accorded melody a parallel
status to the idealist notion of Geist, namely: “the free-sounding of the soul
in the field of music.”8 It was, for him, that transport of freedom from within

4
The rich interplay of literary metaphor and music across different historical periods has been
treated most thoroughly by Michael Spitzer in Metaphor and Musical Thought (University
of Chicago Press, 2003). On the specifically German metaphor of depth in Germanic music,
see Holly Watkins’ engaging study, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought
(Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5
“Melodia dicitur carmen ex intervallis sonorum.” Johannes Burmeister, Musica autoschediastike
(Rostock: C. Reusnerus, 1601); see also Musical Poetics [1606], trans. Benito V. Rivera (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 77ff.
6
“Ueberhaupt, wozu den immer Autoritäten? Für jede Meinung, selbst die absurdeste, wird es
immer wenigstens einen Gewährsinn geben!” Flodoard Geyer, “Kann und soll die Melodie gelehrt
werden?” Neue Berliner Musik-Zeitung (October 10, 1860), 322.
7
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, trans. and ed. M. H. Schubert
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 191.
8
Hegel, Aesthetics 2: 930.
14 German melody

as “an apprehension of itself,” expressed in language that was not literally

literal as the “language of the soul” (Seelensprache).9 Hegel, of course,
privileged the concept of the spirit’s striving for inner freedom elsewhere
in his writing;10 this striving was embodied for him in the concept of
melody, where hope for socio-political freedom found an allegory in
assumptions of musical freedom.
Certain professional musicians in Schumann’s “new poetic age” were no
less idealist, presenting readings of vocal as well as instrumental melody not
as theory, but as allegory,11 thereby establishing common ground with the
discourse of a group of earlier German writers who situated the phenom-
enon of sounding melody squarely at a nexus of philosophy and music.
Consider briefly the following quartet of idealists:
(i) In the 1790s Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, who had received elite
training as a musician, first explicitly anointed art in general and music
in particular as a philosophical monstrance.12 “Holiest Saint Cecilia!”
he implored, “Ah! The wonder of your melody / To which I’m a slave
enchantedly, / It has disarranged my soul,”13 thus preparing the
ground for an aesthetic of feeling (Gefühlsaesthetik), where human
emotion is inscribed in or assumes semiotic coverage within musical
form.
(ii) Friedrich Schlegel gave the metaphor its sharpest form, in which the
composer in the act of composing melody actually becomes a philos-
opher: “There is a tendency of all pure instrumental music toward
philosophy . . . Is the theme in it not as developed, confirmed, varied
and constrained as the object of meditation in a sequence of philo-
sophical ideas?”14 Schlegel’s Thema alludes to the ancient rhetorical
category of an idea apt for discursive treatment rather than a rounded
instrumental melody per se; yet such distinctions were not firm in early

9
Ibid.
10
This he did perhaps nowhere more succinctly than in his Philosophy of History where freedom is
posited as nothing less than the guiding aspiration of mankind: “The history of the world is none
other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of
World History. Introduction: Reason in History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 19.
11
Henri Blanchard, for one, declared in 1840 that Meyerbeer’s melodies will remain “no less great”
than Voltaire’s poetry in this regard [“les mélodies de Meyerbeer ne resteront pas moins”].
Henri Blanchard, “Mélodies de Meyerbeer,” Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris 68 (November
29, 1840), 581.
12
W. H. Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, ed. Lambert Schneider (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider,
1967), 207.
13
Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, 152.
14
Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, 6 vols.
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), 2: 155.
 Monstrance 15

nineteenth-century criticism (where “theme” had acquired the sense of

distinctive, syntactically closed melodic material differentiated from
the shorter “motif”).15 In his theory of the novel, moreover, Schlegel
addresses the literary in musical terms, using instrumental music to
substantiate the aesthetic autonomy of literature.16 This idealist appro-
priation of “melody” gained sway from the ambiguity with which a
non-semantic, linear succession of pitches was intrinsically linked to
the heritage of rhetoric. Melody meant something profound without
being clearly understood, in short, which amounted to having your
rhetorico-melodic cake and eating it.
(iii) Schelling, in his Philosophie der Kunst (1802–03), celebrates the mate-
rial impossibility and acoustic reality of melody – which is to say its
metaphysics – as “the absolute informing of the infinite into the finite,
and thus the entire unity.”17 Time is the “universal form of imagining
the infinite in the finite,” he explains, and music’s quality of temporal
“succession” is epitomized in melodic form.18
(iv) Schopenhauer, like Schelling, credited melody with daunting meta-
physical prestige in 1819 as “the highest grade of the objectification of
the Will, the intellectual life and endeavor of Man.”19 He pre-empted
Hegel in postulating both a freedom of spirit and unity of idea for
melodic construction, further emphasizing that melody’s condition of
“significant and intentional connexion from beginning to end” is
analogous to reflecting forwards and backwards on the course of
one’s “actual life,” which “is intellectual and is thus connected as a
whole.” As such, he concludes, melody “relates the most secret history
of the intellectually enlightened will.”20
While, in several instances here, melody is arguably a metonym for music
proper, such consistently far-fetched claims in handling the concept indicate
the extent to which it was idealist commentators rather than music theorists
who controlled the rhetoric. When understood metaphorically, melody /
music’s power to inspire the monstrance writers was quite literally

15
See Carl Dahlhaus, Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 2: 195ff.
16
Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (London: Athlone Press, 1957),
146ff.
17
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 113.
18
Ibid., 109, 114.
19
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New
York: Dover, 1969), 1: 259.
20
Ibid.
16 German melody

unbounded, for it simply fed the appetite of an imagination, inviting com-

mentators with varying degrees of musical literacy freely to broaden the scope
of melody’s metaphorical weight. It was not therefore Weltanschauungsmusik
in Rudolf Stephan’s sense, but its exact reversal: Weltanschauung als Musik,
melody as illustrative metaphor for a disembodied view of the world.21
As literary praxis, this appropriation of melody draws on tropes of untrans-
latable musical language whose net effect was to render the gulf between
philosophical idea and music-theoretical category utterly unbridgeable. Very
few treatises on melody appeared (Riemann counts none between Anton
Reicha [1814] and Ludwig Bußler [1879]), and given the impossible prestige
melody commanded, it is no coincidence that Wagner’s bold formulation of a
vocal Versmelodie occurred only after the failed revolutions of 1848–49, when
the dam of political optimism had broken and disillusionment had set in,
thereby negating the earlier, largely unchecked aspirations that indirectly
inhibited an adequate theory of melody.
Significantly for the perspective of melodic theory, the monstrance tradi-
tion decisively placed agency into the creative imagination of a beholder,
implicitly shifting the concept of melody away from the status of a scrutable
art “object” (with an independent ontic essence) towards that apprehended
through the subjective screen of audition. The result? The concept changed
from an objective compositional category into a floating signifier for listeners
that fueled a freeplay of ideas; phenomenologically speaking, “melody”
became synonymous with the power of a listening experience – subject to
taste – which constituted something of a carte blanche of reception aesthetics.
Hence its power as a prompt to introspection, evident in literary reactions
from Schopenhauer to Bergson who, by the 1910s, would always represent
inner consciousness as a metaphysical melody: “the continuous melody of our
inner life, a persistent melody that will endure, indivisible, from the beginning
to the end of our conscious existence.”22 In the early nineteenth century, the
corollary turn towards a listening agent signals a shift away from the

21
This marks a decisive break with Kant’s critical philosophy, where music (as well as laughter) had
been purely animal in nature: “a play with aesthetic ideas” causing gratification by “a motion of
the intestines” that “furthers the feeling of health.” Recent commentators, including Roger
Scruton and Richard Mason, have simply concluded that Kant was “probably tone deaf.”
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Haffner, 1951),
§. 54 “Remark,” 176–77; Scruton, “Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject
and Object,” British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2012), ays019; and Mason, Understanding
Understanding (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 31.
22
“Il y a simplement la mélodie continue de notre vie intérieure, – mélodie qui se poursuit et se
poursuivra, indivisible, du commencement à la fin de notre existence consciente.”
Henri Bergson, “La pensée et le mouvant,” in Oeuvres, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1972), 1251–1484, here 1384.
 Neurosis 17

hermeneutics implicit in Reicha’s view from 1814 that one can recognize and
teach “good and bad melodies, that is, those which express something and
those which do not.”23 For a literary Bildungsbürgertum, then, German
melody was now a central, yet centrally indistinct, undefined idea, the under-
standings of which slipped between two inversely related metaphors: at once a
genius’ Rosetta stone, melody had also now become a solipsist’s blank slate for
the transient inscription of illegible emotion.

Neurosis

It is not surprising, therefore, that German critics displayed an uncomfort-

able lack of consensus on the nature of desirable melodic composition
during the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, despite continuous musical output, a
veritable neurosis surrounded the concept of melodic expression, in which
critic chastised composer, composer ridiculed theorist, and theorist com-
plained of composers’ lack of adequate training in melodic composition (as
well as critics’ inability to judge). These roles were rarely mutually exclusive
within professional music networks: the respected Leipzig-based theorist
Johann Christian Lobe complained in 1852 about Schumann’s Genoveva
that “the main deficiencies of his opera are the utter lack of concise,
comprehensible, melody that could be sung back.”24 For his part,
Schumann had criticized the critic Eduard Sobolewski’s melodic poverty a
decade earlier in a review of the latter’s new oratorio cycle Die Erlöser:

One thing is entirely missing, we must announce beforehand; a natural melody. Yet in
the most artificially interlaced forms of Sebastian Bach, a mysterious melody floats
and melody is to be found in everything of Beethoven’s! This our intelligent composer
also knows, surely; but an immense abyss lies between knowing and creating, and it is
only after many hard battles that a mediatory bridge can be built between these.25

And none other than Sobolewski had Wagner in his sights when he declared
that criticism concerning melody was the “real casus belli” that was bringing
about the present upheaval in the musical world. After explaining that

23
Anton Reicha, Treatise on Melody [1814], trans. Peter M. Landey (Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2000), 3.
24
“Die Hauptmängel seiner Oper sind das gänzliche Fehlen der prägnanten, faßbaren, nachsingbaren
Melodie.” J. C. Lobe, “Robert Schumann,” Musikalische Briefe. Wahrheit über Tonkunst und
Tonkünstler. Von einem Wohlbekannten, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1860), 270.
25
Schumann, “Eduard Sobolewsky,” NZfM 15 (1841), 2–4. Quoted here in translation by Fanny
R. Ritter in Schumann, Music and Musicians, 3rd edn. (London, 1880), 35. Sobolewski’s oratorio
Die Erlöser was comprised of three separate compositions: Die Prophezeiung, Heilige Nacht, and
Der Retter.
18 German melody

Example 1.1 Lohengrin’s “series of intervals” that Eduard Sobolewski finds unmelodic,
from Lohengrin, act 1, scene 3, mm. 1155–58.

Wagner “never sought anything so eagerly as melody” in his operas, he

lambasts Lohengrin for its vocal writing, scoffing that “to find any
expression . . . in the series of intervals (for it cannot be called melody) of
Lohengrin, from the passage ‘Den Sieg hab’ ich errungen [sic]’ . . . would
require the imagination of a Brendelist.”26 These “intervals” are reproduced
in Example 1.1. The invocation of Franz Brendel’s Zukunft aesthetics is
apt for discussion, for Wagner himself was certainly not above the fray,
condemning his contemporaries en masse: “most Germans who compose
operas” he summarized in 1843, are simply incapable of writing “an inde-
pendent free melody.”27
Ironically, this very coherency of disagreement underscored the German
experience through a form of what Michael Herzfeld calls “cultural inti-
macy,” namely a communal recognition of those “aspects of a cultural
identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that
nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality.”28
Enabling such prickly “intimacy” was the fact that the definition of melody
was so contestable, and the manner of listening to melody so varied, that
criticism could not assess the quality of melodic composition in new works
with any respectable consensus or authority.
Indeed, already by the early twentieth century this had become a defining
characteristic of the period for several commentators. Reflecting during the
First World War, the musicologist Oscar Bie declared simply that “every
definition [of melody] falsifies.”29 And an entire book on “[t]he melody

26
Sobolewski, “Reactionary Letters IV,” TMW 33 (1855), 70.
27
“in den einzelnen Gesangsstücken fehlte die selbständige freie Melodie . . ..[d. h. ein] Übelstand
der meisten Deutschen, welche Opern schreiben.” Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze,”
(February 1 and 8, 1843) Zeitung für die Elegante Welt, rpt. SB 1: 100. Wagner cut this sentence
from his Gesammelte Schriften of 1871.
28
Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge,
1997), 3.
29
His survey of concepts easily demonstrated that the narrow sense of a tonal succession was a
fallacy of convenience, one that Bie – on offering his own proto-Wagnerian definition – felt
obliged to expand into a vast “melody-element.” See Oscar Bie, “Melody,” trans. Theodor Baker,
Musical Quarterly 2 (1916), 402–17, here 402.
 Neurosis 19

problem” appeared in 1910, seeking a remedy for the imbroglio of criticism

in the data-rich methods of experimental psychology.30 Amid the semantic
tangles, however, the mid-nineteenth-century discourse nevertheless con-
gealed around a stable opposition: that between Italian and German cultural
hegemony. Yet melody skewers the easy binary here. It reframes the
national antithesis of superficiality / depth, sensation / spirit, sugar / nour-
ishment, as a question of aesthetic and – by other coordinates – semiotic
structure. This chapter, accordingly, relates a story of tensions and conflicts
within German criticism about melodic form and the discourses surround-
ing its comprehensibility, principally in terms of predefined continuity and
the lack thereof; turning to the concept of forms of expression, the second
part of the chapter uncovers the framework of philosophical ideas under-
pinning these discourses, and specifically centers on the linkage between
idealist critics’ only partially anti-Italian stance and the difficult reception of
Tannhäuser and Lohengrin as melodic opera.
Reflecting on a decade of debate in the German press over Wagner’s
melodies, the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo in 1859 called melody the “acid
test” that every composer must endure, but complicates the effectiveness of
any such test by adding that “it is harder to argue about the absence or
presence of a melody than anything else.”31 Indeed, this view was not
limited to Wagner criticism, but was echoed by the Italian critic and
Verdi supporter, Filippo Filippi, who simply declined to comment on the
melodies in Don Carlos because: “of this essential musical element, there are
so many diverse concepts that, when judging an opera, it is impossible ever
to ascertain or deny whether melody is present or lacking.” Instead, Filippi
cited three pervasive kinds of melodic taste – reifiable as those of the
transnational dilettante, the Italian, and the German – making little attempt
to disguise his preference:
For some [dilettantes], melody is the trivial motif that tickles the ear and for which is
reserved the final honor [of being played] on hurdy-gurdies; for others [Italians],
melody is any musical phrase that penetrates the fiber of the heart, that touches
them and makes them cry – and those are the ones with a better concept; for
Wagner, melody is infinite, the murmur of the forest, melopoeia without rhythm,

30
Walter van Dyke Bingham, Studies in Melody (Baltimore: Review Publishing Company,
1910).
31
“Über keinen Gegenstand ist wohl schwerer zu streiten, als über Mangel oder Dasein einer
Melodie . . . Es ist und bleibt die Feuerprobe, die jeder Componist und je geistreicher er ist, nur
um desto gewisser wieder durchmachen muss, dass die Welt seinen schönen Gedanken die
künstlerische Existenz abspricht.” in “Die Aufführung der Wagner’schen Opern auf dem
Dresdner Hoftheater,” Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo 38 (1859), 300.
20 German melody

without proportions, without returns, that wanders and digresses, and that can
produce a metaphysical excitement, leaving the ear dissatisfied and the heart arid.32

The positive (Italianate) conception of melody in this typology “penetrates . . .

the heart,” i.e. eliciting a visceral emotional response, but the question of how
this actually happens – i.e. the question German theorists (fired by idealist
visions of the will) urgently wanted to answer – remained unasked.
Writing more broadly about the problem of melodic competency in
opera, Lobe identified the predicament in 1852 (“our modern German
composers have no sense of simple volksmäßige melody; they neither
want nor are able to invent any”), and drew a tripartite distinction similar
to Filippi by way of articulating future options.33 In a telling difference of
national approach, Filippi organizes his melodic typology by listener
response while Lobe does so in terms of differing commitments to a text:
first, by simply declaiming the words with orotund vocal intonation; second,
by grasping onto a poem’s overall meaning and resultant feeling; or third, by
discarding the text’s relation to musical character altogether in favor of the
ear’s pleasure, and deferring responsibility to the singer for “giving the vocal
work expression and character.”34 Tensions between pleasure and compre-
hension when listening go back at least to the debates over periodic syntax
between J. N. Forkel and H. C. Koch, yet Lobe’s ostensibly critical descrip-
tion of the Franco–Italian (third) model betrays a revealing ambivalence.35
Although wholly inappropriate dance rhythms express “sad, impetuous,
wild passions,” these “lovely melodies” nevertheless remain alluring and
“snare the ear with sweet magic bands and find great applause . . . [among
those] who only want to sway and bathe in flatteringly caressing waves of
tone.”36 It remains genuinely unclear whether Lobe was, is, or would like to
be among the swimmers. Irrespective, the regional indexing of melodic style

32
Filippo Filippi, “Studio analitico sul Don Carlos di Giuseppe Verdi,” Gazetta musicale di Milano
24 (1869), 35. Cited in Andreas Giger, Verdi and the French Aesthetic (Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 46.
33
“unsere jetzigen deutschen Componisten haben keinen Sinn für einfache volksmäßige Melodie;
sie wollen oder können keine schaffen.” Lobe, “Die deutsche Oper der Gegenwart im
Allgemeinen,” Musikalische Briefe, 37.
34
“man bemüht sich nur angenehm ansprechend für das Ohr zu sein, kümmert sich um die Worte,
um den Sinn und den Charakter des Stückes wenig oder gar nicht und überläßt die Sorge, dem
Gesangstücke Ausdruck und Charakter zu geben, ausschließlich dem Sänger.” Ibid.
35
On the topic of late eighteenth-century listening, specifically the concern for pleasure and
comprehensibility of periodic form among theorists, see Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the
German Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 17ff.
36
“das Ohr mit süßen Zauberbanden umstricken und großen Beifall bei allen Denen finden, welche
nur Melodie suchen und . . . in den schmeichelnd kosenden Tonwellen eben nur behaglich sich
wiegen und baden wollen.” Lobe, Musikalische Briefe, 37.
 Neurosis 21

functioned as a means of categorizing listeners’ perception of melodic

beauty negatively: as satiation (Lobe’s Italian style) or unsatisfied hunger
(Filippi’s Wagner). Neither critic seemed able to affirm their native style
directly in this respect, though it was only German melodic criticism that
was reflexively self-deprecating.
So what exactly did German critics perceive as the poverty of their native
melodists? Historiographically, broken lines voided melody of the aesthetic
principle of unity, by now a century-old notion that had been applied to
melodic theory since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s unité de mélodie of 1753
where melody in the uppermost voice – as the sovereign, consolidating
element – becomes an arbiter of form, and which entered German discourse
a year later under Friedrich Marpurg’s corrective notion of a principal voice
synonymous with “unity of the whole” (Einheit des Ganzen).37
Again, it is Lobe – himself a Weimar-born, Weimar-trained composer
and flautist – who stared most searchingly into the national mirror. He lists
a series of mistaken attitudes as the causes for contemporary compositional
problems that give rise to fractured melodic lines. His diatribe is represen-
tative of a body of criticism so is recounted here in all its confessional zeal:
composers pay too little attention to the human voice, treating it as a ripieno
instrument, he argues, and ignoring “the public’s demand for beautiful,
melodies that ring out clearly.” Consequently one hears “mere notes, no
closed melodies,” since German melodic attempts are “ripped apart”
between singer and orchestra. The use of harmony is also culpable for
atomizing expression, we learn, for Germanic melodists set almost every
note to a different chord, and make way for a different key in every measure;
their melodies are therefore “too modulatory and harmonically rich,” which
destroys their sense of unity and prevents listeners from gaining a “mean-
ingful conception” of their line. All hope is forlorn, he despairs, for even if
singers “really do once take up a full melody,” the accompaniment is
invariably “too thick,” daubing “dense tonal color” over the melody and
thereby obscuring it. Reaching his acerbic height, Lobe likens “recent
composers” to murderers, whose “immature melodic embryos” tend to
fracture any melodic continuity into lifeless micro phrases:
An eight-measure, forward-moving melody appears to them as too “usual” a form, as
one that is too clear, too simple – horror! And to think that there could even be a second

37
Friedrich Marpurg (ed.), Historisch-Kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, 5 vols. (Berlin:
J. J. Schützens selige Witwe, 1754), 1: 63. Rousseau’s unité de mélodie appears in the Lettre sur
la musique françoise, see Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95),
5: 289–328, esp. 305ff.
22 German melody

part [to the melody]! If they are ever moved to write anything melodic, they cannot
shake it off fast enough in order to return to their unmelodic academic clutter. They
are true child killers, for hardly has a melodic infant been wrested from them, they
strangle and choke it.38

Infanticide notwithstanding, such charges were not in fact limited to

German melody, but – as Andreas Giger has pointed out – were also leveled
at French melodists by Italian critics, where cries of “frasi spezzate” or “frasi
truncate” indicated a corruption of the “melodie lunghe, lunghe, lunghe,”
that for Verdi defined Bellinian style.39 A satirical anecdote in the recently
founded L’Art musical from 1861 underscores the view that Italian melodic
talent is verifiable by “a short aria accompanied on the piano by only two
chords, the chord of the tonic and the chord of the dominant.”40 Cast as an
unlikely dialogue between (an unnamed parody of) Berlioz and Rossini, it
sees the former approaching the latter for compositional mentoring, con-
trasting the apprentice’s “grand work for double choir and double orchestra
called The Last Judgment” (bloated by eight-part brass, eight piccolos and
eight sets of timpani, as well as a chorus of three hundred children), with
Rossini’s advice to prove one’s authenticity of talent by means of simple
melody, tonic and dominant: simplex sigillum veri. Within the tale, natural
invention is posited as a signifier both of true compositional ability and as a
universalized Italian style. In other words, charges of composing “fractured”
melodic lines that required expansive orchestral effects to compensate for a
perceived lack of continuity and coherence were essentially criticisms of
non-Italian style, not just of German ineptitude.
A useful illustration of this principle occurs in a critical review of
Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète from 1855, where the Italian composer and singing
teacher Alberto Mazzucato exemplifies the well-established view that

38
“Eine achttactige fortgeführte Melodie erscheint ihnen als eine zu ‘gewöhnliche’ Gestalt, als
ein zu klarer, einfacher – Gräuel. Und gar einen zweiten Theil dazu zu bringen! Wandelt sie
einmal eine melodische Regung an, so können sie dieselbe nicht schnell genug von sich
abschütteln, um in ihren unmelodischen gelahrten Wirrwar zurückzukehren. Sie sind wahre
Kindesmörderinnen, denn kaum hat sich ein Melodiekind von ihnen losgerungen, so erwürgen
und ersticken sie es.” Lobe, Musikalische Briefe, 39–40. Emphasis added.
39
Verdi to Camille Bellaigue, May 2, 1898, see Alessandro Luzio, Carteggi verdiani, 4 vols. (Rome:
Reale accademia d’Italia, 1935–47), 2: 312.
40
Cited in Giger, Verdi and the French Aesthetic, 73. We should bear in mind that the real Berlioz
disliked Rossini with a passion (“S’il eût été alors en mon pouvoir de mettre un baril de poudre
sous la Salle Louvois et de la faire sauter pendant la représentation de la Gazza ou du Barbiere
avec tout ce qu’elle contenait, à coup sûr je n’y eusse pas manqué”). This appeared in the Gazette
musicale de Paris in 1834. See Berlioz, Critique musicale I: 1823–1834, ed. H. Robert Cohen and
Yves Gérard (Paris: Bucht/Chastel, 1996), 443.
 Neurosis 23

architecturally rounded Italian melody contrasts with the stunted, deformed

vocal lines of non-Italian opera:
Our [Italian] melody is smooth, fluid, composed of proportions that are said to be
architectonic; it is symmetrical, respondent in its various phrases, rounded, peri-
odic, concluding. It has a homogenous beginning, middle, and end. In short, it flows
naturally in carrying out its two elements, that is, tonality and rhythm.
Melody north of the Alps shuns this naturalness, this spontaneity with study,
almost (as it seems) with affection, even repugnance . . . But when it comes to
rhythm, and specifically its natural vehicle, the musical period, the whole thing
proceeds very differently. In the melodies of Le Prophète, with a few exceptions,
there is no ordinary regularity, no rigor of proportions, no symmetry, no rhythmical
correspondence of phrases, no roundedness of periods, no natural conclusions.
More often than not, the melody stops, breaks off, is truncated; and if not always at
the beginning, then certainly in the middle or unfailingly toward the end.41

With his differentiation of melodic structure, Mazzucato neatly summarizes a

body of European opinion.42 Yet along with the few attempts during this
period to construct a typology of melody, it occurred in the context of
journalistic reviews where value-laden categories such as naturalness, beauty,
and expression were themselves ill-defined and subject to criticisms of
national bias. German “art” melody was thought more ambiguous in this
respect than that of Italy, for it was hampered by a musical heritage more
closely linked to late eighteenth-century collections of folk melody, notably by
such luminaries as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Friedrich Reichardt,
both of whom had explicitly recommended folksong as a model for melodic
composition.43 The synthesis of dialectical categories such as art and folk, as
Matthew Gelbart has argued, was expressed in terms of a literal overlap,
in which composers aestheticized putative folk melodies, incorporating
them into compositions by an individual.44 But it also meant that composed
“art” melody carried the burden of both individual and national

41
Alberto Mazzucato, “Il profeta,” Gazetta musicale di Milano 13 (1855), 187. Cited in Verdi and
the French Aesthetic, 45. In fact, Lobe put forward a strikingly similar assessment of Italianate
melody in 1854, but judged it was the librettist who must first enable the rounded, symmetrical
forms of music. See Lobe, “Bellini,” FBfM (1854), 262–80. Rpt. “Vincenzo Bellini,” Musik-
Konzepte 46 (1985), ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik,
1985), 50.
42
See commentators from Stendhal, Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1814), ed.
Daniel Muller (Geneva: Slatkine, 1986) to Abramo Basevi, Studio sulle opera di Giuseppe Verdi
(1859).
43
See Margaret Mahony Stoljar, Poetry and Song in Later Eighteenth Century Germany: A Study in
the Musical Sturm und Drang (London: Routledge, 1985), 194.
44
See Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music” (Cambridge University
Press, 2007), esp. 197–205.
24 German melody

expression, resulting in tropes of public embarrassment from theorists such

as Lobe, who vociferated about his “true child killer” compatriots, whose feral,
fragmented progeny constituted “unmelodic academic clutter.” Eduard
Hanslick summed up the gloomy situation in 1846, musing: “it almost
seems as if we had entered upon a period of poverty and impotence, a state
of barrenness after an ample harvest.” With overtones of national shame, he
asked with exaggerated pathos: “Is German opera entirely widowed? Is there
no one else? No one?”45
Within this discourse, the point of structural difference between Italian
“architectonics” and German “clutter” uncovers a site of tension within a far
older dialectic of formal beauty and expression. In contrast to Lobe’s aversion
to fractured Vormärz opera, Mazzucato’s description of the “homogenous
beginning, middle, and end” of Italian melodic proportions fulfills a key
criterion of beauty dating back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics, namely magni-
tude and ordered arrangement: that which the eye can easily apprehend in its
entirety, that which can be grasped as a whole.46 It is for this reason, as
Friedrich Kittler has argued, that the story of Oedipus is beautiful for Aristotle,
because – like Mazzucato’s architectonic Italian melodic form – it “fulfills the
temporalized optical requirement of having a beginning, a middle, and an
end.”47 The significance of this for melodic theory is that expression of a
(socially distasteful) content, whether scenes of incest and patricide or arias of
vampires and vengeance, was a problem for an aesthetics defined in opposi-
tion to Italianate form. Kittler’s insight was that the operative principle of pre-
Baumgartenian aesthetics was simply: pattern recognition.48 The signified of
melody thus remained racked between the semiotics of formal beauty and
expressive truth, a condition (to which we will return) that can be abstracted
in terms of a dialectic of pattern and chaos, “architectonics” and “clutter.”

Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism

It was Wagner, more than any other mid-century German composer, who
was subject to the severest public attacks as a “fanatic of melodic absence.”49

45
Ironically, of course, in 1846 it was none other than Wagner that the 22-year-old law student had
in mind to play the role of champion in this history of German opera. Eduard Hanslick,
“Tannhäuser,” Music Criticisms, trans. Henry Pleasants (London: Penguin, 1950), 33–34.
46
Aristotle, The Poetics, 1995, 1450b–1451a.
47
Friedrich Kittler, “The World of the Symbolic – A World of the Machine,” Literature, Media,
Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997), 130.
48
Ibid. 49 “Fanatiker der Melodielosigkeit.” Eduard Hanslick, HSS, I/4: 347.
 Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism 25

Ironically, as a respected conductor and aspiring composer in the 1830s, he

was drawn to Mazzucatoean “architectonics” through Bellini, engaging closely
with the discourse on Italian melodic style throughout his twenties. This
resulted in a battery of critical, often mocking, anti-German sentiments that
surface particularly in the essays: “Die deutsche Oper” (1834), “Der dramati-
sche Gesang” (1837), and “Bellini: Ein Wort zu seiner Zeit” (1837). As late as
1872, Cosima dictated what would become his well-known mot juste that
“Bellini wrote melodies lovelier than one’s dreams,”50 and as a young man, he
had indeed dreamt of being an Italian composer: “surely it would not be a sin
if, before going to bed, we prayed that heaven would one day give German
composers such melodies and such a mode of handling song.”51 The joke was
on him, however, when the tease of his compatriots was inverted as a criticism
of his own melodic poverty. Since the premiere of Tannhäuser on October 19,
1845, discourses of German music criticism had targeted Wagner’s perceived
weakness in melodic invention. It would prove a durable accusation in the
nineteenth century, and even become a historical verdict in the twentieth, with
writers such as Paul Bekker, who cited moments of lyrical climax as the points
where Wagner’s “weakness as a melodic writer is at its most apparent,”52 and
Theodor W. Adorno, who echoed Nietzsche in speaking of Wagner’s melody
as an objective lack, calling unendliche Melodie “a bombastic term [that] covers
up a weakness.”53 Yet as Paul de Man once observed, whenever Romantic
attitudes are implicitly or explicitly under discussion, “a certain heightening of
tone takes place, an increase of polemical tension develops, as if something of
immediate concern to all were at stake,”54 and a full anatomy of discourse
since Tannhäuser would unhelpfully merge personal and often political hos-
tility with partisan quarrels, clouding the present inquiry. I therefore present a
representative sampling from the 1850s to illustrate the fault lines along which
criticism of Wagner’s melodies extended.
Before Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) and Oper und Drama (1851)
began circulating, two of the heavyweight organs of the German musical
press, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik, spoke of the Tannhäuser overture as a musical void that was

50
CT (August 3, 1872). 51 SSD 12: 20. Cf. PW 8: 68.
52
“Wo er sie [die Gesangmelodie] in einzelnen Fällen noch anwendet, weil der Augenblick ein
lyrisch liedmäßiges Auschwingen erfordert . . . da erscheint er als Melodiker am schwächsten.”
Paul Bekker, Wagner: Das Leben im Werke (Berlin and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt
Stuttgart, 1924). English translation by M. M. Bozman. Richard Wagner: His Life in His Work
(New York: Norton & Co., 1931), 177.
53
Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2005), 44.
54
Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 3.
26 German melody

inadequately concealed by “instrumental effects.”55 These were not unusual

objections. Similar critiques would be made of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini in
1851, and we even find the future doyen of Zukunft (later: Neudeutsch)
ideology, Franz Brendel, cautioning Wagner: “interesting instrumental
combinations, specifically an interesting violin effect, do not compensate
for a lack of inner content.”56 It was a rare occasion on which the trope of
musical “emptiness” was levelled at Wagner by a would-be advocate.
Following these mild beginnings, Wagner’s Zurich essays sent a shot of
adrenaline into the body of melodic criticism. By rendering his aesthetic
aspirations verbally tangible, Wagner made them susceptible to close
scrutiny by German literati with varying degrees of professional musical
education. In particular, his claims that music should be considered a mere
means for the purposes of drama stuck in the throat, as did his attack on
the most celebrated living melodist of his age: he dandified Rossini pejo-
ratively as an “uncommonly handy modeler of artificial flowers [aka
melodies]” that were drenched in fake scent (“narcotizing melody”),
while rolling his eyes at Weber for having plucked a genuine melodic
flower from the meadow of German Volksmelodie – killing it dead: “the
flower bloomed no more!”57 As an unemployed political refugee, Wagner
was in a weak position to make such claims, and only the memory of
Rienzi’s success in 1842 prevented them from appearing as idle provoca-
tion. But Wagner’s perceived temerity riled conservative critics such as
Ludwig Bischoff, whose descent to a mocking, personal level in the
Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung from 1858 is not untypical:

Richard Wagner despises melody and does not care much about her. The feeling
appears reciprocal, and it is, perhaps, out of mere spite that R. Wagner speaks so
rudely about the gentle virgin in his books. Let’s leave aside for once the misused,
even equivocal expression “Melody.” Melody or no melody: we don’t want to argue
about that. What we require from every work of art . . . are well-defined, palpable, I
want to say, plastically perceptible forms . . . We regret having to confess that
scarcely the slightest trace of such forms and thoughts was visible to our weak
mind, during the four hours Lohengrin took in performance . . . this continuous,

55
“Finden sich auch darin manche interessante Instrumentaleffecte, so fehlt es doch überall an der
Hauptsache: an Melodie, Einheit, künstlerischer Ruhe und Mässigung,” in “Nachrichten,” AmZ
7 (February 18, 1846), 125.
56
“Interessante Instrumentalcombinationen, insbesondere ein interessanter Geigeneffect,
entschädigt [sic] nicht für Mangel an innerem Gehalt,” in Franz Brendel, “Leipziger
Musikleben,” NZfM 18 (March 1, 1846), 72.
57
SSD 3: 251–52, 261. Cf. PW 2: 41, 43, 52.
 Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism 27

eternal psalmodically reciting, musically unmusical declamation bored us, it bored

us indescribably.58

Responding to the same run of Lohengrin at Vienna’s Hof-Operntheater, a

reviewer from the Monatschrift für Theater und Musik characterized
Wagner’s monotony as a historical misstep, roundly contradicting the
assertive stance his writings had adopted on melodic innovation:
If opera is indeed to be only a succession of recitatives, without a resting point – a
mere musical intoning of the dramatic dialogue, without any specific musical aim
and substance . . . Wagner is no reformer, but the most violent artistic reactionary,
who ignores the progress made since Rameau and Lully, and in a most unpractical
way and in place of the cultivated dramatic music we have had for eighty years,
wants to re-establish recitative, the exclusive predominance of whose quintessence
would form the worst monotony.59

Inevitably, critics uncomprehending of Wagner’s reforms suspected an

ulterior motive. Namely, that Wagner’s extensive individuation of “melody”
in Oper und Drama must conceal ineptitude. Hanslick articulated this view
most clearly – following his warm reception of Tannhäuser in 184660 – in a
review of the same production of Lohengrin in Vienna:

58
“Richard Wagner mißachtet die Melodie, will wenig von ihr wissen. Das Verhältnis scheint ein
gegenseitiges zu sein, und es ist vielleicht bloße Rancune, wenn R. Wagner in seinen Büchern von
der zarten Jungfrau ‘Melodie’ so unglimpflich spricht. Lassen wir einmal den durch Missbrauch
allerdings zweideutig gewordenen ausdruck ‘Melodie’ bei Seite. Melodie oder nicht Melodie:
darüber wollen wir nicht streiten. Was wir aber von jeglichem Kunstwerke verlangen . . . das sind
feste, greifbare, ich möchte sagen: plastisch anschauliche Gestalten . . . Es thut uns leid, bekennen
zu müssen, dass unseren schwachen Sinnen von solchen Gestaltungen und Gedanken in der vier
Stunden spielenden Oper Lohengrin kaum das Mindeste wahrnehmbar geworden ist . . . ja,
dieses endlose, ewige psalmodistisch recitirende, musicalisch–unmusicalische Declamiren
langweilte uns, langweilte uns unsäglich,” in Ludwig Bischoff, “Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin,”
Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 38 (1858), 299–300.
59
“Soll die Oper nichts sein, als eine Reihe von Recitativen, ohne Ruhepunct, – eine bloße
musikalische Betonung der drammatischen Rede, ohne specifisch musikalischen Zweck und
Gehalt . . . Wagner ist dann kein Reformator, sondern der ärgste Reactionär im Gebiete der
Kunst, der die seit Rameau und Lully gemachten Fortschritte mißachtet und, höchst
unpractischer Weise, an die Stelle der ausgebildeten dramatischen Musik, wie wir sie seit achtzig
Jahren besitzen, das Recitativ wieder herstellen möchte, dessen Alleinherrschaft den Inbegriff
ärgster Monotonie bilden würde.” W. M. S., “Lohengrin in Wien,” Monatschrift für Theater und
Musik (1858), 437.
60
Contrary to clichéd views of his antagonism towards Wagner, in 1846 Hanslick inserted
Tannhäuser into a succession of great operas, as one he regarded as “the finest thing achieved in
grand opera in at least twelve years . . . just as epoch-making in its time as were Les Huguenots
[1836], Der Freischütz [1821], and Don Giovanni [1787], each for its respective period of music
history.” [“ich [bin] der festen (wenn auch unmaßgeblichen) Meinung, daß der ‘Tannhäuser’ das
Vorzüglichste sei, was seit wenigstens 12 Jahren in der großen Oper geleistet wurde . . . ebenso
epochemachend, dem Geiste der Zeit entsprossen, und hervorragend über die
28 German melody

The [master composers] knew and respected very well the demands of poets, but
they were also musicians, they were inventors. The strength is proper to them that
Wagner wants to deny because it is lacking in him: the strength of melody, of
independently beautiful musical thoughts. It is a great error to portray melody-in-
itself and nothing more as the enemy of those dramatic traits; one only does that
when one is by nature without melody, [and] instructed by clever effects to small
profit . . . [A]s long as there has been a history of music, contempt for melody has
been identical with melodic impotence.61

But the flipside to such criticism of Wagner’s apparently disingenuous

theorizing was his commercial gain from the media exposure. As Lobe
pointed out in 1852, it was precisely the controversy over Wagner’s theory
that began to expand his audience. Or as he put it: Wagner’s operas were to
Oper und Drama what heavily laden sailing ships stuck at port (in windless
weather) are to a billowing breeze; the essay whipped up such a “wind” that
his fleet of dramatic works now “float with full sail on the sea of his fame.”62
(Although only 500 copies of Oper und Drama were printed in 1851, the
content of the essay was propagated further afield by the German press,
albeit with varying degrees of accuracy.63)
The trouble, however, was that most writers had read the essays before
hearing the operas, and Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were now being received
proleptically as “music drama,” when, as one informed commentator

dazwischenliegenden (wenngleich trefflichen) Bestrebungen auf die Hugenotten folgt, wie diese
nach dem Freischütz, und dieser nach Don Juan.”] The serialized review appeared in the Wiener
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1846) and is reprinted in Eduard Hanslick, Sämtliche Schriften:
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. 6 vols., ed. Dietmar Strauß (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), I/1: 62. In a
reassessment of Hanslick’s view of “criticism as an institution” in the second half of the
nineteenth century, Dana Gooley argues that recent musicology has tended to place
disproportionate emphasis on Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, which has exaggerated Hanslick’s
opposition to Wagner. See “Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism,” Journal of Musicology 28
(2011), 289–324.
61
“Die letzteren kannten und achteten die Forderungen des Dichters sehr wohl, aber zugleich waren
sie Musiker, sie waren Erfinder. Ihnen eignete die Kraft, die Wagner leugnen möchte, weil sie ihm
fehlt: die Kraft der Melodie, des selbständig schönen musikalischen Gedankens. Es ist ein großer
Irrthum, die Melodie an sich und ohneweiteres als Feindin jeder dramatischen Charakteristik
darzustellen; das thut nur, wer von Natur melodielos, auf die kleinen Gewinne durch geistreiche
Effecte angewiesen ist. Vielmehr kann in dem gegliederten musikalischen Gedanken, in der
Melodie selbst eine dramatische Kraft wohnen, die das declamatorische Pathos und aller
Instrumentalwitz der Welt niemals erreichen . . . denn so lange es eine Geschichte der Musik gibt,
war Verachtung der Melodie und Mangel an Melodie identisch.” Eduard Hanslick, “Die Oper
Lohengrin,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 47 (1858), 371. Rpt. in Hanslick, HSS I/4, 337, 343.
62
“Seine Opern lagen lange Zeit wie schwer befrachtete Segelschiffe bei gänzliche Windstille im
Hafen fest gebannt. Da fuhr er mit seinen Schriften auf, und die erregten einen solchen Wind,
daß seine kleine dramatische Flotte in Bewegung kam und jetzt mit vollen Segeln auf dem Meere
des Ruhmes dahin schwimmt.” Lobe, Musikalische Briefe, 277.
63
See Wagner to Eduard Avenarius, May 31, 1851, Zurich, SB 2: 567.
 Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism 29

explained, the operas “have little or nothing in common” with the theoretical
essays.64 Wagner tried to clear up the confused chronology in both Oper und
Drama and Eine Mitteilung but a majority of German critics continued to
judge his most recent operas as exemplifications of the tenets laid down in his
Zurich essays, adding to the “misunderstandings” that Wagner privately
dubbed “the depths of the most utter mindlessness.”65 Literary networks, in
other words, controlled the flow of critical persuasion. If we choose to view
literature in this way, as a channel of communication, as an information
system that processes, stores and transmits data, the 1850s emerge as a site of
heightened interference, where the traditional rhetoric of physical presence
and persuasion became reliant on more anonymous technologies of mass
communication. The high frequency of start-up journals, limited print runs
and fractured distribution networks expedited the disintegration of signifiers
such as “melody” into their diverse symbolic values, provoking contrasting
significations, misunderstandings and communication gaps.66 And we
should not underestimate the more devious, wilful desire for misunderstand-
ing. Wagner admitted to Fédéric Villot in 1860 that “when all is said and done
[an artist’s theories] can only expect to be understood by one who already
shares his artistic standpoint.”67 (This was not mere egotism: Wittgenstein
would begin his Tractatus in much the same fashion.)68 After a decade of
partisan criticism, Wagner recognized that being understood in print was
particularly difficult since “understanding” – in his sense of self-effacing
assent – required agreement among politicized factions that often had little
desire to see eye to eye.
In the same publication (introducing the French translation of his
Romantic operas), Wagner responded most publicly to the welter of melodic
criticism, coining the term unendliche Melodie a year before the planned
Parisian premiere of Tannhäuser in 1861. His explanation of the music’s
melodic form as totalizing rather than absent, and his move to characterize
this as unending (between orchestral parts) rather than fragmented (within

64
“die Opern [waren] lange vor den Schriften erschienen, und mit den in den letzteren dargelegten
Theoremen wenig oder Nichts gemein haben.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage: Kritisch Beleuchtet
(Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1854), 5.
65
“in der absoluten gedankenlosigkeit.” Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, July 27, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 363.
66
On the fragmentation of discourse, see David Pavón Cuéllar, From the Conscious Interior to an
Exterior Unconscious: Lacan, Discourse Analysis and Social Psychology (London: Karnac, 2010),
296ff., and on the broader topic of the influence of music criticism on listening practices, see
Benjamin Korstvedt, “Reading Music Criticism beyond the Fin-de-siècle Vienna Paradigm,”
Musical Quarterly 94 (2011), 156–210.
67
SSD 7: 113. Cf. Three Wagner Essays, trans. Robert Jacobs (London: Eulenburg, 1979), 29.
68
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], trans. D. F. Pears and
B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 3.
30 German melody

phrasal sections), arguably anticipated French reactions to those very melo-

dies that had been mauled in the German press over the previous decade, as
well as warning listeners of what was to come in Tristan.69 Ironically, one
critic anticipated and dismissed this very strategy in 1854, complaining that
the principal theme of the Tannhäuser overture “is varied to infinite length in
such a way that gifted listeners grow tired of it, at least [they] long for
something ‘truly new’ – which unfortunately never appears.”70
As a republican agitator, Wagner’s compromised political profile meant that
critics with an interest in devaluing his art had little difficulty; “melody” served
this purpose well since it was already a magnet for controversial opinion. This
complicated what Mary Sue Morrow has called the “us against them” mentality
in German criticism, a rhetorical strategy that involved “positing a superior
Germanic Chosen in opposition to an inferior musical ‘Other.’”71 On one
hand, the dominance of Italian opera within German theaters – “a quantitative
menace to the claim of German hegemony,”72 as Gundula Kreuzer puts it –
supports Morrow’s second criterion for dualistic criticism, namely that “the
Other . . . be held responsible for some injury or wrong to the Chosen.”73 On
the other hand, (i) Wagner’s exile meant that, politically speaking, he was not
wholly one of “the Chosen” (Liszt had to draw his attention to this fact in
1849),74 and (ii) the traditional Germanic ground for unified opposition to
Italian aesthetics was instrumental music based on the paradigm of mimesis,
not vocal melody. Since the early eighteenth century, moreover, a coalition of
theorists including Brossard, Walther, Rameau, and Heinichen began to
define melody itself principally as a vocal aesthetic (a process capped
by Rousseau’s Lettre of 1753).75 Wagner’s two caveats thus ran contrary to
the established terms on which German criticism had functioned since the

69
On this point, see also Thomas Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 249.
70
“Dieses Thema wird jedoch in unendlicher Länge dergestalt variirt, dass begabte Hörer
überdrüssig werden, mindestens sehnsüchtig nach ‘wahrhaft Neuem’ – was denn leider nicht
erscheint.” See “Richard Wagner” in Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 8 (1854), 59.
71
Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 46.
72
Gundula Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13.
73
Morrow, German Music Criticism, 46.
74
Liszt to Wagner, October 28, 1849, Bückeburg, in Correspondence of Liszt and Wagner (Vols. 1
and 2), trans. Francis Hueffer (Cirencester: The Echo Library, 2005), 39
75
Sébastien de Brossard, “Mélodie” in Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris: Ballard, 1703), 43;
J. G. Walther, Praecepta der musikalischen Composition [1708] rpt. in Jenaer Beiträge zur
Musikforschung, ed. Peter Benary (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1955), 2: 10; J.-P. Rameau, Nouveau
Système de Musique Théorique (Paris, 1726), 1; J. D. Heinichen, Der General Bass in der
Composition (Dresden: Bey dem Autore, 1748), 543.
 Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism 31

late eighteenth century. It was partly for this reason that German critiques of
Wagner’s melodies were unusually cannibalistic, so to speak. They can be
broken down into three broad complaints: (i) fragmentation of pre-formed
melodic units; (ii) incomplete compositional working; (iii) pretentions towards
melodic “character.”
The lack of a single perceptible cantabile line led to objections that
Wagner fractured melodic continuity. Some, like the archeologist and
philologist Otto Jahn, heard a concatenation of pre-formed melodic–motific
segments in Lohengrin that lacked integration; it was “as though one wanted
to hurl completed pieces into a mass in flux . . . [W]e find only the raw
materialism of external signs, which moreover pretend to be ingenious.”76
Others felt Wagner’s disjointed melodic working was inherently incom-
plete, even sloppy in its craftsmanship. In 1853, for example, August
Hitzschold dubbed him a Prosaiker whose “mosaic of tones” betrayed an
internal battle between graphic artist and painter, in which the construc-
tional labor of the former is clearly revealed in the final product of the latter:
We miss here and there the law-governed order, the transparency and the equili-
brium. Wagner’s melodies are like paintings, in which the painter had left the lines
that he particularly liked when he proceeded to the coloring stage. There they are
now, the abrupt, angular outlines, perceptible and graspable while the mellow,
fragrant, even sensory hue – cut through everywhere by those lines – now becomes
faint and ineffective. But the [pencil-wielding] graphic artist is victorious; he, the
main artist – the painter may only follow as a second – looks forth everywhere out of
the work, and the tracks of the all-powerful pencil, of the fashioner, remain
unsmudged . . . and the illusion? Yes, fortunately it would be destroyed.”77

Hitzschold implies that such melodic forms rely by their nature on a

deceptive Schein in which “higher dramatic truth [is supposedly clothed]

76
“wie wenn man in eine im Fluß begriffne Masse schon fertige Stücke hineinwerfen wollte . . .
[W]ir [finden] aber nur den rohen Materialismus äußerlicher Kennzeichen der noch dazu
prätendirt geistreich zu sein.” Otto Jahn, “Lohengrin. Oper von Richard Wagner,” first published
in Die Grenzboten (1854); rpt. in Jahn, Gesammenlte Aufsätze über Musik (Leipzig: Breitkopf &
Härtel, 1866), 149.
77
“dort die gesetzmässige Ordnung, hier die Durchsichtigkeit und das Ebenmaass vermissend.
Wagner’s Sang-Melodieen gleichen Gemälden, in welchen der Maler die Linien der Zeichnung,
die ihm besonders gelungen, hat stehen lassen, als er an die Farbengebung ging. Da stehen sie
nun, die schroffen, kantigen Umrisse, fühlbar und handgreiflich, aber der weiche, duftige,
zugegeben sinnliche Farbenton wird nun, überall von jeden Linien durchschnitten, matt und
wirkungslos. Aber der Zeichner hat gesiegt; er, der Hauptkünstler – der Maler darf ihm ja stets
nur in zweiter Linie folgen – blickt überall aus dem Werke hervor, und die Spuren des
allmächtigen Bleistiftes, des gestaltenden, bleiben unverwischt . . . Und die Illusion? Ja, die wäre
glücklich vernichtet.” In August Hitzschold, “Zur Physiologie des musicalischen Drama’s,”
Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 23 (1853), 177.
32 German melody

in music,” but the constant failure of this illusion – revealed by those

“abrupt, angular outlines” – results only in his disappointment at the
tonal mosaic with its “mangle of connections” that Hitzschold hears as
musically and dramatically arbitrary.78 (Curiously, Wagner as “graphic
artist” actually inverts later definitions of his techniques of phantasmagoria
as “the product [that] presents itself as self-producing,”79 replacing what
Adorno – and before him, Mann and Nietzsche – regarded as a sinister
anonymity of underlying forces with outright incompetence: Wagner’s
failure to conceal his modes of melodic production.)
Seeking an explanation for why audiences seemed unable to make sense of
Wagnerian melody, the pedagogue Carl Alberti cited Wagner’s dominant
metaphor – of a vast ocean of harmony on which the dinghy of melody floats –
to argue that a certain amount of confusion is inevitable because Wagner sets
out from the principle of total melodic freedom. He wants to characterize the
“finest nuances” in every progressive emotional step, Alberti explains, through
“swerves and transitions in all conceivable keys,” but “the harmonic motion of
his melody is restricted mostly to triads because these alone can lie immedi-
ately next to each other; and moreover a monotony emerges, induced espe-
cially by the uninterrupted use of the diminished seventh chord, which . . .
allows endless turns.”80 These ambiguities in Wagner’s expression thus
implied a hermeneutical problem where listeners were simply unable to follow
the alleged meaning of the shifting harmonic terrain.
Following such incomprehension, accusations of ineptitude were quick to
set in, and Wagner could be charged with a scandalous lack of creative power.
While such criticism reflected conservative interests within the atmosphere of
disillusionment pervading Nachmärz criticism, it also presented Wagner’s
case as a renegade burner of world orders, whose credibility had been lost

78
“der Hörer . . . wird mit unbefriedigtem Verlangen nach diesem Mosaik der Töne hin horchen
und für die mangelnde Verbindung derselben, die fehlende Abrundung der Perioden, wenig
Trost und Entschädigung in der schweren Harmonieenfolge [u. s. w.] . . . finden.” Ibid.
79
Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 74.
80
“Die Harmonie ist ihm [Wagner] eigentlich nur ein unendliches Meer, auf dem sich der Nachen
der Melodie gewegt; er geht aus von der vollkommenen Freiheit der Melodie, will mit ihr jeden
Fortschritt der Empfindung bis in die feinsten Nuancirungen durch Ausweichungen und
Uebergänge in alle erdenklichen Tonarten begleiten und bezeichnen. Dabei sind Verirrungen
unvermeidlich; die harmonische Bewegung seiner Melodie beschränkt sich meist auf Dreiklänge,
weil nur diese unvermittelt neben einander stehen können; und es entsteht daraus eine
Monotonie, die ausserdem noch besonders durch die unausgesetzte Anwendung des
verminderten Septimen-Accords herbeigeführt wird, der . . . unendliche Wendungen zulässt.”
C. E. R. Alberti, Richard Wagner und seine Stellung in der Geschichte der dramatischen Musik
(Stettin: Müller, 1856). Quoted in “Stimmen der Kritik über Richard Wagner,” Niederrheinische
Musik-Zeitung 38 (1856), 303.
 Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism 33

when the destruction of world order had failed to come to pass in 1848–49,
and, specifically, whose melodic charisma had been swallowed up as part of
what the socialist philosopher Moses Hess called the old “epoch of illu-
sions.”81 A typical line of criticism found in Bischoff’s Rheinische and
Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitungen in 1853–54 argues doggedly that the mel-
odies of Lohengrin show “no great and especially no free invention,”82 and
that, although Wagner evidently tried to compose melodically, in Tannhäuser
the protagonist’s narration betrays the fact that “Wagner lacks the actual
creative power of musical invention, and that whenever melody comes to the
fore in his music, it can make no claims . . . to novelty and originality.”83 It
was hardly a stretch, then, when Hanslick summarized the general belief in
Wagner’s inherent “thematic poverty” with the claim that in the whole of
Lohengrin he was unable to find an eight-measure theme that could only have
been written by a “first rate musical genius.”84 Such damning conclusions
were echoed abroad, notably by the Englishman Henry Chorley, who dis-
dainfully stated: “no opera existed before Tannhäuser – since the cradle-days
of Opera – so totally barren of rhythmical melody.” With outspoken loathing
of the “insulting” piece, he reveals how quickly rational objection to melodic
fragmentation could tip over into vitriolic projections of a composer “more
poor in melodic inspiration than any predecessor or contemporary,” one who
gropes in vain for tunes: “when [they] would not come, he forced his way
along by a recitative as uncouth and tasteless as it is ambitious.”85
To be sure, the negative impulse behind such hyperbolic criticism was self-
reinforcing, generating a momentum of opinion against Wagnerian melody
that had little to do with score analysis or even the relatively few perform-
ances of his operas that took place. The only serious mid-century defense of
Wagner as an architectonic melodist picked up on this. Lobe quoted

81
Moses Hess, Judgement dernier du vieux monde social (Geneva: F. Melly, 1851).
82
keine grosse und namentlich keine freie Erfindung.“ See “Lohengrin, Oper von Richard
Wagner,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 6 (February 11, 1854), 42.
83
“[Es] wird uns auch klar, dass es Wagner an eigentlich schöpferischer Kraft der musicalischen
Erfindung fehlt und dass, wenn Melodie bei ihm zum Vorschein kommt, sie gerade auf nichts
weniger Anspruch machen kann, als auf . . . Neuheit und Originalität,” in “Tannhäuser und der
Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg. Romantische Oper in drei Akten von Richard Wagner. IX,”
Rheinische Musik-Zeitung 138 (February 19, 1853), 1097.
84
“Ich habe bei wiederholtem aufmerksamsten Studium des Lohengrin inmitten der geistreichsten
Intentionen und Züge nicht ein Thema von acht Tacten auffinden können, von denen sich sagen
ließe, diese acht Tacte kann nur ein musikalisches Genie ersten Ranges geschrieben haben,”
Eduard Hanslick, “Die Oper Lohengrin,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 47 (1858), 371–72.
Rpt. in Hanslick, HSS I/4: 338.
85
Henry Chorley, “Glimpses at Dresden,” Modern German Music: Recollections and Criticism
(London: Smith Elder & Co., 1854), 1: 362–63.
34 German melody

extensively from Wagner’s vocal scores (presented as a kind of hard data) in

his analyses to argue, for instance, of Lohengrin’s Verbot: “there is rhythmic
balance, simplest construction, referentiality, unity and a rounding off of the
whole form.”86 Such views are anomalous, however, because very few critics
had a vested interest in defending Wagner’s specific ability as a German
melodist in terms of Italianate construction.
Even those commentators who admired his thematic construction
and accepted his tendency to obviate periodic syntax still conveyed a
sense of bewilderment at the scarcity of demonstrable thematic material.
George Eliot once deduced, in an attempt to remain objective about
her disappointment over Lohengrin, that Wagner’s “exclusion of melody”
must follow from one of two possible suppositions: “either that Wagner
is deficient in melodic inspiration, or that his inspiration has been
overridden by his system, which opposition has pushed to exaggera-
tion.”87 Yet Eliot’s conundrum ultimately takes on a charitably Hegelian
slant:
As to melody – who knows? It is just possible that melody, as we conceive it, is only a
transitory phase of music, and that musicians of the future may read the airs of
Mozart and Beethoven and Rossini as scholars read the Stabreim and assonance of
early poetry. We are but in “the morning of the times,” and must learn to think of
ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog.88

But whether because of Wagner’s participation in violent political reforms,

or because of his call for sweeping aesthetic reforms in opera, few writers
were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in this way.
It is indicative that even the traditional defense of German melody – a
careful portrait of dramatic character – was inverted as a further criticism.
The critic and iconoclast Eduard Krüger vociferated in 1856 over “a bound-
less monotony of stereotypical phrases [in Lohengrin] that one habitually
calls Charakteristik.”89 The aesthetic category of das Charakteristische / die

86
“Da ist Eurhythmie, einfachste Konstruktion, Bezüglichkeit, Einheit und Abrundung der ganzen
Form,” in J. C. Lobe, “Briefe über Richard Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten: Zwölfter
Brief,” FBfM 2 (1855), 29.
87
Eliot’s 1855 essay was written for Fraser’s Magazine and followed the London concert series
between May and June, where Wagner directed the New Philharmonic Society; it forms one of
the earliest documents about Wagner reception in Victorian England. See George Eliot [Mary
Anne Evans], “Liszt, Wagner, Weimar,” Selected Critical Writings (Oxford University Press,
1992), 87.
88
Ibid.
89
“Die Folge ist eine gränzenlose Monotonie stereotyper Sätze, die man charakteristisch zu nennen
beliebt.” Eduard Krüger, “Zerstreute Anmerkungen zu Wagner’s Lohengrin,” Niederrheinische
Musik-Zeitung 1 (January 5, 1856), 5.
 Wagnerian melody: infinite criticism 35

Charakteristik was ostensibly linked to tropes of serious, closely crafted

German expression in opposition to formulaic Italianate melody, but it
could equally be used as a by-word for forced originality, i.e. contorted,
inexpressive melody justified by the promise of dramatic expression that
voided the listening experience of pleasure.90 In Wagner’s case, the
Emperor’s characteristic clothes were clearly invisible for a number of
commentators; Otto Jahn, whom we met earlier, judged that “the striving
to be characteristic allows for no calm flow and no harmonic
development . . . In Wagner, melodies are not rare that are completely
crooked just so that they appear to mean something, and thereby become
entirely unsingable.”91 His two examples of this – both instrumental lines,
incidentally – are reproduced in Examples 1.2a and 1.2b. The former
illustrates how elements such as syncopated or fractured rhythms, har-
monic ambiguity (centering here on different diminished 7ths), and amod-
ular construction defined the trope of empty melodic character for
disbelieving ears. Typically known as the “revenge” motif, Example 1.2b is
rhythmically patterned and metrically balanced, which leads one to suspect
Jahn may have disliked its intervallic play between minor, major, and
augmented seconds, the irregular phrase units (2 + 2 + 3), and the range
that is racked across two octaves, as well as the sudden Neapolitan jolt at the
clarinet’s peak pitch. There were plenty of pro-Wagner articles that made
contrary observations about his melodic portrait of character92 (several
citing the need for multiple hearings as a prerequisite for true apprecia-
tion),93 but I have found none from the 1850s that engaged in an extended
defense of Wagner’s specific ability as a melodist.

90
For an elaboration of this point, see the summary of Franz Grillparzer’s critique of Weber’s
Euryanthe in Jacob de Ruiter, Der Charakterbegriff in der Musik: Studien zur deutschen Ästhetik
der Instrumentalmusik 1740–1850 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag, 1989), 241ff.
91
“das Bestreben, charakteristisch zu sein, läßt keinen ruhigen Fluß und keine harmonische
Ausbildung zu . . . Melodien, die vollständig verschroben sind, damit sie nur etwas zu bedeuten
scheinen, und daher ganz unsangbar werden, [sind] nicht selten. ” Jahn, “Lohengrin. Oper von
Richard Wagner,” 151. Cited in “Richard Wagner,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 6 (1854), 42.
92
One example from a journal otherwise hostile to Wagner concerns the oboe melody immediately
prior to Elsa’s first entry: “Elsa erscheint, der lebendige Gegensatz der Anklage, hehr, rein,
keusch; das Orchester wandelt seine stürmischen Klänge in eine liebliche Melodie (As C, Oboe
und englisch Horn) um, und lässt die Jungfrau in ihrer Reine und Hehre erscheinen.” See Anon.,
“Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin,” Rheinische Musik-Zeitung 165 (1853), 1287.
93
Here we remain with the critic of footnote 92: “diese Oper [Lohengrin] will oft gehört sein, bevor
man ihre Schönheiten erfassen kann . . . Wundervoll sind in der ganzen Oper die Modulationen;
sie sind so originell, so überraschend schön und doch so natürlich; die Melodien, ohne diese
gehört, bleiben gänzlich unverstanden.” See Anon., “Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin,” Rheinische
Musik-Zeitung 170: 1307.
36 German melody

Example 1.2 Two characteristic melodies singled out by Otto Jahn in Lohengrin.
(a) The cello melody from act 2, scene 1, mm. 3–17.

(b) The bass clarinet melody from act 1, scene 2, mm. 533–41.

From this sampling of critiques it seems clear that the anti-Wagner

discourse rested principally on the fact that his melodies did not sound
Italianate. Felix Draeseke, an astute voice within Wagner’s circle, even
suggested in 1856 that the entire debacle over Wagner’s lack of melody
 Forms of expression 37

rests on this: “the nonsensical demand that poetry in music drama ought to
be accompanied by melodies from Italian opera.”94 Despite such awareness,
and the fact that Wagner’s negative status was driven by a politicized
identity that galvanized reactionary criticism to his Zurich essays, the net
result was a series of damning judgments about his basic creative faculties,
manifest as melodic poverty or vacuity. Lobe’s perverse defense of Wagner’s
melodic structures demonstrated how easily these could be refuted, but
given the Italianate associations of the concept of melody, it simply did
not serve anyone’s critical interest to claim Wagner as a “melodist” as such.
Though it will certainly serve our interests to see where this critical impasse
would lead.
At an archeological level, the tensions within German melodic criticism
just examined are superficial to the extent that they are structured by a
broader philosophical ground of expression, character, and “Germanness.”
It was this ground that effectively determined the lines along which critical
discourse could extend. Uncovering this deeper matrix involves pursuing
several concepts back to the eighteenth century but along philosophical
rather than critical tracks. Accordingly we will now revisit some familiar
voices, but with the new purpose of detecting their grounding in concepts
somewhat deaf to immediate temporal events.

PART 2

Forms of expression

Anyone who studies composition – what does he want to learn? The forms
of melody!
Flodoard Geyer95

Imagine a perfect melodic expression: a one-to-one correspondence

between units of expression and units of content that leaves no space for
mystery (hermeneutic or semiotic), and hence rules out “misunderstand-
ing.” This hermetic concept was centuries old by the time it reached writers
of Wagner’s generation; having first been posited by such English linguists

94
“Ein weiterer Vorwurf nennt Wagner melodielos . . . er [beruht] auf der sinnlosen Anforderung,
daß in einem Musikdrama der Dichtung musikalisch durch italienische Opernmelodien begleitet
werden solle.” Felix Draeseke, “Richard Wagner, der Componist,” NZfM 13 (1856), 135.
95
“Ein Jeder, der Composition studirt, – was will er lernen? Die Formen der Melodie!” Geyer,
“Kann und soll die Melodie gelehrt werden?” 338. Emphasis added.
38 German melody

as John Webster and Francis Bacon on discovering Chinese ideograms

(whose putatively precise signifiers contrasted with the diverse meanings
extractable from Egyptian hieroglyphs), it aspired to dissect words into their
constituent “simple notions” and assign symbols to these, which “will be
extremely few . . . the reason of their composition easily known, and the
most compounded ones at once will be comprehended . . . so to deliver the
nature of things.”96 In the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher decried the
enterprise of universal language as an inevitable failure because “agreement
about the universal language is itself subordinated to particular lan-
guages.”97 The diversity of linguistic systems did not apply to the relatively
delimited tradition of a “developing musical language”98 in early
nineteenth-century Germany, however, and compositional hopes for deter-
mining general melodic signifiers persisted, even if the results were often
ridiculed, i.e. “mincing the [musical] impression into little details and
detailed littleness.”99
The German problem, Wagner had specified in 1834, was over-
zealous attention to the minutiae of melodic expression: “What
splitting of hairs in the declamation,” he vociferated about Euryanthe,
“what fussy use of this or that instrument to emphasize a single
word!”100 His insight was the difficulty of a break with Italianate
style. The intractable dilemma for German melodists was how to
convey a specific emotional content, yet adhere to principles of formal
beauty considered by a majority of contemporary theorists to be sub-
ject to inviolable universal laws: “the true and the beautiful.”101 This
contradiction initiated a shift away from the conception of melody as
an abstract “plastic” shape onto which specific content was applied
through text (i.e. Hegel’s sensuous embodiment of the idea, after
Leibniz – in his critique of Locke – had asserted the intellect as prior
to sensation), to a shape itself as the load bearer and signifier of a
content, i.e. as a kind of perfect physiognomy, whose limited meaning

96
Seth Ward, Vindicae academiarum (Oxford: Leonard Litchfield, 1654), 21.
97
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 274.
98
Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York and London: Norton, 1988), 366.
99
SSD 12: 2. Cf. PW 8: 56. 100 Ibid.
101
Lobe is a good example of this: “Man will frei sein und hält jede Regel für eine Fessel. Man wirft
nicht nur die ältere Theorie bei Seite . . . man lehnt sich auch auf gegen die ewigen Gesetze des
Wahren und Schönen.” Lobe, Musikalische Briefe, 26.
 Forms of expression 39

is innate. The writer Theodor Mundt captured something of this

ambition in a corrective from 1845:
[W]e may occasionally have just a suspicion that this or that succession of
tones [Tonreihe] would equally well express a serious or tragic idea as a serene
or jovial one. This tendency . . . is not part of the nature of music itself. It always
results, in fact, from imprecision or from the defects of a particular musical
composition.102

Hanslick would cite Gluck’s Che farò senza Euridice! precisely in order to
argue that vocal melodies do not distinguish joy from grief, Orpheus’ loss
from his hypothetical reunion with Euridice, that without text melodies
become “like silhouettes whose originals we cannot recognize.”103 But the
logic of geometric semiosis, i.e. the interpretive criterion that equates
melodic form monogamously with expressive content, could go much
further. It would achieve an objective sphere for art that Kant had sought,
but without presupposing a consent (beauty as universally pleasing) that is
subordinate to social convention.104 Otherwise expressed, it marked a drive
among German composers to individualize melodic expression, thereby
increasing the degree to which melody could differentiate between content
on the basis of its geometric and harmonic properties.
In response to this impulse the unflattering suspicion arose that density of
expressive effect concealed an inadequacy of simple beauty of invention in
German music, as noted above. The Swiss essayist and novelist Germaine de
Staël lifted the curtain on this judgment when she observed in her cultural
profile of German Romantic thought “De L’Allemagne” (1807) that: “every-
thing which tends to particularize the object of melody must necessarily
diminish its effect.”105 This is a key statement and a portentous problem; it
is worth backtracking to uncover the circumstances that brought it about.

102
“[E]s hat zuweilen den Anstrich, als ob diese oder jene Tonreihe, z.B. ebenso gut einen ernsten,
tragischen, wie einen heitern und scherzhaften Gedanken ansdrücken könne . . . [Das] wird
immer nur die Fehlerhaftigkeit und der Mangel der besondern musikalischen Composition
sein.” Theodor Mundt, Aesthetik: Die Idee der Schönheit und des Kunstwerks im Lichte unserer
Zeit (Berlin: M. Simion, 1845), 352–53.
103
Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1986), 18.
104
Theodor W. Adorno elaborates on the latter point in Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 218ff.
105
Germaine de Staël, “On German Music” [1807], rpt. TMW (February 18, 1841), 103–04. See also
Stendhal, Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase, who, in publishing a collection of letters
from Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, glorified Italian music with melody at its fountainhead in
1814. Yet as late as 1879, Saint-Saëns would declare Stendhal culpable – as a melody-monger of
simple “vulgar” tunes – for the still-widespread attitude that complicated melodic
40 German melody

Since the mid-eighteenth century, a dialectic of beauty and expression

had become deeply rooted in the structure of aesthetic discourses. It was
given its characteristic formulation by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in
1764, whose study of human forms in Greek sculpture led him to contrast
their undistorted, natural beauty with those same forms when they
“expressed” a particular emotion, objectifying the predicate of expression
with formerly untroubled limbs and unfurrowed brows:

Expression is an imitation of the active and suffering states of our minds and our
bodies and of passions as well as deeds. In both states, the features of the face and
posture of the body changes, and thus the forms that constitute beauty change, and
the greater this change is, the more disadvantageous it is to beauty.106

A paradigmatic example of Winckelmann’s distinction – made famous by

Lessing – was the statue of Laocoön (ca. 200 bc; Figure 1.1), the Trojan
priest from book two of the Aeneid, whose anguished expression and
torturously mutilated body is graphically depicted as the two serpents of
Minerva tear at his flesh and devour his two sons, while he curses and snorts
in animalistic death throes. This statue, for Winckelmann, shows:
a being in the greatest pain . . . swell[ing] his muscles and tens[ing] his nerves . . .
The fearful groan he draws in and the breath he takes empty the abdomen and
hollow out the sides, exposing to our view the movement of his entrails . . . [Yet] the
father’s heart is manifested in the wistful eyes, and his compassion seems to float
over them like a cloudy exhalation. His face is plaintive rather than agonized; his
eyes are turned toward the higher power.”107

In other words, even though the expression of Laocoön’s pain is mediated

by the symbolic functions of his facial expression – which otherwise ought
to maximize distension (paradoxically, “where the greatest pain is
expressed, the greatest beauty is also to be found”) – the contortions
distorting his “natural” state mark the statue less as beautiful, more as
expressive art – a contentious description that would initiate one of central
aesthetic debates of the later eighteenth century.108

configurations must be “learned music, and the composer [must be] a pedant who does not
know how to conceal his learning – he [must be] a pretentious nincompoop, an algebraist, a
chemist, a what you will.” Camille Saint-Saëns, On Music and Musicians, trans. Roger Nichols
(Oxford University Press, 2008), 23.
106
J. J. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2006), 204.
107
Ibid., 313.
108
Prominent contributions to this debate include Goethe, “Über Laokoön” [1797] in
Kunsttheoretische Schriften und Übersetzungen, Berliner Ausgabe (Berlin: Aufbau, 1985), 19:
 Forms of expression 41

1.1 Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros [Laocoön and his sons]. Marble copy
of the original, from ca. 200 bc; discovered in the Baths of Trajan in 1506. Musei
Vaticani, Museo Pio-Clementino, Octagon, Laocoön Hall.

In respect of these categories, Winckelmann’s argument bears compar-

ison with the debate over German melodic structure. Writing of “melodic
speech” in 1813, the musically trained writer (and Goethe student) Heinrich
August Kerndörffer argued that “absolute beauty” means declamation
“without approaching consideration of the content of the speech,” i.e.
without contorting sonorous beauty for the purpose of expression, while
declamation substantively linked to the semantic content of what is said is
what “we call relative beauty.”109 Yet the discourse of melodic structure was
complicated by the fact that “form” implied both musical form as a compo-
sitional parameter and plastic form as an aesthetic category. These over-
lapped in the imagination of certain writers, but were never properly
synonymous (E. T. A. Hoffmann, for one, emphatically rejected any such

129–41; Aloys Hirt, “Laokoön,” in Die Horen, ed. Friedrich Schiller (1797), 3: 1–26; and
Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragmente,” in Athenaeum 1 (1798), 261–63.
109
“Unter absoluter Schönheit verstehen wir diejenige, welche der Declamation ohne Rücksicht auf
den Inhalt der Rede zukommt; diejenige, welche ihr in Beziehung auf den Inhalt der Rede
angehört, nennen wir relative Schönheit.” Heinrich August Kerndörffer, Handbuch der
Declamation. Ein Leitfaden für Schulen und für den Selbstunterricht zur Bildung eines guten
rednerischen Vortrags (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1813), 5. Emphasis added.
42 German melody

comparison).110 More than half a century after Winckelmann had died,

Hegel associated plastically perceptible form principally with classical sculp-
ture and architecture as the second of his three epochs delineating the
history of aesthetics: Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic. The ideal of
Classical form, as articulated in his Aesthetics, was nothing less than the
“free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appro-
priate to the Idea itself in its essential nature.”111 That is, a perfect expres-
sion. More specifically, its historical occurrence in Ancient Greek statues
represented a coincidence of Geist as both content and form, without
engaging only the consciousness (Symbolic art) and without divorcing
idea from shape (Romantic art):

[C]lassical art actually attains and sets forth what constitutes its innermost concept
and essence. At this point it lays hold of the spiritual as its content, in so far as the
spiritual draws [the reality of] nature and its power into its own sphere and so is
represented otherwise than as pure inwardness or as dominion over nature.112

When transferred to melody, the philosophical apex this represented was

twofold: first, it completed the unity of the idea in its reality – i.e. unifying
sensuous and spiritual existence – wherein the only defect became “the
restrictedness of the sphere of art [itself]”;113 second, in terms of the
compositional process, it synthesized the dialectic of conscious and uncon-
scious cognition, since classical art – being generated by the spirit – origi-
nated “in the most inward and personal being of poets and artists who have
[nevertheless] created it with clear and free deliberateness, consciously
aiming at artistic production.”114 Within Vormärz discourses on aesthetics
that emerged in the afterglow of Hegel, therefore, self-contained plastic
form acquired status as the signifier of highest attainment, as well as of
beauty: whether in terms of melodic composition, plastically three-
dimensional sculpture, or historical aesthetics.
Whether by design or by accident, Hegel thereby gave Italianate melodic
syntax a learned underpinning. As noted earlier, he employed the concept of
melodic form as a metaphor for freedom – “the free-sounding of the soul” –
that is, analogous to the central organizing concept, and ethical–historical

110
See E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Beethovens Instrumental-Musik,” in Fantasiestücke, 52.
111
Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 77.
112
Ibid., 1: 476. Such was the desire to see Classical art as unsurpassed, the very perfection of the
marble’s whiteness reinforced the essential connection between material and artistic form, for
Hegel, becoming the focus of a bitter debate over whether or not the statues had originally been
brightly painted. See Patrik Reuterswärd, Studien zur Polychromie der Plastik. Griechenland und
Rom (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 1–34.
113
Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 79. 114 Ibid., 1: 477.
 Forms of expression 43

telos, of his social philosophy. The melodies he had in mind when writing
these words were almost certainly Rossini’s. Citing a pantheon of historically
Italianate composers, he expounds that “nature has bestowed on the Italians
above all the gift of melodic expression,”115 later justifying his preference for
Rossini’s melodies as music that is “full of feeling and genius, piercing the
mind and heart [cf. classical architecture’s unity of spiritual and sensuous],
even if it does not have to do with the sort of characterization beloved of our
strict German musical intellect.”116 By connecting the category of melody to
closed, proportionate, symmetrical qualities, i.e. a classical formalist beauty
later adduced in Mazzucato’s vocabulary for Italianate melody, Hegel thereby
reduces the opposition of melody and musical portrayal of character quite
precisely to Winckelmann’s dichotomy of beauty and expression, where
expressive motion effectively hinders the free and purely resounding soul.
The continuity of symmetrically balanced, rounded melodic form – the
aesthetic against which Wagner’s vocal lines were measured during the
1850s – thus found its idealist description, as well as its historically aesthetic
justification, in what Hegel had ascribed to classical beauty.
Unsurprisingly, his musical rationalization of this view appealed to nature:117
The bird on the bough or the lark in the air sings cheerfully and touchingly just in
order to sing, just as a natural production without any other aim and without any
specific subject-matter, and it is the same with human song and melodious expres-
sion. Therefore, Italian music, where in particular this principle prevails, often passes
over, like poetry, into melodious sound as such and may easily seem to sacrifice, or
may actually sacrifice, feeling and its definite expression because it looks only to the
enjoyment of art as art, to the melodious sound of the soul in its inner satisfaction.118

But musical “freedom” is not innocent here. The concept easily splits apart
into its opposing elements along the performance network: to sing on a
whim, to improvise; to piece together expression through increasingly
unregulated configurations of pitch and rhythm; to hear melody abstractly
as a mirror of the “right of subjective freedom.”119
Recall that the critic Alberti understood “total melodic freedom” – in
pitch, meter and rhythm – as the premise for Wagner’s melodic character-
ization of “every step of emotion up to the finest nuancing.”120 The paradox

115
Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 939. 116 Ibid., 2: 949.
117
Specifically, Hegel’s reference is to the still-prevalent, Rousseauian construct of melody as the
representation of nature and genius, harmony of skill and artifice.
118
Ibid., 2: 940. 119 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 124.
120
“Er [Wagner] geht aus von der vollkommenen Freiheit der Melodie, will mit ihr jeden
Fortschritt der Empfindung bis in die feinsten Nuancirungen.” Alberti, Richard Wagner und
44 German melody

was that Hegel’s rigidly architectonic Italian form allowed the singer’s line
to ring out as a “free-sounding soul.” Wagner’s melodic expression was itself
compositionally “free”; Hegel’s conception of melody was that it expressed
freedom in performance. A seeming tension nevertheless arises between the
freedom that Hegel cherishes, and the symmetrically determinate, “unfree”
melodic forms generated by this gift for freedom. He would likely respond
that within a dialectic of nature and freedom, the latter is the self-
transcending of the former,121 but the ambiguity of melodic freedom vis-
à-vis predefined shape functions as a nodal point in the discourse that finally
undoes the eighteenth-century dichotomy of formal beauty and expression.
Just as Italianate structure was not without expression, so the expressionism
within Germanic melodic shape must by definition determine an array of
forms. But what were they? Wagner pointed out the critical orientation of
such a question in 1857, arguing that critics cry out “in agony” for form,
while “the carefree artist – who could no more exist without form than
[critics] – doesn’t worry himself about it in the least while engaged in the
task of creation. How can that be? Probably because the artist, without
knowing it, is always creating forms.”122 When seen as a false dichotomy,
form / expression emphasizes the lack of conscious formal principles
available for melodic expression, that is, the absence of recognizable criteria
by which to determine how expressive melody should be formed. From
which building blocks? Measured by whose criteria?
While Wagner’s writings did not provide an explicit answer, certain
critics used him as the auctoritas against seemingly invariant menus of
“pleasing” melody. Draeseke backed Tannhäuser in this respect, for “sud-
denly it is possible to express in melody that which is magnificent, sublime,
deeply serious, and majestic, and to present it to the masses in graphic
vividness.”123 And Bekker, reflecting in 1924, even felt Wagner had pro-
vided a historical answer to the problem of expression, namely as an
“expressionist” whose earliest identification with music amounted to “ges-
ture in sound.” What Bekker was actually describing (biographically,

seine Stellung in der Geschichte der dramatischen Musik. Quoted in “Stimmen der Kritik über
Richard Wagner,” 303.
121
Hegel’s argument relates specifically to the finite and the infinite, but can be applied by
extension to such dialectics as nature and freedom, individual and universal. See Hegel, The
Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press International,
1969), 146ff.
122
SSD 5: 187. Cf. PW 3: 242.
123
Felix Draeseke, “Franz Liszt’s neun symphonische Dichtungen II. Artikel,” Anregungen für
Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft 2 (1857), 298–316; trans. Susan Hohl, in Franz Liszt and his
World (Princeton University Press, 2006), 496.
 Das Charakteristische / Die Charakteristik 45

genetically) as the basis for Wagner’s art – “neither formal design in tone
nor the natural pleasure of the ear, but a music with an expressive signifi-
cance as precise as that presented by the visual concept”124 – was in essence
the aesthetic category mobilized in response to a shift away from forms of
the dramatically generic toward the painterly specific: das Charakteristische.

Das Charakteristische / Die Charakteristik

Since the seventeenth century, the concept of character had been part of
“the historical development of an anthropology of difference,” i.e. the
index for contradistinguishing members of a common group.125 As such
it can be considered part of the emergence of the notion of the individual
within society. In one of the earliest references to this, Bacon describes
going behind the social mask that disguises individual nature with eti-
quette and mores: “A man’s Nature is best perceived in Privatenesse, for
there is no Affectation; In passion, for that putteth a Man out of his
Precepts; And in a new Case or Experiment, for there Custome leaveth
him.”126 While the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the brothers Grimm and the
later Goethe-Wörterbuch emphasize the variety of meanings this Greek
loanword had acquired by the early nineteenth century,127 both articulate
its central split between “particular features, individualizing as well as
typifying,”128 i.e. between the sense of an individual trait and a basic
(generic) disposition. It is the former that pervades definitions given
in nineteenth-century conversation lexicons, one of which even specifies
six categories by which to differentiate character according to its constit-
uent elements.129 Within aesthetics, already by the middle of the

124
Paul Bekker, Richard Wagner: His Life in his Works, trans. M. Bozman (New York: Norton,
1931), 5.
125
“[die] Entwicklungsgeschichte einer Anthropologie der Differenz.” Thomas Bremer,
“Charakter / Charakteristisch,” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, 7 vols. (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.
J. Metzler, 2000), 1: 773.
126
Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Councele, Civil and Morall (1597–1625), ed. Michael Kiernan
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 120.
127
J. and W. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 2: 611ff, see http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/;
Goethe, Wörterbuch, 2: 980ff, see http://gwb.uni-trier.de/Projekte/WBB2009/GWB/wbgui_py?
lemid=JA00001
128
“Die Möglichkeit bestimmt, sowohl individuierende wie typisierende Merkmale zu erfassen.”
Goethe, Wörterbuch, 2: 980.
129
The six categories are: disposition; temperament; mind; heart; sensibility; and how personal
freedom animates the aforementioned assemblage of traits. See Conversations-Lexicon oder
encyclopädisches Handwörterbuch für gebildete Stände [Stuttgart, 1816], in Roland Kanz and
Jürgen Schönwälder (eds.), Ästhetik des Charakteristischen: Quellentexte zu Kunstkritik und
Romantik (Göttingen and Bonn: V&R unipress / Bonn University Press, 2008), 169.
46 German melody

eighteenth century das Charakteristische had become established in a field of

conflict midway between the beautiful–ideal and the ugly (das Häßliche), but
this often involved a convoluted negotiation: writers such as Christian
Gottfried Körner felt it was possible to retain the beautiful in music by
obviating individual, momentary passion (pathos), and portraying human
character (ethos) instead, for in this way music “can sensualize what is infinite
within human nature: moral freedom,” as Jacob de Ruiter puts it.130 For some
writers, this even made musical character and beauty synonymous. But in
terms specific to vocal, rather than instrumental, melodic composition, the
historical emergence of das Charakteristische as part of a larger impulse
toward realist forms of expression is best traceable through its cardinal
properties: particularity of identity and physicality of expression.
German critics were united in proclaiming characteristic expression
distinctly un-Italian.131 But it seems a post-Hegelian aesthetics came to
terms only uneasily with its drive toward specificity. In 1849, Brendel
declared the elapsed decade unfavorable to “dramatic characterization and
objective portrayal,”132 while Lobe, in 1855, claimed defiantly that all
musical content is verbally nameable or it “is not content.”133 A year later
the aesthetician and art historian Josef Bayer sought to address this issue by
updating Hegelian doctrine for the modern age. Labeling melody “the pure
median of musical beauty [between harmony and rhythm], as it were, a
reproduction of the plastic ideal in the sphere of tones,”134 he recast Hegel’s
defunct tripartite division of fine art as the historical ages of the archaic,
the classical, and the modern, onto which he mapped the sublime, the
beautiful, and das Charakteristische (which take their paradigmatic forms

130
“weil [die Musik, wenn sie einem menschlichen Charakter darstellt] auf diese Weise das
Unendliche in der menschlichen Natur, die sittliche Freiheit versinnlichen kann.” De Ruiter,
Der Charakterbegriff in der Musik, 13.
131
Two prominent examples are Lobe: “Auf tiefere Charakteristik, auf jene Individualisirung ieder
Person . . . richten die Italiener ihr Streben nicht, weil das Verlangen danach bei dem
italienischen Publikum in der Oper nicht vorhanden ist.” Lobe, “Bellini,” 50; and Hanslick: “Ich
will gar nicht von den modernen Italienern reden, deren ganzes Opernwesen eine große
Gewohnheit ist.” Hanslick, HSS I/1: 78.
132
“Die neueste Zeit ist dramatischer Charakteristik und der Objektivität der Darstellung nicht
günstig.” Franz Brendel, “Das Bewußtsein der Neuzeit, das moderne Ideal,” NZfM 30 (1849),
233–34, 237–39, here 237.
133
“Und ein Inhalt, der sich ‘nur fühlen’ und nicht in Worten wiedergeben läßt, ist freilich kein
Inhalt.” Lobe, “Gegen Dr. Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen,” FBfM 2: 2, 65–105, here 103.
134
“Wenn die Melodie sich mit der Harmonie und dem Rhythmus ins Gleichgewicht setzt, so erzeugt
dies die reine Mitte der musikalischen Schönheit, gleichsam eine Reproduction des plastischen
Ideals im Reiche der Töne.” Josef Bayer, Aesthetik in Umrissen: Zur allgemeineren philosophischen
Orientierung auf dem Gebiete der Kunst, 2 vols. (Prague: Mercy, 1856), 2: 92.
 Das Charakteristische / Die Charakteristik 47

in architecture, plastic arts, and painting, respectively). Thus Bayer accom-

modates precisely what Hegel rejects, namely characteristic expression as a
higher, historico–aesthetic development that “gives back the [lost] bodily
side of the poetic worldview.”135
For present purposes, Bayer’s clearest definition of das Charakteristische
occurs within his discussion of the visual arts. As the most representative
form of the characteristic style, painting:

raises itself from the portrayal of a plastic generic picture [Gattungsbild] to that of a
worked-through form of character [Charakterform], from the typical form that a
whole should conceive for itself to the significant individuality which, striving,
acting, or conniving, refers to an intellectual whole.136

As an aesthetic category, however, das Charakteristische remained unstable

(even by the end of the century the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann
concluded that it was still ill-defined).137
In defining a move from the generic to the individual, it held a similarly
equivocal status within music criticism. The aesthetician Friedrich Theodor
Vischer spoke in 1857 of music’s characteristic style as a “portraying,
painting style,” noting that: “Here music progresses right up to the most
extreme boundaries possible, it becomes portraying, objectifying, it becomes
epic, dramatic, orchestrating.”138 If this drive to render music a fully semi-
otic language sounds implausible, it is worth remembering that this was
exclusively a debate between German aestheticians, whereas a similar
debate was almost inconceivable in the intellectual traditions of England,
France, or Italy.139
As we noted earlier, the descriptive power of this aesthetic came to be
associated directly with Wagnerian melody. Joachim Raff even held that a
dialectic of form and character structured Wagner’s entire approach to

135
“Beim charakteristischen Styl angelangt, giebt sie gleichsam die körperliche Seite des poetischen
Weltbildes wieder.” Ibid., 2: 90.
136
“So erhebt sie sich von der Darstellung des plastischen Gattungsbildes zu jener der
durchgearbeiteten Charakterform, – von der typischen Gestalt, die ein Ganzes für sich vorstellen
soll, zu der bedeutenden Individualität, die sich strebend, handelnd oder duldend auf ein
geistiges Ganze bezieht.” Ibid.
137
Eduard von Hartmann, Die deutsche Ästhetik seit Kant, 12 vols. (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1886), 1: 376.
138
“Hier schreitet die Musik bis zu den äussersten Grenzen des ihr Möglichen fort, sie wird
darstellend, objektivierend, sie wird epische, dramatische, orchestische.” Friedrich
Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, 2nd edn. (Munich: Meyer & Jessen,
1923), 5: 242. Dahlhaus points out that this paragraph was actually written by Karl Köstlin, see
Dahlhaus, “Die Kategorie des ‘Charakteristischen’ in den Ästhetik des 19. Jahrhunderts,”
Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, 1988), 286fn.
139
On the German identity of the debate, see Roland Kanz, Ästhetik des Charakteristischen, 7ff.
48 German melody

melodic composition, continuing: “If melody makes use of the same mate-
rial as recitative in respect of outward portrayal, we must first begin here to
observe inner characterization in the most fundamental melodic moments.”
He nuanced Liszt’s public claim that Tannhäuser’s motifs depict emotions
so “vividly” they require no text to be understood,140 in concluding: “It
cannot be denied that these motifs [in Lohengrin] are very concise and
characterizing [kennzeichnend] in a melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic
respect.”141 Wagner would gently disagree with Liszt in 1857,142 and even
Raff felt obliged to point out potential problems in coding melodic material
in this way: it renders opera plots incomprehensible without the aid of
portraying, melodic signs, and subordinates musical style to a dramatic
context (the heroic, noble material of Lohengrin, he instances, ensures the
music is almost entirely restricted to elementary rhythms and 4/4 meter,
meaning that a feeling of monotony is unavoidable in an opera lasting three
and a half hours).143 Other critics argued more practically that Wagner was
restricting himself to a string of unpleasant instants, for he could only
characterize “fleeting situations, agitated moments etc.” with no allowance
for graceful figures.144
To be sure, Wagner’s music was not generating a new debate, but being
inserted into an existing one.145 Yet das Charakteristische had achieved
more than a degree of legitimacy within German aesthetics by the mid-

140
See Liszt, “Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner par Franz Liszt” trans. John Sullivan
Dwight, in Wagner and his World, 257–58.
141
“Wenn in Hinsicht der äußeren Darstellung die Melodie sich derselben Mittel zu bedienen hat,
als das Recitativ, so muß hier zunächst die Betrachtung der inneren Charakteristik in den
wesentlichsten Momenten des Melodischen beginnen . . . Es ist nicht zu leugnen, daß diese
Motive in melodischer, rhythmischer und harmonischer Hinsicht sehr prägnant und
kennzeichnend sind.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 100, 109–10.
142
Referring to the mental images of Orpheus and Prometheus, Wagner argues euphemistically
that one “may still point to the difficulty of extracting an intelligible form for musical
composition out of such exalted representations.” SSD 5: 192. Cf. PW 3: 247.
143
Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 111.
144
“er charakterisirt immer nur einzelne vorübergehende Situationen, unruhige Momente u.
dergl.” [Julian Schmidt], “Stimmen der Kritik über Richard Wagner,” Niederrheinische Musik-
Zeitung 11 (March 17, 1855), 83–84.
145
This goes back at least to 1805 when Goethe translated Diderot’s unpublished satirical dialogue
Le Neveu de Rameau, explaining in a postscript that northern composers’ “peculiar harmonies,
interrupted melodies, forcible deviations and transitions” cannot but “insult” the ear. He
explains that, for northern composers in competition with poetic expression: “Seltsame
Harmonieen, unterbrochene Melodieen, gewaltsame Abweichungen und Übergänge sucht man
auf, um den Schrei des Entzückens, der Angst und der Verzweiflung auszudrücken. Solche
Componisten werden bei Empfindenden, bei Verständigen ihr Glück machen, aber dem
Vorwurf des beleidigten Ohres . . . schwerlich entgehen.” Goethe, “Anmerkungen über
Personen und Gegenstände, deren in dem Dialog: Rameau’s Neffe erwähnt wird,” Goethes
Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1874), 13: 467. Equally, Friedrich Schlegel had spoken
 Das Charakteristische / Die Charakteristik 49

nineteenth century. After Körner’s pioneering essay Über Charakter-

Darstellung in der Musik (1795) had been “barely noticed”146 by his con-
temporaries, later applications of das Charakteristische to music were
mostly left to professional theorists, who remained ambivalent about its
perceived destruction of unity. Brendel simultaneously legitimized and
rebuked the modern Lied aesthetic in this respect, where a drive “towards
sharper characterization”147 forms part of a narrative of decline: “every
expansion, every progression, by devaluing art, is also a backward
step.”148 But in a self-serving move, he later alluded to Marx for the view
that some harmonic progressions cannot be explained through normative
theory and must be interpreted by the ear in conjunction with an Idee. This
uncoupling of grammar and sensation was enlisted to interpret the more
outlandish harmonic maneuvers in Liszt’s Symphonic Poems:
The sensory point of view [Sinnlichkeitsstandpunkt] is the Marxian principle of the
characteristic . . . on this footing it can therefore certainly happen that a [harmonic]
combination is justified not merely through technical harmonic analysis, rather
directly through the idea . . . [W]here the ear is the judge, other laws are in force
than where the characteristic principle appears.149

This occasional incongruence between pleasing, euphonious sensations and

das Charakteristische explains why, for Bayer, “plastic and music [are] com-
pletely opposite,” effectively dashing any lingering hopes to merge Italianate
and Germanic aesthetics. But consider the specious dialectics needed to
transcend this impasse: Bayer’s melodic ideal is defined precisely as a “plastic
ideal in the sphere of tones” where one must regard beauty itself as “doubly

of “artistic chaos” in his critique of modern literature, where the “total predominance of what is
characteristic, individual and interesting” was leading to a “restless, insatiable striving for what
is new, piquant and striking,” an outcome – he felt – of an aesthetics of innovation engaged in an
empty process of continually outdoing itself. See Friedrich Schlegel, “Über das Studium der
griechischen Poesie” [1795–97], Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 35 vols., ed. Ernst Behler
(Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958–) 1: 224, 228.
146
de Ruiter, Der Charakterbegriff in der Musik, 13. But see also Matthew Pritchard’s counter-case
in “‘The Moral Background of the Work of Art’: ‘Character’ in German Musical Aesthetics
1780–1850,” Eighteenth-Century Music 9 (2012), 63–80.
147
“zu schärferer Charakteristik.” Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” NZfM 22 (1845), 8.
148
“Jede Erweiterung, jede Fortschritt ist beim Sinken der Kunst zugleich ein Rückschritt.” Ibid., 9.
149
“[Die Sinnlichkeitsstandpunkt] ist das Marxsche Prinzip des Charakteristischen . . . Auf diesem
Wege kann es demnach auch wohl geschehen, dass nicht mehr bloss durch technisch
harmonische Analyse, sondern durch die Idee unmittelbar eine Kombination zu rechtfertigen
ist . . . Wo das Ohr der Richter ist, gelten andere Gesetze, als da, wo das Charakteristische als
Prinzip auftritt.” Franz Brendel, “Franz Liszt als Symphoniker,” NZfM 49 (1858), 73ff. For an
examination of Brendel’s position, see Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute
(Princeton University Press, 2002), 161–67.
50 German melody

formed”150 since the visual arts and music more or less isolate two sides of the
beautiful against each other: “the visible and the audible, appearance and
movement, form and life.”151 This confrontation of silent matter and sound-
ing motion can only be unified in poetry, Bayer claims optimistically, and,
anticipating the final telos of modern art, he alludes to physiology – implicitly
disagreeing with Brendel – where the sheer pleasure of any sonic stimulation
makes up for the lack of beautiful forms in visually specific characterization.
In terms of Winckelmann’s category of expression, the resulting com-
promise Bayer comes up with invokes music through classical sculpture in a
grand bargain:
The [modern] artistic genius is that Pygmalion who wants to give soul to and imbue
with his innermost life the form that he has created. But this form disappears disem-
bodied in his arms as soon as he tries to embrace it with rising feeling. Here enters,
instead of beautiful form that delighted the eye, the inner euphony of harmonic
existence that fills the ear with delight. The former silent beauty must part from the
realms of the visible, in order to make audible the deeper fullness of its being.152

Pygmalion – that Cypriot sculptor whose ivory female statue came to life at
the amorous touch of his lips – is an apt analogy, both in breathing animate,
particularizing life into inanimate, sculptural beauty and in requiring divine
intervention in the process. (Wagner had spoken similarly of “liberating”
human sculpture into the reality of the mimetic dancer, where “the illusion
of plastic art turns to truth in drama.”153) It is the movement of music,
whose corollary is the physical pleasure of sound, that makes up for any loss
of visual specificity, the amputated “realms of the visual” that Bayer allied to
the emergent category of das Charakteristische. Briefly stated, he wants to
safeguard the category of the beautiful as a higher sphere, while welcoming
the characteristic as a quintessentially modern form of art. Again, however,

150
“So sind Plastik und Musik völlige Gegensätze; wir müssen die eine über der anderen vergessen,
um uns dem vollen Genusse der Schönheit hingeben zu können, die hier doppelgestaltig
erscheint: einmal als ein Zauber für das Auge, das anderemal als ein Zauber für das Ohr und die
Seele.” Bayer, Aesthetik in Umrissen, 2: 300.
151
“Die bildende Kunst und die Musik haben mehr oder weniger zwei Seiten des Schönen gegen
einander isolirt: Das Sichtbare und das Vernehmbare, die Erscheinung und die Bewegung, die
Gestalt und das Leben.” Ibid.
152
“Der künstlerische Genius ist jener Pygmalion, welcher die Gestalt, die er geschaffen hat, auch
beseelen und mit seinem innersten Leben durchdringen möchte. Aber diese Gestalt
verschwindet ihm körperlos in den Armen, sobald er sie mit gesteigertem Gefühl zu umfassen
sucht. Da tritt an die Stelle der schönen Form, die das Auge entzückte, der innere Wohlklang der
harmonischen Existenz, der den Lauscher beseligt; die früher stumme Schönheit muß aus dem
Bereiche des Sichtbaren scheiden, um die tiefere Fülle ihres Seins vernehmbar zu machen.” Ibid.
153
SSD 3: 155. Cf. PW 1: 189.
 Das Charakteristische / Die Charakteristik 51

the means for achieving this was not melody, but harmony (“the inner
euphony of harmonic existence”) where melody becomes an incidental
remainder. Such convoluted dialectics signal a decidedly reluctant accept-
ance of the historical agency propelling a painterly manifestation of the
characteristic, namely “a realism having arrived at its true goal.”154
Perhaps melody played no part in this compromise because it had already
been co-opted in an alternative drive for artistic realism. One of the reasons
Nietzsche described Wagner as “the Victor Hugo of music as language” is
that, even by the age of 25, Hugo had gone further than Bayer would in
outlining an aesthetic capacity for portraying the real, for expressing atom-
ized particularities that contravened classical aesthetics.155 Since real life is
“ugly” in its endless diversity, Hugo argues, suspicions about the infinite
complexities of reality actually support the aesthetic integrity of ugliness:
From the human point of view, beauty is none other than form seen in its most
elementary relationships, in its most absolute symmetry, and in its deepest harmony
with our organism . . . what we call ugly, on the other hand, is a detail from a great
whole that eludes us, and that harmonizes not so much with man alone but with all of
creation. That is why ugliness constantly reveals new, but incomplete aspects of it.156

Nachmärz criticism frequently cited Wagner’s harmonic freedom and

melodic disintegration as wearisome, which surely figures as “ugly” in
Hugo’s sense of that which appears constantly new, but irredeemably frag-
mentary.157 “His reckless melody mocks our logical reflection,” Friedrich
Hindrichs slammed Lohengrin in 1854.158 Indeed, for all the charges of
Melodielosigkeit, very few critiques of Wagner’s music during the 1850s
actually labeled his melodies by their aesthetically accurate term: ugly.
Nietzsche’s finger-waving quip about Wagner’s “gymnastics of ugliness on
the ropes of the enharmonic. Let us dare to be ugly my friends! Wagner

154
“Mit Hilfe dieser geistvollen [painterly] Technik, dieses zu seinem wahren Ziele gelangten
Realismus folgt jetzt die Malerei dem psychologischen Ausdruck auf seiner leisesten Spur.”
Bayer, Aesthetik in Umrissen, 2: 90.
155
Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books,
2000), 629.
156
Hugo, “Preface” to Cromwell. Cited in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen
(London: Harvill Secker, 2007), 281.
157
Eduard Sobolewski writes on this topic with his customary ebullience: “when, in 60 bars
[Wagner] treats us to about 56 bars of chords of the seventh, minor, major, and diminished, so
that, in order to satisfy our desire of dissolution, we would fain be changed into a piece of butter
upon a hot tub – then we are not at all for Wagner.” Sobolewski, “Reactionary Letters. III,” The
Musical World 33 (January 27, 1855), 68.
158
Friedrich Hinrichs, Richard Wagner und die neuere Musik. Eine Skizze aus der musikalischen
Gegenwart (Halle: Schrödel and Simon, 1854), 63. Cited in Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 246.
52 German melody

dared!” was not entirely hyperbolic.159 Even the broader discourse that
defined German melody negatively, in opposition to that of Italy, finds a
new frame in this sense; the Christian philosopher Johann Dursch thought of
ugliness in 1839 as an unnatural distortion of some natural, primary state:
“something [melody] is ugly if it doesn’t emerge in accordance with its nature
[periodic, rounded, Italianate], i.e. if it appears in a form not determined
by its essence, or in which that essence or being vanishes.”160 Hugo’s notion
of isolated elements reflecting an elusive whole allows us to reread
his claims specifically in light of the melodic debate: “beauty has only
one type [Italianate architectonics], ugliness has thousands [Wagnerian
expressionism].”161 Far from a negative aesthetic category, then, the ugly
pervaded the nineteenth century – a period Umberto Eco recently termed
“the redemption of ugliness” – denying the expectation that its art will be
pleasurable, yet affirming its fractured realism as an object of fascinated
contemplation.162
The principal mid-century German monograph on the subject was Karl
Rosenkranz’s Ästhetik des Häßlichen (1853), which – with echoes of
Aristotle – drew on Winckelmann’s 1764 treatise to argue that unity is
“the basic condition of all beauty.”163 Beauty requires “restriction,” he
continues (in silent analogy to Italianate style), because only in restriction
lies the power of differentiation, and differentiation is impossible without
isolated unity. Rosenkranz thus formulates his theory of ugliness by invert-
ing the principle of beauty, i.e. as negative beauty:
1. [Ugliness] represents disunity, incompleteness, uncertainty of form;
2. [Ugliness] elicits difference, if it clarifies it, either as false irregularity or
as false equality and inequality;

159
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 244.
160
“Ein Ding ist Häßlich, wenn es nicht seinem Wesen gemäß in die Erscheinung tritt, wenn es also
in einer Gestalt erscheint, die durch das Wesen desselben nicht bedingt ist, oder in welcher das
Wesen oder Seyn verschwindet.” Johann Georg Martin Dursch, Aesthetik; oder die Wissenschaft
des Schönen auf dem christlichen Standpunkte (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1839), 426.
161
Victor Hugo, Cromwell (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 71. 162 Eco, On Ugliness, 271.
163
“Die abstrakte Grundbestimmung alles Schönen ist . . . die Einheit.” Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik
des Häßlichen (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1853); rpt. (Leizpig: Reclam, 1996), 62. It
seems likely that Rosenkranz based his definition of ugliness on Winckelmann’s influential
treatise of 1764: “All beauty is heightened by unity and simplicity . . . Everything which we must
consider in separate pieces, or which we cannot survey at once, from the number of its
constituent parts, loses thereby some portion of its greatness . . . From unity proceeds . . . the
absence of individuality; that is, the forms of it are described neither by points nor lines other
than those which shape beauty merely, and consequently produce a figure which is neither
peculiar to any particular individual, nor yet expresses any one state of the mind or affection of
the passions.” J. J. Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art Among the Greeks, 43–44.
 Ugliness in Das Rheingold (1854) 53

3. Instead of the reunification of form with itself, [ugliness] engenders, on the

contrary, the transition to divisiveness in the fogginess of false contrasts.164
The three Greek terms Rosenkranz uses to identify these subdivisions are:
amorphousness, asymmetry, and disharmony. Recall that Filippi described
Wagner’s melodies in 1869 as: “melopoeia without [formed] rhythm, without
[symmetrical] proportions, without [harmonious] returns,” and Hanslick
thought Die Meistersinger was simply a “boneless tonal mollusk float[ing]
on towards the immeasurable.”165 Without needing to engage in a close
reading, the overlap between the discourse on ugliness and Wagner’s critical
reception would seem evident both at the level of vocabulary and of concept.

Ugliness in Das Rheingold (1854)

If we step outside the discourse linking Tannhäuser and Lohengrin to idealist
criticism, Wagner’s composition most contemporary with Rosenkranz’s trea-
tise was Das Rheingold (1853–54). By way of exploring Wagner’s claims for
unendliche Melodie, Thomas Grey once linked the aesthetic of ugliness to the
“interior musical logic” of the fragmented instrumental prelude to Siegfried,
act II (illustrating what Charles Stanford criticized as “ugly characters” por-
trayed by unnecessarily “ugly music”).166 Building on this effective compar-
ison, it would seem the primary domain of melodic ugliness was vocal, not
instrumental, at least when conceived as a realist, literary aesthetic: cries, saliva,
panting, and clamour disfigure a “singing” voice more palpably than the still
refined playing of instrumental motifs. As Example 1.3 shows, the third scene
from Das Rheingold, set in Nibelheim, presents mimetic chromatic lurches and
syncopated twitches in a series of one-measure instrumental fragments whose
rising chromatic sequencing is void of harmonic logic (until m. 1903 when the
dominant is tentatively established). Its pictorial logic is vividly onomato-
poeic – Alberich dragging a shrieking Mime on stage by the ear, pinching
him, Caliban-like – and continues through a series of stunted motific gestures
that become the figures for the nine-measure vocal line, where Alberich’s

164
“1. die Nichteinheit, Nichtabgeschlossenheit, Unbestimmtheit der Gestalt ausmacht; 2. daß es
den Unterschied, wenn es ihn setzt, entweder als eine falsche Unregelmäßigkeit oder als eine
falsche Gleichheit und Ungleichheit hervorbringt; 3. daß es statt der Wiedereinheit der Gestalt
mit sich vielmehr den Übergang der Entzweiung in die Verworrenheit falscher Kontraste
erzeugt.” Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen, 62.
165
Taken from Hanslick’s 1874 review of Die Meistersinger. See Vienna’s Golden Years, trans.
Henry Pleasants (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 127.
166
Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 287; for Stanford’s comments see Robert Hartford (ed.),
Bayreuth: the Early Years (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), 106.
54 German melody

Example 1.3 Different instances of Karl Rosenkranz’s aesthetic of “ugliness” within

Wagnerian melody. (a) Das Rheingold, scene 2, mm. 1894–1910.

voice – between a snigger and disgusted shout – characterizes the heaving

exhalation of his physical supremacy written into the downbeats of each
utterance. The pervasive half step motion in the instrumental fragments
then transmutes into Mime’s first notated cries, whose own rising and falling
half step (F–G[ / G[–F) mocks the heritage of the pianto / Seufzer – so
 Ugliness in Das Rheingold (1854) 55

Example 1.3 (Cont.)

(b) Das Rheingold, scene 3, mm. 2175–81.

earnestly adopted for Fricka’s cries of “Wehe!” earlier in scene 2 – with a realist
prerogative. But beyond mimesis, Mime’s stuttering monotony (given in
Example 1.3b) as he relates how the magic tarnhelm outwitted him indicates
that Rosenkranz’s ugly aesthetic need not only apply thematically: to physical
pain, deformity, and fractured movement. The tarnhelm’s Leitmotiv itself
rocks back-and-forth between common-tone chords with no sense of pro-
gression (A[ / F[), which along with Mime’s “melody” presents the zero-
degree of melodic invention if we insist that melody consists of balanced form,
phrasal contour, and harmonic closure, to paraphrase Charles Rosen.167
Viewing Wagnerian melody in reductionist terms as decisively deformed,
the negative or inverse of Italian melody, is helpful in that it structures
the critical debate around a polarity of predefined formal continuity and its
absence. In itself this is hardly new to Wagner scholarship, but as Rosenkranz
explains: “Asymmetry is not simple shapelessness, it is an un-shape
[entschiedene Ungestalt].”168 The aesthetic platform that Hugo provided for
Rosenkranz here found visual expression early on in Theodor Géricault’s oil A
Study of Severed Limbs (1818–19) – reproduced as Figure 1.2. It is mutilated
man: expressing either an assemblage of incomplete parts or elements ripped
apart from an absent whole i.e. literalizing the shredding of the bourgeois
subject whose unity was predicated on, and found its aesthetic mirror in, the
work of art.169 Never had the nascent Leitmotiv technique found such an
ambivalent visual analogue.
In this respect, it is perhaps no coincidence that Rosenkranz cites melody
as the most apparent site of the destruction of perceptible unity:

167
Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (London: Fontana, 1999), 492.
168
“Die Asymmetrie ist nicht einfache Gestaltlosigkeit, sie ist entschiedene Ungestalt.”
Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen, 76.
169
Jacob de Ruiter specifically discusses critics’ perception of fractured melody during the early
nineteenth century in Der Charakterbegriff in der Musik, 241ff.
56 German melody

1.2 Theodor Géricault, A Study of Severed Limbs (1818–19) © Musée Fabre de

Montpellier Agglomération – Photograph by Frédéric Jaulmes.

With music the ease of production increases, and with it the possibility of the ugly,
like with that of this art-specific subjective inwardness. Although in its abstract
form – in meter and rhythm – this art rests on arithmetic, it is nevertheless subject to
the greatest indefiniteness and randomness in that which first preserves its true
soulful expression of the idea, in melody, and the judgment about what is beautiful
and what is not beautiful therein is often infinitely difficult. Therefore the ugly is
able to gain here still more ground than in painting because of the ethereal, volatile,
mysterious, symbolic nature of tones and the uncertainty of criticism.170

At least one music journalist made essentially these connections between

music, melody, ugliness, and Wagner. Reviewing Lohengrin, Bischoff wor-
ried that “[m]usic is just as free as a bird. It has absolutely no rules, not even
acoustic rules that the artist must respect; Wagner’s scores announce this

170
“Mit der Musik steigert sich die Leichtigkeit der Produktion und mit ihr sowie mit der dieser Kunst
eigenen subjektiven Innerlichkeit die Möglichkeit des Häßlichen. Obwohl nämlich diese Kunst in
ihrer abstrakten Form, im Takt und Rhythmus, auf der Arithmetik beruhet, so ist sie doch in dem,
was sie erst zum wahren, seelenvollen Ausdruck der Idee macht, in der Melodie, der größten
Unbestimmtheit und Zufälligkeit ausgesetzt und das Urtheil, was schön, was nicht schön sei, in ihr
oft unendlich schwer. Daher denn die Häßlichkeit vermöge der ätherischen, volatilen,
mysteriösen, symbolischen Natur des Tons und vermöge der Unsicherheit der Kritik hier noch
mehr Boden als in der Malerei gewinnt.” Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen [1853], 47.
 Between symbolism and realism 57

principle ‘loud and clear.’”171 In this respect, Wagner’s approach to melodic

freedom, viewed by some critics (though not by Wagner himself)172 as part
of a characteristic aesthetic, exemplifies the shifting condition of melody
from a metaphysically plastic form governed by metrical and harmonic
organization, to a deliberately disfigured, fragmentary form expressive of
some level of specifiable reality that was officially beyond the grasp of fine
art (Hugo’s universal harmony). Among the spectra of shaded meanings
“melody” had acquired in this discourse, the term’s mid-century position in
Germany can be summarized under the category of a geometric semiosis
defined as melodic, but voided of melodious continuity.

Between symbolism and realism

Germany, land of harmony, of symphonists; Italy, land of melody,

of singers.
Victor Hugo173

And here you still speak of Italy, of Bellini and the land of song. When will
we have done with the naïve superstition that we could learn something
about song from them?
Robert Schumann174

Predictably, perhaps, a backlash against the validity of pro-Italian aes-

thetics175 catalyzed the embrace of “ugliness” (if not always under that

171
“Die Musik ist eine völlig vogelfreie Kunst. Es gibt in ihr keinerlei, auch nicht akustische
Gesetze, welche der Künstler zu respectiren hätte; dieses Princip verkünden Wagner’s
Partituren ‘laut und hell.’” Bischoff, “Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin,” 299.
172
For a discussion of the differences between Wagner’s critical application of the term
“charakteristik” to Weber and Meyerbeer in Oper und Drama, see Dahlhaus, Klassische und
romantische Musikästhetik, 228–30.
173
“L’Allemagne, terre de l’harmonie, a des symphonistes; l’Italie, terre de la mélodie, a des
chanteurs.” Victor Hugo, “Post-scriptum de ma vie,” in Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, “Philosophie
II: William Shakespeare et Post-scriptum de ma vie” (Paris: Albin Michel, 1937), 512.
174
“Und ihr sprecht noch immer von Italien, von Bellini und dem Lande des Gesanges? Wann
endlich wird jener Köhlerglaube aufhören, wir könnten im Gesange von dorther lernen?”
Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, 2: 250.
175
The Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung directly challenged the indigenous argument in 1855, namely
the “great prejudice” that melody is created in Italy. It was not native Italians, the paper argues, who
first gave Italian composers the impulse “we now call melodic,” but “German (Dutch) masters”
since they first taught at the music academies of Rome and Venice. Appealing to remote levels of
ethnographic realism, the paper seeks to undermine the myth of congenital melodic talent further
by reversing the clichéd roles of German and Italian opera: contemporary Venetian gondoliers do
not sing “plastically formed” themes or “rounded, closed melodies,” the paper retorts, instead they
sing declamatorische Recitative. As if citing a conclusive proof, the article declares that none of the
58 German melody

name), where critics sought to gain a legitimate role for musical complexity
within the prevailing Gefühlsaesthetik. This demanded a creative response
from music theory. The challenge, in short, was not only how to systematize
melodic expression adequate to (non-Italian) Vormärz opera, but to conceive
of a kind of “grammar of expression” that reflected a worldview at once
limited and universal. (Much the same problem had dogged the British search
for a universal language during the seventeenth century, where “inventors of
philosophic a priori languages needed to invent characters that referred to
things or notions: this meant that their first step was to draw up a list of
notions and things,” Eco explains. “This was not an easy task.”176)
It dissuaded some. Writing in 1774, Johann A. P. Schulz asserted that “the
essence of melody consists in expression” but he remained skeptical of an
expansion of this knowledge into formulaic phrases or plastically finite
shapes.177 Any rigid itemizing of expression is doomed, he asserted:
It would be a ridiculous task to want to stipulate to the composer particular
formulae or small melodic phrases that truly express every particular emotion, or
even to say how he should invent such forms or phrases.178

Forty years after Schulz’s skepticism, the implicit onus was precisely on
achieving systematic melodic expression. By 1852 it formed one part of
what Brendel called music’s “law of development” (Entwicklungsgesetz),
namely an ever greater “particularity of expression” (Bestimmtheit des
Ausdrucks).179 The closest a music theorist from Wagner’s formative years
came to objectifying melodic intervals in this sense was A. B. Marx, whose
first book Die Kunst des Gesanges (1826) is a philosophical and pedagogical
study of singing and vocal composition.180 Towards the end of the text, after
older Italian folk melodies exist in the sense of “our plastische Lied form.” See “Vorbeifliegende
Gedanken,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 22 (June 2, 1855), 172.
176
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana,
1997), 222.
177
“Das Wesen der Melodie besteht in dem Ausdruck.” Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie
der schönen Künste in Einzeln, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: Weidmannschen, 1793), 3: 371. (J. A. P. Schulz
wrote the music entries in Sulzer’s edition.)
178
“Uebrigens würde es ein lächerliches Unternehmen seyn, dem Tonsetzer besondere Formeln,
oder kleine melodische Sätze vorschreiben zu wollen, die für jede Empfindung den wahren
Ausdruck haben, oder gar zu sagen, wie er solche erfinden soll.” Ibid., 3: 379.
179
Brendel, Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich, 338.
180
Published in 1826, two years after Marx co-founded and began editing the BamZ, the book
analyzes many aspects of vocal production, providing detailed discussions with examples
for a musically educated readership in the Prussian capital. It comprises three sections:
rudiments of music theory, vocal training, and vocal performance. These structured Marx’s
putatively encyclopedic commentary on the history and notation of vocal music, the
variously differentiated compositional structures and their aesthetic properties, the teaching
and training of singers, as well as national styles and linguistics.
 Between symbolism and realism 59

Marx declares that “one must follow faithfully the witty [German] composer
in each individual situation, and in each configuration keep in mind his
essential intention in order to be adequate to his works,”181 he proceeds to
examine tonal intervals as finite entities, categorizing them according to their
apparently inherent emotional properties for listeners. The paradox of a
“limited universality,” then, was to be resolved through the equal-tempered
chromatic keyboard. Marx begins from the essentializing premise that not
only the rising or sinking of human utterances, but “all intervals” in which the
voice rises or falls “each have their necessary meaning,” and proceeds to the
more general assertion that “all tonal relationships desire an inherent partic-
ular, special meaning.”182 While acknowledging that it is difficult fully to
grasp such meanings, and that comparisons of the symbolic (sinnbildlich)
representation of ideas have led to “apparent differences of opinion” in this
matter, Marx proceeds to outline his view of the “underlying truth” of each
relationship with startling candor:183
Minor 2nd = calm but powerless, faint movement
Major 2nd = calm, secure movement
Augmented 2nd = painfully felt movement
Minor 3rd = ascertainment, but without the awareness of power and of
success
Major 3rd = firm ascertainment, with the awareness of accomplishment
Perfect 4th = the accomplished, decisive stepping out
Perfect 5th = yearns for another, unspecified point to the first tone
Augmented 5th = expects the unknown so violently that the fixed relation to the
first tone is lost
Major 6th = pronounces the need for outside reassurance
Diminished 7th = soft, but hopeless longing
Minor 7th = character of powerfully felt, painfully urgent desire mixed with a
related but weaker, hopeful longing etc.
Major 7th = the painful, lively desire for satisfaction184

181
“Man muß dem geistreichen Künstler in jede einzelne Situation treu folgen und in jeder seiner
Gestaltungen seine wesentliche Intention vor Augen behalten, um seinen Werken zu genügen.”
Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges: theoretisch-praktisch (Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1826), 232.
182
“[A]lle Intervalle, in denen sie [die Stimme] steigt oder fällt, haben jedes seine nothwendige
Bedeutung . . . allen Tonverhältnissen [möge] eine bestimmte besondere Bedeutung inwohnen.”
Ibid., 257.
183
“eine anscheinende Meinungsverschiedenheit . . . [D]ie verschiedenen und dennoch unter sich
stets verwandten Darstellung [deuten] auf eine ihnen allen zum Grunde liegende Wahrheit.” Ibid.
184
Marx orders his intervals by major and minor, diminished and augmented categories, which I
reorder to form the chromatic scale in my translation. Here, I quote Marx’s original ordering of
intervals: “Von den innerhalb der Oktave liegenden großen Intervallen stellt die Sekunde – c d –
die ruhige, sichere Bewegung, die Terz – c e – feste Bestimmung mit dem Bewußtsein des
60 German melody

Though putatively abstract, this relies partly on the imagination of a human

voice, and, of course, a harmonic context (to distinguish an augmented
2nd from a minor 3rd; a diminished 7th from a major 6th). Indeed, later
attempts at similar intervallic maps made this explicit, from Paul Hindemith
(where harmonic tension is empirical, based on acoustics)185 to Arthur
C. Edwards (where it is psychological, based on perception).186 Needless to
say, all typologies differ, anachronisms notwithstanding. In 1848, a pseudon-
ymous Anglo-German theorist named Teutonius187 would reassert Marx’s
principle of intervallic correlates, though less systematically, declining to
specify each interval’s putative character.188 Raff similarly shied away from

Vollbringens . . . die Quarte – c f – das vollbrachte, entscheidende Hinaustreten dar . . . Die

Quinte – c g verlangt vom Anfangstone nach einem andern, unbestimmten Punkte hin, . . . die
Sexte – c a – spricht das Bedürfniß nach Beruhigung von außen, die Septime – c h das
schmerzlich lebhafte Begehren dieser Befriedigung aus . . . So ist die Sekunde – c des – eine
ruhige aber unkräftige, matte Bewegung; die Terz – c es – Bestimmung, aber ohne jenes
Bewußtsein der Kraft des Gelingens; die Septime – c b – hat den Karakter kräftig empfundenen,
ja schmerzlich dringenden Begehrens mit dem verwadten aber schwächern einer weichen
hoffenden Sehnsucht vertaucht u. s. w. Die verminderte Septime – cis b – wird dagegen zur
weichen, aber hoffnungslosen Sehnsucht . . . Daher wird schon die Sekunde – c dis schmerzlich
empfundene Bewegung, die Quinte – c gis – verlangt so heftig in das Unbestimmte, daß das feste
Beruhen auf dem Aufangstone verloren geht.” Ibid., 258–59.
185
Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 1: 87–89, 175–201.
186
Arthur C. Edwards, The Art of Melody (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 145ff.
187
The pseudonymous identity of this writer was never publicly revealed. He appears to have been
a Bristol-based correspondent for The Musical World and writer for the Bristol Times,
contributing letters, reviews, and reports between 1848 and 1849. His review of one particular
concert [TMW 36 (1848), 572–73] garnered controversy from local musicians for its apparently
disrespectful and erroneous reportage [See “Original Correspondence” TMW 38 (1848),
604–05], which Teutonius rebutted [TMW 39 (1848), 612–13], and after which he continued to
review concerts and engage in journalistic ping-pong with local Bristol musicians. Towards the
end of 1848, he published six Letters to a Music Student in The Musical World: (i) “On the Tonal
System,” TMW 44 (1848), 689–91; (ii) “The Origin and Fundamental Laws of Harmony,” TMW
45 (1848), 709–11; (iii) cont., TMW 46 (1848), 729–31; (iv) “The Study of Musical
Composition,” TMW 48 (1848), 762–64; (v) “Melody and Melodious Combination,” TMW 49
(1848), 773–75; (vi) cont., TMW 50 (1848), 792–96. Teutonius continued to receive criticism
that speculated on his identity [TMW 40 (1848), 636–37], and it was alleged that he was not
actually German as his name suggests. His reference to “Dr. A. Mara” in the sixth letter probably
refers to Adolph Bernhard Marx, and suggests that he could not read Fraktur well; his
translation of Marx’s title Die alte Musiklehre im Streit mit unserer Zeit (Leipzig: Breitkopf &
Härtel, 1841) as “the present musical instruction a contradiction to the spirit of our age”
similarly shows a very dubious grasp of German. See “The Study of Musical Composition,” 763.
188
“When . . . a feeling, or sensation, is already firmly rooted in the soul, and has obtained a
considerable degree of intensity, it will manifest its decided character by such a lever motion [of
intervals] of the melody.” Teutonius adds that every intervallic progression “has its own peculiar
character,” and that, given more time and space, it “would not be difficult to distinguish and
define” each interval’s character. See Teutonius, “Letters to a Music Student: VI. Melody and
Melodious Composition,” TMW 47 (1848), 795.
 Between symbolism and realism 61

illustrating his assertion that “every impression is essentially the result of the
change of consonant and dissonant intervals.”189 Marx’s concrete descrip-
tions of intervals are on the cusp of a semantic melodic theory, one that would
utilize what Wackenroder had called “the inexplicable sympathy . . . between
the individual, mathematical, tonal relationships and the individual fibers of
the human heart,” though this can hardly be considered practical from a
compositional standpoint.190 With palpable disappointment, Marx later con-
ceded as much. Music and drama, expression and meaning, “ought to blend
together with equal right and equal share of effect,” he maintained in 1855.
“But this is impossible. The wavy line of melody and the being-in-itself of
feeling run directly counter to the sharpness of character and quick-
wittedness of action.”191
But what about the original desire to circumscribe expression that is
inherent in melodic configurations, i.e. to identify some part of melody’s
“essence” that could be objectified? The standard response to this was either
to argue that listeners’ tastes were too mobile (or fickle) and therefore not
stable enough to build a theory that allied plastic shape with specific
expression, or to protest that this real correlation of shape and expression
existed, but would forever remain beyond human comprehension. Lobe
opted for the latter view in 1844, as had Reicha thirty years earlier when he
posited the shape of musical figures as that which truly defines melodic
character or characteristic expression in a phrase of identical proportions,
key, meter, dynamics, and length; these figures, he asserts, “must [actually]
be created,” and cannot be taught. Backing away from the implications of
this arguably naïve admission, Reicha continues that:
[Figures are] the product of feeling, taste, intelligence, and finally of genius. It would
be absolutely useless to wish to determine the means by which and principles for
creating the figures of an aria, for this would be overly prescriptive, and cannot be
done with impunity.192

189
“Jener Eindruck ist wesentlich das Resultat der Abwechselung consoner und dissoner
Intervalle.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 59.
190
Wackenroder, Confessions, 188.
191
“Drama und Musik sollten . . . in gleichem Recht und gleichem Wirkungsantheil sich
verschmelzen. Allein das ist unmöglich. Die Wellenlinie der Stimmung und das
Insichhineinleben des Gefühls sind der Schärfe des Karakters und der Schlagfertigkeit der
Handlung stracks entgegengesetzt.” Marx, Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre
Pflege (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1855). English translation by August Heinrich Wehrhan and
C. Natalia Macfarren. The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture (London: Robert
Cocks & Co., 1854), 111.
192
Reicha, Treatise on Melody, 62–3.
62 German melody

The hope for a different answer persisted, however, and it is indicative of the
longevity of the hermetic concept that Reicha’s dismissal reflected the same
skepticism Schutz had voiced forty years earlier, and presaged Marx’s
dispirited comments forty-one years hence.
To generalize for a moment, most aesthetics of this period taught that art
was to express in outward, sensibly perceptible forms the inward spiritual
life of human beings.193 Wagner interpreted this pragmatically as the need
for shape-giving structures of some kind: “music can be perceived only in
forms which were originally foreign to it, forms derived from external
aspects of human experience.”194 Beyond dyadic units, the assumed form
through which this was to be accomplished is a basic equation of linear
shape and emotion. This involved a visual conception of musical line as a
topographical register of emotion, or what an anti-idealist might term the
seismographic tracing of feeling (rendered objective by its implied mecha-
nism).195 Since we are now dealing with conceptions of sound structure that
put the psyche in dialogue with the external world, we are breaking out of
the idealist tradition that we have been revisiting hitherto, and will draw on
a slightly different set of concepts; here, a distinction between symbolic and
realist orders of perception will be useful in structuring this closing analysis
of the historical discourse under discussion.
Briefly, melody as a symbolic representation of feeling is shape that
acquires signification by association (tradition) and context. It involves
the formation of arbitrary musical signifiers that have no intrinsic connec-
tion with what is signified, and are without inherent meaning but acquire
this through their interrelation with an immediate harmonic context, or,
more distantly, with the muffled heritage of Figurenlehre, and can be
categorized by such properties as dyadic intervals and short formulae
(their patterning, durational extension, and repetition). Realist melody, by
contrast, is iconic, intuitively comprehended as being “real” in relation to
some order of our experience of the external world. It is that emotive unity

193
Precisely this definition is given in a discussion of the pedagogy of music composition by
“Teutonius.” See “Letters to a Music Student: V. Melody and Melodious Combination,”
TMW 47 (1848), 774. See also the broader definition of “Ausdruck” in Schilling’s
Encyclopädie as the “vividness of inwardness through outwardness, the powerful and lively
emergence of the mental within the corporeal” [“die Anschaulichkeit des Innern im Aeußern,
das kräftige und lebendige Hervortreten des Geistigen im Körperlichen.”], Encyclopädie der
gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, 336.
194
SSD 5: 192. Cf. PW 3: 246–47.
195
Adorno’s use of the metaphor of music as a seismographic register of social conditions is quite
different (pointing towards a concealed social meaning of musical works), and carries none of the
literalism that “seismographic melody” can in the present context. See, Adorno, “Schubert”
(1928), Musikalische Schriften, 4 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedermann (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 4: 18–33.
 Between symbolism and realism 63

of sound and expression that resists representation. By definition, this kind

of vocal melody must be performative (in the Austinian sense of not saying
something, but accomplishing an action), for it does not represent emo-
tional content, but transmits it directly to a recipient, stamping it directly
inside the cochlea. Thus there is no space in realist melody between positive
content and form. In this sense, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler has
aligned the Lacanian real with the “physiology of voice”196 reproduced by
the gramophone as a paradoxical writing system that eschews legible signi-
fication, but that makes the real accessible in the sense of actual, physical
sound waves.
A cluster of German writers argued that linear melody could function as a
real register of emotion, eliciting a mirror response from listeners by
essentially tracing the topography of one’s inward feelings across the
stave. In 1837, Gustav Schilling’s Encyclopädie is unequivocal:
Just as every feeling does not linger for long at the same level, and never inwardly
makes rhythmically disjointed leaps . . . so its vehicle of expression – melody – in
order to gain necessary satisfaction demands not an arbitrary ascent and descent
through larger or smaller, consonant or dissonant intervals, but [motion that is]
alternately rising or falling, moving easily or with difficulty in joy or pain like
emotion itself.197

This belief in the absolute correlation of feeling and melodic trajectory had
traction.198 It was effectively reasserted in 1848 by Teutonius, who stated
that “a rising melody always expresses and excites a growing intensity of
feeling . . . whilst a falling one depicts a relaxation . . . from the climax of
excitement”;199 and by Lobe200 who argued further that stirrings in the “soul
of our spiritual perception” are a linear wave play (Wogenspiel) that is

196
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz (Stanford University Press, 1999), 82.
197
“Denn so wie jedes Gefühl nicht auf gleicher Höhe lange verweilt, und wie es niemals innerlich
rhythmisch unverbundene Sprünge macht . . . so fordert auch sein Ausdruck, die Melodie, wie
aber auch um des nöthigen Wohlgefallens an dieser willen, ein nicht willkürliches Aus- und
Absteigen durch größere oder kleinere, consonirende oder dissonirende Intervalle, sondern wie
die Empfindung selbst abwechselnd steigt oder fällt, sich leicht oder mühsam in Freude oder
Schmerz bewegt.” Gustav von Schilling, “Melodie,” Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen
Wissenschaften, 644.
198
As late as 1882, Riemann essentially repeats this definition in his dictionary. See “Melodie” in
Riemann, Musik-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1882), 568a.
199
Teutonius, “Letters to a Music Student: VI. Melody and Melodious Composition,” TMW 50
(1848), 794.
200
“[Eine Tonfolge] bleibt nicht auf gleichem Niveau, sie steigt von e bis h höher, und kann eine
sich steigernde Empfindung analogisiren,” in Lobe, “Aesthetische Briefe. Dritter Brief. Die
Tonfolge,” FBfM 1 (1854), 328.
64 German melody

“alternately rising, sinking and lingering, now fast, violent . . . now slow,
lethargically creeping and then rippling more narrowly.” The metaphorical
movements of a composer’s soul “can and must mould themselves onto the
[literal movements of the] tone sequence as faithfully as possible” he con-
tinues, “when they deliver their elementary contribution to the truth of
musical expression.”201 But, for Lobe, this analogy is only capable of
explaining the likeness, not of generating any self-recognition or empathy.
In other words, it remained symbolic.202
Why not realist? Simply put, melodic realism could go too far, whether in
the service of das Häßliche or indeed of any geometric semiosis. That
theorists had begun to caution against incorporating direct realism into
melodic expression indicates that it was a conceivable threat. Lobe himself
argued that music could not truly express the real world: “Art remains art
and can never become actuality,” he retorts:
Full realism destroys art . . . no one actually sings his fury, his desperation . . . But if
one could force a man actually to sing of his fury, his desperation, and one wanted – in
order to be true to nature – to copy such singing exactly on the stage, everyone would
rightly laugh at such natural realism. / Germans take too little heed of this.203

Yet claims for melodic realism encroached by other means. In 1880, the
psychologist Edmund Gurney offered a Darwinian rationale for the sym-
pathetic sensation of emotional rising and falling in terms of a learned
response. Higher vocal registers are always used “to attract attention or to
give force and wide reach to the utterance of vocal sound,” he explains.204

201
“die Regungen [erscheinen] in unserem Gemüth unserer geistigen Wahrnehmung im Ganzen
als ein Wogenspiel . . . als ein Wechselsweises Heben, Senken und Verweilen, bald rasch,
heftig . . . bald langsam, träge schleichend und dann geringere Kräuselungen nur auftreibend . . .
jenes Steigen und Fallen und Verweilen der Regungen und Regungstheilchen der Gefühle aber
kann und muß die Tonfolge überall so treue wie möglich verähnlichen, wenn sie ihren
Elementarbeitrag zur Wahrheit des musikalischen Ausdrucks liefern soll.” Ibid., 330.
202
Other, more nebulous orders of symbolism have been proposed, such as Alfred Cramer’s claim
for a structural link between the contours of calligraphic writing and melodic expression, even
likening Wagnerian melody to cursive script with the argument that “melodic shapes could
evoke voice because similar shapes had this effect in handwriting.” Alfred Cramer, “Of
Serpentina and Stenography: Shapes of Handwriting in Romantic Melody,” 19th-Century Music
30 (2006), 163.
203
“Die Kunst bleibt Kunst und kann niemals Wirklichkeit werden. Volle Naturwahrheit
vernichtet die Kunst . . . Kein Mensch singt in der Wirklichkeit seinen Zorn, seine
Verzweiflung . . . Könnte man aber einen Menschen zwingen, in der Wirklichkeit seinen
Zorn, seine Verzweiflung auszusingen und man wollte, um naturwahr zu werden, auf der
Bühne einen so Singenden genau copiren, so würde Jedermann mit Recht über solche
Naturwahrheit lachen. / Das beachten die Deutschen zu wenig.” Lobe, “Vierter Brief.
Deutsche Musik,” Musikalische Briefe, 22–23.
204
Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880), 140.
 Between symbolism and realism 65

1.3 The modest wavy line (“V”) to indicate Brangäne’s scream in Wagner’s
Orchesterpartitur for Tristan und Isolde, NA A III h 7, p. 235. Reproduced by permission
of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.

More developed claims linking melodic pitch and evolutionary context

appear well into the twentieth century,205 but it was Herbert Spencer’s
materialism from the 1850s that helped render such views plausible by
claiming that music originated on just this basis, that the raw “musical”
expression of high-pitched cries and yells were a response to noxious stimuli
of the musculature.206 And it is in this sense that, for Kittler, Wagner could
allow Brangäne “to utter a scream whose notation cut straight through the
score”207 in a moment of totalizing realism, i.e. a “melody” that finally dared
entirely to annul melody’s symbolic form, while still maintaining its identity
as an expressive utterance. In fact, Wagner did not actually write a descend-
ing wavy line to indicate this “piercing scream” (greller Schrei), rendering
the seismographic register of emotion more conceptual, less literal. The
symbol “V” (Figure 1.3) was a common notational shorthand for him and
sits alongside his numerous other prescribed screams, wails, cries, and
laughter (mostly unnotated), which, in Parsifal, turn melody’s most literal,
“ugly” realism into Kundry’s characteristic mode of utterance: animalistic
sounds that only humans can utter.208

205
A prominent example is Arthur Edwards, who argued in 1956: “the fluctuation of sounds in the
crude emotional vocalizations of primitive man had several characteristics which carried over
naturally into the musical movements of tones. With an increase in intensity of emotional
expression, the voice would ascend, and the speed quicken; conversely, with a decrease in
intensity of emotional expression, the voice would descend and the speed slacken. This
emotional wave-expression took on definite melodic patterns in primitive melodies and
realistically recalled the savage shouts of joy or rage.” Edwards, The Art of Melody, 140.
206
Herbert Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music” [1857], Essays, Scientific, Political, and
Speculative (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1907), 358–84.
207
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 23.
208
See also Philip Friedheim’s study of this phenomenon in Wagner’s compositions, “Wagner and
the Aesthetics of the Scream,” 19th-Century Music 7 (1983), 63–70.
66 German melody

But irrespective of the merits of Spencer’s or Gurney’s claims, pitch-

continuous screaming epitomizes inarticulate expression, a form too crude,
and ultimately had little to offer opera (or drama) beyond a momentary
effect. Against such imprecision, hopes for the precise correlation of emo-
tion and melodic shape fell to speech physiognomy as the alternative to
plastic shape for approaching an Hugoean realism. The hope, specifically,
was that by positing individual units of speech as metaphysical objects of
utterance parallel to melodic expression, a Gefühlsaesthetik could be sharp-
ened semantically by accessing impulses prior to their semantic utterance.
Some of the leading European music journals had carried articles on this
linguistic turn in melodic theory. Two of the most important contributions
to the discourse come from critics Stephan Schütze and Gustav Nauenburg.
In 1830, Schütze had peddled the old line that “in declamation lies
the nucleus of melody,” but he cautioned readers of Caecelia that music
should not blithely mirror declamation, but completely transform it into
melody.209 Drawing on the Jena Romantics’ argument that through music, a
far wider realm of feelings opens up than through language, Schütze
believed that although melodic composition is outwardly structured by a
text’s physiognomy, it should “turn immediately to the inner stirring itself,
and create the inspiration of heaven from this source, which the human
heart transfigures.”210 While this lofty manifesto for pre-linguistic impulses
remains a poetic abstraction, Schütze fleshes it out in terms of a compromise
that would be echoed by a generation of aestheticians:
The art [of melodic composition] consists in bringing each accent into a melodic
course [Gang] so that a really beautiful melody results, so that it sounds as though the
text had only given the opportunity for a beautiful melody, while the feeling therein
believes only to be examining the text, and to understand it completely. Strictly, the
text is never reproduced in the music, rather only the feeling on which it is based.211

Written without any music examples, such rhetoric remained defensively

abstract. The postulate of subvocal feelings that acquire their outward form

209
“[I]n der Deklamation liegt der Keim der Melodie.” Stephan Schütze, “Über Gefühl und
Ausdruck in der Musik” Caecelia 12 (1830), 253.
210
“[Ein rechter Meister wird] sich lieber unmittelbar an die innern Regungen selbst wenden, und
aus dieser Quelle die Eingebungen des Himmels schöpfen, die das Herz des Menschen
verklären.” Ibid., 254.
211
“Die Kunst besteht eben darin, Accente so in einen melodischen Gang zu bringen, dass eine
wirklich schöne Melodie entsteht, so dass es klingt, als ob der Text nur Gelegenheit zu einer
schönen Melodie gegeben hätte, während doch das Gefühl darin nur den Text zu vernehmen,
und ihn so erst ganz zu verstehen glaubt. Streng genommen wird eigentlich nie der Text in der
Musik wiedergegeben, sondern nur das Gefühl, das demselben zum Grunde liegt.” Ibid.
 Between symbolism and realism 67

in German poetry would prove the fulcrum around which the debate over
German melodic expression turned. Poetic metaphor did a lot of heavy
lifting in making such claims persuasive, though, as Gustav Nauenburg, the
last of our melodic witnesses, illustrates in the Neue Zeitschrift from 1843:
Real German vocal music is a fragrant bridal gown, which the composer wraps
around the genius of language; where the musical garment nestles supplely up to the
body of speech, there singable melody has melded with the poem, there melodic
expression runs parallel with declamatory expression, there the basis for real
German vocal melody is to be found.212

By placing a dress code of text loyalty at the heart of a melodic theory,

Nauenburg could argue pragmatically that vocal composers simply need to
be taught text-emphasis just as instrumental composers are taught harmony
and counterpoint. But by comparison with Schütze, this was simplistic,
deceptively impractical, and hardly new.
The concept was in fact borrowed from dramatic theorists, such as
Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, who, only two years earlier, had posited a
direct correlation between the shape of the melodic waveform emitted by
verbal speech and the quality of emotional effect perceived, that is, effec-
tively an emotional seismograph for language:
Beauty first permeates the expression of human speech when the tone in itself is able
to generate different vibrations which, notwithstanding the purity of sound and
word accent, resound in our ear, and through their rising and sinking move the
emotions in equal alternation. This is the musical element of tonal formation
[Tonbildung]: height and depth, slowness and rapidity, strength and weakness.213

The centrality of language here, the linguistic turn, is indicative of the

strengthening bond between a culture of literary Bildung within German
self-identity, and is prognostic of the future directions for melodic theory
during the 1850s. To be sure, the nationalist argument also allowed German
critics to rationalize a flawless skepticism at Italy’s “content-less” musical

212
“Echt deutsche Gesangmusik ist ein duftiges Brautgewand, welches der Tondichter um den
Genius der Sprache hüllt; wo sich das Tongewand geschmeidig an den Sprachkörper anschmeigt,
da ist sangbare Melodie dem Gedichte entquollen, da läuft der Melodieausdrück parallel mit dem
Declamations-ausdrucke, da ist die Basis für echt deutsche Vocal-Melodik gefunden.” Nauenburg,
“Kritische Mischlinge,” NZfM 18 (January 26, 1843), 30.
213
“Die Schönheit dringt erst in den Ausdruck der menschlichen Rede, wenn der Ton in sich selbst
verschiedene Schwingungen zu erzeugen vermag, welche unbeschadet der Reinheit des Lauts
und des Wortaccents an unser Ohr klingen und durch sein Auf- und Absteigen die Empfindung
in gleichen Wechsel versetzen. Dies ist das musikalische Element der Tonbildung; die Höhe und
Tiefe, die Langsamkeit und Schnelligkeit, die Stärke und Schwäche.” Heinrich Theodor Rötscher,
Die Kunst der dramatischen Darstellung, 3 vols. (Berlin: Wilhelm Thome, 1841), 1: 137–38.
68 German melody

style that seemingly used poetic text only as a “starting point.”214

(Schumann quipped you could recognize an Italian melody even before it
started.) If the search for semantic melodic shapes and intervals had failed,
the tentative coalescing of text and melodic line opened up the possibility for
nascent disciplines such as Philologie (historical linguistics) to enter the fray
as fresh nourishment for those anticipating the establishment of a more
precise melodic expression.
* * *
We have tracked a shift in the discourse on melody from “plastic” form to
linguistic physiognomy; from (classical) beauty to the “relative” beauty of
characteristic shapes; from a plastically generic, to the dramatically specific
form. Following the decisive, reactionary break of post-Hegelian German
aestheticians with the prestige of Italianate idiom, the two forms of positive
data they drew upon as the basis for melodic structure were the image of
linear, seismographic emotion and text physiognomy. Both remained
vaguely defined, however, leading Brendel to complain in 1845 that even
the better music critics are idle, and allow “Italian meaninglessness”
(italiänische Sinnlosigkeiten) to dominate German theaters without once
finding it necessary “to develop the laws of dramatic music.”215 Beyond the
interrelation of melodic theory and linguistics, the stakes underlying the
enterprise of systematizing melodic expression were high enough to subject
Wagner to ridicule for his “illogical,” incomprehensible fragmentation of
melodic material. They were predicated, needless to say, on the assumption
that melody rather than harmony is the vehicle of choice for communicat-
ing comprehensible emotional experience in operatic scenarios. For
German critics, the mid-century debate over Wagner’s melodic material
can therefore be construed not so much as to whether it was “beautiful” or
why it was “ugly,” but the extent to which it could be understood.

214
“Anknüpfungspunct.” Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 7. While many Italian composers did of
course seek to couple text and music closely, and rejected their German labels as cavalier text
setters, the view that they disregarded textual subtleties was catalyzed by the fact that foreign
opera was frequently performed in translation within the German states. Under such
circumstances, the integrity of syllabic enunciation was perilously susceptible in performance to
disconnection from the metrics and pitch assignment of a musical line. As Simon Maguire
points out, one of Bellini’s teachers, Girolamo Crescenti (1762–1846), writes in the preface to his
treatise Raccolta di essercizi (1811): “il canto deve essere un’imitazione del discorso” and closes
with the observation that: “Good taste in singing lies solely in the expression of the words, and in
those appropriate inflections that are mentioned in paragraph 8.” Cited in Maguire, Vincenzo
Bellini and the Aesthetics of the Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (New York and London:
Garland, 1989), 45.
215
“doch hatte [die bessere Kritik] gar nicht einmal nötig, die Gesetze dramatischer Musik zu
entwickeln.” Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 6.
2 Melodielehre?

I feel it, and yet can’t fathom it; Ich fühl’s und kann’s nicht versteh’n; –
can’t retain it – and yet can’t forget it; kann’s nicht behalten, – doch auch nicht vergessen;
and were I to grasp the whole thing, – I couldn’t und fass’ ich es ganz, kann ich’s nicht messen!
measure it!
But then, how should I measure that Doch wie wollt’ ich auch fassen,
which seemed immeasurable to me? was unermesslich mir schien?
No rule would fit here, Kein’ Regel wollte da passen,
and yet there was no error in it. und war doch kein Fehler drin.
Hans Sachs, Die Meistersinger1

The genius does not know himself how he has come by his ideas; and he
has not the power to devise the like at pleasure or in accordance with a
plan, and to communicate it to others in precepts that will enable them to
produce similar products.
Immanuel Kant2

Lightning bolts

Goethe said it first: the ideas of a creative genius are as bolts of lightning
whose heavenly origin remains unknown, but whose otherworldly brilliance
illuminates our earthly travails. His oft-quoted letter from June 6, 1810
speaks of Beethoven’s music in this vein:

To think of teaching him would be an insolence even in one with greater insight
than mine, since he has the guiding light of his genius, which frequently illuminates
his mind like a stroke of lightning while we sit in darkness and scarcely suspect the
direction from which daylight will break upon us.3

1
Act 2, scene 3 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. 2 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 151.
3
“[I]hn belehren zu wollen, wäre wohl selbst von einsichtigern, als ich, Frevel, da ihm sein
Genie vorleuchtet, und ihm oft wie durch einen Blitz Hellung giebt, wo wir im Dunkel sitzen und
kaum ahnen von welcher Seite der Tag anbrechen werde.” J. W. von Goethe to Bettina von
Brentano, June 6, 1810, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler,
1835), 202. 69
70 Melodielehre?

With all the claims for sublime natural power, instantaneous invention, and
unpredictability this simile projects, the flipside of such appreciation is the
blinding “darkness” of pedagogy, of knowing that systematic learning is
“insolent” in the presence of musical genius.
Of course, the poetic equation of light with knowledge had informed
French Enlightenment projects since the mid-eighteenth century; by blur-
ring the differentiated metaphors of sun and lightning, and thus the creative
sources of systematic knowledge and immediate inspiration, the model of
genial invention to which Goethe alludes became ambiguous for a gene-
ration of would-be lightning rods. (By 1838, Liszt’s inference of “momen-
tary flashes” could refer to either.)4 How could you know when lightning
will strike, or if it will choose you? Would it be better first to absorb the sun’s
“daylight” through disciplined music-theoretical study and later hope
melodic lightning will strike in your hour of need? At the other end of the
century, Nietzsche confirmed such occult fears when he described the
ecstatic power of inspiration with Goethe’s simile, but emphasized there
can be no wilful candidacy in the act:
If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly
reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely
a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that
suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible,
audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down, that
merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not
ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation
regarding its form, – I never had any choice.5

Given the neurosis surrounding melodic expression in Germany that we

saw in Chapter 1, it was not merely problematic that John Gregory’s classic
assertion – “musical genius consists in the invention of melody”6 – still held
sway a century on. “[Melody] is a gift of nature” Berlioz shrugged in 1837.7
More than ever, it was melody’s apparent autogenesis that poetic commenta-
tors equated with those mysterious origins that fulfilled a primary criterion for

4
Franz Liszt, Artist’s Journey: lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, 1835–1841, trans. Charles Suttoni
(University of Chicago Press, 1989), 66.
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Reinhold Grimm
and Caroline Molina y Vedia, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:
Continuum, 1995), 219.
6
John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal
World, 4th edn. (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), 148.
7
“C’est un don de la nature.” Berlioz, “De la musique en général I” [1837], Revue et gazette musicale
de Paris IV (1837), 407a.
 Lightning bolts 71

Kantian genius, otherwise construed as “that innate mental disposition (ingen-

ium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”8 At stake, then, is the function
of music theory in its pedagogical application with respect to melody as a
product of nature. That constituted a stark oxymoron.
Melody’s special status rested precisely on the long-standing belief
that it could not be taught, as well as the fact that – in liturgical chant
repertories – it sat at the fountainhead of Western musical practice itself.
Eighteenth-century theorists such as Daube, Riepel, and Koch had addressed
the design of melodic units at the phrasal level, but this was remote from the
stylistic and expressive demands of German opera in the new century.9 While
only a few nineteenth-century theorists broached the prestigious but inherently
thorny topic of melodic pedagogy, the pressing need brought its own neologism:
Melodik, first defined by Gottfried Weber in 1821, referred to the teaching of
voice-leading within a succession of notes.10 The controversy of Melodielehre
came to a head in the infamous quarrel about compositional pedagogy between
A. B. Marx and G. W. Fink in 1841–42.11 While Fink maintained the tradition-
alist view that General-Baß (thoroughbass, incorporating harmony and coun-
terpoint) sufficed for training composers, Marx sought dedicated studies in
melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, and form. “One should at least hope
now to find a theory of melody,” he vociferated in 1841, “for melody is the
simpler substance and precedes and is primary to harmony, which cannot form
an artwork by itself, as melody is famously able to do (e.g. in unaccompanied
song). But a theory of melody is lacking altogether.”12 The hope was not,
therefore, that young composers might learn their craft exclusively by using a
textbook, an unlikely scenario for any period, but that such studies could
provide a modern understanding of melodic function and working.
Uncertainty about the place and function of Melodielehre within music theory
doubtless contributed to the difficulties of outlining a persuasive melodic

8
Kant, Critique of Judgment, §. 46.
9
Regardless of stylistic differentiation, Thomas Grey insightfully links the move from smaller to
larger melodic units in eighteenth-century theory to Wagner’s conception of form as an
expansion of melody (Ausdehnung der Melodie). See Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose¸ 274.
10
Gottfried Weber, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, 4 vols. (Mainz: Schott,
1824), 1: 136.
11
The most comprehensive study of this is still Kurt-Erich Eicke, Der Streit zwischen Adolf
Bernhard Marx und Gottfried Wilhelm Fink um die Kompositionslehre (Regensburg: Gustav
Bosse, 1966). See also Scott Burnham’s translation of Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–34.
12
“Nun sollte man wenigstens hoffen, die Lehre von der Melodie zu finden, da Melodie die einfachere
Substanz ist und der Harmonie vor- und vorangeht, die für sich allein kein Kunstwerk bilden kann,
wie es die Melodie (z. B. Im Naturgesang) bekanntlich vermag. Aber – die Lehre von der Melodie
fehlt überall,” in Die alte Musiklehre im Streit in unserer Zeit (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1841), 16.
72 Melodielehre?

theory. Quantitatively, Harmonielehren dwarfed their melodic counterparts

during the nineteenth century, indicating that Marx’s reversal of hierarchy
proved more problematic than perhaps it seemed at first. Eyeing the historical
failure of Melodielehre, Carl Dahlhaus could argue comfortably in 1972 that it
had been an “error” to regard melody as “elementary and fundamental” to
music theory, that such a belief rested on a restriction of the concept of harmony
(echoing Hindemith),13 and tended to invalidate harmonically oriented
approaches to the study of counterpoint with the spurious logic that counter-
point is a polyphony of melodies and therefore “would have, for its part, to be
founded on a theory of melody.”14 Instead, the teaching of counterpoint is far
better suited to Harmonik, he reflected, and always assumes a harmonic basis.
Whereas General-Baß had served as the foundation of compositional peda-
gogy since a cluster of treatises explicated la règle de l’octave in the early
eighteenth century, neither harmony nor counterpoint formed the central
category of musical expression a century later. “In song . . . the listener’s
attention should not be wasted on harmonic art,” explained Friedrich August
Kanne, the leading critic of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1821.15 Yet
as late as 1851 Emil Grimm (younger brother to the Brothers Grimm) could
still caricature the “musical madness of the nineteenth century” (Figure 2.1)
with a regime of merciless schooling in General-Baß for girls, seemingly from
cradle to social eligibility. In contrast to such comfortable satire, the seemingly
unbridgeable gulf between idea and exemplification in Melodielehre meant that
almost all attempts were cast defensively, and begin with nervous provisos that
they could not open a gateway to genius.16 Melodie had become radically
overdetermined – overloaded with expectations of expressive truth, emotional
intensity, and natural form – and it is perhaps no coincidence that Marx and
Johann Christian Lobe both chose to use the synonym Tonfolge in their
respective Treatise on Musical Composition (1837) and “Aesthetic Letters”

13
Paul Hindemith had argued in 1937 that it is “not practicable” (nicht ausführbar) to construct
melody without harmonic grounding. See Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretische Teil (Mainz:
Schott’s Söhne, 1937), 206.
14
Carl Dahlhaus and L. U. Abraham, Melodielehre (Cologne: Hans Greig, 1972), 11.
15
“beym Gesang . . . darf also die Aufmerksamkeit des Hörers nicht durch Verschwendung
harmonischer Künste abgezogen werden.” A. F. Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat 69 (August
29, 1821), 547.
16
Reicha’s Traité calls explicitly for three unteachable attributes – “perfect feeling, an exquisite
taste, and finally genius” – as the prerequisites to avoid melodic monotony, and Teutonius
declared openly that “you cannot expect . . . to see me develop a complete system or theory of
melody, or to put down certain abstract rules. Such a thing is out of the question.” See Reicha,
Treatise on Melody, 64; Teutonius, “Melody and Melodious Combination,” 774–75.
 Lightning bolts 73

2.1 Emil Grimm, Musikalischer Wahnsinn des 19ten Jahrhundert

(1851) © Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel.

(1854) when addressing the topic. Back in 1821, Kanne’s bathos highlighted the
gulf between poetic description and music-theoretical category:
Melody is . . . [i] the inner thread through which the human creative sprit forms a
soulful web, invisible to the eyes, that glides over the enraptured ears with its magic
world, and penetrates the soul with such omnipotence that the outside world surround-
ing it disappears before it, and lets itself delightedly bear part of the tonal vibrations
through all pain and bliss of the earth. It is [ii] the language of the spirit that finds its
echo in every disposition, although it will not at all be understood by reason – that
rouses all feelings from their slumber, and simultaneously wraps the sharply seeing eye
of reason in mist – it is [iii] the ideal and invisible embodiment of all feelings and
passions because on reviving their first breath, the related spiritual elements are awoken
in the souls of the listeners – it is [iv] the successive wave play [Wellenspiel] of all lines of
beauty that float on the coexisting basis of harmony, on the fixed construction of its
inner organism – it is (for mere musicians) the stepwise progress of tones according to the
rules of beauty.17

17
“Die Melodie ist . . . der geistige Faden, durch den der menschliche Schöpfergeist das seelenvolle
Gewebe bildet, das unsichtbar dem Auge, mit seiner Zauberwelt vor dem entzückten Ohre
vorübergleitet, und mit solcher Allgewalt die Seele durchdringt, dass die sie umgebende Aussenwelt
vor ihr verschwindet, und sie sich entzückt auf den Schwingen der Töne mittragen lässt, durch
alle Schmerzen und Wonnen der Erde. Es ist die Geistersprache, die in dem Gemüthe allen
Wiederhall findet, indessen sie vom Verstande gar nicht begriffen wird – die alle Gefühle aus dem
Schlummer ruft, und die scharfblickenden Augen des Verstandes gleichsam in Nebel hüllt – es ist
die ideale, und unsichtbare Verkörperung aller Gefühle und Leidenschaften, weil bey Belebung
ihrer ersten Hauche schon die verwandten geistigen Elemente in der Seele des Hörenden
74 Melodielehre?

With four poetic metaphors stacked against one bland theoretical descrip-
tion, the gap between “melody” and Melodik was unmistakable.
As one might expect, the exclusionist cult of genius garnered a number of
detractors as well as a majority of blithe advocates. Anton Reicha initiated a
limited succession of theorists who countermanded the aesthetics of mys-
tery in composition by emphasizing the constructedness of melodies, along-
side the industry and training composers needed to produce them. Table 2.1
lists the principal German contributors up to 1862, cites their definitions of
melody, and gives the musical elements they believed to be fundamental to
understanding and teaching melody.
But a counterimpulse against these attempts, nourished on an aesthetics
of inspiration, invalidated systematic attempts at melodic theory. A repre-
sentative voice in this regard was the Königsberg-based Kapellmeister
Eduard Sobolewski, who affirmed in 1855 that “Melody cannot be
taught . . . We may criticize it here and there, but we cannot improve it,
or it is no melody.”18 To support this judgment, Sobolewski relates a
cautionary tale of an aspiring composer in Dresden – with unintentional
overtones of Wagner – who was deficient in melody, and who sold every-
thing he owned to pay for lessons and advice, begging every composer who
visited the city to remedy his affliction: “Nothing, however, availed him,”
Sobolewski concludes bleakly.19
The skepticism underpinning Sobolewski’s tale, i.e. the hierarchical division
of poiesis into unthinking inspiration and conscious artifice, goes back at least to
Plato’s Ion. While its full history cannot be traced here, it rests on a somewhat
schematic opposition between divine power and human artifice, where genius is
merely a vessel through which celestial agency channels artistic inspiration.20

erwachen – es ist das successive Wellenspiel aller Schönheitslinien die auf der coexistirenden
Basis der Harmonie, auf dem festen Baue ihres inneren Organismus dahinschweben – es ist
(für blosse Musiker) die secundenweise Fortschreitung der Töne, nach den Gesetzen der
Schönheit.” Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ 64, 507. Emphasis added.
18
Eduard Sobolewski, “Reactionary Letters II,” TMW 33 (1855), 45.
19
Sobolewski, “Reactionary Letters I,” TMW 33 (1855), 19.
20
Plato’s Socratic dialogue Ion sees a rhapsode (actor) interrogated by Socrates about his
recitations of Homer. Divine inspiration or possession, the latter deduces, are the origins of all
beautiful poetry; the rules of art, by contrast, are only a means of deception, of expressing
something disingenuously: “[T]he poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no
invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in
him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles . . .
for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine . . . God takes away the minds of poets, and
uses them as his ministers . . . in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not
of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself
is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.” See Plato, Ion, trans. Benjamin
Jowett at: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ion. Emphasis added.
Table 2.1 Nineteenth-century theoretical approaches to Melodik

Theorist Publication Definition Fundamental Melodik

A. Reicha Traité de mélodie (1814) Melody is a succession of Musical rhythm; “symmetry

(tr. Czerny) tones, just as harmony is a of ideas” as the basis for
succession of chords, or as periodic structure
discourse is a succession of
wordsa
F. A. Kanne “Der Zauber der Melody (for mere musicians) Wave motion (Wellenspiel)
Tonkunst,” AmZ is the stepwise progress of of rising and falling lines
68 (1821) tones according to the rules
of beautyb
A. B. Marx Die Lehre von der A tonally and rhythmically major scale; rest –
Komposition (1837) ordered series of tones is motion – rest
called melodyc
J. C. Lobe Compositions-lehre [Melody is a] sequence of Thematic working
(1844); “Aesthetische tones in a certain order, (thematische Arbeit)
Briefe,” FBfM 1 (1854) relation, symmetryd within 8-measure periods
Teutonius “Letters to a Music Melody is a succession of Scale; truth of expression
Student: Melodies and different sounds expressing corresponding to a
Melodious a certain feeling or sensation particular psychological
Combination,” TMW in a beautiful forme character
47 (1848)
R. Wagner Oper und Drama (1851) Melody is the redemption of Root syllables; vowels;
the poet’s endlessly breath; assonance and
conditioned thought into a alliteration in archaic
deep-felt consciousness of poetry; poetic–
emotion’s highest freedomf musical period
J. Raff Die Wagnerfrage (1854) Melody is a crookedly Speech inflection in
inflected line in space and tandem with consonant /
time simultaneouslyg dissonant intervals
F. Geyer Musikalische Melody is a succession of tones Rhythmicized scale
Compositions-lehre governed by rhythmic, (cf. Marx)
(1862) scalic, and harmonic orderh

a
Reicha, Treatise on Melody, 9.
b
“[Melodie] ist (für blosse Musiker) die secundenweise Fortschreitung der Töne, nach den Gesetzen der
Schönheit.” A. F. Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ 64 (1821): 507.
c
A. B. Marx, School of Composition, 4th edn., trans. Augustus Wehrhan (London: Robert Cocks and
Co., 1852), 1: 21.
d
J. C. Lobe, “Aesthetische Briefe. Dritter Brief: Tonfolge,” FBfM 1 (1854): 326.
e
Teutonius, “Letters to a Music Student,” TMW 44 (1848): 774.
f
“Die Melodie ist die Erlösung des unendlich bedingten dichterischen Gedankens zum tiefempfundenen
Bewußtsein höchster Gefühlsfreiheit.” Wagner, SSD 4: 142. Cf. PW 2: 281.
g
“Die Melodie ist eine krumme inflexionsvolle Linie in Raum und Zeit zugleich.” Joachim Raff, Die
Wagnerfrage (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1854), 58.
h
“Jedenfalls ist sie ein Aufeinanderfolge von Tonen. Doch wird derjenige . . . bald genug innewerden, dass
hierbei in vieler Hinsicht Ordnung herrschen müsse, wie auch, welche andere Einflüsse geltend werden.
Der Rhythmus ist das Erste . . . der Tonleiter . . . ist das Zweite, . . . Harmonie . . ., dies ist das Dritte.”
F. Geyer, Musikalische Compositions-Lehre (Berlin: A. Vogel & Co., 1862), 15.
76 Melodielehre?

Even into the 1850s – ostensibly encroaching on a post-Romantic age in which

Jochen Schmidt finds a proliferation of cracks in the history of the Genie-
Gedanke21 – this paradigm continued to lay siege to the poetic imagination. It is
precisely a clairvoyant state of altered consciousness, for instance, that allows
Eduard Mörike’s Mozart – in Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (1855) – to
conceive a melody for Zerlina (in Don Giovanni) while simultaneously stealing
Edenic fruit from an orange grove in an instance of blatantly adjusted biblical
symbolism.22 Without delving into the cobwebbed contradictions of contem-
porary writing on genius,23 the nodal point in this discussion, that which fueled
the inhibiting factor for a pragmatic approach to melodic pedagogy, was the
inverse of unconscious invention, namely paralyzing self-consciousness, the
burden of reflecting – in solitude – on one’s self-awareness as an impudent
double, all the while being consciously aware of the idealist mantra that melody
could not truly be invented through conscious awareness.
Explanations for this logical bind relied on the incompatibility of categories
of activity and observation. For Hegel’s dialectic, the condition of being
trapped observing oneself in the act of observation “is a [mental] battle . . .
a life and death struggle” that splits apart orders of experience and percep-
tion.24 Analytical psychologists would clarify during the 1830s that two states
of mind – direct experience (inspiration) and assimilative monitoring (theo-
rizing scrutiny) – cannot be simultaneous, and that the one must necessarily
inhibit the other,25 while more poetic commentators had addressed the tricky

21
“In der nachromantischen Zeit ist die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens voller Verwerfungen.”
Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und
Politik, 3rd edn. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004), 2: 63.
22
In Mörike’s narrative, Mozart: “was seized by an idea, which he immediately and eagerly
pursued. Unthinkingly, he again grasped the orange . . . He saw this happen and yet did not see
it; indeed so far did the distraction of his creative mood take him as he sat there twirling the
scented fruit from side to side under his nose, while his lips silently toyed with a melody,
beginning and continuing and beginning again, that he finally, instinctively . . . cut through the
yellow globe of the orange from top to bottom.” In a reflexive move, Mörike even scripts a jest
about Mozart’s Edenic fall in a paradisiacal grove (p. 19), but the manual “mischief” here could
just as well be writing down the freshly captured tune as stealing the fruit, presenting an
ambiguity that links Mozart’s theft structurally to his creativity in a resounding endorsement of
the divinely inspired genius model. See Eduard Mörike, Mozart’s Journey to Prague and a
Selection of Poems, trans. David Luke (London: Penguin, 2003), 17–18, 31–32.
23
The classic account of the historical Genie-Gedanke within German-speaking territories remains
Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und
Politik.
24
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §431–32.
25
See the review-article “Mr Mill’s Analysis of the Mind,” in The Westminster Review 36 (1869),
148–79, here 165. The book under review is James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the
Human Mind, ed. John Stuart Mill (London, 1869), which was originally published in 1829
(2 vols.), but reprinted by the author’s son in 1869.
 Lightning bolts 77

specter of a (Fichtean) mind only too aware of itself thinking by arguing that to
become capable of beautiful art the mind must first pass through an infinity of
consciousness, which is to say, rendering man either “a marionette or a god.”26
Thus, in the same year as Mörike’s novella, Wagner was not alone in wishing
that “I could have lost my private consciousness, and hence my consciousness
in general, in that refining fire.”27 This broad condition was witness to a
uniquely Romantic exploration of what Geoffrey Hartman has called
“the dangerous passageways of [an artist’s] maturation,”28 and speaks to a
fundamental condition of aesthetic modernity. The knowledge that even
asking the question of how to write melody would dispel any chance that it
could be achieved unselfconsciously was a matter of some despair. It was
against this despair that composers and melodic theorists staked their art and,
to some extent, their sanity.
Following the vigorous melodic debates of the 1850s, the Neue Berliner
Musik-Zeitung carried an article by the Berlin-based professor of music,
Flodoard Geyer, that asked just that question. Boldly entitled “Can and
Should Melody be Taught?” it parodied the usual skepticism by lampooning
Johann Mattheson’s antique sentiment (from 1739) that melody is given
“only through God’s grace,”29 labeling him as “one of the first satirists, a
delightful rapier wit and main cock, an original, a ‘Bonmotist.’”30 While

26
Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, trans. and ed. David Constantine (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hacket Publishing, 1997), 412.
27
Wagner to Liszt, June 7, 1855, Weimar, in SB 7: 205.
28
Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romanticisim and Anti-Self-Consciousness,” in Romanticism and
Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 47.
29
“Melodiker werde nur von Gottes Gnaden,” quoted in Flodoard Geyer, “Kann und soll die
Melodie gelehrt werden?” 321.
30
“Mattheson in Ehren: es ist einer der ersten Satiriker, ein ergötzlicher Klopffechter und Haupthahn,
ein Original, ein Bonmotist,“ in Ibid., 322. Geyer was evidently unsympathetic to Mattheson’s
treatise on the topic. Two years before penning his more famous Der vollkommene Capellmeister,
Mattheson had published a treatise entitled Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Christian
Herold, 1737) with detailed chapters on a variety of aspects pertaining to melodic composition:
intervallic construction; differentiation of style (church, theater, chamber); melodic character (light,
lively, clear, flowing); distinctions between vocal and instrumental melody; the rhetoric and syntax
of melodic speech; melodic differentiation by genre (both vocal and instrumental); and the
“dispositon, development and ornamentation” (“Einrichtung, Ausarbeitung und Zierde . . .
dispositio, elaboratio, and decoratio”) of linear phrases. The inclusion of three letters of support
entitled “Gültige Zeugnisse über die jüngste Matthesonisch-Musicalische Kern-Schrift” as an
appendix to editions from 1738 onwards suggests that Mattheson’s attempt to codify melody in
all its elements met with a certain amount of resistance. At fifty-six, and with fifteen music-
theoretical publications behind him, Mattheson’s decision to append letters of support from
Johann Paul Kuntzen and Johann Adolph Scheibe (as well that of an aristocrat from the
Schleswig-Holstein court) to his treatise is perhaps indicative of its controversial status. Though
aspects of this earlier treatise on melody were later incorporated into Mattheson’s “Von der
wircklichen Verfertigung einer Melodie” from Vollkommene Capellmeister, it is noteworthy that he
78 Melodielehre?

Geyer – a student of Marx and C. F. Zelter – actually argues for the

possibility of systematically teaching “melodic form” through model-
based studies of counterpoint and sonata movements, he summarizes the
widespread doubt surrounding his titular question:
Surely, readers want to answer with great unanimity: “No; melody cannot be taught!
If it could – then we would at least like you to show us how we could write
something similar to, say, Schubert’s ‘Lob der Thränen’ or an andante like that
of Beethoven’s C-minor symphony. We would readily pay large sums for this
skill!”31

When Geyer’s satire later extends specifically to the melodists of the

recently formulated neudeutsche Schule, however, it acquires a more
mocking tone as an ironic dialogue between the learner and the
learned:
student: Look, there is little Müller; he composed such a nice Waltz. I really want
to compose a Waltz just like that for my small cousin . . .
teacher: [D]on’t you know yet, or don’t you believe me: Melody comes from
God’s grace! . . . Melody cannot and should not be taught now or ever.
Some have tried it – this Marx, this Lobe and now even this Geyer – but the
desire to teach has had the opposite effect and the whole “music of the
future” of our present age is completely devoid of melody. The music is
without melody in spite of the fact that one teaches melody. Heaven
forbid . . . that it may ever become so with us.32

Such parody is accurate in a double sense: the New Germans were

criticized with remarkable consistency – Wagner in particular – for
an inability to invent melody; in this, Geyer’s “teacher” is not merely
satirical, becoming an ironic parody in stating exactly what his author
intends to say.
states: “es sey fast unmöglich, gewisse Regeln davon [about composing melody] zu geben,” in
Mattheson, Der Vollkommene Capellmeister, ed. Friederike Ramm (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1999), 219.
31
“möchten freilich mit grosser Einmüthigkeit die Leser wohl antworten: ‘Nein; die Melodie
kann nicht gelehrt werden! Könnte sie es – dann wünschten auch wir wenigstens uns zeigen zu
lassen, wie wir so Aehnliches, als z. B. Lob der Thränen von Schubert oder ein Andante, wie
das der C-moll-Symphonie Beethoven’s schaffen könnten. Wir wollten das gern theuer
bezahlen!’” See Geyer, “Kann und soll die Melodie gelehrt werden?,” 321.
32
“ ‘Sehen Sie, da ist der kleine Müller, der hat einen so netten Walzer geschrieben. Ich möchte
doch gar zu gerne auch einen solchen Walzer für meine kleine Cousine componieren. . .’ weisst
Du denn noch nicht oder glaubst Du mir nicht: Melodiker ist ja von Gottes Gnaden! . . . Die
Melodie kann und soll nun und nimmermehr Jemand lehren. Es haben zwar Einige versucht –
dieser Marx, dieser Lobe und nun dieser Geyer, – aber das Lehrenwollen hat gerade den
entgegensetzten Erfolg gehabt und die ganze gegenwärtige Zukunftsmusik ist der Melodie
vollkommen baar. Die Musik ist trotzdem, dass man Melodie lehrt, ohne Melodie. Gott
behüte . . . so soll es mit uns nimmermehr werden!’,” Ibid., 338.
 Lightning bolts 79

What, then, was the solution to the problem of inhibiting self-

consciousness and melody’s putative autogenesis? In the end, it rests on
an epistemological shift between thought as disembodied imagination,
and quantifiable, material substance. Discourses on the materiality of
melodic invention typically involved two beliefs: that plastic melodic
shape is a crafted, constructed object; and that the process of composition
is cognitive and, to some extent, determined by physical and electro-
chemical forces. These beliefs were not mutually dependent. Melody as
an ideal construct of the listener was entirely different to the crafting of a
musical line qua material shape, as Kanne made clear in 1821; and the task
of modern melodic theorists was principally to objectify or desubjectify
melody without annulling its poetic content, to render it unthinkingly
systematic so that it functioned like “a marionette or a god” – flowing
from an absence or totality of consciousness – both unaware or self-
forgetful of its coming into being and yet directed unwittingly by an
background agency of knowledge. In light of this, the present chapter
pursues three aims: to examine the ways in which creative thought,
and melody in particular, could be objectified or otherwise rendered
material; to counterpoint the nineteenth-century residue of earlier
philosophical ideals of originality and natural genius against the composi-
tional aspirations of music theorists during the 1830s and 1840s;
and to interrogate – among others – the two chief theorists of the
Vormärz, Marx and Lobe, through their responses to the problem of
Melodik and their attempts to retool German musicians with melodic
capability during a period heavily stigmatized for its lack of melodic
beauty. This chapter is not therefore a survey of “how it was done,”
how pedagogical approaches might potentially relate to actual composi-
tional practice in the nineteenth century. It is a study of ideas; specifically,
the shift between conceptions of melody as an intangible and tangible
phenomenon.
While the transition to a fully “desubjectified” melody would ulti-
mately fail, the enterprise of rationalizing melodic content sheds light
on the broader scene of music pedagogy as it adapted to the shifting
philosophical ground of the 1840s and 1850s. The Janus-faces of theorists
such as Lobe – looking back to eighteenth-century theories of mechanical
invention while anticipating a post-Romantic age of materialism – has
some resonance even today in the implicitly wide-ranging reach for
systematic approaches to melody. One of the challenges of modern
melodic genres, from 8-bit video game music to big budget film scores,
is precisely the commercial demand for memorable melodic material
80 Melodielehre?

that is stylistically restricted yet original (Koji Kondo, the composer

behind Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda, is unequivocal:
“for me it’s the art of creating that one main melody that is the primary
goal behind music composition”),33 suggesting that the need to get
around self-consciousness in composing melody and puncture idealist
assumptions remains the same; and so – one imagines – do the attendant
economic and psychological struggles.34

Associationism

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night

God said: “Let Newton be” and all was light.
Alexander Pope35
The laws of the phenomena of mind are sometimes analogous to
mechanical, but sometimes also to chemical laws.
John Stuart Mill36

In the German counter-revolution against the Enlightenment, divine

inspiration – as a concealed positive faculty37 – was inverted to become an
acknowledged void, a kind of quantified ignorance or “negative greatness”38 –
as J. G. Hamann put it – that could explain what aestheticians felt ill-disposed
to address. By the nineteenth century, this acknowledged void expressed the
need for perfect ignorance of nature’s “workshop,” and would become
strongly associated, as Jennifer Ann Bates summarizes, with “the realm of
magic” for the simple reason that “genius is located in the movement of

33
See “Interview with a legend” at http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/772/772299p2.html
34
See John Seabrook’s assesment of the economic imperative driving musical style in the modern
record industry, “The Money Note,” The New Yorker (July 7, 2003): www.newyorker.com/
archive/2003/07/07/030707fa_fact_seabrook
35
Alexander Pope, “Epitaph. Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster-Abbey” [1730], The
Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 808.
36
John Stuart Mill, The Logic of the Moral Sciences, excerpted from A System of Logic, vol. 2, bk. 6
[1843]; rpt. (London: Open Court, 1994), 39.
37
Eduard Young, Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir
Charles Grandison (London: A. Millar, R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 31ff. Young saw
creative genius in religious terms back in 1759 as an inwardly divine secret:
“God within,” that remained foreign to the human nature of its bearer, i.e. a “stranger
within.”
38
Johann Georg Hamann’s term: “eine negative Größe.” From “Hamburgische Nachricht.
Berlinische Beurtheilung der Kreuzzüge des Philologen” [1763], in J. G. Hamann, Sämtliche
Werke, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Thomas-Morus-Presse, 1950), 2: 260.
 Associationism 81

a merely subjective soul . . . [which] in itself it is not sufficient for a science

of experience.”39 Yet, as noted earlier, attempts at Melodielehre needed a
degree of rational stability to approach a pedagogical application. As it turns
out, the drive to objectify creative invention drew on none other than the
eighteenth-century principle of mechanical associationism (the involuntary
connection of ideas wherein “the simple ideas generate . . . the complex
ones”),40 which stemmed, as M. H. Abrams reminds us, from the attempt
“to import into the psychical realm the explanatory scheme of physical
science, and so to extend the victories of mechanics from matter to mind.”41
This parallelism between mental activity and elementary concepts of
Newtonian physics held that the creative association of disparate ideas in
the brain becomes an introspective correlate to the operation of the mechan-
ical laws of motion in the electrical nervous system, and would provide a
key link between the eighteenth-century belief in a mechanical imagination
and the automatic cognitions required, for instance, by Lobe’s melodic theory
in 1844 (which we will examine presently). The Aberdeen-based philosopher
Alexander Gerard offers a detailed account of artistically applied associa-
tionism in his Essay on Genius (1774). The imagination’s associative
principle forms the “origin of genius,” for him, but if it was to avoid arbitrari-
ness, a governing “design” must regulate it in the same way that a magnet will
sort ferruginous items according to the laws of magnetism or a sequence
of interconnected water ducts will direct the water down the path of
least resistance according to Newton’s law of gravity. An overarching
design doubles the strength of certain associative links, allowing relevant
ideas to overrule their irrelevant rivals. Genius in this sense is merely a
superior pathway complex of interconnected associations that regulates the
imaginative process. It is a more efficient mechanism, a finer filterer of
unwanted ideas, a better algorithm, and Gerard can thus claim quite logically
that “[t]he extent of Homer’s imagination is not more remarkable than its
regularity.”42 Just as associationism could regulate the functioning of an
unconsciously inventive mind, so by extension it could be deployed to objec-
tify the functioning of unconsciously inspired acts of melodic composition: the
association of tonal succession, thematic permutation, modular phrasal
syntax, and rhythmic patterning were all amenable to mechanism in this

39
Jennifer Ann Bates refers specifically to Hegel’s conception of genius in the Preface of the
Phenomenology of Spirit. See Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (New York: State University of
New York Press, 2004), 140.
40
Mill, The Logic of the Moral Sciences, 40.
41
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1971), 159.
42
Alexander Gerard, Essay on Genius (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1774), esp. 39–70, here 48.
82 Melodielehre?

sense. By offering a means of circumventing conscious deliberation, it

proved to be the Trojan horse that pedagogy needed to breach the gates of
divinely inspired genius, at least in the discourse of nineteenth-century
Melodik.43
If we accept that the principles of mechanical association continued to
dominate the psychology of the age (as late as 1890 William James would
characterize associationism as our elementary “law of neural habit”),44 how
exactly did they interrelate with melodic theory? In one reading, analogical
laws were originally nothing more than a means of regulating failures in our
memory: the imprecision of our recollections resulted in the invention-
by-substitution of seemingly new phenomena.45 Far from an arbitrary or
lawless faculty, then, the temporal and spatial reordering of images in the
mind’s eye (or inner ear) becomes the elementary process by which items
lacking a precedent in sense (mythological grotesqueries, for example, or
“original” melodic shapes) enter our thoughts, or are “created” by the
imagination according to the laws of association. Distinct objects are diver-
sified by the varying combinations into which they are instinctively asso-
ciated, thus poetic imagination feeds off real sensory input, rearranging its
elements into irreal compounds (as in, for example, a hybrid between a lion
and eagle, a gryphon; or between a man and bull, a minotaur). This stickle-
brick conception of imaginative invention would essentially form the basis
of Lobe’s justification for thematische Arbeit in 1844, as well as the rationale
for piecing together complex thematic units mechanically from simple
fragments.
Nineteenth-century devices for enforcing mechanical learning were long
familiar in German territories. J. B. Logier’s “Chiroplast,” which regulated
the finger movement of aspiring piano virtuosos, was endorsed by the
Prussian government in 1821 when funds were created to set up the first

43
The nineteenth-century afterlife of associationism was secured through the widespread influence
of such concepts as Kant’s basic “analogical laws” and Coleridge’s “mechanical fancy” (defined in
opposition to the “organic imagination”), which occurs in the thirteenth chapter of the latter’s
Biographia Literaria [1817], ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975). See also
Kant, Critique of Judgment § 49.
44
William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1: 566
45
Alongside comments in Gerard’s Essay on Genius, 38ff, it is arguably his Essay on Taste (1759)
that offers the clearest articulation: “when memory has lost [the] real bonds of union [between
ideas], fancy, by its associating power, confers upon them new ties, that they may not lie perfectly
loose, and it can range them in an endless variety of forms [cf. ‘original’ melodic shapes]. Many of
these being representations of nothing that exists in nature; and therefore whatever is fictitious or
chimerical is acknowledged to be the offspring of this faculty, and is termed imaginary.” Gerard,
Essay on Taste, 3rd edn. [1780], rpt. ed. Walter J. Hipple Jr. (Gainsville: Scholars’ Facsimiles &
Reprints, 1963), 153–54.
 Associationism 83

of several academies for “chiroplastic” instruction, while rote-learning of

literature – its mental analogue – remained commonplace in German
grammar schools.46 Marx was quick to give a patriotic stamp of approval:
“So in Germany, [Logier’s chiroplastic method] received its scientific
acceptance and basis, its general adoption in the science of sound.”47 On
this basis, Myles Jackson has argued that “musicians used machines and
mechanical principles to teach the skills normally taught by masters, and . . .
some musicians, rather controversially, saw physicists as possible allies in
pedagogical matters.”48 Beyond the measurable physical practices Jackson
illuminates, however, this principle plausibly extended to understandings of
compositional pedagogy. It is arguably in this sense of physical mechanism,
for instance, that the second volume of Heinrich Christoph Koch’s Versuch
einer Anleitung zur Komposition (1793) could speak of the “mechanical
rules of melody” which regulate the piecing together (Zusammenzetsung) of
melody as opposed to its invention (Erfindung).49
While originally driven by associationism, the nineteenth-century incar-
nation of a mechanical mind placed emotion at its center, a move that
allowed for an unequivocal link between Melodik and the scientific dis-
course. In 1833, John Stuart Mill had proposed “feeling” as the organizing
principle of poetic invention, to which are indebted “all the combinations
which the mind puts together, all the pictures which it paints, the wholes
which Imagination constructs out of the materials supplied by [mechanical]
Fancy.”50 Lobe similarly would argue that unlearnable “inner emotion”
remained the source for all melodic expression, and that the training he
advocates was to ensure the smooth transmittance of emotion into melody

46
See David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918¸ 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
228ff.
47
Marx, “Zusatz aus andrer Feder,” BamZ 2 (1825), 58–60, 65–67, 73–75, here 60.
48
M. W. Jackson, “Physics, Machines and Musical Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century Germany,”
History of Science 42 (2004), 371–418, here 374.
49
“Von den mechanischen Regeln der Melodie,” in H. C. Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur
Komposition [1787], 2: 6, 135.
50
Mill’s full statement reveals his rationale: “Thoughts and images will be linked together,
according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A thought will introduce a thought
by first introducing a feeling which is allied with it. At the center of each group of thoughts or
images will be found a feeling; and the thoughts or images are only there because the feeling was
there. All the combinations which the mind puts together, all the pictures which it paints, the
wholes which Imagination constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to
some dominant feeling, not as in other natures to a dominant thought, for their unity and
consistency of character – for what distinguishes them from incoherencies.” J. S. Mill, “The Two
kinds of Poetry,” Early Essays, ed. J. W. M. Gibbs (London: George Bell & Sons, 1897), 225. This
was first published in Monthly Repository n.s. (1833), 714–24.
84 Melodielehre?

as part of a mechanical operation.51 While the link between Mill and Lobe
remains indirect, Mill’s psychology mirrored eighteenth-century melodic
theorists in arguing the basic principle that complex (cognitive / phrasal)
units must result from the association of smaller units, but questioned
whether this was a mental or a physical process, whether “the association
did not exist between the two thoughts, but between the two states of the
brain or nerves, which preceded the thoughts.”52 Receptive to such materi-
alist sympathies, Lobe conceived melody as an object, and would draw on
mechanical-associative principles within the governance of “feeling” a year
later to outline a pedagogical strategy, in which, paradoxically, theories of a
mechanical mind could be employed to subjectivist ends.

The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious

consciousness”

These pages . . . contain a soul in its entirety. Is it my own, or is it the soul

of someone else? . . . The soul stirred the pen and overwhelmed it. / I prefer
to leave all that in the realm of mystery and conjecture.
Gustave Flaubert (1838)53

This need to objectify the creative flow of thought returns us to our starting
point. If we revisit Goethe’s stroke of lightning with materialist spectacles,
his metaphor no longer appears entirely poetic, perhaps not even entirely
metaphorical. Corresponding with the same interlocutor, Bettina von
Brentano, Goethe also spoke of: “the electric shocks of your inspiration”
after which Brentano herself ventured: “electricity excites the spirit to
musical, fluent, streaming production. / I am of electric nature.”54 It had
been sixty years since Benjamin Franklin and Thomas-François Dalibard
had proven that lightning was in fact a giant electrostatic spark, a discovery
that led Kant – defender of an aesthetics of mystery in the natural genius –
to dub Franklin “the modern Prometheus” who had brought down

51
Lobe, Compositions-Lehre oder umfassende Theorie von der thematischen Arbeit und den
modernen Instrumentalformen (Weimar: Bernhard Friedrich Voigt, 1844), 42; rpt. (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1988), 37.
52
Mill, The Logic of the Moral Sciences, 36.
53
Gustave Flaubert, Mémoires d’un fou [1838], trans. Timothy Unwin, www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/los/
madman.pdf, 3.
54
“die elektrischen Schläge Deiner Begeisterungen.” Goethes Briefwechsel, 1: 278; “Alles
elektrisches regt den Geist zu musikalischer, fließender, ausströmender Erzeugung. / Ich bin
elektrischer Natur.” Ibid., 2: 199.
 The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious consciousness” 85

fire from the heavens.55 Theological fears as to the implications of channel-

ing “natural” electricity or “tinkering with God’s messaging system”56 were
registered widely both in Europe and the American colonies,57 and in the
early nineteenth century, Kant’s epithet was used as the subtitle for one of
the most famous novels capturing the popular fascination with the secret of
a galvanic vital force within human forms. The promise of electricity in
Mary Shelley’s imagination was precisely that Frankenstein’s monster could
receive a divine spark. Structurally, the playful affinity between this and
Goethe’s Beethoven is more than coincidental. If we pursue the idea of
electrophysiology further, then the metaphor for inspiration reads increas-
ingly as scientific description.
Half a century after Luigi Galvani had used electric current to induce
twitching from the legs of dead frogs via the sciatic nerve, an altogether
different implication for human cognition arose from his concept of an
endogenous “animal electricity”:58 that electrical impulses from the cere-
brum could be decoded to create art. Alexander von Humboldt’s experi-
ments in Jena during 1797 had seemingly verified Galvani’s view that
electrical current had an internal source in the nerves and brain.59 During
the 1850s, this suspicion was embodied most notably in an invention called
the “psychograph” or “thought indicator” whose sole agency was given as
“nervous electricity.” The patent, registered on January 23, 1854, reads as
follows:

A Psychograph, or Apparatus for Indicating Persons Thoughts by the Agency of

Nervous Electricity:
The apparatus consists of a combination of rods or pieces of wood joined so as to
permit of free action in all the parts. From one of the legs of the instrument hangs a
tracer; on one or more of the other extremities is fixed a disc, upon which the
operator is to place his hand, and from this extremity or these extremities depends

55
Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Werke, Prussian Academy Edition, 29 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1910–), 1: 472.
56
Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical
Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2006), 189.
57
See, for instance, Reverend Thomas Prince. “Appendix Concerning the Operation of GOD in
Earthquakes by Means of the Electrical Substance,” in Two Boston Puritans on God, Earthquakes,
Electricity and Faith, 1755–1756, see http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/
ideas/text1/godlightningrods.pdf. For a summary account of reactions to Franklin’s lightning
conductors in the wider context of his experiments, see Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down, 188–93.
58
Luigi Galvani, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius (Bononiae: Ex
Typographia Instituti Scientiarium, 1791), 15ff.
59
Alexander von Humboldt, Versuche über die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser nebst
Vermuthungen über den chemischen Process des Lebens in der Thier- und Pflanzenwelt, 2 vols.
(Berlin: Heinrich August Rottmann, 1797–99).
86 Melodielehre?

another tracer. The other parts of the apparatus consist of a glass slab or other non-
conductor, and of an alphabet and set of figures or numerals. Upon a person
possessing nervous electricity placing his hand upon one of the discs the instrument
will immediately work, and the tracer will spell upon the alphabet what is passing in
the operator’s mind.60

A colleague of the inventor, Freiherr von Forstner, reports that several such
devices were sold in California, and to advertise the sale, Forstner published
no fewer than four psychographically induced poems; these were attributed
to supposedly inartistic and not especially literate Prussian citizens (a first
lieutenant in the Prussian army, and a 12-year-old girl).61 While hardly a
challenge to the literary elite, psychographically induced literature offered
the promise of socializing genial invention. Indeed, the appeal of the
psychograph for early commentators rested partly on the assumption that
anyone could tap into their “genius” to some extent.
As one of the more philosophically intriguing inventions of the 1850s, this
contrivance can be viewed as an expression of a larger materialist trend whose
quest for the “real” vacillated between embodied and disembodied entities,
where ostensibly intangible phenomena such as thought and sound courted
the suspicion of harboring a substantive, physical “reality” which could be
harnessed, channeled, and quantified.62 In this sense, it is not surprising that

60
See patent no. 173 from 1854 in the London Patent Office, also listed in Patents for Inventions:
Abridgements of Specifications, Patent Office, Great Britain (Patent Office, 1859), 382–83.
References to the device appear in The Mechanics Magazine: Iron 60 (1854), 107; Arthur’s Home
Magazine, May 1854 (T. S. Arthur & Co., 1854), 398; Journal of the Proceedings of the Assembly of
the State of California (California Legislature Assembly, 1854), 434; The Mechanic’s Magazine
(Robertson, Brooman & Co., 1854), 142; Newton’s London Journal of Arts and Sciences: Being
Record of the Progress of Invention as Applied to the Arts 44 (William Newton, 1854), 231.
61
A. Freiherr von Forstner, Der Psychograph oder Seelenschreiber des Herrn Musikdirektor
A. Wagner in Berlin (Berlin: A. Wagner, 1853), esp. 15–16.
62
An entire industry of occult literature thrived on the belief that scientific breakthroughs could
transgress laws that separated consciousness from non-consciousness, or even the living from
the dead. The pseudo-scientific basis for this was the phenomenon of animate polarities within
inanimate objects. In addition to electricity, magnetism was co-opted in a number of fantastical
claims about communicating with dead figures. One such example purported to use a
psychographic apparatus to talk to Heine and printed the transcripts, see D. Hornung, Heinrich
Heine, der Unsterbliche: Eine Mahnung aus dem Jenseits. Nur Thatsächliches, keine Dichtung
(Stuttgart: J. Scheible, 1857). Other texts in this vein include: Louis Alphonse Cahagnet, Blicke in
das Leben der Todten. Die Lehre von Gott und den Geheimen Kräften der Natur (Leipzig:
Edmund Stoll, 1853); Pater Lacordaire, Die enthüllten Geheimnisse des Magnetismus und des der
Electrizität (Leipzig: Edmund Stoll, 1853); August Debay, Die Mysterien des Schlafes und
Magnetismus, oder Physiologie des natürlichen und magnetischen Somnambulismus in
Erzählungen und Anekdoten, and Die Physik des Tischrückens (Stuttgart: J. Scheible, 1855);
Ferdinand Santanelli, Geheime Philosophie oder magisch-magnetisch Heilkunde. Eine Erklärung
der wunderbaren Erscheinungen des Magnetismus und Einleitung in die verborgensten
Geheimnisse der Natur (Stuttgart: J. Scheible, 1855).
 The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious consciousness” 87

the invention was patented in London by a music professional, the Berlin-

based professor of music Adolphus Theodore Wagner (no relation). While
there is no evidence to suggest that it was conceived in relation to any specific
theory of mind – whether associationist, materialist, or mechanistic – among
the range of available theories at the time, its initial plausibility rests on the
idea that it obeyed a set of electrochemical forces, utilizing their material
interconnections. Hence it can be seen as an anti-metaphysical statement that
embodied the desire to conceive of thought as a material process.63
Skeptical commentators protested, notably within Humboldt’s circle,
that the psychograph was only the latest of a string of “monstrous absurd-
ities”64 of the age, and by the 1890s its proto-scientific claims for electrical
agency were replaced by “spirits” as it definitively entered the realm of
occult fantasy.65 (Its quack-phrenology would become a precursor to both
the lie detector and the Ouija board.) Though recent medical technologies
have decoded speech from brain synapses,66 at the time this “invention”
was clearly a scam, forming part of what James Sheehan has termed an age
of “eccentric theories and fashionable fakery.”67 At an archeological level,
though, it also emblematized the desire to tap inventive faculties by
reifying thought as a material substance: ostensibly offering a failsafe
solution to the problem of inhibiting self-consciousness. Beyond
Forstner’s unscientific propaganda, mentioned above, the specific belief
that processes of cognition could be reified as such, and that electricity
carried these, whether as fluid or synaptic impulse, throughout the nerv-
ous system – the belief, that is, that enabled the psychograph to appear

63
There were philosophical precedents. Kant, notably, suggested to Samuel Thomas Sömmerring
that neural impulses cause electrolysis to occur within the cerebrospinal fluid linking spinal
nerves with the brain, Because this watery conduit “would not only allow nerves to perceive the
sensory world, but also to ‘react back on it,’” Veit Erlmann sees in this “Kant’s cautious turn
towards the materiality of thought . . . by transforming the production of ideas into a form of data
processing.” See Erlmann, Reason and Resonance (New York: Zone books / Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010), 181–83; and Kant to Sömmerring, August 10, 1795, in Soemmerring und die
Gelehrten der Goethezeit, ed. Gunter Mann and Franz Dumont (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1985), 33.
64
“solche Ungeheuerlichkeiten.” K. A. Varnhagen to A. von Humboldt, July 8, 1854, Berlin. See
Briefe von Alexander von Humboldt an Varnhagen von Ense aus den Jahren 1827–1858, 5th edn.
(Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1860), 288.
65
In Rudolf Eisler’s philosophical dictionary from 1899, spirits rather than electricial energy
moved the machine, and the whole operation was now merely “alleged.” [“Psychograph:
Name eines von den Spiritisten benutzten Apparates, der angeblich durch ‘Spirits’ in Tätigkeit
versetzt wird.”] See Rudolf Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, 2nd edn. (Berlin:
Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1904), 2: 151.
66
B. Pasley, S. David, N. Mesgarani, A. Flinker, S. Shamma, N. Crone, R. Knight, and E. Chang,
“Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex,” PLoS Biology 10 (2012), e1001251,
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251.
67
James Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford University Press, 1994), 809.
88 Melodielehre?

plausible – was given empirical credence in the 1850s by a circle of

academic materialists associated with the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
First to put the case among them was Carl Vogt, a professor of zoology
at the University of Geneva, who declared in his Physiological Letters of
1854: “all those capabilities that we understand by the term activities of
the soul [Seelenthätigkeiten] are just functions of brain substance . . .
thoughts in themselves stand in relation to the brain as gall to the liver
or urine to the kidney.”68 Jacob Moleschott, a prominent colleague at
Heidelberg, regarded such comparative logic as “incontestable,” adding
that “[t]hought is movement, a conversion of brain substance; the activity
of thinking is just as necessary, just as inseparable a characteristic of the
brain as any material will always possess agency [Kraft] as an inner,
inexpressible feature.”69 Such ideas had already percolated into musical
discourse. Gustav Nauenburg, the aesthetician and pedagogue we met in
Chapter 1, declared himself “a warm, if not an absolute admirer of
phrenological science” to readers of Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift. He related
how different areas of the brain correspond to different musical aptitudes,
continuing that “mental, immaterial force acts from the sensory organ
[brain], like magnetic or electrical force; it appears as the expression of
the material’s activity.”70 During the 1850s, moreover, the dominant

68
“alle jene Fähigkeiten, die wir unter dem Namen der Seelenthätigkeiten begreifen, [sind] nur
Funktionen der Gehirnsubstanz . . . die Gedanken [stehen] in demselben Verhältniß etwa zu
dem Gehirne . . . wie die Galle zu der Leber oder der Urin zu der Nieren.” Carl Vogt,
Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände, 323. In her study of materialist thinking within
the German natural sciences, Annette Wittkau-Horgby has emphasized that it was principally
Vogt whose arguments led to the view that a materialistic interpretation of the connection
between brain and consciousness (or “soul” as he put it) was the logical necessary outcome of the
study of natural science. See Wittkau-Horgby, Materialismus: Entstehung und Wirkung in den
Wissenschaften des 19. Jahnhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 77–95,
here 85. With this view, Vogt was only reformulating a statement by the physiologist Pierre Jean
George Cabanis (1757–1808), who had spoken in 1802 of “la sécrétion de la pensée” from the
brain. See Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, 2 vols. (Paris: Crapart, Caille
and Ravier, 1802), 2: 137–38.
69
“Der Vergleich ist unangreiflbar . . . Der Gedanke ist eine Bewegung, eine Umsetzung des
Hirnstoffs, die Gedankenthätigkeit ist eine eben so nothwendige, eben so unzertrennliche
Eigenschaft des Gehirns, wie in allen Fällen die Kraft dem Stoff als inneres, unveräußerliches
Merkmal innewohnt.” Quoted in Ibid., 324.
70
“ich bin jetzt ein warmer, wenn auch nich unbedingter Verehrer der phrenologischen
Wissenschaft . . . Die geistige, immaterielle Kraft wirk aus dem sinnlichen Organe; wie, z.B. die
magnetische, electrische etc. Kraft; sie erscheint als Thätigkeitsäußerung der Materie.”
Nauenburg, “Die Phrenologie in ihrer Beziehung zur Tonkunst,” NZfM 2 (1851), 13–16, here 13.
Nauenburg also recommended that, by identifying and distinguishing musical faculties within
the brain, composers could determine their most favorable stylistic aptitudes (and parents, those
of their children) without the painful experience of trial and error. This appears not to have
provoked much discussion in the Neue Zeitschrift.
 The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious consciousness” 89

metaphor for communication within human neural networks was an

alternative mechanism for transmitting ideas. In the same year as
Nauenburg’s article, the widely respected experimental physiologist Emil
du Bois-Reymond suggested that:
the wonder of our time, electrical telegraphy, was long ago modeled in the animal
machine. But the similarity between the two apparatuses, the nervous system and
the electric telegraph, has a much deeper foundation. It is more than similarity, it is a
kinship between the two, an agreement not merely of the effects, but also perhaps of
the causes.71

Just as the invention of telegraphy could transmit literal coded (Morse)

signals through electrical cable from 1837, the psychograph claimed to
simulate the mysterious transmission of actual creative thought, albeit
coded through the Roman alphabet.72 Its very conception demonstrates
the extent to which it became unproblematic, even desirable, that human
self-consciousness could be bypassed in favor of a conductor of “nervous
energy” that transmitted an original idea, transforming it into symbolic
graphics. Humboldt, accordingly, once described telegraphy to Werner von
Siemens as Gedankendrahtung (wiring thoughts), i.e. an embodied form of
information that characterizes an entanglement of signal and materiality.73
Such materialism held an artistic appeal. Writing about the process of
drafting his realist novel Effi Briest,74 Theodor Fontane claimed to have
finished it “as in a dream and almost as if I were using a psychograph.”75
This creative process appealed for its absence of mundane labor; but like
Fontane’s novels, the statement was actually a fiction based on putative
reality (he in fact spent years revising and redrafting). His claim never-
theless appeals to the styling of a writing process that is subjective to the
point of becoming unthinking, “as if” a machine were giving voice to and
transcribing pre-linguistic thoughts immediately as they occurred in a pure

71
Emil du Bois-Reymond, Reden, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Veit, 1887), 2: 51, cited in Laura Otis,
Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001), 11.
72
Samuel Finley Breese Morse first built a telegraphic conductor in 1835; the patent followed in
1837. A summary of the genesis of this device is given in Anton A. Huurdeman, The Worldwide
History of Telecommunications (Hoboken: Wiley, 2003), 55ff.
73
See Laura Otis’ rich exploration of the metaphors, experiments and writings surrounding the
theory of communication within neural networks in the nineteenth century, in Networking, 1.
74
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest [1894]. Rpt. trans. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers (London:
Penguin, 2000).
75
“Vielleicht ist es mir so gelungen, weil ich das Ganze träumerisch und fast wie mit einem
Psychographen geschrieben habe.” Fontane to Hans Hertz, March 2, 1895, in Briefe an Wilhelm
und Hans Hertz 1859–1898, ed. Kurt Schreinert (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1972), 356.
90 Melodielehre?

state to the author, who is now reduced to an origination function and

stripped of any formative, revisionary, or calligraphic craft. This is where the
historical psychograph becomes dislocated from the discourse it tapped
into, for there is a sharp distinction between the conscious, unspoken
thoughts putatively transcribed by it, and its broader artistic appropriation
as a mechanism for unconscious invention that fed into a far longer tradition
of automatic writing. A century earlier, Voltaire had pretended to marvel
that Virgil’s hand just happened to write the Aeneid at precisely the time
that his soul produced it: “even though his hand in no way obeyed the
intention of the author.”76 Decades later, E. T. A. Hoffmann captured
essentially the same principle in the sphere of fiction with The Golden Pot
(1814), when the exotic Serpentina turns the bourgeois Anselmus into an
unconscious writing machine who transcribes her spoken story unawares
into Sanskrit.77 And in the realm of autobiography, Gustave Flaubert
fictionalized his writing process similarly as the involuntary transmission
“of a madman” directly from soul to pen. Giving voice to the narrative
agency’s ambivalence, Flaubert’s fictional author cautions right at the out-
set: “I know no more than you [the reader] of what you are going to read,”78
thereby replicating the desired condition of would-be writers of melody.
The literary topos had rich musical resonances. For his part, Wagner’s
appeal to a creative dream state in Die Meistersinger, where “man’s truest
madness is disclosed to him in dreams: all poetry and the art of verse
is nothing but true interpretation of dreams”79 essentially rewords the
aspiration to tap the unconscious. Fitting within the Enlightenment
(but anti-rationalist) dichotomy of (natural) genius and (schooled) scientist,
such comments inscribe a valuation system into modes of artistic produc-
tion. The mode of literary production embodied in Fontane’s psychograph,

76
“Ainsi l’âme de Virgile produisait l’Enéïde, et sa main écrivait l’Enéïde, sans que cette main obéît
en aucune façon à l’intention de l’auteur.” Voltaire, “La Métaphysique de Neuton ou parallèlle
des sentiments de Neuton et de Leibnitz” [1740], Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford: Taylor
Institution, 1992), 15: 229.
77
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. and ed. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford
University Press, 1992), 1–84.
78
Gustave Flaubert, Mémoires d’un fou [1838], 3. This resolution of dream and reality would of
course later come to define the aesthetic of surrealism: “psychic automatism in its pure state,
by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word . . . the actual
functioning of thought,” and its architect – André Breton – argued accordingly that good
writing from Swift to Roussel had always been surreal in its coming-into-being. See Breton,
“From the First Manifesto of Surrealism 1924,” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources,
ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (University of Chicago Press,
1998), 309.
79
“des Menschen wahrster Wahn / wird ihm im Traume aufgetan: / All’ Dichtkunst und Poeterei /
ist nichts als Wahrtraumdeuterei.” Act 3, scene 2, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
 The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious consciousness” 91

suggested by Flaubert’s autobiographical “madman,” and reinforced by

Hans Sachs is unsettling in part because it both mystifies and mechanizes
the creative process by transgressing Cartesian oppositions of outer and
inner, mechanical sequence and organic causality, thereby also weakening
such dichotomous constructs as labor and inspiration, layman and genius,
activity and feeling.80 This slackening of antagonistic categories was essen-
tial for the achievement of an adequate melodic theory, where melody had
to be understood systematically in terms of a rational pedagogical applica-
tion. Devices such as the psychograph, in short, can be read as materializing
a conception of automatic creation through a concealed process of ideation
that remained mechanic–systematic: this was precisely the task of melodic
theory during the nineteenth century.81
In a sense, German idealism had always constituted a systematic attempt
to legitimize creative subjectivity and to understand this at the same time as
an organ for portraying the absolute.82 But mid-century materialism
remains an autonomous concept here; it does not necessarily go hand in
hand with the belief that mind is irreducibly mechanistic.83 Nor are the
associationist psychologies of the previous section necessarily materialist,
even though the metaphorical and analogical thinking that was often used
to chart those psychologies frequently resorted to materialist imagery
(e.g. Mill’s mental chemistry). For music theorists, aligning non-conscious
cognition with materialist philosophy could arguably be just as impractical
and inhibiting as idealist models of genius. Under the changing skies of
the Nachmärz, then, the implicit question for an aesthetics of Melodik is

80
Here I take the distinction between mechanical and organic expressed by Marshall McLuhan:
“mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts
in a series . . . there can be no principle of [organic] causality in a mere sequence.” McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 11–12.
81
Far from a trivial toy, the psychograph can be understood as a simulacrum whose very existence
offered tangible proof, more so than any theory, that the natural universe of physics and
human biology was susceptible to mechanistic explication. In this sense, the psychograph can
be viewed much like the eighteenth-century automata of inventors such as Henri Maillardet,
Pierre Jacquet-Droz, and Jacques de Vaucanson. Helmholtz, for one, explained that it would
be incomprehensible for men like Vaucanson and Droz to spend so much time in the
construction of these figures “if they had not hoped in solemn earnest to solve a great problem.”
Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Interaction of the Natural Forces,” in Popular Lectures on
Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson (New York: Dover, 1962), 138.
82
For an investigation of this definition in the wider context of post-Enlightenment German
aesthetics, see Jochen Schmidt, “Die intellektuale Anschauung als ästhetische Genialität,” in Die
Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens, 1: 415.
83
A prominent contemporary example would be Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s comments on
“physical–mental mechanisms.” See Medicinische Physiologie, oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig:
Wiedmann, 1852), 66ff.
92 Melodielehre?

“why the Romantic reaction to the problem of self-consciousness should

be in the form of an aggrandizement of art,” as Hartman puts it.84
Wagner’s reaction in these terms is revealing, for it illustrates his engage-
ment with the problem of a supremely self-conscious model of uncon-
scious creativity. Nine years before his desire to lose his “private
consciousness,” he advised Hanslick that art of the most modern period
“can only be produced by a process of conscious creation,”85 yet he
vacillated, telling Liszt in 1851 that his expository discourse in Oper und
Drama was merely a conscious means to unconscious ends: “the beautiful
unconsciousness of artistic creation.”86 This debate did not remain a private
matter. The protean symbolism of Lohengrin was seen by Wagner’s most
prominent journalistic spokesperson as an explicit dramatization of the antag-
onism between creative acts and self-conscious knowledge thereof. “Lohengrin
is the representative of Genius, of artistic genius,” Franz Brendel explained in
1859, “and the opera depicts the conflicts in which this genius – with his
opposite, otherworldly and simultaneously earthly double-nature – gets caught
through his relations to the world.”87 Following its Vienna premiere in 1858,
widespread criticism of the opera impelled Brendel to clarify, on Wagner’s
behalf, the curious taciturnity and aloofness of the undercover grail knight.88
Although he was extrapolating freely from Wagner’s more nuanced program-
matic explanations, his insight is that the value of an artwork (still) depended
on its mysterious creation, both for audience and artist. Mystery is classed as a
fundamental enabler of appreciative perception. That his hermeneutics may
appear naïve to us is less important than his implicit belief that this clarification
of Lohengrin’s meaning would garner public sympathy against a deepening tide
of anti-Wagner criticism, especially the journalistic vortex encircling Wagner’s
melodic writing:
Any artistic creation [such as melody] is rooted in a mysterious workshop, from which
the veil of mist may not be cleared away if the creation is not to be profaned; and only

84
Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,” 52.
85
Wagner to Hanslick, January 1, 1847, Dresden, in SB 2: 538. In view of the pragmatic decisions
an operatic composer must make, Wagner’s assertion suggests less a negation of the
inexplicability of natural genius, and more the view that this genius must also be conjoined to
conscious decision-making as operatic projects are conceived, planned, and executed.
86
Wagner to Liszt, November 25, 1850, Zurich, in SB 3: 467.
87
“Lohengrin ist Repräsentant des Genius, des künstlerischen Genius, und das Werk stellt die
Conflikte dar, in die dieser Genius mit seiner jenseitigen, außerweltlichen und zugleich irdschen
Doppelnatur in seinen Beziehungen zur Welt geräth.” Franz Brendel, “Einige Worte über
Lohengrin zum besseren Verständniß desselben,” NZfM 8 (February 18, 1859), 91.
88
See also “Lohengrin als dramatischer Charakter,” Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft
4 (1859), 265–73.
 The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious consciousness” 93

as long as this workshop is removed from profane eyes, is it the creative property out
of which the forms of imagination arise aloft. Every really great artist possesses this
sacred awe that warns him to tread at his peril on his inner self and thereby to blurt out
the most inward secret . . . He may not sever the mysterious threads that bind him to a
higher world if he does not want to betray his genius; he may not give himself
completely to the world, he may not even make this sacrifice for his beloved wife, as
in fact no genius has done . . . So we see brought to portrayal the pain that the divinely
sent feels in his relation to the world, his tragic fate, to have to drag through the world
in his most inner essence the misunderstood urge to communicate.89

In the context of materialist perspectives on cognition, the “mysterious

workshop” Brendel posits functions almost as a synonym for the psycho-
graph’s “rods and pieces of wood” in that the latter sought to lay bare the
workshop’s mechanism in an act of “profane” afflatus.
The character Lohengrin, we remember, bans Elsa from asking after his
name or provenance as a condition of his service to her. Given that Brendel
made his claims amid the full force of criticism over Wagner’s melodic
ineptitude we saw in Chapter 1, Lohengrin’s mystification of artistic invention
suggests that this Verbot can be read, not so much in the dramatic sense of
“where does he come from,” but more allegorically, as the composer’s arch
psychological weakness: “where do melodies come from?” Brendel’s conclu-
sion was indeed that Wagner’s Verbot was “psychologically grounded,”90
making him the last scion, and first psychologist, of Wagner reception.
Wagner’s own reading of his opera was explicitly self-reflexive in these
terms. The fantasy of an idealized unconscious creative process implied by
A. T. Wagner’s patent had been one of the composer’s allegories for the
relationship between Elsa and Lohengrin in 1851 (“Elsa is the unconscious,
the involuntary, into which Lohengrin’s conscious, deliberate being yearns

89
“Jedes künstlerische Schaffen wurzelt in einer geheimnißvollen Werkstätte, von der der Schleier
nicht hinweggezogen werden darf, wenn dasselbe nicht profanirt werden soll, und nur solange
als diese Werkstätte profanen Blicken entzogen bleibt, ist sie der schöpferische Grund und
Boden, aus dem die Gebilde der Phantasie emporwachsen. Jeder echte große Künstler besitzt
diese heilige Scheu, die ihn warnt, zersetzend an sein Innres heranzutreten und damit das
innerste Geheimniß auszusprechen . . . Er darf die geheimnißvollen Fäden, die ihn an eine
höhere Welt ketten, nicht zerreißen, wenn er seinen Genius nicht verläugnen will, er darf sich
nicht vollständig hingeben an die Welt, selbst dem geliebten Weibe darf er dieses Opfer nicht
bringen, wie es in der That auch noch kein Genius gebracht hat; . . . So sehen wir den Schmerz
zur Darstellung gebracht, den der Gottgesandte empfindet in seinen Beziehungen zur Welt, sein
tragisches Geschick, im Drange nach Mittheilung in seinem innersten Wesen unverstanden
durch die Welt ziehen zu müssen.” Brendel, “Einige Worte über Lohengrin zum besseren
Verständniß desselben,” 91.
90
“So ist das Verbot psychologisch begründet.” Ibid.
94 Melodielehre?

to be redeemed”) as well as – like Fontane’s fictive realism – a description of

R. Wagner’s own mind in the act of composition:
Through the capability of this “unconscious consciousness,” such as I myself now
felt alike with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman also . . . came to ever clearer
understanding in my inner mind . . . But this blessedly felt knowledge lay hidden
at first . . . only slowly did it ripen into loud acknowledgement.91

In other words, according to Wagner, the ideal, androgynous unity of

conscious and unconscious allegorized in the dramatic relationship at
the center of Lohengrin is a description of the state of mind that allowed
him to write the opera in the first place, a state of “unconscious conscious-
ness” seemingly manifest technologically in the material transmissions of
the psychograph.92 Other speculations about Lohengrin couched this oppo-
sition more explicitly in terms of divine knowledge and mortal ignorance
(Jupiter and Semele),93 and whether or not Wagner’s remarks represent a
cart-before-horse scenario not untypical of his self-styling practices, it at
least articulates a creative process he publicly aspired to at this time.
Musically, one can extrapolate from his comments about the redemption
of consciousness into unconsciousness that the psychic meeting point, i.e.
the wakeup call, then becomes Lohengrin’s alarmed repetition of his inter-
diction up a half step in act 1 (A[ → A; see Example 2.1), which follows
Elsa’s “quiet, almost unconscious” ascent to his first Verbot.94 Thus, before
this explicit awakening, in Elsa’s ethereal dream from act 1 we arguably hear
Lohengrin’s music in a finer state than Lohengrin himself can sing it later in
the act, i.e. Elsa’s unconscious vision – as a musical way station between the
celestial Prelude and Lohengrin’s bombastic earthly arrival – thematizes the
purity of pre-conscious creation in the human realm. The vocabulary of
Liszt’s propagandistic description glimmers with this possibility: “[deliv-
ered] as if in a state of somnambulism . . . Elsa’s song . . . loses itself in the
infinite, and touches upon an unattainable ideal.”95 But as we have seen,
hopes for attaining this kind of artistic ideal were grounded in decidedly
91
SSD 4: 301–2. Cf. PW 1: 346–48.
92
By invoking androgyny, I refer particularly to Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s extensive work into this
question in Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton
University Press, 1993).
93
See Eduard Kulke, “Semele und Lohengrin. Eine Parallele,” Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und
Wissenschaft 6 (1861), 41–6, 77–90.
94
Wagner’s stage direction for Elsa’s first response to the Verbot is: “leise, fast bewußtlos.” See
Lohengrin, WWV75, ed. John Deathridge and Klaus Döge (London and Mainz: Eulenburg,
2007), 104.
95
“[C]omme dans un accès de somnambulisme . . . [s]on chant . . . se perd dans l’infini, et touche à
un insaisissable idéal.” Liszt, SS 4: 38, 80.
 The psychograph, or Lohengrin as “unconscious consciousness” 95

Example 2.1 Lohengrin’s repetition of his Verbot to Elsa; Lohengrin, act 1, scene 3,
mm. 777–96.
96 Melodielehre?

finite mental processes that were frequently deemed automatic, and some-
times mechanical.

The “melograph” as mindless composing

Machines that simulate psychic processes implicitly assert the objectivity of

those processes. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the desired
process of automatic–unconscious melodic invention was seemingly modeled
in a mechanical device called the “Componium” or “mechanical improviser”
that generated melodic variations. Invented in 1821 by Diederich Nicolaus
Winkel, it was a sophisticated orchestrion (a clockwork musical instrument
whose components created the aural impression of a performing orchestra),
but outstripped related devices of the period in that its mechanism feigned
automatic, unceasing improvisation without repetition of material.
When exhibited at Paris’ Wenzel Pavilion late in 1823, it was advertised as
an improvisateur musical, and the Journal de débats marveled misleadingly at
its ability to improvise instantly on a given theme from the audience.96 In fact,
the theme had to be pre-programmed, and the music was restricted to
aleatoric permutations and combinations of melodically and harmonically
predefined segments. Every two measures the “improvisation” alternated
imperceptibly between the pins of two simultaneously rotating barrels, each
of which could offer eight different musical segments at any one time, and
whose selection was determined by a random sequencer. While the principle
is essentially that of mere musical dice games, Philippe van Tiggelen estimates
the combinatorial potential of the componuim’s seven barrels at 14.513
quintillion variations.97 In 1865 François-Joseph Fétis cited an official report
from the Institut de France to predict that “thousands of years could pass
without the same variation occurring exactly.”98 The sequencer, pin, and
rotation mechanism which seemed to embody this ceaselessly inventive
automation is shown in Figure 2.2.
Gustav Schilling’s Encyclopädie classed this as a species of melograph, an
automaton that improvises mechanically on a given theme by itself using
wheel and clock mechanisms set in motion by spring tension: “for the sake
of its mechanical performance” he explains, this “is more correctly called an

96
See Philippe Van Tiggelen, Componium: The Mechanical Musical Improvisor (Louvain-la-Neuve:
Institut supérieur d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’Art, 1987), 199ff.
97
Ibid., 325.
98
“il est dit que des milliers d’années pourraient se passer sans que la même variation se produisit
exactement.” F.-J. Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens, 8th edn. (Paris: 1865), 447.
 The “melograph” as mindless composing 97

2.2 The internal mechanism for Diederich Nicolaus Winkel’s

Componium (1821) © Musée des Instruments de Musique, Brussels.

extemporizing machine, Fantasirmaschine or improvising machine.”99

It represented a kind of unthinking creation “where nothing is lacking
but imagination [Fantasie],” Schilling explained, and each theme is
worked according to extant rules of inversion and imitation in a predefined
manner so that it “runs around in a circular line like a ball in roulette.”100
The medium of performance is centrally implicated in the discourse,
and if these clockwork machines lack original ideas, their capacity to
generate melodies without conscious cognition (and thus inhibiting self-
consciousness) once thematic material was entered into them allegorizes the

99
“eine Art Automat, der um seiner mechanischen Verrichtungen willen richtiger auch
Extemporirmaschine, Fantasirmaschine und Improvisirmaschine heißt.” Gustav von Schilling,
Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, oder Universal-Lexicon der
Tonkunst (Stuttgart: Franz Heinrich Köhler, 1837), 4: 651
100
“weiter nichts fehlt als die Fantasie.” Ibid. Schilling’s description is suggestive of the melodic
discourse in this sense. While the Fantasirmaschine is mechanically fascinating, on the whole it
has “absolutely no value from a musical or artistic point of view” [“so hat sie im Ganzen doch in
musikalischem oder künstlerischem Betracht gar keinen Werth.”] because it cannot generate
original ideas, and lacks any feedback loop coupled to aesthetic sense with which to hear and
correct itself. Ibid., 651–52.
98 Melodielehre?

unconscious mind that is all rule application.101 This essentially rewords

the “mental disposition . . . through which nature gives the rule to art”
that Kant equated with the faculty of genius. And intriguingly, Lobe’s stylized
“conversation” with Hummel essentially recounts the melographic principle
as compositional method:
First I search for some interesting opening measures for a passage. That is its melodic
material; I need nothing more from the direct inventive power of imagination, for . . .
the majority of passages are just a continuation of the same opening measures with
different progressions, which is already more a matter of exercise [Uebung].102

For the melograph, such development of a theme – i.e. “composition” –

simply happens automatically according to predefined mechanical laws
(cf. “associative laws”); an original theme, weights and spring tension
are all that is required to begin the process: no (self-) consciousness
necessary.
This aesthetic is heir to the kind of “mechanical sublime” that Annette
Richards has identified in Mozart’s F minor Fantasie K. 608 – “an organ
piece written for a clock” – whose variation set and intricate fugal permu-
tations redouble the signifiers of an “automatic genius.”103 It is not hard to
see how the debate over Melodik stoked arguments over the desirability of
such “mindless” automation. And during the early nineteenth century, the
principal exemplar for this was the received idea of Mozart. As we saw in
Möricke’s novella, German criticism vaunted Mozart as the paradigmatic
musical genius under the cult of individualism. For Jean Paul Richter, he
embodied the combination of “blindness and security of instinct” with the
supremacy of a particular organ and creative power.104 The Mozartbild,
primarily propagated by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz’s forged letter from
August 23, 1815,105 was classic romanticized Kant and constructed the
101
Even though the machine is all rule-application, the allegorical reading of unconscious mind
holds, for as we shall see with Lobe it is precisely the inculcation of mechanical rules to
unconscious levels the enables melodic pedagogy.
102
“Erstens suche ich nach interessanten Anfangstakten der Passage. Das ist ihr melodisches
Material; mehr brauche ich von der unmittelbaren Erfindungskraft der Phantasie nicht, denn
wie Sie sehen, ist ein großer Theil der Passage nur Fortführung derselben Anfangstakte über
andere Harmoniefolgen, was schon mehr Sache der Uebung . . . ist.” J. C. Lobe, Aus dem Leben
eines Musikers (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1859), 75–76.
103
Annette Richards, “Automatic genius: Mozart and the mechanical sublime,” Music and Letters
80 (1999), 366–89, here 366, 389.
104
“die Oberherrschaft eines Organs und einer Kraft, z. B. in Mozart, wirkt alsdann mit der
Blindheit und Sicherheit des Instinktes.” Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Aesthetik, ed.
Norbert Miller (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1974), 56.
105
Mozart’s frequently reprinted (and inauthentic) letter about his compositional process first
published in the AmZ (1815), in tandem with F. Rochlitz’s criticism from 1820 in the same
 The “melograph” as mindless composing 99

composer as a psychographic Kopfkomponist who “completed entire

works in his head”106 where “the finding and working out takes place as
it were in a dream.”107 Amid a rationalist confrontation between natural
aptitude and deliberate hard work, the latter – conceived as a sure path to
diminishing returns – could continue to rehearse the notion that unthink-
ing creation is authentic, while conscious, deliberate construction is
artificial.108 One of the most frequently cited similes for this was som-
nambulism, where straining to compose beautiful melodies is like trying
hard to fall asleep: it is by definition counterproductive, though it is
precisely the confidence of the sleepwalker that the composer constantly
seeks.109
In an article on the essence of Phantasie, Sobolewski (the Kapellmeister
we met earlier who emphatically upheld an antinomy of melody and
pedagogy) argued simply that “our greatest composers were generally bad
theorists,”110 and, by alluding to Schiller’s conception of the naïve genius,
turned it into a stick with which to beat Wagner:
There will always be a great difference between the kind of intelligence which
calculates and that which really creates; the last is what is properly called Genius!
Should we not hold it to be the sign that a person is somewhat deficient in this

paper, and A. Oulibicheff’s 1843 biography reinforced the Mozartbild as an exemplar of a

Kopfkomponist. Recent commentaries on this aspect of Mozart reception have emphasized the
constructedness of the composer’s image. See Ulrich Konrad, “Friedrich Rochlitz und die
Entstehung des Mozart-Bildes um 1900,” in Mozart – Aspekte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Mannheim:
Hoschulschriften, 1995), 1–22; and Torstend Brandt, “Mozart,” in Johann Christian Lobe
(Göttingen: Vadenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002), 126–53.
106
“So machte [Mozart] ganze Musikstücke im Kopfe fertig.” F. Rochlitz, “Mozarts guter Rath an
Componisten,” AmZ 22 (1820), 299.
107
“Alles das Finden und Machen gehet in mir nur, wie in einem schönstarken Traume vor.” See
“Schreiben Mozarts an den Baron von . . .” AmZ 34 (1815), 564. This statement is from the
spurious letter, published by Rochlitz in 1815, pertaining to Mozart’s compositional process.
While broadly adhering to the Kopfkomponieren thesis, Georg Niklaus von Nissen’s early
biography of Mozart (1828) appears to lend the discourse flavor realism by referencing
Mozart’s minor corrections and a protracted working out period, while nevertheless
reinscribing the primacy of Kopfkomponieren for the composer’s most valued works. See
Georg Niklaus von Nissen, Biographie W. A. Mozart’s [1828], rpt. (Hildesheim and New
York: G. Olms, 1972), 649.
108
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 151.
109
Two diverse examples are J. F. Unger, author of the most extensive treatise on the Notensetzer,
and Arthur Schopenhauer in his discussion of “the invention of melody” (§52). See Unger,
Entwurf einer Maschine, wodurch alles was auf dem Clavier gespielt wird, sich von selber in Noten
setzt (Brunswick: Waisenhaus, 1774), 5; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea,
trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1969), 1: 260.
110
“Unsere größten Componisten waren in der Regel schlechte theoretische Schriftsteller.”
Eduard Sobolewski, “Phantasie,” NZfM 5 (December 24, 1839), 202.
100 Melodielehre?

quality when we perceive but too clearly the immense labor expended in seeking for
means of expression.111

While such ideas seemed trapped in a penumbra cast by the moon of thirty
years past, in other quarters, a deepening apostasy in the guise of realism
signalled a turn away from this model of creative invention. In the same year
as Sobolewski’s antique comments, Klaus Ziegler set out the Marxist posi-
tion with wry humor in his biography of the dramatist Christian Dietrich
Grabbe:
[T]he period in which one went on bended knee before men of genius is already long
past . . . On the whole, one no longer loves geniuses since the recent discovery that
they are none other than the organs of the time, that the spirit of God hides in the
masses, and that only the masses move the course of history forwards. If in fact men
of genius have bad habits and weaknesses to boot, one easily takes a dislike. In this
context, one asks why the genius can’t behave as well as every other reasonable
person.112

In this antagonistic atmosphere, the fact that the only true “living” exem-
plars of the ageing principle of natural melodic genius were mechanical
simulacra gave pause. Pedagogically minded music critics such as Marx
took issue with the “myth” on principle, directly contradicting it in his Streit
with Fink.113 While unthinking creation remained a durable belief, then, the
desire to puncture it was more in sync with a crystallizing spirit of realism
grounded in scientific materialism.114

111
This comment occurs in the context of a criticism of Wagner’s charlatanism, where he uses
“scales” – perhaps a euphemism for melody – that are only employed by “beginners or bunglers,
or by careless persons, and such as are hard of hearing.” E. Sobolewski, “Reactionary Letters,
VII” TMW 33 (1855), 114.
112
“[D]ie Periode, wo man vor den Genies auf den Knien lag, [ist] schon lang vorüber . . . Im
Ganzen liebt man die Genies nicht mehr, seit dem man in neuerer Zeit die Entdeckung gemacht
hat, daß sie nichts anderes als die Organe der Zeit sind, daß der Geist Gottes in der Masse steckt,
und daß nur die Masse den Lauf der Geschichte fortbewegt. Haben sie sogar noch Unarten und
Schwächen, so gewinnt man leicht eine Abneigung. Man sagt sich in dieser Beziehung, warum
können sich die Genies nicht ebenso gut gebehrden, wie jeder andere vernünftige Mensch.”
Klaus Ziegler, Grabbes Leben und Charakter (Hamburg: Hoffmann, 1855), 2.
113
See Marx’s comment from Die alte Musiklehre im Streit mit unserer Zeit (1841) that: “if anyone
still desired to return to that old misunderstanding about the dreamlike unconsciousness of
genial creativity, he would find himself corrected not only by words of a Goethe but by the works
and words of the musical masters, namely by Mozart himself – who reveals a remarkably clear
consciousness of his intentions and their execution in his letters,” in Marx, Musical Form in the
Age of Beethoven, 19.
114
For a study of the educational ideal of genius during the later Enlightenment, see Christoph Hubig,
“Genie – Typus oder Original? Vom Paradigma der Kreativität zum Kult des Individuums,” in
Propyläen-Geschichte der Literatur, ed. E. Wischer (Berlin: Propyläen, 1983), 4: 207–10.
 The “melograph” as mindless composing 101

Let me summarize the matrix of Genie-Gedanke laid out so far in relation

to melodic theory: simulacra of musical invention such as the melograph –
propped up during Vormärz aesthetics by the Mozartbild – embodied an
inventive process that obviated inhibiting consciousness by seemingly
materializing processes of mechanical associationism theorized within
1830s psychology. The cognitions central to this model were utilized frau-
dulently in the 1850s by devices such as the psychograph which aspired to
harness creative inventiveness itself as “nervous electricity,” i.e. as literalized
material thought. While this move was decidedly monistic and coincided
with a wider realist turn that was increasingly skeptical of genius, the belief
(among philosophers of mind as well as music theorists) in emotion as both
the origin and coordinating agent of mechanically inventive cognition
meant that an aesthetics of inspiration still retained a vestige of mystery in
the concept of feeling (a nodal concept for Wagner, explored in Chapter 6).
The question of whether it matters that man can conceive himself in
mechanical terms provoked a number of satirical responses during the
eighteenth century,115 but it applies equally to nineteenth-century melo-
dists: namely, does it still matter if we conceive melodic structure as a
mechanical assemblage, a constructed imitation of something more genu-
ine? Whether or not this was thought injurious to beauty, there were few
alternatives for a self-aware theoretical approach. Lohengrin – in Brendel’s
reading – had seemingly forbidden any such questing, at least in the eyes of
self-conscious composers, and in this sense the project of a material melodic

115
Writing satirically on the ambivalence within this uneasy transcendence, Jean Paul’s narrative
voice in Menschen sind Maschinen der Engel (1785) disabuses the reader of the assumption that
the world exists for mankind, and explains that angels are the real inhabitants of the earth;
humans are merely their tools, toiling on their behalf as automata to serve “all [their] needs.”
The “bleak, naked truth,” he concludes, is that humans are “mere machines.” [“Denn es ist keine
poetische Redensart, sondern kahle nakte Wahrheit, daß wir Menschen blosse Maschinen sind,
deren sich höhere Wesen, denen diese Erde zum Wohplatz beschieden worden, dienen.”] Jean
Paul applies a second layer to the narrative by citing machines of angels (humans) who also
build machines, and thus “mimic the angels in the machine-building process.” Since the writer
references well-known, actual (chess-playing, piano-playing) automata of the eighteenth
century, the discourse enters a new level of realism that plays ambiguously on the boundaries of
his metaphor, and is now fully reflexive for the reader: “this woman who plays the piano is at
most a fortunate copy,” he claims slyly, “of those female machines who play the piano and who
accompany the music with [bodily] motions, which clearly seem to betray emotion.” [“ienes
[sic] Frauenzimmer z. B., das Klavier [spielt], ist höchstens eine glückliche Kopie der weiblichen
Maschinen, die das Klavier schlagen und die Töne mit Bewegungen begleiten, die offenbar
Rührung zu verrathen scheinen.”] Such satirical rhetoric exploits ambivalence over the
desirability of the mechanical in acts of expression (of which melody must count as one) by
deliberately blurring the status of man-made automata with biological humans. Jean Paul,
Sämtliche Werke, pt. 2 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1974), 1: 1028, 1031.
102 Melodielehre?

theory risked a willing act of masochism, one that would finally short circuit
the divine spark.

(Failed) attempts at Melodik ca. 1840–50

The two major Vormärz theorists writing about melodic invention were
Marx and Lobe. As we have seen, both opposed the notion that melodic
structure was inscrutable; Marx, in particular, is bluntly combative. “The
lament is old,” he carped in 1841, “so too is its answer: melody is a matter of
talent; one is born with it; it cannot be taught and exercised.”116 In his
Compositions-Lehre four years earlier, he had praised Reicha for rebuffing
the “old-school” doctrines,117 and alluded to models of cognition to argue
that modern science “would be hard pressed to concede such a thing as
innate melody or a specific mental faculty for tone succession and rhythmic
motion.”118 Instead, the ability to discover melody is universally innate, he
argues, and extends to “most well-constituted children.” This facility is
only blunted in adults, he qualifies, through “dry rules,” “eternal prohib-
itions,” and stifling “rows of chords” handed down from the desk of dry
theory.
This was a distinctly modern approach to melody (and genius). Back in
1814, Reicha’s commonplace distinction between genius (“a favorable
natural aptitude”) and talent (“acquired only through strict, assiduous,
painstaking application”) had already begun to dissolve the monolith of
the Kantian genius by inverting its normative hierarchy, claiming that talent
is actually far more useful than genius, which “amounts to little” without the
means provided by the former.119 But Marx and Lobe went a stage further.
They finally annulled Kant’s original distinction between (mechanical) talent
and (organic) genius120 by arguing that “genius” itself is in fact an aptitude
that must be developed, i.e. a product of hard work. In this respect,
the mechanical aspect of study – including the assimilation of patterns,

116
Burnham, Musical Performance in the Age of Beethoven, 20.
117
Marx, The School of Musical Composition, x.
118
Burnham, Musical Performance in the Age of Beethoven, 21. Translation modified.
119
Reicha, Treatise on Melody, 3.
120
While arguing for the possibility of a mechanical understanding of art produced by natural
genius, Kant maintains the division between talent and genius in terms of artistic invention
itself: “Although mechanical and beautiful art are very different, the first being a mere art of
industry and learning and the second of genius, yet there is no beautiful art in which there is not
a mechanical element that can be comprehended by rules and followed accordingly.” See Kant,
Critique of Judgment, 153.
 (Failed) attempts at Melodik ca. 1840–50 103

the repetition of models, and the absorption by constant practice of

principles of motific variation – effectively recasts the genius of melodic
invention as a mechanical–associative faculty predicated on the postulate
of associative laws.
Within this realist awakening, what were the strategies for objectifying
melody that began to make this shift towards rigorous study plausible?
I briefly summarize four representative examples.

Rhythm
Musical rhythm – i.e. periodicity and proportion – was at the very center of
Reicha’s Traité (1814). After subordinating harmony to melody “entirely,”
he declares that, first and foremost, melody “requires a theory of
rhythm,”121 which is later defined simply as “musical symmetry.”122 The
interrelation and metric balance of periods according to cadence type,
measure count, and phrasal symmetry provide the analytical means for
him to interrogate eighteenth-century melodic models with empirical
certitude. This methodology was drawn from Reicha’s Enlightenment belief
in the centrality of reason (“the sun in the system of the world”),123 and
enables his radical stance against the mystery of melody: “the composer is
either a skillful architect, or a simple workman . . . Music is either good or
bad and the reasons for this difference are indisputably demonstrable.”124
After chastising the “vague arguments” of earlier attempts at melodic
theory for their lack of rigor and amenability to proof, he allies the metrical
scrutability of melody with the study of poetic rhythm and oratory to argue
that if melody:
is only the fruit of genius, or more precisely an outpouring of feeling and its various
forms, it must be conceded that it holds this in common with poetry and oratory.125

But if the metrical scrutability of language and the rules of oratory are both
Reicha’s initial justification for approaching melody quantatively, they are
also his closing confirmation that such an approach to melodic theory is
valid. The comparative logic argues that like alcaic and iambic feet, melody
can be measured and assessed, but whereas these meters measure “only the
syllables,” true musical rhythm measures “ideas.”126
In a further expansion of the definition of rhythm, Reicha posits the
symmetry of ideas, not of periods or figures, as the defining element of good

121 122 123 124

Reicha, Treatise on Melody, 13. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 119.
125
Ibid., 3. 126 Ibid., 97.
104 Melodielehre?

melody. His final sentence poses a question that brings the argument full
circle, where melody becomes didactic for the very linguistic elements that
enabled Reicha’s scrutiny of it in the first place:
Could not the principal rhythmic procedures, as important for both poetry and
oratory, be discovered by strictly imitating the best melodies with poetic phrases,
rendering them as well rhythmicized as melodic phrases?127

Irrespective of whether this reinstates a degree of mystery over melodic

origins, reviews of Czerny’s German translation of the Traité in
1824 admired the audacity with which Reicha tackled “music’s most
essential element, about which no treatise has yet appeared.”128 But the
ostensibly narrow insistence on rhythm earned Reicha’s treatise an
abrupt dismissal by its most influential reviewer. François-Josef
Fétis regarded it as inferior to its precursors because Reicha “has
considered his topic in only one respect, that of rhythm and melodic
phraseology,” and leaves out such central parameters as “tonality,
modulation, harmony and aesthetics.”129 The controversy over this
point was still being discussed as late as 1850 by the Gazzetta musicale
di Milano,130 but in fact, Fétis only identified what Reicha himself
openly acknowledged: that two arias sharing the same meter and key,
and with the same modulations, rhythm, and form – i.e. exhausting the
scope of his investigation – “may nevertheless be entirely opposite in
character.”131

Wellenspiel
Rather than isolating the temporal properties of melodic form, Kanne’s brief
excursus into melody sought a way of objectifying the poetic idea of
melody’s linear motion. Like Reicha, Kanne pursues a means of giving

127
Ibid., 98.
128
“[Reicha bietet ein Werk an,] ueber dessen Gegenstand, als den wesentlichsten in der Musik,
bisher noch gar keine Abhandlung erschienen ist.” Caecilia 8, Supplement “Intelligenzblatt zur
Caecilia” (1825), 57.
129
“A l’égard de son livre en lui-même, on peut dire qu’il est imparfait, en ce que l’auteur n’y a
considéré son sujet que sous un seul aspect, celui de rythme de la phraséologie mélodique,
et n’a pas même entrevu les lois de la mélodie sous les rapports de tonalité, de modulation,
d’harmonie et d’esthétique.” Fétis, Traité élémentaire de musique (Brussels, 1831–32), rpt.
Biographie universelle (Paris, 1863), vii: 203.
130
See G. V., “Del ‘Trattato di melodia’ di Antonio Reicha,” Gazzetta musicale di Milano 42
(October 20, 1850), 180–81.
131
Reicha, Treatise on Melody, 62.
 (Failed) attempts at Melodik ca. 1840–50 105

form to melody. He acknowledges rhythm as a primary factor, and sym-

metry as “just as essential for music as superior architecture.”132 But unlike
Reicha, Kanne’s simile for symmetry is the imperfect human body, and his
fundamental law of melodic succession is wave motion, which he likens
emphatically to the ocean:
Who will think me wrong for seeking a relationship in great nature that is entirely
analogous in its puzzling organization to that which I am endeavoring to analyze
here in music? . . . / With her gentle movements, the surface of the sea is like the
primal key of C major. The [musical] scale recurs on it like a measure of tones, except
that the latter accumulates more precisely and does so in the smallest relationship of
the tapering scale [of proportions], namely in the shortening strings and in the higher
octaves. / But even this relationship finds its likeness, namely by means of one’s
perspective wherein every more distant wave appears like a higher octave that
permits smaller vibrations, and yet it has the same nature as the larger wave – just
in a greater magnitude . . . / It is certain that there is no relationship to be found in all
the grandeur of nature that would be more similar to the melodic scale through its
inner essence and lively nature than the moving surface of the sea! / What can better
help explain the embodied picture of all feeling and passion, music, than this symbol
of all rest and movement, all gentle feelings and stormy passions, all change of calm
stillness and of furious struggle? / Morally the similarity would be undeniable.133

There is a literal quality to this simile. For Kanne, all melodic motion is
fundamentally stepwise, and intervals larger than a second merely leave out
an original composite of second steps through “an act of freedom that the
sense of beauty demanded.”134 The proof thereof lies in nature, in the

132
“Denn die Symetrie ist in der Musik so unerlässlich, als in der höheren Architectur.” Kanne,
“Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ 65 (August 15, 1821), 514.
133
“Wer wird es mir übel nehmen, dass ich ein Verhältniss in der grossen Natur aufsuchte, das in
seiner räthselhaften Eintheilung ganz analog dem ist, welches ich hier in der Musik zu
analysiren bemüht bin? . . . / Die Fläche des Meeres in ihrer sanften Bewegung ist gleich der
Urtonart C-dur, und in ihr wiederholt sich die Scala wie im Tonmass, nur dass sie in letzterem
spitziger und in das kleinste Verhältniss des verjüngten Massstabes ausläuft, nähmlich in den
kürzer werdenden Saiten, und den höheren Octaven? / Jedoch auch diess Verhältniss findet
seine Vergleichung. Nähmlich durch die Perspective erscheint jede entferntere Welle gleichsam
als eine höhere Octave, die also kürzere Schwingungen zulässt, und doch dieselbe Natur hat,
wie die grosse Welle, nur in höherer Potenz . . . / Soviel ist wenigstens gewiss, dass kein
Verhältniss in der ganzen grossen Natur aufzufinden, das dem der melodischen Scala durch sein
inneres Wesen und lebendige Natur ähnlicher wäre, als die bewegte Meeresfläche! / Was
kann mehr das verkörperte Bild aller Gefühle und Leidenschaften, die Musik, erläutern helfen,
als dieses Sinnbild aller Ruhe und Bewegung, aller sanften Gefühle und stürmischen
Leidenschaften, alles Wechsels der ruhigen Stille und des wüthendsten Kampfes? / Moralisch
wäre die Ähnlichkeit unläugbar.” Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ 68 (August 25,
1821), 538–39.
134
“Ich sage die secundenweise Fortschreitung, weil alle bey Terzen-, Quarten-, Quinten und
anderen Sprüngen ausgelassenen Secunden doch ursprünglich mit gedacht, und nur durch
106 Melodielehre?

2.3a F. A. Kanne’s illustration of melodic wave motion in imitation of

water, AmZ 68 (1821), 537.

Volk (“e.g. farmers, old wives, children, shepherds”) who fill in intervening
intervals because they cannot actually manage leaps, and because their
“instinct for symmetry and order forces them spontaneously to fill in the
gaps.”135 (Marx went the other way and, five years later, would associate
such vocal fill-ins with the original impulse for virtuosic embellishment in
Italian singers.136)
On the basis of this speculation, an unbroken chain of seconds in every
melody is able to mirror the undulating waves of the ocean with tactile
literalism since every melodic leap implies a “wave” in one direction and
must then be balanced in the other. As Figure 2.3a shows, graphic wave motion
was also pictorial for Kanne, and in Examples 2.2a and 2.2b, he illustrates how
actual melodic lines become, as it were, a reduction of implied linear motion.
More specifically, the octave is split at the fifth into two halves. Melodic
“waves” rise up to the fifth, and fall in tension as the line continues to the
tonic. In other words, in ascending 1̂–5̂ we increase tension, and as we
continue 6̂–8̂ we return to repose. The scale can incline entirely, if rising to a
new key, as Figure 2.3b shows.
But here “the calm is abolished” and the fixed trajectory destroys the
“wonderful circle of scales rising and returning to repose.”137 As Figure 2.3c
shows, the movement often rises and forms a new “circle” (i.e. tonicizes the
einen Act der Freyheit, den das Gefühl der Schönheit geboth, weggelassen sind.” A. F. Kanne,
“Der Zauber der Tonkunst,“ AmZ 42 (May 26, 1821), 508.
135
Kanne’s full justification for a folk-reading of melodic seconds is: “Daher zieht der Naturalist im
Gesange (z. B. Bauern, alte Weiber, Kinder, Hirten etc.) die Secunden auch alle durch, und
nimmt selten einen Sextensprung ohne die inmitten liegenden Secunden mit anzuschlagen . . .
der gemeine Mann [singt so] weil er erstlich die Sprünge oft nicht treffen kann, aber (2) weil ihm
da Lücken zu seyn scheinen, die das jedem Menschen innewohnende Wohlgefallen zu Symetrie
und Ordnung, ihn unwillkürlich auszufüllen zwingt.” Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ
65 (August 15, 1821), 513.
136
Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, Theoretisch–Praktisch (Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1826), 261.
137
“Durch eine solche Scala wäre der Aufschwung fortgesetzt, aber auch alle Ruhe aufgehoben, und
der wunderbare Zirkel der steigenden und wieder zur Ruhe zurückkehrenden Scala zerstört.”
Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ 68 (August 25, 1821), 538.
 (Failed) attempts at Melodik ca. 1840–50 107

Example 2.2a F. A. Kanne’s sample Lutheran melody, AmZ 65 (1821), 513.

Example 2.2b F. A. Kanne illustrates an underlying melody, composed only of seconds,

AmZ 65 (1821), 537.

2.3b F. A. Kanne’s scale, rising by 5th to modulate, AmZ 68 (1821), 538.

2.3c F. A. Kanne’s melodic “whirlpools,” centered around each station of the cycle of
fifths, AmZ 68 (1821), 538.

dominant) where the “concrete particularity of the wave circle” can relocate its
center like a series of whirlpools. In Figure 2.3d, Kanne illustrates the kinship
between graphic wave motion and non-modulating melodic scales, i.e. the
“vividness of the first plastic line of oceanic waves applied to music.”138
One wonders why Kanne’s illustrative sine waves do not demand non-
discrete intervals, i.e. glissandi, or vocal portamento. Though this may be
implied by the continuous topography of water, the practical impossibility
of justifying such anti-grammatical lines – essentially: pitch-continuous
cries – in compositional terms perhaps rendered the full implications of
this principle of motion unrealizable in 1821.

138
“Wir wollen der Anschaulichkeit wegen die erste plastische Linie der Meereswellen, welche
oben abgegeben ist, auf die Scala der Musik angewendet, hier aufzeichnen.” Ibid.
108 Melodielehre?

2.3d F. A. Kanne’s graphic register of tension within non-modulating (C major)

melodic scales, AmZ 68 (1821), 538.

Parameters of expression
In seeking to fulfill the idealist criterion where “the beauty of
melody depends solely upon the truth of its expression,”139 the
Anglo-German theorist Teutonius spelled out two objectives for melodic
material:
[1] to give a characteristic expression to certain feelings, and to raise the
same or similar feelings in the heart of the listener
[2] to do this in a manner pleasing to the human ear.140

His ensuing approach to Melodik advances little beyond unconvinc-

ing generalities, indicating how difficult it remained to identify
melodic objects analytically. All melody is essentially vocal and must
reside within a given key, he argues, while a melody’s character is
determined by:
* ambitus141
* relation to the tonic scale degree142
* intervallic motion143

139
Teutonius, “Melody and Melodious Combination,” 795. 140 Ibid., 774.
141
A determined or violent character requires larger; more passive or quieter feelings require
smaller range. Ibid., 794.
142
Melodies beginning on the tonic exhibit a decisive, definite character; those beginning on
other scale degrees are unsettled, “expressive of feelings [and] float on trembling waves.”
Ibid., 793.
143
Stepwise melodies are “more natural in accordance with the way feelings arise . . . [and] typical
for singing the praise of nature, innocence, domestic happiness, tenderness . . . or any other
quiet feeling”; but melodies characterized by leaps express “greater boldness and decision”
proportionately to the frequency and size of the leaps. Ibid., 795.
 (Failed) attempts at Melodik ca. 1840–50 109

* relation to the tonic scale144

* choice of key and tonality145

Such unhelpfully broad categories underscore a general disappointment

over attempts to quantify “true” melodic expressivity through the objecti-
fication of discrete analytical parameters.

Plural listening
An intractable problem – foregrounded by Teutonius – in this questing
for objectified expression was that “[a]mong a thousand hearers perhaps
not two agree in opinion of the outward beauty of any musical produc-
tion.”146 Musical beauty was in fact commonly defined only as “the effect
produced upon the organ of hearing,” he asserts, and, by broadening the
scope of Melodik to the effects of sound on sensory perception, his
approach to expression becomes inherently unstable because no two
listeners are identical (as he admits) and, furthermore, any auditor’s
perception cannot be measured remotely, it can only hypothesized vicar-
iously by a composer.147
One response to this indeterminacy of expression was a pragmatic recourse
to recurrent structure. While addressing thematic development as an essen-
tial ingredient of melody, Kanne sets up a listening perspective wherein the
varied repetition and recurrence of thematic material is demanded by the
nature of music’s transience; if a theme is heard only once and disappears, it
“scarcely leaves behind a lasting impression on the listener’s soul.” This
condition is not true of poetry, Kanne qualifies, since semantic concepts are
clearer and more distinct than melody in what they express, and therefore
easier to grasp and retain mentally. Kanne thus articulates a “law of

144
Remaining in a scale’s tonal orbit creates “a feeling or sensation [that] is already rooted in the
soul . . . [such as] faith, courage, enthusiastic love . . . [it is typical for] songs of war and hymns of
praise”; while the incorporation of foreign notes, particularly by leap “always express[es] an
excited state of mind, and progressions to strange sounding intervals, indicate always a sudden
change, or the unexpected appearance of a new emotion in the heart of the singer.” Ibid.
145
All of which have “distinctive characters” which Teutonius does not specify. Teutonius,
“Melody and Melodious Combination,” 774–75, 792–95.
146
Ibid., 795.
147
Paradoxically, Teutonius accounts for this difficulty by embracing the illimitability of renditions
for each melody under observation, i.e. by embracing the diversity of the listening subjects. He
asserts that the integrity of the “spiritual idea” behind each melodic expression determines the
perception of beauty irrespective of who is listening: “the nearer [a melody] approaches this
ideal, the greater is the beauty of its [material] production.” Ibid.
110 Melodielehre?

recurrence” as a distinguishing feature (and basic condition) of music in

general, and melody in particular:
Does music not rush . . . so quickly before our souls that hardly any thought of it
remains in our memory unless the composer was accustomed to leading his
wonderworld into new shapes and shining colors? . . . With the wonderful forms
of melody our memory tries in vain to hold on to certain main moments . . . He who
follows the whole is unable to hold on to ragged moments and individual beauties in
his soul . . . the rapid rushing by of sounds has made the repetition of phrases an
essential postulate of music.148

In a sense, Kanne’s observation is only that we are slow on the uptake, and
that composers must account for this in their melodic structure. But the
direct, causal connection he establishes between listener and compositional
theory was new, and distantly foreshadows Wagner’s later aspiration for a
sound mass that would be intuitively comprehensible (gefühslverständlich)
for a listener, whether or not fractured through multiple perspectives.

Marx’s organicism

With a slightly different pedagogical purpose in mind, Marx brushed aside

concerns over the signified of melody – the heritage of seventeenth-century
Figurenlehre – arguing contrariwise that composers should let go of their
aesthetic inhibitions and stop fretting about the quality of a theme and its
expression. In a drive to shake off the collective neurosis surrounding
melodic poverty in the German states, he explains that “any combination
of two or more sounds . . . may serve as a motif,” at least for pedagogical
purposes.149 The innate quality of a combination of two or more notes is not
that important, since – unlike periodic structures – it can be developed and
manipulated indefinitely through continual permutation. (Citing the first
movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, he is entirely serious when

148
“Denn rauscht nicht die Musik . . . so schnell vor der Seele vorüber, dass von ihr kaum ein
Gedanke in der Erinnerung bleibe, wenn nicht der Tonsetzer seine Wunderwelt in neuer Gestalt
und Farbenglanz wieder vor die Seele zu führen gewohnt wäre? . . . indess bey den
wunderbaren Formen der Melodie das Gedächtnisse vergeblich sich bemühen würde, gewisse
Hauptmomente festzuhalten . . . Denn wer das Ganze verfolgt, kann unmöglich abgerissene
Momente und einzelne Schönheiten in seiner Seele auffassen und festhalten . . . Denn das
schnelle Vorüberrauschen der Töne hat die Wiederholung der Sätze als ein unerlässliches
Postulat in der Tonkunst aufgestellt.” Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ 66 (August 18,
1821), 522–23.
149
Marx, The School of Musical Composition, 27.
 Marx’s organicism 111

stating that even “apparently the most insignificant” motifs can be used to
great effect.)150
If the task of Melodielehre had once been the systematization of melodic
expression, Marx’s four-volume treatise of 1837 – which went through six
full or partial editions during his lifetime – returned the debate to modes of
construction and fluent productivity. He elaborates a theory of melodic–
motific germination based, as we know, on principles of homology derived
from Goethe’s Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (1790),
where the motif – as he clarified in 1856 – corresponds to “the germinal
vesicle, that membranous sac filled with some fluid element . . . the Urgestalt
of everything organic – the true primal plant or primal animal.”151 This
raises the question as to whether Marx’s purpose was actionable pedagogy
or more a philosophical validation of the compositional process through
organicism.152
With this in mind, here is a brief reminder of Marx’s approach to melody.
His paradigm for all melodic construction was the major scale in a single
octave, which – like Kanne’s Wellenspiel of repose rising to tension and
falling back to repose – embodies his mantra of Ruhe – Bewegung – Ruhe as
it rises and falls (see Example 2.3a). Thus, the formal principle from which
Marx derives all the genres of modern instrumental music is, for him,
equally embedded in the nature of melody’s fundamental formation. Not
surprisingly, the scale is also implicit in the origin of periodic form, which
Marx casts as a literal peak; that is, an “elevation from repose and intensi-
fication in tone succession and rhythm up to a natural high point; return,
likewise with intensified motion . . . to the true tone of repose.” He denies
that the seven degrees of the major scale are restrictive, calling them simply
“the most natural model for the formation of tonal succession.”153 But they
are unequal, he explains, even in purely melodic terms, for tetrachordal
structure requires that G rise to C, F fall to C, as illustrated in Example 2.3b.
Though it is not substantiated, the implication is that hierarchies of har-
monic function influence all melodic motion.
While Marx discusses four types of melodic motion – ascending,
descending, wandering, and repeating – only the first two constitute genu-
ine motion for him, and awaken predictably contrary feelings (of excitement

150
Ibid., 28.
151
Marx, “Die Form in der Musik,” in Die Wissenschaften im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed.
J. A. Romberg (Leipzig: Romburg, 1856), 2: 21–48, here 29.
152
A thorough account of organicist models of theories of invention during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries is given in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 198–225.
153
Marx, The School of Musical Composition, 17.
112 Melodielehre?

Example 2.3a A. B. Marx’s complete periodic melody based on the scale.

Example 2.3b A. B. Marx’s examination of the scale.

and calm) in the listener.154 The need for the first and last sounds of a
melody to fall on the principal parts of the measure entails Marx’s different
rhythmicizations of the scale, where the beginning and end must be “suffi-
ciently energetic.” Over and above this highly systematic approach to a
melody-as-scale (which Marx admits is “of no artistic value”155), his interest
in the actual germination of thematic motifs enters regions that earlier
theorists, wary of being seen to prescribe and thereby reify genius, could
not access. In doing so, he begins to articulate the territory of what could be
called the Romantic–mechanic genius. The rationale for needing such a
concept is clear:
We may, perhaps, be so fortunate as to possess some good [melodic] ideas. But this
alone would be of little use. We must be certain that we shall always be able to
produce something new; our productive power must not depend upon the acciden-
tal occurrence of a happy idea.156

Marx’s veiled play with two of Goethe’s more influential metaphors – organic
growth (“produce something new”) and a lightning strike of inspiration
(“accidental occurrence of a happy idea”) – encapsulates his solution to the
difficulties of other melodic theorists. By ignoring rather than directly contra-
dicting an aesthetics of inspiration, Marx sidesteps the doctrine of genius and
replaces it with a theory at once organically conceived and mechanically
modeled, as well as foregrounding the imperative of a work ethic.
Such an attitude risked appearing dismissive of expression, which
Schilling’s Encyclopädie regarded “solely and exclusively” as the “real

154
With ascent comes “the feeling of intensification, elevation, and tension”; descent brings
“feelings of slackening, depression, and the return to rest”; and roving motion has no decided
character. Burnham, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, 38.
155
Marx, The School of Musical Composition, 26. 156 Ibid.
 Marx’s organicism 113

essence of every melody.”157 If Marx’s Melodielehre marked a watershed in

the history of melodic theory, how was it received? While the next gener-
ation of German critics such as Joachim Raff tended to laud “Marx’s
excellent composition treatise,”158 an émigré organist and composition
teacher – Max Braun – demonstrates that twenty years after its initial
publication it still courted controversy, at least from the safe distance of
New York.159 Writing in the New York Musical World, Braun charged that
Marx was “falsely representing the character of melody in general.”160 He
systematically disputes every step of Marx’s process for generating melodic
forms, protesting against the theorist’s specious tools in a pyrrhic reasser-
tion of the old school of natural genius:

Will the reader even get a distinct idea of the character of a sound and good melody?
Must not this method of inciting to “artistic activity” give him the idea that
composing a melody consists merely in filling up four or eight bars in a rhythmical
manner? Is not such treatment simply detestable note-making in its most horrible
shape?161

Though riddled with the rhetorical excess of polemics, Braun’s line of

criticism evidently proved hard to refute. Marx’s original compositions –
both within and without his theoretical writings – would seem to have been
a prime opportunity to dismiss such attacks. But press reviews only served
to reinscribe suspicions of Marx’s creative monotony. Even August Kahlert,
a staunch advocate of Marx’s theoretical writings, conceded in the Neue
Zeitschrift that he was divided over the professor’s 1841 oratorio Moses,
equivocating politely that “the musical invention appeared to me not always
to be on the same level as the poetic inspiration that distinguishes the
composer overall.”162 And looking purely at Marx’s theoretical writings,
Gustav Prinz reviewed the second edition of the Compositions-Lehre
warmly in the Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung, but requested that, in
future, Marx direct his “mental energy” (geistige Thatkraft) more towards

157
“denn das eigentliche Wesen einer jeden Melodie besteht einzig und allein im Ausdruck.”
Schilling, Encyclopädie, 4: 644.
158
“Marx’s vortrefflicher Compositions-Lehre.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 57.
159
Max Braun’s primary professional identity appears to have been as the organist at St. Francis
Xavier’s College, New York.
160
Max Braun, “Max ‘versus’ Marx: Critical analysis of A. B. Marx’s ‘Musical Composition’ with
additional commentary on music training,” New York Musical World 18 (1857), 533.
161
Ibid.
162
“die musikalische Erfindung schien mir nicht überall auf der Höhe der poetischen Begeisterung,
die den Componisten in seinem ganzen Wirken auszeichnet, zu stehen.” August Kahlert, “Aus
Breslau,” NZfM 16 (1842), 116.
114 Melodielehre?

examples of “authentic folk melody” (das wahre Volkslied), thereby implic-

itly belittling Marx’s examples.163
Nevertheless, as Example 2.4 illustrates, Marx demonstrates a painfully
incremental approach to melodic germination, indicating that he is aspiring
to create neither expressive natural gestures (Kahlert) nor volkstümliche
Melodie (Prinz), but rather is illustrating the paradigmatic construction of
melody from a single motif. It is a tour de force of Goethean organicism, and
very much illustrative of a process, not a product. “A piece of gold which I
find,” Marx exhorts professorially, “is worth only so much as its value in
money; but a skill which I have acquired, may be a source of constant
profit.” This skill – of inventing melody from a motific fragment – is bravely
exemplified in his own procedure.
Of course, it remains rooted in the C major scale and consequently
“partakes in a general monotony of expression.”164 Not only does the
approach therefore require a leap of faith from readers that such a method
could yield beautiful, expressive melodies, but Marx also cautions against
consciously striving for originality, which he felt would always be forced
unless it arises spontaneously when a composer is in the right state of mind
(this is the closest Marx comes to a Goethean view of melodic lightning).165
But Braun continues to lampoon the artifice in Marx’s modern method-
ology, quipping that his means of spinning out a melody to infinite lengths
could provide a “musical submarine telegraph around the globe.”166
(The metaphor was a propos: a first attempt at laying a transatlantic cable
took place that same year, 1857.)167 Braun’s accusation is that, in practice,
no genuine composition or beautiful melody is derived from germinal
motifs in this way; he likens Marx’s organicist language ironically to that
of a producer of artificial flowers, who instructs his apprentice: “Here is a
leaf, and here is a stem; nurse them; apply them, etc. Make a bouquet!” This
results, he continues sarcastically, in “splendid bouquets, which would look
[as good] . . . as Marx’s designs sound!”168 Artificiality of means and materi-
als thus underpin Braun’s critique and, with overtones of Tristan avant la
lettre, the notion that Marx – “a first rate necromancer” – utilizes the major

163
Gustav Prinz, “Musikalische Literatur,” Allgemeine Weiner Musik–Zeitung 4 (1843), 119.
164
Marx, The School of Musical Composition, 34.
165
Marx states that a student should not search for that “which he fancies to be most interesting or
unusual,” – continuing that – “such things cannot even be discovered by being purposely sought
for, but arise spontaneously, when the mind is fully engrossed in the development of an artistic
idea.” Ibid., 35.
166
Braun, “Max ‘versus’ Marx,” 615.
167
Huurdeman, The Worldwide History of Telecommunications, 130ff.
168
Braun, “Max ‘versus’ Marx,” 567.
 Marx’s organicism 115

Example 2.4 A. B. Marx’s illustration (adapted) of how to derive melodic phrases from a
two-note motif; The School of Musical Composition, pp. 30–32.
116 Melodielehre?

scale – “his magic musical bottle” – to provide the melodic material for all
sorts of motifs – “all sorts of drinks”169 – provokes a positively glandular
response:
[S]hould [a composer] wish to invent a melody of eight bars, to fit to a long or a
short meter, he will find, at last, that his carefully nursed [motific] germs will forsake
him in the hour of necessity, and he will be thrown back, musically poverty-stricken,
upon his barren Marx again. I speak from experience . . . The whole of Marx’s
treatment . . . consists merely of making notes, and it is, for this reason, the most
objectionable method that an extravagant mind could put forth. It stupefies and
kills.”170

Marx’s necromantic “drinks” are noxious, Braun implies, because they do

not work – a placebo exposed as such – requiring not even an “antidote
for evil poisons” (für böse Gifte Gegengift); by contrast, Wagner’s lovers in
Tristan pursue their sexual destiny precisely because their potion does
work, even though, dramatically, we understand it as a functioning
placebo, as Thomas Mann first argued.171 According to his own ironic
conceit, Braun desires a state of altered consciousness through the “secret
arts” in order to compose melodies; but when this is denied him, the
Compositions-Lehre becomes merely another redundant prop, and the
mystery of melodic invention torments him into publishing his black
review.
Such visceral anger stems from Braun’s frustration at being duped, as he
sees it, into believing that a system could generate melodies. The logical
problem he identifies is that Marx derives his motifs from the scale, encourag-
ing his readers to imitate the procedures by which such motifs are generated.
As a final jeu d’esprit, Braun gripes that an aspiring composer would have first
to invent an original melody for the derivative motifs to be possible. Without a
melody or scale from which to take motific fragments in the first place, there
can be nothing to develop: “Just like the man who cannot find the matches in
the dark, and strikes a light to seek them!”172 Thus, the underlying theoretical
construct that serves in place of original melody, the C major scale, is both the
source and predicate of Marx’s “barren” and “unnatural” examples, in this
reading, as well as the proof that – from Braun’s perspective – Marx is not
addressing original composition per se.

169
Ibid., 615. Emphasis added. 170 Ibid., 567.
171
“[the lovers] might as well have been drinking water.” Thomas Mann, “The Sorrows and
Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” in Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (University of
Chicago Press, 1985), 105.
172
Braun, “Max ‘versus’ Marx,” 567.
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 117

J. C. Lobe and the human melograph

While no theorist risked citing their own melodies exclusively as exemplars,

Lobe’s Compositions-Lehre (1844) avoided paradigmatic scales, relying
instead on a combination of borrowed melodies of the First Viennese
School and thematic deconstruction to move beyond such criticism. It
propounds a methodology in which the mechanical assimilation of prized
melodic models is a prerequisite for any composer (alongside the ability to
correct and improve one’s original melodies). As a means of composition,
such inculcation resonates with the mechanical melograph we saw earlier in
that it ultimately aspires to foster the ability to formulate expressive melody
without conscious intervention because of an internalized associative mech-
anism – a learned mental process (substituting for an intricately designed
mechanical assemblage) – that makes invention possible.
Lobe is explicit about this: the student’s objective is “to internalize the
purely technical means [of expressive melody] so that he does not have to
think about them, at least not at moments of invention.”173 Though osten-
sibly commonsensical, this registers an unequivocal point of contact
between pedagogy and unconscious creation. Where sublimation is the
aim, the purpose of studies in melody – Lobe continues – is:

to fathom and bring to consciousness in the most particular and clearest way which
tempo, which meter, which kind of notes, which kind of rising and falling from a
tonic, which kind of articulation, and which accent to apply and which would be
suitable to elicit the desired expression in the listener.174

Once this special knowledge has been fully absorbed and its “technical
means” operate unconsciously within the composer’s mind (i.e. the laws
of associating the means of expression have been inculcated), a composer
ought to be able to invent expressive melodies without needing “to think
about” the means, Lobe argues. In this context, he proceeds to a decidedly
practical definition of genius that moves dialectically between conscious
(study) and unconscious (inspiration) before being sublated as a higher
state of consciousness (revision):

173
“Vorausgesetzt wird, dass er (der Schüler) die rein technischen Mittel bereits so durchgeübt und
in sich aufgenommen habe, um an sie nicht mehr besonders denken zu müssen. Im Momente
der Erfindung wenigstens nicht.” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 42.
174
“bei den Uebungen, auf’s Schärfste und Klarste zu ergründen und in sein Bewustseyn zu bringen,
welches Tempo, welche Taktart, welche Notengattungen, welche Art von tonischem Steigen
und Fallen, welche Stricharten und welche Accente anzuwenden und geeignet seyn möchten,
den bezweckten Ausdruck bei dem Hörer hervorzubringen.” Ibid.
118 Melodielehre?

As a master, he will no longer need these [technical melodic] procedures. Then he

exercises zeal [Begeisterung] in invention, and notates what this provides him. But in
this zeal all the elements that he had consciously practiced affect him, admittedly
more mysteriously in that instant, in a more dreamlike manner, but nevertheless
operating more securely and with more accomplishment; and altogether they bring
him his due. To be sure, the glowing stream of zeal also carries cinders with it, at
least it rarely flows in a pure way onto the paper. But then in the cool moments
following, the entire, lucid knowledge of various artistic means learned earlier come
to consciousness, and where, on looking over his creation, his feeling notices
something that does not belong, this knowledge tells him where the foreign element
lies, how he might cut it out and replace it with something authentic and correct.175

The intricate cog mechanisms of the melograph can be seen as a material

analogue for the first stage of this Melodik in its embodiment of the agency
of unconscious, systematic processing.176 Recall that this embodied the
hope to obviate inhibiting self-consciousness. Perhaps it was on this basis
that the pedagogue Julius Becker dubbed Lobe’s approach “synthetic” in a
review from 1844.177 Unlike other experts – Becker continues – who “first
discover a half-measure, then become aware of a way to a way to a distant
lying error, and finally perhaps even are embarrassed by a school-masterly,
pedantic method, and want to ascribe genius to what appears to them as
unattainable by an arithmetic example,” Becker cites Lobe’s unrelenting,
systematic strictness as laudable, labeling his approach “just as necessary as
of essential benefit.”178

175
“Als Meister wird er dieser Proceduren nicht mehr bedürfen. Dann läßt er bei der Erfindung
die Begeisterung walten, und zeichnet hin, was sie ihm eingiebt, aber in dieser Begeisterung
wirken alle die früher mit Bewusstseyn durchgeübten Elemente ein, zwar ihm in Augenblicke
dunkler, traumumfangener, aber dennoch sicherer und wohlerzogener Thätigkeit, und
bringen ihm im Ganzen das Rechte. Allerdings führt der glühende Strom der Begeisterung
auch Schlacken mit sich, wenigstens wird er sehr selten durchaus rein auf das Papier fliessen.
Dann kommt ihm aber in den nachherigen kühlen Augenblicken die ganze früher
gewonnene hellere Erkenntniss der mannichfaltigen Kunstmittel in’s Bewusstseyn, wo sein
Gefühl bei’m Ueberschauen des Erfundenen ihn auf etwas Ungehöriges aufmerksam macht,
sagt ihm auch diese Erkenntniss, worin das Ungehörige liege, wie er es ausschneiden und
durch Aechtes und Rechtes ersetzen könne.” Ibid., 42–43.
176
Lobe’s reference to cinders curiously modifies Shelley’s metaphor – in A Defence of Poetry
(1821) – of the mind in creation as burning coals glowing according to an inconstant wind. By
inserting dirtying cinders into the creative flow, Lobe appears inadvertently to critique Shelley’s
belief in the purity of unconscious invention.
177
“Der Verfasser geht nun in seinem Werke den synthetischen Weg. . .” Julius Becker, “Theorie:
J. C. Lobe, ‘Compositions-Lehre’,” NZfM 25 (1844), 97.
178
“Wenn im flüchtigen Durchblicken der Sachverständige bei einzelnen Bemerkungen,
Erörterungen und Regeln bald eine Halbheit entdeckt, bald einen Weg zu einem Weg zu einem
entfernt liegenden Irrthume gewahrt, bald vielleicht sogar da von einem schulmeisterlichen
pedantischen Verfahren unangenehm berührt wird, wo er dem Genius anheim gegeben wissen
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 119

In answer, then, to the perennial question of whether melody can be learned,

Lobe asserts that it must be learned. “No skill exists from birth,” he warns,
adding for good measure that “no skill would develop by itself along with the
growing human [either].”179 The evidence for this is conveniently close at
hand: if German composers had been directed to melodic exercises early on
“we would not have so many melody-less composers”; and if the striving for
expressive melody were part of those exercises, “there would not be so many
expressionless compositions that say nothing.”180 His emphasis on expressivity
demands that he foreground expressive motifs themselves as the foundation of
a melodic pedagogy. Accordingly, this dominates his analytical approach to
musical models within the framework of the 8-measure period. Specifically, it is
the interrelation, frequency, and repetition of motifs within a period that
interests him, i.e. a governing principle of thematische Arbeit – defined as
“the art of being able to repeat a musical thought, yet always altered, always
metamorphosed so that it always appears as the same, but then also as always
different.”181 This mechanism for generating motific variants further reinforces
the common ground with the melograph’s mechanical permutation, under-
scoring the extent to which the treatise and the machine represented two sides
of the same philosophical coin, even though, as noted earlier, such devices bore
no explicit connection to any individual theories of mind.
Stylistically, Lobe’s models (and the Componium) are rooted in the late
eighteenth century, however, and may seem a long way from the fleshy
bodies and expressive voices of mid-nineteenth-century Wagnerian opera,
around which the debate over melody raged most vehemently. But
Wagner’s famous comment on Beethovenian sonata allegro forms (from
1860) establishes an elective sympathy with Lobe’s mechanical project. It
was precisely through the principle of motific permutation that Wagner
envisaged the crystallization of motific fragmentation into a single unified
melodic sense, that is, the principle of a proto-unendliche Melodie. His

möchte, was ihm auf dem Wege eines Rechenexempels nicht erreichtbar scheint, so bemerken
wir, daß die Strenge, mit welcher der Verfasser in seiner Entwickelung vorschreitet und den
Schüler an den Weg fesselt, welchen er ihn führt, eben so nothwendig als von wesentlichem
Nutzen sei.” Ibid.
179
“Kein Können kommt mit dem Menschen auf die Welt; kein Können bildet sich etwa mit
seinem körperlichen Wachsthum von selbst in ihm aus.” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 36.
180
“Wenn des Compositions-Schülers Streben frühzeitig auf technische Bildung von Melodieen
gerichtet würde, so hätten wir nicht so viele melodielose Componisten; und wenn damit bald
das Streben nach ausdrucksvollen Melodieen verbunden würde, so gäbe es gewiss nicht so viele
ausdruckslose, nichtssagende Compositionen.” Ibid., 39.
181
“die Kunst, einen musikalischen Gedanken vielmals wiederholen zu können, aber immer
verändert, immer verwandelt, dergestalt, dass er stets als derselbe, aber doch zugleich immer als
ein anderer erscheint.”Ibid., 29.
120 Melodielehre?

description pertains to Beethoven, but could almost be read in relation to

the Componium’s putative improvisation:
The fragments are continually being reassembled in different formations – coalescing
in a logical succession which here pours forth like a stream, there disperses as in an
eddying vortex. Throughout one is riveted by their vivid expressiveness, absorbed by
the excitement of sensing melodic significance in every harmony . . . [T]he completely
novel outcome of this procedure was the expansion of a melody, through the rightly
various development of all its constituent motifs, into a continuous large-scale piece of
music, which itself constituted no less than a single, perfectly coherent melody.182

With Beethoven in mind, Lobe encourages his students to use their own
motifs and copy the procedure through which he develops and varies his
motifs, as well as the order in which he introduces motifs where more than
one is used within a period. Aesthetics is “guilty” of not being able to explain
why some motifs are “more interesting” than others, he argues, but melodies
with fewer basic motifs are perhaps generally more comprehensible than
those with many, and the use of only one motif in a melody may lead to
monotony, he continues, adding that: “monotony and incomprehensibility
may, however, be reduced or totally quashed by other elements” listed
simply as rhythm, tonal structure, meter, and tempo.183
Lobe’s achievement, in short, was to apply principles of systematic learning
to model-based pedagogy with a mandate for uncovering expressive “mech-
anisms.” In a sense, this merely reverses the direction of stylistic composition
or pastiche: instead of copying generic models within a given style to learn
their expressive grammar, a student dismantles a particular model to discover
the causes of its expression. But since the listening subject must register the
changes in expression precisely and individually in Lobe’s process, he is forced
to argue that the “main condition” of an aspiring composer is simply “con-
stant observation of the essence of the stirrings, feelings, affects, and passions
in one’s breast as well as of the ways in which others express the same.”184 In
other words, the composer-as-listener is now to become the expressive
register of his own melody, which in a feedback loop then educates him
cumulatively as to the emotional properties of melodic expression.

182
Wagner, “Music of the Future,” Three Wagner Essays, 38.
183
“Doch mag die Monotonie, so wie die Umfasslichkeit durch eine Menge anderer, günstig
hinzutretender Umstände . . . sehr gemildert oder ganz verbannt werden.” Lobe, Compositions-
Lehre, 35.
184
“Unausgesetzte Beobachtungen des Wesens der Regungen, Gefühle, Affecte und Leidenschaften
in seiner eigenen Brust sowohl, als in den Aeusserungsweisen derselben bei Anderen, ist
Haupbedingung eines Jeden, der ein ächter Componist werden will.” Ibid., 39–40.
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 121

In this respect, Lobe – after Kant – conjoins natural aptitude with rational
expertise without philosophical trauma or contradiction.185 This is only
made possible by ascribing both mechanical and organic functions to a
composer without a preference for the priority of either. Within the broader
discourse on genius, such rhetoric was decidedly unusual. Whereas the
organic imagination of genius was effectively lawless and expressly unregu-
lated, it must also – in Lobe’s reading – be a product of systematic cognitive
construction. Lobe holds these two properties in equilibrium (as comple-
mentary) in his discussion of utilizing melodic inspiration. Here, as we have
seen, the processes of automatic recall are educated to function according to
a centrally governing emotion or design:

In all real artistic creation, there is inner emotion or thought, and the artist portrays
both externally through the medium of art. The warmth of emotion or the depth of
thought cannot be learned, although it can be very much educated and increased
through learning and individual study; contrariwise, the still warm emotion or still
deep thought cannot emerge from the head and heart without complete technical
training. Melodic construction has such technical training, and this can be learned
and improved with exercises.186

Mechanism is most evident in Lobe’s illustration of how to compose a

symphonic theme. In fact, it is an artificial reconstruction of the first theme
from the fourth movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, even though
reversing his dissection of Haydn’s theme into its rhythmic and tonal param-
eters would seem far from a normative compositional process. Example 2.5
gives the five-part derivation. The zero-degree of melodic invention in Lobe’s
point of departure (Example 2.5i), the “primal figure of all possible themes,”
which he labels “monotonous – a dead thing,” suggests that every melody can
be created by building up rhythmic and tonal motion mechanically – step by
step – from the underlying Urgestalt.187 Had Lobe used his own melody, the
derivation process would have succeeded or failed according to the quality of

185
See Kant’s counterpoint of genius with taste as the “disciplining (or training) of genius,” in
Critique of Judgment, § 50.
186
“Bei allem ächten Kunstschaffen wirkt ein innerlich Empfundenes oder Gedachtes, und beides
stellt der Künstler ausser sich dar durch das Medium seiner Kunst. Die Wärme der Empfindung
oder die Tiefe des Denkens kann nicht erlernt werden, obgleich sehr ausgebildet und gesteigert
durch Lehre und eigenes Studium; dagegen kann auch das noch so warm Empfundene und
noch so tief Gedachte nicht heraus aus Kopf und Herz, ohne vollendete technische Ausbildung.
Einen solchen technischen Theil hat auch die Melodiebildung, und dieser lässt sich erlernen und
durch Uebung fördern.” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 37.
187
“Ich nehme . . . als Urgestalt aller möglichen Thema’s, ja aller musikalischen Gedanken
überhaupt, eine Melodie von acht Takten an . . . Folgender achtaktige Gedanke . . . ist . . .
monoton – ein todtes Ding.” Ibid., 3.
122 Melodielehre?

Example 2.5 J. C. Lobe’s process of thematic derivation, “Das Thema,”

Compositions-Lehre (1844), pp. 3–4.

the resulting melody; by relying on Haydn’s reputation and working back-

wards, he merely underscores the artificial mechanism of the process.
The painterly practice of copying models was familiar in eighteenth-
century compositional treatises, of course, where it had been quite explicit
about melody. Daube recommended that budding composers adopt one or
two pieces and write them out, adding: “It simply cannot fail, the benefits
must follow. To work with good examples always remains praiseworthy.”188
That Geyer in 1860 would parody his readers who doubted they could learn
to compose in this manner indicates a failure to persuade, suggesting not so
much a methodological weakness, but rather that by the middle of the
nineteenth century the method was out of sync with the aesthetic moment.
As mentioned above, Lobe did not accept the reasoning that held this process
to be artificial, mechanical and therefore worthless; instead, he defended
elementary illustrations of recomposition (such as those in Example 2.5) as
those which develop and explain the melodic, thematic, periodic and formal
designs “of all possible pieces of music.”189 Only by internalizing the technical
means through such exercises, he countered, will students become able to wield

188
“Man nehme sich vor, auf ein oder zwey Stücke Achtung zu geben, sodann sich solche
aufschreiben . . . Es kann gar nicht fehlen, der Nutzen muß nachfolgen. Nach guten Mustern
arbeiten, bleibt allezeit lobenswürdig.” Johann Friedrich Daube, Anleitung zur Erfindung der
Melodie und ihrer Fortsetzung (Vienna: Christian Gottlob Täubel, 1797), 58.
189
“alle melodischen, thematischen, periodischen und formellen Gestaltungen aller möglichen
Tonstücke. . .” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 3.
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 123

their own inspiration. To this end, he seeks in a later example to demonstrate a

middle ground between this mechanical reconstruction of Haydn and actual
original composition; this takes the form of an organic dissection of Mozart.
If the one appears to piece together a Frankensteinian monster from
“dead” melodic matter (or Urgestalt), the other dissects living melodic tissue
with the scalpel of music analytical parameters, as it were, testing – as though
galvanic current were being passed through the various neural networks – what
expressive movement sparks into life. The former enlivens melody, the latter
dismembers it: processes of simulated composition, and musical autopsy,
respectively. In this second approach, given in Example 2.6, Lobe disrupts
different musical elements one by one in Zerlina’s aria “Batti, batti o bel
Masetto” from act 1 of Don Giovanni, and asks rhetorically how Mozart created
the “coaxing–asking” expression.190
The notion that melodic expression can only be revealed in its moment of
destruction – i.e. as apophasis, only definable obliquely by its absence rather
than directly by its presence – suggests that Lobe regards it as fundamentally
concealed, in line with Hamann’s definition of genius as a “negative great-
ness.” The laws by which “every affect, every feeling, every passion” appears
recognizably formed in melodic expression encompass for Lobe the “laws of
motific formation and rearrangement.”191 But despite his pedagogical urge
to show how these can be explored, he ultimately hints at the blasphemy in a
student’s desire to know and understand them directly. In other words, the
natural, systematic mechanism of expression exists, but is safely beyond
conscious comprehension:

[I]t is granted to no mortal to understand these laws exactly, to enumerate them in

detail, and to bring them to recognition. One can only intimate the points on which
one’s mind fixes, drawing attention to what we expect and desire it to deliver to us.
What it delivers to us, to examine the extent to which it corresponds to what is
desired, is for the moment something of our feelings and our taste.192

While Lobe does not pursue his veiled reference to genius, he finally frees
himself from “slave-like imitation,” and composes an original melody (see
Example 2.7) through the mechanical permutation and rearrangement of a

190
“schmeichelnd-bittender Ausdruck,” Ibid., 40.
191
“jeder Affekt, jedes Gefühl, jede Leidenschaft . . . tragen ihre Gesetze der Motivgestaltung und
Umgestaltung in allen bisher gezeigten Verhältnissen ihrem Wesen gemäss in sich.” Ibid., 43.
192
“[D]em Verstand aber diese Gesetze bestimmt und im Detail aufzuzählen und zur Erkenntniss
zu bringen, ist keinem Sterblichen vergönnt. Nur andeuten kann man die Punkte, auf die man
seinem Geist zu fixiren hat, gleichsam ihn aufmerksam machen, was wir verlangen und
wünschen, das er uns liefern soll . . . Was er uns aber liefert, zu prüfen, in wie weit es dem
Gewünschten entspricht, ist zunächst Sache unseres Gefühls und unseres Geschmacks.” Ibid.
124 Melodielehre?

Example 2.6 J. C. Lobe’s thematic deconstruction, “Aesthetic tips on melodic

formation,” Compositions-Lehre (1844), pp. 40–42.

(a) Mozart’s original.

(b) Rhythmic alteration: the expression is “destroyed.” Deduction: “a

simple note type is a basic condition to every expression.”193

(c) Pitch alteration: the original feeling is again “destroyed.”

Deduction: “the gentle, stepwise falling and rising of tones in
the . . . [original] melody awakens the coaxing–asking feeling most
perceptibly,” and larger intervals modify this expression, but
cannot increase or enhance it.194

(d) Metric alteration 1: the original expression is essentially

maintained in common time, “although a quiet change to the
delicate feeling cannot be avoided.”195

193
“Wir folgen daraus . . . dass zu jenem Ausdrucke eine einfache Notengattung wesentliche
Bedingung ist.” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 40.
194
“Wir folgen daraus . . . dass das sanfte, stufenweise Fallen und Steigen der Töne in dem ersten
Abschnitte obiger Melodie das Schmeichelnd-Bittende am empfindbarsten weckt.” Ibid., 41.
195
“eine leise Veränderung [mag] dem feinen Gefühle nicht entgehen.” Ibid.
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 125

(e) Metric alteration 2: the change of expression “stands out more” in triple meter, but
rhythmic modifications also contribute to this.196

(f) Articulation alteration: accents and other aspects of performance articulation

“smudge or entirely alter” a melody’s expression.197

(g) Dynamic and articulation alteration: “again the expression is different” to Mozart’s
original.198 Deduction: The degree of this difference is directly proportional to the
degree of alteration, leading ultimately to “an entirely different” kind of expression
which at times can even become unrecognizable.

virgin arpeggiated motif, examining its aesthetic balance with a second

contrasting motif, and the expressive conditions under which they function
symbiotically as an expressive whole. This is the closest any response to the
oxymoron of Melodielehre came to a concrete application.

* * *
The story of mid-nineteenth-century Melodielehre is an epic rather than a
novella. The mystique of unthinking creation had underpinned melody’s
pre-eminence since the early eighteenth-century discourses on genius, but
after Galvani animated dead matter, its idealist footing was undermined by
creative speculation into the mechanisms of human biology. Once thought
itself could be deemed material (electrochemical), the principle of vital
materialism afforded modern aestheticians a more tactile grasp of processes
of “genius.” Hence, unconscious melodic invention was no longer absolute,

196
“Hier wäre aber freilich nicht blos diese, sondern auch das Rhythmische verändert.” Ibid.
197
“den Ausdruck einer Melodie verwischen oder ganz umwandeln.” Ibid.
198
“Wieder anders wird der Ausdruck.” Ibid., 42
Example 2.7 J. C. Lobe’s exercises in original melodic composition (“Reshuffling of
8-measure melodies”), Compositions-Lehre (1844), ex. 146, 156–62.
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 127

and even appeared susceptible to scientific explication through the mechan-

ical permutations of melographic automata, leaving only the conundrum of
systematic or simulated melodic expression. But broadening our horizon
somewhat, for Baudrillard (quoting Ecclesiastes), simulacra “never conceal
the truth – it is the truth which conceals the fact that there is none. The
simulacrum is true.”199 Was original melody an idealist hoax, with no
truth to it? The mechanical simulation of musical cognition effectively
challenged a faculty of modern melodic genius to reveal itself. Beyond the
Mozartbild, narratives of German criticism prevented any show-and-tell,
however, leaving only the “truth” of simulated expression within treatises
such as Lobe’s, whose very existence served to conceal the absence of more
authentic invention. Numerous eighteenth-century definitions of genius
allowed for such rule-bound practice, and it was only when a priori rules
became conscious precepts that they constituted the simulation of some-
thing deemed more genuine. Precisely the accusation of dull mechanism
was leveled at Lobe and Marx. Even half a century later, the same halo of
doubt surrounded self-aware melodic composition: “Is the invention of
melody unique and merely an expression of the unconsciously creating
imagination of the composer,” the theorist Salomon Jadassohn asked six-
teen years after Wagner’s death, “or is [conscious] musical artistic sense also
already active in this process? / We are unable to answer even this question,
for we are unable to separate these two activities.”200 Of course, it was
theoretically possible to teach schematic dance melodies in various genres
and “imitation” folk melodies by principle or by copying models, but what
remained out of reach was the assumed source of melody’s essential expres-
sivity. On a shifting stylistic platform, earnest attempts to bridge the gap
between emotional response and tonal configurations never reached a state
of readiness for practical application in composition. Lobe held that laws
governing melodic expression did exist, but as we have seen, urges and
pledges in this direction were not followed with actionable theory, and Lobe
had to compromise that while such laws could be assimilated mechanically
they were not consciously knowable. This effectively marks the failure of
pedagogical approaches to the elusive source of melody’s expressiveness.

199
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.
200
“Ist nun die Erfindung der Melodie einzig und allein eine Äusserung der unbewusst schaffenden
Fantasie des Tonschöpfers, oder ist auch hierbei schon der musikalische Kunstverstand
mitthätig? / Auch diese Frage vermögen wir nicht zu beantworten, da wir überhaupt diese
beiden Thätigkeiten nicht in der Weise trennen können.” Salomon Jadassohn, Das Wesen der
Melodie in der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1899), 80.
128 Melodielehre?

Perhaps this was inevitable. Kanne had poeticized in 1821 that mystery is
basic to the condition of Romanticism:
Melody . . . will not at all be understood by reason . . . Who can have an inkling, for
example, of what is Romantic if he does not know that precisely this magic spurns
the sharpness of contours and that character that is clearly defined in dazzling
light . . . rather its spirits always enter in the twilight of moonlight, or allow
themselves to develop from the silver veil of mist.201

Against this validation of a “twilight” whose only illumination could

take the form of unpredictable electrostatic sparks, Lobe’s Melodik provided
a model for inculcated “mechanical” learning that was expressly to be
sublimated, supposedly allowing for emotion to be converted – via this
internalized, now unconscious process – into expressive music, or true
German melodic invention.
While it is difficult to know whether these different strands of thought
interacted, and how many student composers in the 1840s and 1850s
actually adhered successfully to a Lobean approach, the latter’s intersub-
jective conceptualization of the aesthetic of inspiration has lent itself
readily to mechanical explication in this study. If the melograph offered
a framework for understanding unconscious melodic creativity, it also
cast a dark shadow over claims for melody’s teachability, for it is expres-
sion – the signal (human) quality of melody for many observers –
that is lost when machines generate melody. Whether the creative
mind – conceived mechanically – arrives at the same lack must remain
undecidable within the semiotics of organic and mechanic. The fact that
the melograph still needed an initial theme to be programmed also meant
that the device had not solved the problem of autogenesis, but merely
defined the problem of Melodik in terms of scientific agency: mechanical
invention needs an a priori inventor of devices to function (for melody
was never literally autogenetic); hence the discourse of melodic theory is
forever retrospective.
Ultimately, this condition shares an affinity with one aspect of Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre. If the Fichtean ego only knows itself in the act of
philosophizing, the logic of melodic expression similarly is only created

201
“[Melodie wird] vom Verstande gar nicht begriffen . . . Wer kann aber eine Ahnung z. B. vom
Romantischen haben, wenn er nicht weiss dass gerade diese Zauberwelt die Schärfe der
Conturen und die in zu grelles Licht tretende Bestimmtheit der Charaktere verschmäht, . . .
sondern stets in der Dämmerung des Mondenlichtes ihre Geister hervortreten, oder aus den
silbernen Schleyern des Nebels sich entwickeln lässt.” Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ
(August 22, 1821), 507, 529.
 J. C. Lobe and the human melograph 129

and perhaps conceivably “understood” in the moment of its creation: its

action and existence are the same, that is, it can have no quality of self-
awareness, which lends credence to Jean Paul’s statement that “[t]he genius
of the moment alone gives a law of melody to music; what an aesthetic
theorist can provide to this end is itself [nothing but] melody.”202 The
pedagogical response was to work on constructing the composer’s mind,
rather than melody itself. At root, however, this equates mind with melody
in what was ultimately a failed coupling made plausible by belief in the
tangibility of creative thought processes.

202
“Eine Melodestik gibt der Ton- und der Dichtkunst nur der Genius des Augenblicks; was die
Ästhetiker dazu liefern kann, ist selber Melodie.” Jean Paul, Vorschule zur Ästhetik, 25.
 3 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Plagiarism . . . exalteth the lowly, it enricheth those who are of poor

estate; it purchaseth respect and reverence from the ignorant and
oftentimes winneth the applauses of the learned . . . O Divine
Sovereign and Omnipotent Plagiarism, who, like Midas, canst
transmute all thou touchest into pure gold, or at least an admirable
semblance of the same . . . thou hast been the resource . . . of all the poor
in spirit, the mean in capacity, the pigmy in intellect, the deficient in
ability, and the weak in imagination! Thou canst lend the bright
sunbeam Fancy to the darkest souls, and the gem Learning to the
duskiest understandings! . . . Thou art equally the goddess of the rich
and poor, of Parnassus and of Grub Street . . . With solemn awe we
contemplate so potent a divinity.
Francis Mahony, 18491

Even in his old age, Wagner remained insecure about matters of originality and
imitation. With the external trappings of success behind him – international
fame, royal sponsorship, a network of eponymous societies, an army of articu-
late propagandists, as well as the egoist’s dream of Bayreuth replete with
distinguished, pilgrim-like followers – his remarks to Cosima as late as 1880
indicate the degree of self-consciousness and moral ambivalence that continued
to color his views on melodic invention and its flipside: the “unmelodic” or
inexpressive.
On June 20, 1880, Giovanni Sgambati, an Italian symphonist (who
composed no operas), gave a private performance of his recently completed
piano concerto at Wahnfried. Cosima reports Wagner’s frank assessment
the morning after:

Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody,
they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion’s mane and shake at
us! It’s as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone
else. It is always as if the world is having to be created anew, so forceful, so pompous,
while I am always looking for melody. In painting, one still has the advantage of

130 1
Francis Mahony, “Moore’s Plagiarisms,” TMW 48 (December 1, 1849), 764.
 Wagner in the melodic workshop 131

shape and form: when a painter paints a rooster and does it badly, it still remains a
rooster, but here I do not even have a rooster.2

The freedom of form in abstraction could evidently become as much a burden

for Wagner’s melodic imagination, as it was a liberation from “dance melody,
sternly chained to certain rhythmic and melismatic conventions.”3 Melodic
originality appears decidedly self-conscious territory for him to the extent
that the “fear of having perhaps stolen [melodies] from someone else,”
occurring in his autumn years, can be read self-reflexively in terms of the
caustic criticism to which he himself had been subject in earlier compositions.
The suspicion arises, namely, that the older Wagner is projecting the fears of
the younger Wagner onto other composers.
With all the accoutrements of his Bayreuth éclat, why would this be the
case? What did he have left to prove? Perhaps because Wagner’s renown
was coupled to the excesses of a drawn-out propaganda war in the German
press, he was subject to accusations of plagiarism as late as 1870. Two
instances detail charges both of general imitation and of specific hack
work. The Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung regarded such practice as
un-German in a post-concert report from Paris:
What brutish, base materialism! I had expected to be introduced to newly created
music, and was astounded to find nothing but a shallow plagiarism of Berlioz! –
Berlioz must consider himself unlucky to see such imitation and caricature. – I cannot
possibly explain how such idiocy can arise in Germany.4

In more measured tones, Eduard Hanslick had made the same argument of
the melodies in Lohengrin, which he found “conspicuously reminiscent of
Carl Maria von Weber.”5 This trope of Wagner criticism was pre-empted in
1854 by the London Times, where J. W. Davison groused that the
Tannhäuser overture “is a weak parody . . . not of M. Berlioz, but of his
imitators,” illustrating the degree of imitation in such claims themselves.6
But rebuttals are equally informative: with a certain political savvy, the
composer and conductor Heinrich Dorn laughed off an accusation – circulating

2
CT (June 21, 1880). Emphasis added. 3 SSD: 3: 285. Cf. PW 2: 78.
4
“Welch ein roher, niedriger Materialismus! Ich hatte erwartet, eine Musik von neuer
Erfindung kennen zu lernen, und erstaunte, nichts zu finden, als einen flachen Plagiarius
Berliozs! – Berlioz muß sich unglücklich fühlen, sich so nachahmen und karikieren zu
sehen. – Eines kann ich mir nicht erklären, wie solche Niaiserie in Deutschland hat aufkommen
können.” This relates to a concert in Paris on January 25, 1860, see “Stimmen aus Paris von
R. Wagners erstes Konzert,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung (February 11, 1860), 11.
5
“theils ganz alltäglich, theils auffallende Reminiscenz an C. M. v. Weber” [1858]. Edward
Hanslick, HSS I/4: 344.
6
J. W. Davison, “New Philharmonic Society,” The Times (May 3, 1854), 9.
132 Wagner in the melodic workshop

in 1870 – that Wagner had borrowed a musical phrase from Otto Nicolai’s
Lustige Weiber in his Meistersinger:

If one depicts the plagiarist Wagner with tender, monumental concern for wooing the
artistic comradeship of Otto Nicolai, that is just childish. Wagner and Nicolai in one
breath: I reckon Richard would laugh himself to death and Otto would turn in his grave.7

What matters here are the implications of an attitude in which accusations of

melodic borrowing were either scandalous or ridiculous. Within the ethics of
borrowing, in other words, there was no middle ground. In a familiar cyclic
trap, the would-be melodist’s desire to compose “original” melodies means in
this case avoiding normative “melodic” patterns, which casts Wagner’s
composer-by-composer denunciation of almost all prior operatic melody in
Oper und Drama in a new, defensive light. Avoiding melodic cliché was a
prevalent criticism of both German and Italian opera at the time,8 and
Hanslick’s review of Tannhäuser from 1846 makes this very point in relation
to Wagner’s own “melodic habits.” The rising sixth to the submediant or
mediant, Hanslick worried, is a vocal phrase that had almost become an
obsession for Wagner. After citing examples from Rienzi and Tannhäuser,
reproduced as Examples 3.1, the 22-year-old critic explains soberly:

[N]othing becomes more damaging and restrictive for a composer over time than a
melodic habit which is often much harder to give up than a moral habit. . . .
[Elisabeth’s cantilena Der Sänger klugen Weisen lauscht’] is indeed impeccable,
but not innovative enough, too habitual, and reminds one of so many routine
composers who believe they have done everything if they bind together the text
before them with appropriate notes. A mediocre opera would still be graced by the
cantabile, in Tannhäuser it is a shadow.”9

7
Heinrich Dorn: “Wenn jemand den Plagiarius Wagner als einen in zärtlicher monumentaler
Besorgnis für Otto Nicolai schwärmenden Kunstgenossen darstellt, so ist das kindisch. Wagner
und Nicolai in einem Atem: ich glaube, Richard lacht sich zu Tode und Otto dreht sich im Grabe.”
(May 2, 1870). Cited in Wilhelm Tappert, Richard Wagner im Spiegel der Kritik (Leipzig:
C. F. W. Siegel, 1915), 66.
8
See, for example, Berlioz’s complaint in an obituary about the monotony of Bellini’s recitative
based on motifs centered on the fifth and sixth scale degrees. See Berlioz, “Notes nécrologiques,”
Les Musiciens et la musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1903), 167–79.
9
“Nichts kann einem Componisten mit der Zeit schädlicher und hemmender werden, als eine
melodische Gewohnheit, indem eine solche wirklich oft schwerer abzulegen ist, als moralische.
Ich will gar nicht von den modernen Italienern reden, deren ganzes Opernwesen eine große
Gewohnheit ist . . . Der Gesang [von Elisabeth] ist durchaus tadellos, aber zu wenig neu, zu
gewöhnlich, und mahnt an so manche routinirte Componisten, die Alles gethan zu haben
glauben, wenn sie den vorliegenden Text mit passenden Noten zusammenbinden. In einer
mittelmäßigen Oper wäre das genannte Cantabile noch eine Zierde, im Tannhäuser ist es ein
Schatten.” Hanslick, “Richard Wagner, und seine neueste Oper Tannhäuser,” Wiener allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung (December 17, 1846); rpt. in Hanslick, HSS I/1: 78–79.
 Wagner in the melodic workshop 133

Example 3.1 Eduard Hanslick’s illustrations of Wagner’s Manie for rising 6ths
in his review of Tannhäuser (1846).

But as Roman Jakobson argued long ago, all human communication

(whether linguistic–phonological or pitch–timbral) is based on a principle
of common coding, hence “the originality of the [art] work finds itself
restricted by the artistic code which dominates during a given epoch and
in a given society.”10 By renouncing imitative “shadows” completely, and
valuing amorphousness as a first principle for beginning composition, the
danger is that a Wagner figure would begin to undermine the aim of
comprehensible expression when he renounces those very modes of expres-
sion that made a line “melodic” in the first place.
At root, such logic is self-defeating, for it posits an antithesis of expres-
sivity and originality. Eighteen years earlier, Wagner acknowledged the
selfsame antithesis, confessing to Mathilde Wesendonck that, as a young
man, he had grave doubts about his capacity for original expression.
Reflecting on the period in which he premiered Rienzi and Der fliegende
Holländer, his oft-quoted confession invokes a veritably Bloomian anxiety:
I well remember how, when I was about thirty, I used to ask myself whether after all
I had the stuff in me to do really original work. I could still see influence and
imitation in everything of mine, and could only venture an anxious hope that
I might someday develop as a truly original artist.11

Twelve years later, Nietzsche would share (though did not publish)
Wagner’s concern, placing it in a negatively charged context fully four
years before his official “break” with the composer: “None of our great
composers was still such a bad composer as [Wagner] when he was 28 years

10
Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 451; see also “Linguistics and
Communication Theory,” Selected Writings II: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton & Co.,
1971), 570–79.
11
Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, June 9, 1862, Biebrich, in SB 14: 176–77.
134 Wagner in the melodic workshop

old.”12 Beyond the basic autobiographical reading of a young composer

thirsty for success, whose financial privation and professional circumstance
compelled him frequently to make musical arrangements, Wagner’s
“anxious hope” rhymes with his inhibiting fear in 1880 that “the world is
[always] having to be created anew.” (He told Cosima “with splendid high
spirits” in 1878 that he had “‘stolen’ so much from [Liszt’s] symphonic
poems”; but this relaxed confession belies an irremediable condition of
self-awareness.13 Witness Wagner’s continuing magpie practice at this
time in his well-documented borrowing of the opening theme and Holy
Grail March for Parsifal from Liszt’s secular oratorio Die Glocken des
Strassburger Münsters, which he checked against Liszt’s score “to make
sure he has not committed a plagiarism,” and which Liszt re-incorporated
into a poetic benediction for his late son-in-law: Am Grabe Richard
Wagners.14) It seems that even later in his life, such fatalism appears
inevitable, reinscribing a psychology in which every attempt to find a
substitute for the “original” melody, theme, or expression pivots uncom-
fortably between a benign displacement – a melody among “friends” – and
yet only another culpable trespass.

Plagiarism and originality

To be sure, Wagner’s insecurity over melodic originality was fueled in part by

a new legal milieu. For almost two decades before his birth, under

12
Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard
T. Gray (Stanford University Press, 2000), 346. In a study of the shifting relationship between
Nietzsche and Wagner, Dieter Borchmeyer argues that “the ‘break’ with Wagner was hardly so
rigorous as it has long been represented,” in Borchmeyer, “Critique as Passion and Polemic:
Nietzsche and Wagner,” The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas Grey (Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 192–202, here 192.
13
CT (August 27, 1878).
14
CT (December 27, 1877). Liszt’s inscription on his manuscript for Am Grabe Richard Wagners
(1883) reads: “Wagner once reminded me of the similarity between his Parsifal motifs and my
earlier composition – ‘Excelsior’ – (Introduction to the Bells of Strasbourg). May these
remembrances live on here. He achieved the great and the sublime art of the present.” [“Wagner
erinnerte mich einst an die Ähnlichkeit seines Parsifal Motivs mit meinem früher
geschriebenen – ‘Excelsior’ – (Einleitung zu den Glocken von Strassburg). Möge diese Erinnerung
hiermit verbleiben. Er hat das Grosse und Hehre in der Kunst der Jetzt-zeit vollbracht.“] The
quotation by Wagner of “Excelsior” was first pointed out in print by Hans Redlich, Parsifal
(London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1951), and the “re-quotation” by Liszt in his late piano works
began to receive attention in 1953 from Arthur Marget. See Marget, “Liszt and Parsifal,” Music
Review 14 (1953), 107–24. The most recent assessment of mutual borrowing between Liszt and
Wagner is Kenneth Hamilton, “Wagner and Liszt: Elective Affinities,” in Wagner and his World,
44–54.
 Plagiarism and originality 135

the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten of 1794 (ALR), plagia-
rism had in principle been a form of property theft, and protected publishers’
(rather than authors’) rights, including specifically the reprinting of “musical
compostions.”15 An unsuccessful claim brought by Adolph Martin
Schlesinger against the Viennese publisher of a piano arrangement of Der
Freischütz being sold in Berlin during 1822 illustrates that, under the ALR,
reprinting referred to specific arrangements and not an abstract musical
work. E. T. A. Hoffmann – a trained lawyer and Prussian civil servant – served
as an expert witness on this point, arguing that “it is impossible to extract
musical compositions in the same way as can be done with books. The reprint
of a composition would only occur where an original is ‘re-engraved’ [nachge-
stochen] and reprinted identically with the original.”16 But on July 11, 1837 –
shortly after Wagner turned twenty four – laws specifically pertaining to
copyright (Urhebergesetz) were first passed in Berlin to protect citizens
against theft of intellectual property, including music in the sense of abstract
works, thereby making imitation-bordering-on-plagiarism a potentially
criminal as well as an ethical matter.17 The 1837 Act gave Prussia the most
modern legal protection of the age for intellectual property. Regarding
musical arrangements, it dictated:

It is regarded as an infringement if somebody publishes an excerpt, any instrumental

arrangements, or other adaptations which cannot be considered as an original
composition.18

15
See ALR, part 1, no. 11, § 997. The Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten became law
on February 5, 1794. The entire legal document is reproduced at www.smixx.de/ra/Links_F-R/
PrALR/pralr.html. For a study of the legal and political apparatus during the first half of the
nineteenth century in Germany see Reinhart Koselleck’s classic study, Preußen zwischen Reform
und Revolution. Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848
(Stuttgart: Klett, 1967).
16
See Friedemann Kawohl, “Music Copyright and the Prussian Copyright Act of 1837,”
Nineteenth-Century Music. Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, ed.
Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 269.
17
This was the Gesetzt zum Schutz der Wissenschaft und Kunst gegen Nachdruck und
Nachbildung. An account of the details is given in Elmar Wadle, “Das preußische
Urheberrechtgesetz von 1837 im Spiegel seiner Vorgeschichte,” in Woher kommt das
Urheberrecht und wohin geht es?, ed. Robert Dittrich (Vienna: Manz, 1988), 55–98. The wider
context is given in Friedemann Kawohl’s study, Urheberrecht der Musik in Preussen
(1820–1840) (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2002).
18
§ 20. “Einem verbotenen Nachdruck ist gleich zu achten, wenn Jemand von musikalischen
Kompositionen Auszüge, Arrangements für einzelne Instrumente, oder sonstige
Bearbeitungen, die nicht als eigenthümliche Kompositionen betrachtet werden können, ohne
Genehmigung des Verfassers herausgiebt.” The complete text of the 1837 Act is given in Elmar
Wadle, “Das preußische Urheberrechtgesetz von 1837 im Spiegel seiner Vorgeschichte,”
55–98. This translation is taken from Kawohl, “Music Copyright and the Prussian Copyright
Act of 1837,” 284.
136 Wagner in the melodic workshop

In addition to overt borrowing, the Paulskirchenverfassung or constitution

of fundamental rights from the Frankfurt assembly in 1849 would refer
directly to the protection of artistic works against imitation.19
The point at which legitimate stylistic imitation becomes illegal copying
was not subject to uniform principles, however.20 On the one hand, Paul
Daude, surveying the legal territory of intellectual property in 1888,
confirmed that “the labor of a composer does not need to consist in the
production of new material, but can also express itself in the artistic
arrangement of already extant musical compositions or in the peculiar use
of foreign melodies in a completely independent manner.”21 In addition to
orchestral and piano arrangements that occupied Wagner during his tenure
at Riga, Magdeburg, and Königsberg, as well as “all manner of instrumental
arrangements” for Maurice Schlesinger in Paris, the individuation of
borrowed melodic material also has direct implications for his more stylis-
tically “imitative,” early scores.22 Daude’s viewpoint might have mollified
Wagner’s fears, as he continues that any judgment as to whether such
an arrangement or individuation constitutes “independent usage” of the
material must be left to the judicial assessment of individual cases, but

19
Article VII, § 40 of the Paulskirchenverfassung stated: “State power also exclusively legislates
against the reprinting of books, every unauthorized imitation of art works, factory signs, models
and forms, and against other infringements of intellectual property.” [“auch steht der
Reichsgewalt ausschließlich die Gesetzgebung gegen den Nachdruck von Büchern, jedes
unbefugte Nachahmen von Kunstwerken, Fabrikzeichen, Mustern und Formen und gegen
andere Beeinträchtigungen des geistigen Eigenthums zu.”] Cited in E. R. Huber (ed.), Dokumente
zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, “Deutsche Verfassungsdokumente 1803–1850,” 3rd edn.
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978), 377.
20
The Staatsvertrag zwischen Hannover und Großbritannien of August 4, 1847 indicates simply
that such questions: “shall be decided in all cases through the courts of justice in the respective
states according to their extant laws.” [“Die Frage, ob ein Werk als Nachahmung oder als
unerlaubte Vervielfältigung zu betrachten ist, soll in allen Fällen durch die Gerichtshöfe der
respektiven Staaten nach deren bestehenden Gesetzen entschieden werden.”] This is reproduced
in Paul Daude, Lehrbuch des Deutschen litterarischen, künstlerischen und gewerblichen
Urheberrechts (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1888), 184.
21
“Im übrigen braucht auch das Schaffen des Komponisten nicht notwendig in der Produktion
eines neuen Stoffes zu bestehen, sondern kann sich auch in der künstlerischen Verarbeitung
bereits vorhandener musikalischer Kompositionen oder in der eigentümlichen Benutzung
fremder Melodien auf eine vollkommen selbständige Weise äußern.” Daude, Lehrbuch, 81.
22
Wagner notes with disdain in his autobiographical sketch from 1842 that: “now I found myself
forced to renounce all creative activity for some time while I had to produce for Schlesinger all
manner of instrumental arrangements, including even some for the cornet à pistons. This
work provided some slight amelioration of my circumstances. Thus I subsisted through the
winter of 1841 in a most inglorious manner.” See Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze,”
Zeitung für die elegante Welt (February 1–8, 1843). Translation adapted from Thomas Grey,
“Richard Wagner: Autobiographical Sketch (to 1842),” The Wagner Journal 2 (2008), 42–58,
here 58.
 Plagiarism and originality 137

reminds readers that “the law itself . . . does not forbid the use of a foreign
composition out of hand.”23
On the other hand, it seems that one reason for Wagner’s sustained anxiety
over original melodic composition was that, by the early 1830s, melody was
recognized in Germany as the main protectable “object” of a musical work.
A Leipzig publisher’s agreement on May 12, 183124 – an Erweiterungsakte to
the Saxon Erläuterungsmandat which itself had expanded on the so-called
Konventionalakte (May 23, 1829) – penned by Heinrich Dorn stipulated that:
Melody will be recognized as the exclusive property of the publisher, and every arrange-
ment that reproduces the composer’s notes and is only based on mechanical work-
manship should be seen as a reprint and be subject . . . to a fine of 50 Louis d’or.25

In England, similarly, a judgment from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst,

in the case of D’Almaire vs. Boosey (1835) specified that “it is the air or
melody which is the invention of the author, and which may in such cases be
the subject of piracy.”26 Wagner was well aware of such legal battles. In a
haughty complaint about them – written for Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift –
he gave a witty account of a lawsuit between publishers, Troupenas and
Schlesinger, over the rights to Rossini’s Stabat Mater, closing:
That dreadful word: copyright – growls through the scarce pacified breezes. Lawsuit!
Lawsuit! Once more, lawsuit! And money is fetched out to pay the best of lawyers, to
have documents produced, to enter caveats. Oh, you foolish people, have you lost your
love of gold? I know someone who, for five francs, will compose five waltzes for you,
each of which is better than the wealthy master’s [Rossini] miserable specimens!27

Rossini-envy aside, Wagner’s ridicule of court action in 1841 was grounded

on the fact that the legal arguments had nothing to do with the composers

23
“Ob eine solche künstlerische Verarbeitung oder selbständige Benutzung vorliegt, muß der
richterlichen Beurteilung des einzelnen Falles überlassen bleiben, soweit nicht das Gesetz
selbst . . . die Benutzung einer fremden Komposition überhaupt verboten hat.” Daude, Lehrbuch
des Deutschen litterarischen, künstlerischen und gewerblichen Urheberrechts, 81.
24
The publishers who signed were all from the larger houses, indicating that this was a powerful
business agreement: Friedrich Hofmeister, Wilhelm Härtel (Breitkopf & Härtel), H. A. Probst,
H. Simrock, C. H. Hartmann (Wolfenbüttel), C. C. Lose, G. M. Meyer (Brunswick), Schuberth &
Niemeyer, Cosmar & Krause, Friedrich Laue, Friedrich Ph. Dunst, Schott Söhne.
25
“§ 5. Die Melodie wird als ausschließliches Eigenthum des Verlegers anerkannt und jedes
Arrangement, daß die Töne des Componisten wiedergibt und nur auf mechanischer
Verarbeitung beruht, soll als Nachdruck angesehen und der Strafe von 50 Louis d’or . . .
unterworfen sein.” The full text of this Act is reproduced in Friedemann Kawohl, “Die
Erweiterungsakte,” in Urheberrecht der Musik in Preussen, 239–41. Emphasis added.
26
Cited in W. A. Copinger, The Law of Copyright in Works of Literature and Art (London: Stevens
and Haynes, 1870), 159. Emphasis added.
27
SSD 1: 193. Cf. PW 7: 149.
138 Wagner in the melodic workshop

who actually created the melodies, and monies paid benefitted dispropor-
tionately an elite commercial circle (which excluded him).
But there was also a more ideological objection to the new legislation.
Wagner may well have become familiar with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s
leftist manifesto What is Property? (1840) while based in Paris
(1839–42);28 Proudhon, whom Wagner later credited as the only man in
France to know “that we are human,”29 famously argued that all property is
“theft” and should be abolished, that (compositional) talent is the product of
“universal intelligence” and accumulated knowledge across generations,
meaning that, in reality, artists and poets “do not labour for themselves
but for society, which creates them.”30 Nobody has the right to own the
means of (melodic) production, in other words. The argument is bolstered
by witty rhetoric: “Should the vase say to the potter, ‘I am what I am, and I
owe nothing to you’?” and leads Proudhon to conclude that: “all capital,
whether material or mental, is the result of collective labour and so is
collective property.”31 Wagner was drawn to such egalitarian logic. He
would identify Proudhon’s ideas with the Nibelungen hoard at the end of
his 1848 scenario Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Saga, and with his
negational supplement to “Thou shalt not steal” in Jesus von Nazareth;32
and of course, Proudhon’s marked influence on Wagner’s subsequent
revolutionary texts is not in question.33 Yet the contrast between a utopia
of common ownership – that must include melody – and Wagner’s penny-
counting correspondence at the time with his publisher Schlesinger is
glaring.34 It seems Wagner remained pragmatic while dreaming of the
abolition of debt: whether monetary or artistic.35

28
Speculation on this point comes from Mitchell Cohen, “To the Dresden barricades: the
genesis of Wagner’s political ideas,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, 51–52; and
Barry Millington, Wagner (London: Dent, 1992), 26.
29
Wagner to Ernst Benedikt Kietz, December 30, 1851, Zurich, in Letters of Richard Wagner.
The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (London: Gollancz, 1951), 258.
30
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, ed. and trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie
G. Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111.
31
Ibid., 111, 114. Emphasis added.
32
SSD 2: 152–55. Cf PW 7: 295–98. After condoning the commandment “du sollst nicht
stehlen,” Wagner continues: “but . . . do not store up treasures for yourself, whereby you steal
from your neighbor and cause him to starve.” SSD 11: 290–91. Cf. PW 8: 303–04.
33
See Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 133fn, and Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing
Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s Ring (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 38ff.
34
See especially the itemized billing and advances of Wagner to Schlesinger, April 27, 1841,
Paris, in SB 1: 478–80.
35
Unsurprisingly, this attitude to debt was set out explicitly by Proundhon: “A peasant
admitted one day at confession that he had destroyed a document by which he admitted
being a debtor to the amout of 300 francs. / Said his confessor, ‘You must return these
 Plagiarism and originality 139

While the legal injunctions mentioned earlier sought to prevent publish-

ers from stealing each others’ wares, a debate in the Berlin press mere
months before Wagner’s courtroom sarcasm about Rossini specifically
addressed authorial rights concerning melody, and sheds light on contem-
porary attitudes to musical originality at the time that Wagner was engaged
with his closest imitation of Bellini’s Norma, as we shall see. The inter-
locutors were Karl Gaillard, a 30-year-old poet and dramatist, who
would found and edit the Berliner Musikalische Zeitung (1844–47), and
Friedrich Hofmeister, a 59-year-old Leipzig publisher who, in 1829, had
established the association of German music publishers (Verein der deut-
schen Musikalienhändler).36 Whereas Hofmeister, concerned about print-
ing rearrangements, argued that these “require[ed] mere mechanical
skills”37 to alter an original, and asserted that offending publishers would
be sued only if the name of the composer is used to advertise the borrowed
melodic material, Gaillard argued for a more essentialist conception of
original melody, and retorted eloquently:
As Shakespeare put it: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any name
would smell as sweet.” So it seems to me that it is not only a matter of justice but also
of duty that an artist who borrows from another has to quote his source. If he does
not, he is robbing him of his most noble richness.38

Commercially, Breitkopf would later force Wagner to realize that he did

not even own his own “name” in this sense,39 but ethically, Gaillard’s
300 francs.’ ‘No,’ replied the peasant, ‘I will return two pennies to pay for the paper.’” Even if the
dreamt-of utopia never came to pass, such anecdotes would seem to have characterized Wagner’s
view of artistic borrowing at the time as well as, more obviously, his oft-cited financial
irresponsibility. See Proudhon, What is Property?, 83–84.
36
See Max Schumann, Zur Geschichte des deutschen Musikalienbuchhandels seit der Gründung des
Vereins der deutschen Musikalienhändler 1829–1929 (Leipzig: Verband der Deutschen
Musikalienhändler, 1929), 15ff.
37
Cited in Kawohl, “Music Copyright and the Prussian Copyright Act of 1837,” 291.
38
“Shakespeare dagegen: ‘Was ist ein Name? Was uns Rose heißt, wie es auch heiße, würde
lieblich duften.’ So will es mir denn auch scheinen, daß es nicht nur ein Act der Gerechtigkeit,
sondern einer der Pflicht ist, daß der Künstler, der etwas von einem andern entlehnt, auch seine
Quelle angiebt, denn sonst betrügt er diesen um seinem edelsten Reichtum.” Karl Gaillard,
“Über das Eigenthum an einer musikalischen Composition,” Allgemeine Press-Zeitung 80 (1841),
757. In his study of copyright, Kawohl summarizes the exchange as “a shift of the work’s essential
factors from ‘melody plus author’s name’ to ‘melody plus form.’” See Kawohl, “Music
Copyright and the Prussian Copyright Act of 1837,” 294.
39
The publishing house reissued Wagner’s 1831 piano sonata in B-flat major (WWV 21) in 1862
without consulting the composer, later citing public demand as the reason. Curiosity had been
aroused over the composer of the sonata after Selmar Bagge, editor of Vienna’s weekly
Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, had published the opening of the Minuet and Trio on February 1,
1862 without naming the composer, but instead challenging readers to name the contemporary
composer to whom it belonged. A week after Bagge’s challenge, entitled “Rätsel,” he revealed
140 Wagner in the melodic workshop

point that melodic form itself is a “most noble” authorial property

rapidly gained ground, and by 1847, concerns about a veritable
Reminiscenzenjägerei began circulating in the largest papers.40 In 1855,
the Berlin Musik-Zeitung Echo complained that now every kind of
melodic reminiscence is regarded as thievery, that “one sometimes
hunts with raging fury for any melodic similarity which finds its way
more or less unconsciously with new composers into their works from
those of predecessors.”41 The resulting mania for uncovering illicit bor-
rowing makes it far harder for young composers to actually create, the
article continues, discouraging, exhausting, and suffocating them as they
“wriggle between the search for novelty and the fear of getting into a fight
with an already very famous maestro over the [musical] expression, and
thus in the most characterless way continually end up writing the most
knotty, most ridiculous leaps in order to get away with it, to get over all
obstacles of reminiscence.”42 Wagner’s ascription of the “fear of having
perhaps stolen [melodies] from someone else” was thus part of a wider
discourse protesting at a detrimental situation whereby the idealist belief
in original invention fuels a legalistic awareness of property ownership,
inserting composers such as Sgambati – and no doubt Wagner too – into a
minefield of potential infringements. (A genre of literary plagiarism even
became a vehicle for character assassination when mid-nineteenth-
century Irish writers such as William Maginn and Francis Mahony –
cited in the epigraph above – produced works artfully modeled on some

the answer, no doubt to the great surprise of his readers. The episode coincides with Wagner’s
preparation in Vienna for the planned premiere of Tristan und Isolde, and seems clearly to
have been intended to damage the composer’s reputation. Wagner would surely not have given
permission for the reprint, describing the sonata as “scanty work” [dürftiges Werk] and the
republication without his permission as an “indiscretion” [Indiskretion]. A full account is given
in WWV 83; see also Egon Voss, Richard Wagner und die Instrumentalmusik. Wagners
symphonischer Ehrgeiz (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1977), 20–22.
40
See “Über Reminiscenzenjägerei,” AmZ 49 (1847), 561–66; L. A. Zellner, “Über Plagiat,” Blätter
für Musik, Theater und Kunst 1 (November 27, 1855).
41
“man [macht Jagd] . . . zum Theil mit wahrer Wuth . . . auf jegliche melodische Aehnlichkeit,
welche sich bei neuen Componisten, mehr oder weniger unbewußt, in ihren Werken mit denen
ihrer Vorgänger vorfindet,” in “Über Plagiate und Reminiscenzen,” Berlin Musik-Zeitung Echo 7
(February 18, 1855), 49.
42
Here I quote the phrases in full from which I part paraphrased and part quoted in the main text:
“Diese vielseitig sanctionirte Reminiscenzenjägerei hat manchem aufkeimenden Talente das
Leben recht schwer gemacht, ja dasselbe wohl ganz entmuthigt, ermattet, erstickt. Oder, was
noch schlimmer, sie hat eine Literatur erzeugt, die nicht süß nicht sauer, nicht warm nicht kalt, in
kläglicher Weise in der Luft herumzappelt zwischen Neuerungssucht und der Angst, in die
Wendungen irgend eines schon zu sehr bekannten Maestro hineinzugerathen, und deshalb in
der charakterlosesten Weise fortwährend die verzwicktesten, lächerlichsten Sprünge macht, um
über alle Reminiscenzenklippen mit heiler Haut hinwegzukommen,” in Ibid., 50.
 Plagiarism and originality 141

literary text by a famous author, which they then claimed audaciously to

be the lost original that the author had plagiarized.43)
While very few prosecutions of composers took place during Wagner’s
lifetime, Christopher Reynolds in his study of musical allusion in this period
states explicitly what was at stake beyond a jail term and a shared pitch
content:
Notions of creativity, inspiration, and originality; the constraints of tradition and
innovation; musical listening and the audience for allusion; the relationship
between criticism and composition; and musical symbolism.44

What Reynolds leaves out – because it is not strictly part of allusional practice –
is pedagogy. Categories of borrowing and learning overlap in the modeling of
compositions when the later work is intended for professional performance
and publication. A legal distinction between what could be called “artistic” and
“didactic” borrowing – allusion that is elective, incidental as opposed to
instructive, structural – did not exist, and as the contemporary critic
Wilhelm Tappert observed in his pioneering study of melodic borrowing,
Wandernde Melodien (1868): “there are no music police who ask for birth
certificates and certificates of conduct!”45 On occasion, press skirmishes did
debate melodic ownership publicly, however, illustrating that although the
boundaries of musical allusion, quotation, and plagiarism may be decidedly
fuzzy (for the salient varia Reynolds lists), such acts of borrowing remained an
acknowledged fact.46 “Melodies roam,” Tappert exclaims, “They are the most
tireless tourists on earth! They cross raging rivers, pass the Alpine mountains,
emerge beyond the ocean, and nomadize in the desert.”47 Example 3.2, taken

43
See Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2003), 240ff.
44
Christopher Reynolds, Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), xi.
45
“Es giebt ja keine musikalische Polizei, welche nach Geburtsschein und Führungsattest früge!”
Wilhalm Tappert, Wandernde Melodien: eine musikalische Studie [1868], 2nd edn. (Berlin:
Brachvogel & Ranft, 1889), 5.
46
One such instance is a letter from J. B. Sale (an English organist at St. Margaret’s, Westminster)
to the editor of The Musical World in which he denies having borrowed from a melody of
J. Dair for his duet The Butterfly, stating flatly: “I never was aware, until the present moment, of
the existence of Mr. Dair’s Song . . . The Butterfly, such as it is, is my own unassisted
production.” See “Correspondence: Mr. J. B. Sale, and Mr. J. Dare,” TMW 15 (February 18,
1841), 105.
47
“Die Melodien wandern, sie sind die unermüdlichsten Touristen der Erde! Sie überschreiten
die rauschenden Ströme, passiren die Alpen, tauchen jenseits des Oceans auf und nomadisiren in
der Wüste.” Tappert, Wandernde Melodien, 5.
There is a vast literature on musical borrowing and influence expressed in the form of quotation,
allusion or other traceable incorporation of a certain musical material from one composer’s work
into another’s. For an overview, see the extensive bibliography maintained by Peter Burkholder at
142 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.2 Wilhelm Tappert’s illustrations of Wagner’s melodic borrowing

in Wandernde Melodien: eine musikalische Studie (1868).

from Tappert’s study, illustrates the kind of shared linear contour and
harmonic kinship that he believed constituted melodic borrowing.
As we have seen, suspicions of plagiarism clung to Wagner in less
charitable criticism. But pragmatism led the debate in a different direction.
J. C. Lobe suggested publicly that blatant melodic commonalities between
Tannhäuser and Meyerbeer’s Robert were real, but unwitting musical
adoptions. “Do not think I want to indict Wagner as a deliberate plagiarist,”
he cautions diplomatically. “That would be more than ridiculous, it would
be slanderous. Less injustice would be done were one to think: Meyerbeer’s
phrase emerged from Wagner’s quill unconsciously through memory while
he worked, and he regarded it as his own invention.”48 But legalistic rhetoric
aside, the argument finally reaches the nub of the issue in Lobe’s next letter,
which states that “no single measure [in anything] is absolutely new.”49 The
implications of this were equally injurious to a composer’s reputation (by
contradicting the legal and idealist criterion of originality), and as Tappert’s
single use of the word Plagiat indicates, musical “rights” remained a thor-
oughly ambiguous issue in professional criticism.50 Acknowledging the

Indiana University: www.chmtl.indiana.edu/borrowing/. For nineteenth-century borrowing in

particular, see Reynolds, Motives for Allusion; Charles Rosen, “Influence: Plagiarism and
Inspiration,” 19th-Century Music 4 (1980), 87–100; Kevin Korsyn, “Towards a New Poetics of
Musical Influence,” Musical Analysis 10 (1991), 3–72; Raymond Knapp, “Brahms and the Anxiety
of Allusion,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1998), 1–30; Paul Thissen, Zitattechniken in der
Symphonik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Sinzig: Studio, 1998); W. C. Petty, “Chopin and the Ghost of
Beethoven,” 19th-Century Music 22 (1998), 281–99.
48
See “Letters to a Young Composer about Richard Wagner” in Wagner and his World, 280.
49
Ibid., 283.
50
Speaking of Lucien Grison’s oratorio Esther, Tappert explains: “The opening is formed in such a
way that one could even (and with much greater justification!) speak of [Grison] having
committed plagiarism from Mozart’s Zauberflöte.” [“Der Anfang ist so gestaltet, dass man auch
 Plagiarism and originality 143

truism that melodic originality remained endlessly discoverable and debat-

able, Lobe publicly cast absolute originality as a false idol; it seems the case of
Wagner was merely the means by which this Kantian myth could best be
exploded. Suffice to conclude that while Wagner’s self-consciousness about
melodic invention stemmed primarily from his belief in the prestige of
idealism, it must also be seen against a background of the juristic principles
of material property ownership as they expanded into the sphere of intel-
lectual property.
Given this context, we may suspect that Wagner’s insistence in the Zurich
essays on the historical unprecedentedness – i.e. total originality – of his music
is an exaggeration that conceals an insecurity.51 Human credulity is elastic, but
not endless. The disbelief inspired by Wagner’s claim received a certain
historiographic reinforcement when his early operas re-emerged after his
death. Carl Dahlhaus’ assessment of them as mere “Kapellmeistermusik,” i.e.
the product of a parasitic musical mind, able to imitate styles and construct
forms, but otherwise devoid of original creativity, essentially reworded
Hanslick’s withering critique of Die Feen from 1888, after Franz Fischer had
directed a popular performance of the opera in Munich on June 29 of that year:
The Fairies is a caricatured imitation of Weber . . . Not one strong original thought,
not one alluring melody, not one note emerging from the bottom of the heart
interrupts the monotony of this factory work. One could ascribe this work less to an
as-yet-unskilled young genius, and much more to a run-of-the-mill old
Capellmeister, to whose mind nothing occurs anymore.”52

(Wagner remarks blithely in Mein Leben that the same label –

Kapellmeisteroper – was applied to Der fliegende Holländer by the managers
of the Berlin Court Theater in 1844; and of course he himself devalued his

(und zwar mit viel grösserem Rechte!) von einem Plagiat, an Mozart’s Zauberflöte begangen,
reden könnte”], Wandernde Melodien, 61.
51
Lobe disputed Wagner’s claims as early as 1854. He criticized the Zurich essays for their bluster
about the historically unprecedented nature of Wagner’s music, scoffing that the composer
“appears to be congenitally blessed in the highest degree with the belief that he is absolutely
original, that he creates everything purely from his spirit.” [“Wagner glaubt er sei durchaus
original, schöpfe alles rein nur aus seinem Geiste, schon von Haus aus in hohem Grade gesegnet
zu sein scheint.”] Lobe, “Briefe über Rich. Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten. Fünfter Brief,”
FBfM 1 (1854), 427.
52
“Die Feen sind eine carikirte Nachahmung Webers . . . Nicht ein starker origineller Gedanke,
nicht eine reizvolle Melodie, nicht ein aus dem Herzensgrund aufquillender Ton unterbricht das
Einerlei dieser musikalischen Fabriksarbeit . . . Man könnte diese Musik weniger einem noch
ungeschickten jungen Genie zuschreiben, als vielmehr einem routinierten alten Capellmeister,
dem nichts mehr einfällt.” Hanslick, Musikalische und Litterarisches. Kritiken und Schilderungen,
2nd edn. (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Litteratur, 1889), 54.
144 Wagner in the melodic workshop

early works in later years, remarking “how bad” Das Liebesverbot was: “[w]hat
phases one goes through! It is hard to believe it is the same person.”53)
But Hanslick’s view is less a verdict on the young Wagner than a
validation of the later criticisms of his mature output. In other words, it is
not that the early works are inexplicable in relation to the later works, but
that “the criticism of the mature Wagner receives its confirmation through
the early Wagner,” as Ludwig Holtmeier put it.54 The comments about
melodic habits in Hanslick’s 1846 review of Tannhäuser indicate that the
seeds of this criticism were sown early on, and that the Viennese critic
sowed them even under the best of circumstances.

Shadowing Bellini: Wagner’s armature

Given that some critics heard Wagner’s works as aesthetically barren as early as
1844, it would surely not be specious to draw parallels with the critiques of
melodic training we encountered in Chapter 2. Recall how, on the way to his
fully fledged pedagogy of melodic expression that same year, Lobe admitted
that certain products of the training are “still worth nothing in terms of
aesthetics.”55 At the risk of an overly schematic perspective, might this apply
to Wagner’s Kapellmeistermusik? To what extent did Wagner’s “apprentice-
ship”56 – as Thomas Grey recently dubbed the period from 1833 to 1840 – in
fact follow a clear pedagogical methodology that would later be codified in
Lobe’s Compositions-Lehre?57 If we accept that such a view brings together the
pedagogical approach of analytical, model-based compositional practice with
Wagner’s acknowledged tendency towards imitation during this period, this
would lead us to reassess aspects of his pre-1849 melodies.

53
ML 263; and CT 2: 263 (February 1, 1879).
54
“[D]ie Kritik des reifen Wagner erfährt durch das Frühwerk Bestätigung.” Ludwig Holtmeier,
“Von den Feen zum Liebesverbot,” in Richard Wagner und seine Zeit, ed. Eckehard Keim and
Ludwig Holtmeier (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), 34.
55
“In ästhetischer Hinsicht ist sie [eine aus eigen erfundenen Motiven nachgebildete und
ausgesponnene Melodie] noch nichts werth.” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 38.
56
Thomas Grey, “Meister Richard’s Apprenticeship: The Early Operas (1833–1840),” in The
Cambridge Companion to Wagner, 18–46. See also Cooke, “Wagner’s Operatic Apprenticeship,”
The Musical Times 106 (1965), 103–05.
57
See also Nicholas Baragwanath’s detailed study of the interwoven practices of vocal pedagogy
and compositional training in nineteenth-century Italy, which provides a complementary
instance wherein compositional method cannot meaningfully be extracted from its context of
performance practice and training in music theory. See Baragwanath, The Italian Traditions and
Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2011), esp. 256–312.
 Shadowing Bellini: Wagner’s armature 145

So what, or who, did Wagner imitate? “How little we are really convinced by
our pack of [German] rules and prejudices!” he chided his fellow countrymen:
Let us drop for once the jest, let us spare ourselves for once the sermon, and ponder
what it was that so enchanted us; we then find, especially with Bellini, that it was the
limpid melody, the simple, noble, beauteous Song . . . Song, song, and a third time
Song, ye Germans! For Song is once and for all the speech in which man should
musically express himself.58

It was between 1834 and 1839 – the period in which he radicalized his pro-
Italian position – that Wagner’s public engagement with Bellini’s operas
reached its height: he first conducted I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La straniera,
Norma, and I puritani between 1834 and 1836, including no fewer than six
performances of Norma in Bad Lauchstädt, Rudolstadt, and Magdeburg;59
in 1837–38, he directed eight performances of the opera in Riga, and even
selected it for his first benefit concert there as musical director of the theater
(December 11, 1837),60 for which he adjusted the wind parts to suit the
smaller forces available to him.61 Though Wagner’s appointment in the
German-colonized Latvian town would be short-lived, it had promised to
keep his spiralling debt at bay and allow his wife, Minna, to return after she
had left him for her parents (he was to receive all proceeds from the event).62
It was correspondingly important – personally and professionally – that his
initial performance of Norma was well received, and in seeking to draw an
audience, Wagner’s notice in the Neue freie Presse alluded principally to the
power of melody: “Of all Bellini’s creations [Norma is] the richest in the
profoundly realistic way in which true melody is united with intimate

58
SSD 12: 20. Cf. PW 8: 67–68.
59
A complete list of Wagner’s operatic repertory in the 1830s is given in The Wagner
Compendium, ed. Barry Millington (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 69.
60
See Egon Voss, “Wagner und Rossini,” ‘Wagner und kein Ende’: Betrachtungen und Studien
(Zurich: Atlantis, 1996), 359–76.
61
The resulting orchestral retouchings are listed as WWV 46A, but are not contained in the New
Wagner Edition because “Wagner’s alterations to Bellini’s score are too slight to justify printing
the musical score.” Furthermore, Egon Voss explains that Wagner based his arrangement not on
Bellini’s original score, but on “a version which differs from it, particularly as regards the
orchestration, and that is probably an arrangement by somebody else.” Further information on
this source is not forthcoming, though the full score with Wagner’s handwritten alterations is
housed in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. See SW 20: viii.
62
Natalie Planer, who believed she was Minna’s sister, remembers from 1894 how Wagner “made
Minna’s life a veritable hell through his unjust, immoderate and violent jealousy . . . Minna could
stand it no longer. And so . . . on the last day of May or June 1837 . . . she left Königsberg with me . . .
not stopping till she was back with our parents.” See Wagner Remembered, ed. Stewart Spencer
(London: Faber, 2000), 22–23. Wagner’s correspondence reveals the role that financial circumstances
played in this. See especially Wagner to Minna, June 20, 1837, Berlin, in SB 1: 331.
146 Wagner in the melodic workshop

passion.”63 It was a failsafe play to popular taste, but remained true to his
own deep-seated musical interests at the time.64
It was on the basis of such close engagement with Italianate musical
grammar that Holtmeier muses: “[p]erhaps in the Wagner biography,
Bellini approaches the role that Vivaldi played in Johann Sebastian Bach’s
life.”65 While Bach’s numerous concerto transcriptions tip the numerical
balance of such a relationship heavily in favor of the baroque pair, Wagner’s
single recomposition of a Bellini aria from 1839 – “Norma il predisse, o
Druidi” – nevertheless provides a lens through which to focus his quasi-
Oedipal engagement with one of the nineteenth century’s most famed
Italian melodists. With Lobe’s Compositions-Lehre in the background,
then, there is good reason to consider the view that, as with the privately
didactic partnerships peppered throughout music history, Wagner’s
borrowings functioned partly as a pedagogical tool. Equally, Wagner was
expressly imitating Bellini as a model (and insertion arias rarely matched
their surroundings in this way);66 over and above any pedagogical purpose,
he nevertheless intended the work to be performed in Paris, resulting in a
complex claim to its originality and his own creative agency.
But before examining Wagner’s Italian aria it will be helpful first to
consider the changing status of artistic imitation alongside what, for
Wagner, became a nodal point in the debate over originality: borrowed
poetry. The eighteenth-century heritage of mimesis – epitomized in
Winckelmann’s 1755 prediction that “the only way for us to become great,
and indeed (if this is possible) inimitable, is by imitating the ancients”67 –
represented a weighty historical double bind because it prevented a modern

63
“Norma, tra le creazioni di Bellini, è quella che è più ricca di vera melodia unita, con profondo
realismo, all passione intima.” Quoted in Giampiero Tintori, Bellini (Milan Rusconi, 1983), 176.
64
It was also to inspire interest in this performance that Wagner wrote his essay on “Bellini, a
word about his time,” which appeared in Riga’s main newspaper, Der Zuschauer, mere days before
the performance. See “Bellini: Ein Wort zu seiner Zeit,” Der Zuschauer (December 7, 1837),
reprinted Dichtungen und Schriften, 10 vols., ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel,
1983), 5: 25–27.
65
“Vielleicht kommt Bellini in der Wagnerschen Biographie die Rolle zu, die Vivaldi in Johann
Sebastian Bachs Leben gespielt hat.” Ludwig Holtmeier, “Von den Feen zum Liebesverbot”, 59.
66
To cite one example, John Ebers, manager of the King’s Theatre in London 1820–27,
explained: “Let a new opera be intended to be brought forward. Signor This will not sing his part,
because it is not prominent enough; so to enrich it, a gathering must be made of airs from other
operas, no matter whether by the same composer or not, nor whether there be any congruity
between the style of the original piece and the adventitious passages introduced.” See Ebers,
Seven Years of the King’s Theatre (London: Cary, Lea & Carey, 1828), 82–83.
67
This statement from Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke is given in German
Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 33.
 Shadowing Bellini: Wagner’s armature 147

worldview from being free from restrictive self-identification with a different

culture. Thirty-five years after this staunch Philhellenism, and in the context
of a long and complex debate, the Kantian position where “everyone is agreed
on the point of complete opposition between [original] genius and the spirit
of imitation” marks a significant delegitimization of mimesis in the sphere
of German idealism.68 Imitation appears as a negative absolute in Kant’s
value-laden categories, and, of course, informs most readings of Wagner’s
early stylistic dependency.
On closer inspection, however, we see that Kant’s position is not absolute.
His statement is incomplete because he later insists that works of genius must
be received as models which awaken the younger genius “to a feeling of his
own originality.”69 Such a reading of this passage is based on Kant’s distinction
between “original sense” and “original nonsense,” where the former establishes
a new sense or rule for art that others can follow, while the latter, remaining
inherently incomprehensible, makes no such sense, creates no such rule and
cannot therefore be imitated despite being original. Kant is clear: “Since there
may also be original nonsense, [works of genius] must at the same time be
models, i.e. be exemplary.”70 Was the possibility of “original nonsense” in this
specific sense of not being received as an exemplary work, was this the cause of
Wagner’s fear that “the world is [always] having to be created anew”? If so,
Sgambati’s self-conscious melodicizing would count as nonsensical, and the
legitimacy of working with (melodic) models is revealed as basic to Wagner’s
compositional Weltanschauung, for the matrix just outlined situates his artistic
endeavors in a reflexive discourse on invention that is self-aware of creating its
own “original sense.” As we saw in Chapter 2, musical genius was no longer
defined exclusively by an aristocracy of natural talent, but by studiously
cultivated – mechanically inculcated – aptitude, after Lobe, who continued
to condone the use of stylistic models; thus, within this discourse, “genius” and
“didactic imitation” become two sides of the same coin.
(To an extent, this was also indicative of a shift in the model of the
German genius away from the Kopfkomponist, towards the studious, strug-
gling, refining, revising composer: the Skizzenkomponist. As concerns over

68
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 151.
69
Another term for this would be inspiration, which differs from imitation ethically, in terms of its
motives. “[T]he product of a genius (as regards what is to be ascribed to genius and not to
possible learning or schooling) is an example, not to be imitated (for then that which in it is
genius and constitutes the spirit of the work would be lost) but to be followed by another genius,
whom it awakens to a feeling of his own originality and whom it stirs so to exercise his art in
freedom from the constraint of rules, that thereby a new rule is gained for art; and thus his talent
shows itself to be exemplary.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 162.
70
Ibid., 150.
148 Wagner in the melodic workshop

German melody continued to trickle corrosively over the pages of music

journals, in other words, the Mozartbild was increasingly replaced with the
Beethovenbild. “Many ‘new geniuses’ will think: what a vulgar realistic view
of the procedures of genius!” Lobe parodies, acknowledging that in the old
view, education ought simply to come “like pure revelation.”71 But in 1844,
he drew explicitly on Anton Schindler’s creative biography of Beethoven
[1840] to back up his claim that Germany’s Riesengeist72 thoroughly
revised parts of Fidelio “three or four times.”73 Schumann would make a
similar point about Beethoven’s working habits to a student in 1848, later
encouraging them: “above all, you must strive [suchen] to write new and
beautiful melodies.”74 But overturning the entrenched idol of natural
genius was slow, and Lobe’s treatise was no silver bullet; arguably the
construct was never fully invalidated in the field of modern German
music, and as late as 1947, Thomas Mann’s most famous fictional
composer ambivalently reinscribes the concept: Adrian Leverkühn must
still make a pact at the cost of deadly syphilis for his geniale Zeit.75 Back in
1844, such was the anticipated resistance and need for proof of Beethoven’s
work ethic that Lobe even included an expensive lithograph of his revisions
to the passage “Freude schöner Götterfunken” in the first edition of the
Compositions-Lehre, asking with duplicitous disbelief: “But Beethoven was
certainly a genius, right?”76)

71
“Das Genie ist eben Genie dadurch, dass ihm seine herrlichen Bildung wie reine Offenbarung
kommen.” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 48.
72
Lobe’s pronoun of choice for Beethoven. See Musikalische Briefe, 24.
73
“Drei-, vier-mal hat er ganze Nummern in seinem Fidelio total umgearbeitet.” Lobe,
Compositions-Lehre, 48.
74
For Schumann’s comments about Beethoven as a model for the constantly revising composer see
his letter to Ludwig Meinardus, September 16, 1848. For his comment to Meinardus about
striving hard to achieve his own melodies, see Schumann to Meinardus, December 28, 1853.
Translations are taken from Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 78–79.
75
Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt
von einem Freunde (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1947).
76
“Beethoven war doch wohl ein Genie?” Lobe, Compositions-Lehre, 48. We should remember,
however, that the status of the Ninth Symphony was contested during the 1840s, even by such
eminent composers as Louis Spohr. Lobe’s publication of the Beethoven facsimile in effect forms
part of the pre-history of Beethoven sketch studies, and predates Gustav Nottebohm’s revelatory
article on the composer’s studies (in species counterpoint, figured bass, and fugue) in the AmZ by
some nineteen years. The first of Nottebohm’s volumes on Beethoven’s sketchbooks appeared
only in 1865. Gustav Nottebohm, Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1865). Two years earlier, he had probed Beethoven’s formative studies in: “Beethoven’s
theoretische Studien,” AmZ 41 (October 7, 1863), 685–91.
 Shadowing Bellini: Wagner’s armature 149

Cementing the link between model-based pedagogy and contemporary

melody, Lobe’s 1854 letter on Tonfolge analyzes the arhythmic pitch
sequence from nothing but the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony. His strategy, in short, was to reorient what he saw as misdir-
ected energy and overturn an inhibiting aesthetic belief in the instantaneous
birth of works of “nature.” Against doctrines of natural genius and legal
protectionism, this reflected a broader project to legitimize both creative
struggle as compositional praxis (“the materialist version of subjective
agency”)77 and imitation as compositional method, respectively.
The assault on Kant was blunt. But as late as January 1844, Wagner
articulated his own proudly retrograde genial self-assessment to Karl
Gaillard, the very interlocutor of the legal debate over melodic property in
1841 we met earlier. Following the Berlin production of Der fliegende
Holländer on January 7, 1844, Wagner invoked his own mysteriously instan-
taneous invention thereby aligning himself explicitly with the Kopfkomponist
tradition:
[E]ven before I begin writing a single line of the text or drafting a scene, I am already
immersed in the musical aura of my new creation, I have the whole sound and all the
characteristic motifs in my head so that when the poem is finished and the scenes
are arranged in order the actual opera, for me, is already completed.78

Given Gaillard’s well-publicized legalistic opinion that melody is a composer’s

“most noble richness” and property, where not only justice but duty dictates
that any borrowing must be acknowledged, Wagner’s comments glimmer
with self-awareness – awareness about his status as a melodist, confirming his
later remarks to Mathilde Wesendonck that positively document his
insecurity.
The letter to Gaillard has typically been celebrated by Wagner scholars as
“one of the most valuable documents we possess in connection with
Wagnerian aesthetics.”79 Since – in addition to binding dramatic character
genetically to musical themes – it aligns Wagner with tenets of the Kantian
genius, it serves the agenda of confirming his creative prowess. The context
of its inception suggests, however, that this may have been precisely
Wagner’s intention, and we might consider taking a more circumspect
view of this document, particularly given that Wagner would squarely

77
David Wellbery, “Forward” to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800–1900 (Stanford
University Press, 1990), xv.
78
Wagner to Karl Gaillard, January 30, 1844, in SB 2: 358.
79
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966), 1: 453.
150 Wagner in the melodic workshop

contradict it twelve years later.80 Gaillard had recently established one of the
most significant music journals in Berlin, the weekly Berliner musikalische
Zeitung (1844–47), and pledged his emphatic admiration for Wagner,
which elicited Wagner’s self-elucidatory response, that is, his first commu-
nication with this well-disposed public defender of melodic originality. Why
was Wagner’s unsolicited, rare self-assessment of his creative process sent to
a complete stranger? While Wagner’s later comments in Mein Leben are
dismissive of Gaillard’s own talents, they emphasize his disappointment
that the journalist was unable to help him professionally in Berlin, hinting
that Wagner calculated somewhat in his first letter.81 The tendency remains
to accept Wagner’s comments on faith, perhaps because we too want to
believe their claims. Yet rather than any methodological veracity, it seems
more likely that the remarks testify to Wagner’s awareness of his need to be
seen as original, i.e. at root, an enterprising attempt to insert himself into
narratives of the natural genius.82

Contrafacta and confessions of melodic failure

Praise for Wagner’s melodies that expressly contravened the composer’s aes-
thetic vision outlined to Gaillard illustrates that more was at stake here than
merely a quarrel over creative aptitude: it was a conflict over creative method. In
his serialized “Letters to a Young Composer about Richard Wagner,” published
as part of the Fliegende Blätter between 1854 and 1855, Lobe offered one of the
most articulate mid-century defenses of Wagner’s vocal melodies but rejected
his poiesis (the inner conflation of word and tone) as a “regrettable error!”
(Bedauerlicher Irrthum!), explaining: “[i]n no way does Wagner practice what
he preaches.”83 Lobe’s analysis, accordingly, disentangles Wagner’s melodies
from their orchestral and poetic context. As Examples 3.3a and 3.3b show, the

80
“Sonderbar! erst beim Komponiren geht mir das eigentliche Wesen meiner Dichtung auf: überall
entdecken sich mir Geheimnisse, die mir selbst bis dahin noch verborgen blieben.” Wagner to
Liszt, December 6, 1856, Zurich, in SB 8: 219.
81
“Only my poor friend Gaillard stuck by me through all the unpleasantness, but was entirely
powerless to do anything about it. His . . . music periodical had already perished: thus he could
help me solely in very small matters.” ML 350.
82
This would form an early instance of the kind of behavior Nicholas Vazsonyi has characterized
more broadly as Wagner’s “marketing strategies” wherein the composer “pioneered his own
merchandizing . . . [and] presented his works as distinct creations unlike all others.” See
Vazsonyi, Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 1ff.
83
“Was aber Wagner lehrt, übt er keineswegs konsequent praktisch aus.” Lobe, “Briefe über Rich,
Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten. Dreizehnter Brief,” FBfM 2 (1855), 37.
Example 3.3a Wolfram’s lyric song for the Sängerkrieg from Tannhäuser,
act 2, scene 4, mm. 664–96.
152 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.3a (cont.)

Example 3.3b Lohengrin’s repetition of his Verbot from Lohengrin act 1, scene 3,
mm. 789–96.

two melodies he cites are purposively formulaic, with patterned repetitions that
have little or nothing to do with the “musical prose” Wagner had outlined in
1850–51. “Melodies,” Lobe explains “must have simple construction out of truth
of expression, they must allow themselves to be grasped easily as musical periods
and groups.”84 As the theorist observes, Wolfram’s melody (Example 3.3a)

84
“Melodien . . . müssen außer der Wahrheit des Ausdrucks, auch einfache Konstruktion haben,
müssen sich als musikalische Periode und Gruppen leicht auffassen lassen.” Ibid., 29.
 Contrafacta and confessions of melodic failure 153

shows a triple repetition: the second period (b) repeats the first (a), the fourth (d)
repeats the third (c), and the final period (e) is a varied repeat of the opening (a).
In other words, the form is: a a’ b b’ a’’ which corresponds precisely to basic mid-
century lyric form, common in lyrical passages throughout contemporary
Italian opera, as Lobe well knew. In another example (which we encountered
in Chapter 1), Lobe cites the double repetition in Lohengrin’s interdiction
(Example 3.3b) to sum up his endorsement with a claim to formal organization:
“there is rhythmic balance, simplest construction, referentiality, unity and a
rounding off of the whole form.”85 By ignoring the poetic text, Lobe was
constructing Wagner as a defensible melodist emphatically against the tide of
criticism. Had Wagner written nothing but these two melodies, he continues,
the notion that he lacked the ability to compose melody “would be incompre-
hensible, or – there are no melodies in any operas at all.”86
Of course, in what would become a famous protest, Wagner complained to
Theodor Uhlig in 1852 that “[t]he person who, in judging my music, divorces
the harmony from the instrumentation does me as great an injustice as the one
who divorces my music from my poem, my vocal line from the words!”87 Lobe
would actually support the composer’s claims as a melodist by arguing the
reverse, that “one need only sing Wolfram’s and Lohengrin’s melody without
text and they are and remain music because they have comprehensible phrase
and periodic structure, and also express without words a certain feeling.”88 At
root, such comments merely co-opted Wagner (as a self-styled genius and
victim of sustained criticism over Melodielosigkeit) to make a larger point
during the Nachmärz that (Wagner’s) compositional work defeats (his) merely

85
“Da ist Eurhythmie, einfachste Konstruktion, Bezüglichkeit, Einheit und
Abrundung der ganzen Form.” in Lobe, “Briefe über Richard Wagner an einen jungen
Komponisten. Zwölfter Brief,” FBfM 2 (1855), 29.
86
“Hätte Wagner nichts als diese beiden Melodien geschrieben, der obige Ausspruch wäre darnach
schon ein unbegreiflicher, oder – es gibt in keiner einzigen Oper Melodie.” Ibid., 28. Admittedly, this
was not the fragmentary, recitational stichomythia that the majority of critics associated with
Wagnerian melody from the mid-1840s. Indeed, in his study of Wagner’s stylistic development,
Lippman tacitly implies that Lobe was on the wrong side of history when he characterized the
particular nature of Wagner’s development during the 1840s as “a transition from symmetrical
melody and balanced melodic phrases to a freely constructed continuity.” See Edward A. Lippman,
The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999),
203. And yet, by rejecting Wagner’s poiesis, Lobe consciously interprets Wagner’s melodies against
the doctrine of continuity laid out in Oper und Drama, that is, as “absolute” melody (in Wagner’s use
of the term).
87
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, May 31, 1852, Zurich, in SB 4: 386.
88
“Man singt die Melodie ‘Wolfram’s’ und ‘Lohengrin’s’ ohne Text, beide sind und bleiben gute
Musik, weil sie verständlichen Satz- und Periodenbau haben, und auch ohne Worte eine
Gefühlstimmung ausdrücken,” in Lobe “Briefe über Richard Wagner an einen jungen
Komponisten,” FBfM 2 (1855), 30.
154 Wagner in the melodic workshop

ambitious, wishful thinking. But as we shall see presently, Lobe had good reason
to misread Wagner in the case of Lohengrin’s Verbot. His position vis-à-vis
Wagner’s vocal melody, in short, is that Wagner was a bone fide melodist in
spite of himself.
On the few occasions that Wagner speaks about his compositional
process, it is not musical but poetic originality that he regards as the
inhibiting factor in melodic composition. In the same letter to Gaillard in
which Wagner divulged his putative creative process, he explains that “it
would now be totally impossible for me to set another’s text to music.”89 But
aside from suspected acts of borrowing from Weber or Meyerbeer, it is the
specter of self-borrowing, of Wagner setting different texts to the same
“original” melody (and regretting it), that finally renders his claims plausible
for an inseverable bond between original melody and poetry after the mid-
1840s. Even the most famous line from Lohengrin is derivative.90 Far from a
theft from his contemporaries (or their publishers), this was self-theft. The
Verbot was borrowed from a sketch for an earlier, incomplete, perhaps
incidentally accompanied theatrical work in 1837 that appears on the
reverse side of the manuscript for Wagner’s overture on Rule Britannia
(the redoubtable Tappert first pointed out the correspondence in 1887).91
The repetitious phrase structure of Wagner’s Verbot bears a striking
similarity to his unpublished sketch – a little over two leafs – of a scene
about Percunos drafted in Riga. Examples 3.4a and 3.4b present the music in
question, and the extant text for this scene is provided below.
Extant text to Percunos (square boxes mark the lines set in A minor to Wagner’s later
Verbot; dotted lines mark the same music in F major)

Chor der Priester Chorus of Priests

Hört der Götter Spruch! Hear the word of the Gods!
Fühlet ihren Fluch! Heed their curse!
Auf blut’gem Throne herrscht Picullos, Picullos reigns on a bloody throne,
die Feuerkrone trägt Percunos, Percunos wears a crown of fire,
doch Glück zum Lohne Potrimpos, however, grants
schenkt Potrimpos happiness as reward

89
Wagner to Karl Gaillard, January 30, 1844, in SB 2: 358–59.
90
It was not entirely unusual for Wagner to salvage thematic material from earlier works for use in
later projects. In another instance, Deryck Cooke pointed out in 1965 the self-borrowing of the
Nuns’ Salve Regina from Das Liebesverbot for use as the motif for the “Feast of Grace” in
Tannhäuser. See Cooke, “Wagner’s Operatic Apprenticeship,” 104.
91
Wilhelm Tappert, “Percunos und Lohengrin,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt. Organ für Musiker
und Musikfreunde 35 (August 25, 1887), 413–15. The manuscript in question is in the
Nationalarchiv (NA B I c 4) along with Tappert’s transcription (NA B I g 3).
 Contrafacta and confessions of melodic failure 155

Jünglinge Young men

Percunos! Percunos! Percunos! Percunos!
Nimm auf blutigem Alter Receive our sacrifice mercifully
Unser Opfer gnädig wahr! On the bloody altar!
Leih’ uns Deiner Schrecken Macht, Lend us your terrible power,
Stärke uns in wilder Schlacht! Strengthen us in ferocious battle!
Jungfrauen Virgins
Potrimpos! Potrimpos! Potrimpos! Potrimpos!
...................... .......................
. Nimm auf Deinem Weihalter . Receive our sacrifice mercifully
::::

::::
. .
...................... .......................
Unsers Opfers gnädig wahr! On your consecrated altar!
Sende Deines Segens Macht, Send us the power of your blessing,
Strahle Licht in unsre Nacht! Shine a light into our night!
Tutti Tutti
Für die Opfer, die wir bringen, For the sacrifices that we bring,
Steht mit Eurer Macht uns bei, Stand by us with your power,
Dass im Kampfe wir bezwingen So that in battle we conquer
Feindes Macht, Tyrannei! the tyranny of enemy power!
Chor der Priester Chorus of priests
Die Flamme sprüht, The flame flickers
Der Holzstoss glüht; the pile of wood glows;
Percunos, Blutgott, gib ein Zeichen, Percunos, God of blood, give us a sign
Wer Dir zum Opfer soll erbleichen! Who shall be your sacrifice!

Example 3.4a Sacrificial song from Wagner’s aborted sketch for Percunos
(1837), Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth NA B I c 4.

Example 3.4b Sacrificial song in canon, from Wagner’s aborted sketch for
Percunos (1837), Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth NA B I c 4.
156 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Beyond the musical correspondence, there also appears to be a topical

connection with Lohengrin, suggesting that rather than text physiognomy, it
was the dramatic scenario that determined his choice. So who was Wagner’s
Percunos? Percunis is the Old Prussian name for thunder (Latvian: Pērkons;
Lithuanian: Perkǘnas), as recorded in the Elbing glossary (a Middle Low
German glossary which contains some 802 Old Prussian words; dated ca.
1300). This mythical Percunos, the pagan god of thunder, would later be
refashioned as Donner in Das Rheingold,92 and in his Geschichte der deut-
schen Sprache (1848), the eminent philologist Jacob Grimm would charac-
terize the three deities Wagner adduces (the three “chief divinities” of the
ancient Prussians or Pruzzi, according to James Bell’s 1832 account)93 as
archetypal powers within different pre-Christian cultures: military, creative,
and thunderous (earth fertilizing) power, respectively:94

Latin Mars Mercurius Jupiter

Greek Άρης  Έρμής  Zεΰς 
Celtic Hesus Teutates Taranis
Old High German Zio Wuotan Donar
Old Norse Tŷr Odinn Thôrr
Slavic Svjatovit Radigast Perun
Lithuanian Pykullas Potrimpos Perkunas
Indian Siva Brahma Vishnus

While residing in Riga during 1837, Wagner evidently planned to use the
Lithuanian names for his narrative of sacrifice, but switched to Old High
German for divinities in Lohengrin and the Ring.
Thus, at precisely the time Wagner was immersed in themes of druidic
rebellion while conducting and arranging Bellini’s Norma, his mythic allusion
to Percunos established a point of contact between a repetitious A-minor
melody, themes of sacrifice, and pagan gods, all of which would be duly
recycled in Lohengrin where his “composition” of the Verbot was seemingly
driven by dramatic association. Wagner’s 1837 text even provides a tentative
thematic link to the “sacrifice” of knowledge and temptation that Elsa must

92
Percunos is a god to whom life is sacrificed for rain, while also being called upon to spit fire (bolts
of lightning) and kill devils. He is closely associated with the oak tree, which he strikes with his
lightning, and which accordingly stores up (the potential for) fire. For a brief account of the
different connotations associated with the god Perkunas, see Martin West, Indo-European Poetry
and Myth (Oxford University Press, 2007), 239–40.
93
Percunos was worshiped, Bell explains, under the venerated oak: “the monarch of the wood.” See
James Bell, A System of Geography, Popular and Scientific: Or A Physical, Political, and Statistical
Account of the World and Its Various Divisions (Glasgow: Archibald Fullarton, 1832), 473.
94
Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache [1848], 4th edn. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1880), 84.
 Contrafacta and confessions of melodic failure 157

Example 3.4c J. C. Lobe’s contrafactum of the well-known Verbot in Lohengrin,

act 1, scene 3, from Lobe’s Briefe über Rich. Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten
(1855). [Trans. “Here lies she whom you have slandered; I have killed her / and you
have stolen all my happiness.”]

endure in order to gain Lohengrin as her champion. As the extant text for this
scene shows, Wagner’s three substantive references to sacrificial offerings (for
Potrimpos and Percunos) are accompanied by the proto-Verbot motif. This
motif also accompanies the chorus as they implore Percunos in exchange to
“stand by us with your power,” mirroring Elsa’s desperate plea for “my knight
[who] will fight for me!” to whom she “sacrifices” her hand, soul, and body: “to
him I’ll give everything I am!”95 But in all this, the connections remain topical,
not textual. Unaware of the likely origin of the motif, Lobe illustrated his point
in 1855 by supplying an entirely new text (Example 3.4c), which becomes all the
more salient in light of the Percunos sketch.96
That Wagner interpreted such accusations of melodic–poetic inter-
changeability as an attack on his originality belies his most severe criticism,
a charge that brings together many of the threads in the discourse I am
uncovering, and which he explicitly articulated in 1860 in answer to a
decade of vigorous debates over melody:
to say that a piece of music has no melody – taken in its highest sense – can only
mean: the musician has failed to create a form that grips and stirs our feeling; a
statement which simply announces the composer’s lack of talent, his want of
originality, compelling him to cobble together his piece from melodic phrases often
heard before, which therefore leave the ear indifferent.97
But if Wagner was setting the same tunes to different texts, yet consistently
lauded melody as “music’s [very] nature” and “only form,” to what extent
did he secretly agree with the criticisms about the Melodielosigkeit of his
own music before his exile in 1849?98 In 1851, Adolph Stahr had published a

95
“Des Ritters will ich wahren / er soll mein Streiter sein!” and “geb’ ich ihm was ich bin!”
Lohengrin, Act 1, scene 2. Intriguingly, in some accounts, Percunos’ car is drawn by a male goat,
which if not quite the white swan of Lohengrin, nonetheless offers a vague correspondence of
bestial transport. See J. Balys, Tautosakos darbai (Kaunas: Lietuvie Tautosakos Archyvas,
1937), 3: nos. 316f. See also West’s brief discussion of “Perkunas” in relation to thunder in
Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 240.
96
Lobe, “Briefe über Rich. Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten,” FBfM 2 (1855), 31.
97
SSD 7: 125. Cf. PW 3: 333. Emphasis added.
98
SSD 3: 309. Cf. PW 3: 103; and SSD 7: 125. Cf. PW 3: 333.
158 Wagner in the melodic workshop

review of the fifth performance of Lohengrin in Weimar, comparing

Wagner’s “rigor against melody, his rhythmic monotony, his disregard for
the most virtuosic elements of artful singing, with the zealous severity of
Lutheranism.”99 Wagner, of course, was not consciously practicing melodic
asceticism. But in a letter to Stahr three days later, his response tacitly
accepts the implied criticism:
I know what you mean when you speak of monotonous, unrhythmical melody [in
Lohengrin] . . . The reason lies not in the music but – since music after all can only ever
be language developing to its fullest potential – in the language itself, in the verse. At
present we have only inadequately formed verse, not the real thing. My musical
expression, moreover, continues to be related only supersensually to language: a sub-
stantial, sensual [sinnliche] relationship between the two has escaped me until now.100
Under pressure of Stahr’s scrutiny (and without ever having heard a
performance of Lohengrin), Wagner silently concedes his earlier ideal of
perceptibly melodic composition, which is to say the “clear, graspable
melody” that he lauded in Bellini, and sublimates this to a “sensualized”
relation between verse and melody.101 The realization that Lohengrin’s
melodies had failed entailed a forcible recasting of Wagner’s erstwhile
aspirations; thirteen years after praising Bellini’s “limpid melody, the simple,
noble, beauteous song,” Wagner now decried how modern “ploughboys
march to Bellinian Arias to the murder of their brothers,” perhaps the
most politically negative allusion to Bellini ever to flow from Wagner’s
pen.102 In contrast to Wagner’s ebullient rebuttals of criticism over what
Nietzsche would mockingly call his “infinity: but without melody,” he
expressed a different view in private to Stahr. In light of the Percunos sketch,
i.e. after borrowing his own melody, he invokes an inseverable, sensory bond
between poetry and melody to account for what he acknowledged, for the
first time, as his melodic insufficiency.103

99
“In diesem Betrachte möchte man Wagner mit seinem Rigorismus gegen die Melodie, seiner
rhythmischen Eintönigkeit, seiner Vernachlässigung der virtuosistischen Elemente im
Kunstgesange vergleichen mit der eifervollen Strenge des Lutherthums.” Rpt. Frankfurter
Zeitung und Handelsblatt, August 17, 1901, “Erstes Morgenblatt.” Quoted in SB 4: 59.
100
Wagner to Adolph Stahr, May 31, 1851, Zurich, in SB 4: 59. The fifth performance of
Lohengrin at the Weimar Hoftheater took place on May 11, 1851. Stahr’s review was printed
in the Berlin National-Zeitung on May 27–28, nos. 243 and 245.
101
SSD 12: 20. Cf. PW 8: 68. Wagner first heard a performance of Lohengrin at the dress rehearsal
in Vienna on May 11, 1861. See his letter to Minna Wagner on May 13, 1861.
102
SSD 3: 261, Cf. PW 2: 52.
103
Nietzsche’s quip was that the term unendliche Melodie merely concealed an absence.
See Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner” [1888], in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the
Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley & Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press,
2005), 243.
 Contrafacta and confessions of melodic failure 159

Wagner redoubled his protest about borrowed text while in exile. In

response to Liszt’s suggestion that he publish a volume of vocal composi-
tions to alleviate his financial dependence on the Weimar Kapellmeister, an
increasingly beggarly Wagner confesses that “it would be absolutely impos-
sible for me simply to write music to another man’s poems, not because I
consider this beneath me, but because I know, and know by experience, that
my music would be bad and meaningless.”104 Beckmesser’s feeble attempt
to sing the words of Walther’s song in act 3 of Die Meistersinger would
appear to dramatize this sentiment, and is preceded in act 2 by Hans Sachs’
general warning: “Don’t you care about the melody? / Methinks tone and
word should fit.”105 Although the opera’s poem was only completed in 1862,
the first prose scenario was finished less than eighteen months after
Wagner’s first complaint to Gaillard (August 3, 1845); if Sachs counts as
one of several acknowledged musical self-portraits, so too must Beckmesser,
whose actions aptly stylize Wagner’s fear of embarrassment at mid-century.
If we take Wagner’s numerous comments about setting the poetry of others
at face value, what “experience” before Lohengrin is he talking about? What had
conditioned such inadequacy in 1849, inadequacy he confessed to Wesendonck
in 1862, and projected onto Sgambati in 1880? John Deathridge’s study of the
sources for Rienzi revealed that the musical revisions correspond, in the
majority of cases, with alterations in the verse draft (i.e. in the text itself),
suggesting that “Wagner was already on the verge of challenging the notion of
music as an autonomous mode of expression.”106 Deathridge’s insight is that
“when deprived of dramatic movement and a workable text,” Wagner’s “purely
musical moments [show him] at his weakest and most imitative.”107 The years
during which he composed the music for his aria “Norma il predisse, o Druidi”
(1839), in other words, during which text and musical originality were still
officially separated in his mind, form a crucible of Wagner’s attitude toward
imitation, melodic originality, and original verse. They also indicate the central-
ity of borrowed Italianate melody to him within this formative period.
The crux is that Wagner valued Bellinian melody above all others during the
1830s, but feared his own attempts at melodious composition were corres-
pondingly derivative. His mid-century reassessment of vocal melody – well
within memory of composing his most explicit pastiche aria – was seemingly

104
Wagner to Liszt, December 5, 1849, Zurich, in Correspondence, 41.
105
“Ist Euch an der Weise nichts gelegen? / Mich dünkt, sollt’ passen Ton und Wort.” Die
Meistersinger, Act 2, scene 6.
106
John Deathridge, Wagner’s Rienzi. A Reappraisal based on a Study of the Sketches and
Drafts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 141.
107
Ibid.
160 Wagner in the melodic workshop

driven by his belief that a sensory (sinnlich) relation between text and music
was what ensured melody would communicate with a listener’s “feelings.”
Hence, poetic text was vital for a non-derivative melody; but this belief meant
something different to Wagner in 1839 and 1849.

Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling

Far be it from me to regard and recommend Bellini as a model for us . . . To

invite imitations of his operatic style? Certainly not! But I want to induce the
German artist to investigate and to consider whether some of his maxims
could not be developed with German spirit and German thoroughness so
that German opera might also win a large public and a long life?
J. C. Lobe (1854)108
On numerous occasions Wagner did set relatively short texts by other poets
(see Table 3.1), producing a number of Lieder and one insertion aria for
Bellini’s Norma while in Paris in 1839.109 The first problem he encountered
in composing this aria was his poor Italian. Dictating Mein Leben in 1866, he
explains: “[Samuel] Lehrs was obliged to dig up an Italian political refugee to
extract from him the text for such an aria. This was done, and I executed an
effective composition in Bellini’s style.”110 The resulting ersatz aria with chorus
documents Wagner’s most explicit musical engagement with bel canto melody.
It was most likely intended to supplant Oroveso’s “Ah! del Tebro al giogo
indegno” in act 2 and Wagner presented it to the famed bass Luigi Lablache in
October 1839 for performance at the Théâtre Italien that season.111 Whereas

108
“Ich bin daher weit entfernt, Bellini als Muster für uns zu betrachten und zu empfehlen . . . Zur
Nachahmung seiner Opernweise auffordern? Gewiß nicht! Aber ich möchte die deutschen Künstler
veranlassen, zu untersuchen and zu überlegen, ob nicht manche seiner [Bellini’s] Maximen, mit
deutschem Geiste und deutscher Gründlichkeit so auszuprägen wären, daß auch die deutschen
Opern sich ein größeres Publikum und ein längeres Leben erringen könnten?” Lobe, “Bellini,” rpt.
Musik Konzepte 46: Vincenzo Bellini (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1985), 48, 63.
109
Wagner wrote his own text for his only other insertion aria “Doch jetzt wohin ich blicke, umgibt
mich Schreckensnacht” in Marschner’s Der Vampyr. This dates from Wagner’s time at
Würzburg (1833) and is not a complete aria but rather a new Allegro section to be appended to
Marschner’s Andantino “Wie ein schöner Frühlingsmorgen.” See SW 15: 55–81.
110
ML 173.
111
Competing theories exist as to the intended placement of Wagner’s aria: the New Wagner edition
indicates the likely location as Oroveso’s modest recitative “Invan di Norman la mente investigai,” in
act 2, scene 5; whereas the Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihre Quellen
(WWV) suggests that the aria was intended for act 1, to be inserted between Norma’s and Aldagisa’s
first scenes. See WWV, 195–96. The manifest musical misreadings of Oroveso’s “Ah del Tebro” in
act 2, however, along with the strong textual correspondence between this and Wagner’s Italian text,
leads me to believe that it was in fact intended to replace Oroveso’s aria in act 2. That there remains a
sense of ambiguity over this question would seem – at one level – a testament to Wagner’s
camouflaging of any overt borrowing.
Table 3.1 Original compositions by Wagner that set texts by other poets

Date WWV poet comp. / singer / wk title status

1831 15 Goethe 7 pieces for Goethe’s i. Lied der Soldaten Lied

Faust
– – Goethe – ii. Bauer unter der Linde Lied
– – Goethe – iii. Branders Lied Lied
– – Goethe – iv. Es war einmal ein König Lied
– – Goethe – v. Was machst du mir vor Liebchens Lied
Tür
– – Goethe – vi. Gretchen am Spinnrade Lied
– – Goethe – vii. Gretchen melodrama
1832 30 Theodor Apel Abendglocken Glockentöne Lied (lost)
1834 41 J. Singer “Die letzte Heidenverschwörung in Preussen” theater music (127 mm.
sketch)
1837 43 Karl von Holtei Blum (Mary, Max u. Michel) Sanfte Wehmut will sich regen
1837 45 I. F. Castelli Joseph Weigl (Die Schweizerfamilie) aria (comp. sketch)
1838 50 Georg Schuerlin Der Tannenbaum Lied
1839 52 ? Bellini (Norma) Norma il predisse, o Druidi insertion aria
1839 54 Victor Hugo “Les orientales” Extase Lied (19 mm fragment)
1839 55 Victor Hugo “Les orientales” Attente Lied
1839 56 Victor Hugo “Les voix intérieures” La tombe dit à la rose Lied (31 mm. sketch)
1839 57 Pierre de Mignonne Lied
Ronsard
1839 58 Jean Reboul Tout n’est qu’images fugitives Lied
1839 60 Heinrich Heine (trans. F.-A. Loeve-Veimar) Les deux grenadiers Lied
1840 61 Pierre Jean de Béranger Adieux de Marie Stuart Lied
1841 53 ? Dors mon enfant Lied
1857–58 91 Mathilde Wesendonk Der Engel; Stehe still Concert Lieder
Im Triebhaus; Schmerzen
Träume
1858 92 Baron E. von Feuchtersleben Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat Lied (13 mm. draft)
162 Wagner in the melodic workshop

the use of insertion arias was common practice during the later eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, copyright laws limiting the liberties that could be
taken with a score began to appear in 1840,112 and as Hilary Poriss points out,
even by the early 1830s contracts began to forbid singers from interpolating
arias on their own volition.113 Whether by contract or caprice, Lablache
declined Wagner’s entreaty on the grounds that the Parisian public knew
Bellini’s opera too well and would expect the customary (authentic) melodies.
Evidently, he did not want to disappoint them.114
As a result, Wagner’s aria was never performed during his lifetime, and
warrants examination because of the light it sheds on him as a neophyte
Italian melodist and advocate of Bellini shortly after the Italian’s death in
1835, about which time Wagner later confessed he was striving for
originality.115 It can be viewed as a musical counterpart to the early
pro-Bellinian essays, in which – as we read in Chapter 1 – Wagner
chastised his fellow Germans for “our pack of rules and prejudices,”
dreaming instead of awaking as an Italian composer (“surely it would
not be a sin if, before going to bed, we prayed that heaven would one day
give German composers such melodies and such a mode of handling
song”).116 In this context, the aria becomes something of an “Italian
confession” that essentially admits what the coeval melodic idiom of
Rienzi implies, namely that Wagner actively sought to insert himself
into this sphere of culturally appealing melodic expression. The key
difference for Wagner’s development is that he penned the text for his
opera, but not for the aria.
There is little need in this case to establish covert correspondences
between Wagner’s and Bellini’s arias because the former is already an

112
See Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1: 5.
113
In her enlightening study of operatic perforance practice, Hilary Poriss cites the example of
Giuditta Grisi’s contract for the 1833 carnival season at La Fenice, whose third article set a trend
in declaring: “It is forbidden for Signora Grisi to insert pieces of music without special
permission from the impresario.” See Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the
Authority of Performance (Oxford University Press, 2009), 18.
114
“Er [Wagner] berichtet, daß ihm Lablache bedauernd erklärt hatte, sich weigern zu
müssen, eine Wagner’sche Komposition bei der Aufführung einer schon oft gespielten Oper
einlegen zu lassen. Er bedauert den Rat Anders[’] nicht befolgt zu haben, sich vorher Lablache
vorstellen zu lassen.” Jacob Levi, Wiesbaden, Autographen-Anzeiger, No.1, p. 21, No. 228, quoted
in SW 15: 22.
115
For mention of recent performances of this aria, see John Deathridge, “Reminiscences of
Norma,” in Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte – Ästhetik – Theorie: Festschrift Carl
Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hermann Danuser, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Silke Leopold
and Norbert Miller (Laaber: Laaber, 1988), 225.
116
SSD 12: 20. Cf. PW 8: 67–68.
 Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling 163

explicit surrogate, and was written – almost as historical revisionism

made manifest – for performance: to out-sing, out-maneuver Bellini’s
original, and otherwise woo the Parisian beau monde. This actually
reverses the Bloomian critic’s strategy to uncover borrowings or other
relational arcana, and the new onus is to establish difference in the sense
both of creating new benchmarks for Bellini’s popularity, and of
Wagner’s failure to hide behind a seamless stylistic mask. For, if we
ignore those aspects of his aria that exceed mere imitation, the danger
is to think of him in 1839 as a benign chameleon, where his ambitions
towards Meyerbeer and Scribe at the Opéra suggest he was far more
predatory in daring Europe’s musical mecca to shift – or at least share –
its allegiance.117
The respective recitative and aria texts both concern Oroveso’s rage at
the Roman oppressors and his bidding to the druid troops to remain
patient until Norma decrees the time for uprising. Both texts are pro-
vided in Table 3.2. While a comparative reading would only compare the
poets Felice Romani and Wagner’s unknown Italian refugee, we might
note that Wagner chose to set a moment of repressed revolutionary
ambition amid druid worship of pagan gods (a topic that resonates
with his 1837 Percunos sketch as well as Ortrud’s entire persona), and
pays particular attention to Bellini’s setting of the line “simuliamo” (we
shall pretend, from simulare: to fake, feign, or simulate), as we shall see.
We cannot know whether Wagner intended a double meaning encom-
passing the Norma plot and his pretensions towards Bellini’s style, but
these remain enticing possibilities, as does the idea that it was a double-
edged in-joke for Lablache who would have sung the simulated Bellini on
behalf of an ascendant German revolutionary rather than a reigning
Italian melodist.

117
Wagner desperately wanted a Parisian success with Rienzi, for the French capital was
unquestionably Europe’s musical mecca. Owing to the fact that Paris paid continuous
royalties to the composers of works performed, a successful opera premiere meant not only
fame, but fortune. Wagner was optimistic in 1839 and pursued a collaboration with Scribe
and support from Meyerbeer to this end; in Wagner’s retrospection, both were ill-fated. His
aspirations, frustrations, and debts in Paris between 1839 and 1842 are very well
documented in the literature. Two specific accounts of Wagner’s literary activities are
Philippe Reyna, “Richard Wagner als Pariser Korrespondent 1841: Neun Pariser Berichte
für die Dresdner Abend-Zeitung – Reportage oder Vorwand?,” ‘Schlagen Sie die Kraft der
Reflexion nicht zu gering an!’ Beiträge zu Richard Wagners Denken, Werk und Wirken, ed.
Klaus Döge, Christa Jost, Peter Jost (Mainz: Schott, 2002), 21–31 and Bernard Schulé,
“Wagner, Paris et la musique française: Jeux d’influences,” Revue musicale de Suisse
romande 37 (1984), 72–78.
Table 3.2 The texts for Bellini’s “Ah! Del Tebro” (1831) and Wagner’s insertion aria (1839).

Wagner Bellini

Norma il predisse, o Druidi. Norma foresaw it, oh Druids; The day O: Invan di Norma la mente I questioned Norma to no avail.
Ancor non fulse il giorno di has not yet come to vindicate the investigati.
vendicar lo scorno, che sulle humiliation, which stands upon Gallic C: E che far pensi? What do you think we should do?
Gallie stà. lands.

Ma già gli dei preparano But the Gods are preparing a terrible O: Al fato piegar la fronte, separarci, e Bow to fate, separate, and arouse
terribile vendetta; come del revenge; which will explode like nulla lasciar sospetto, del fallito no suspicion of our failed
ciel saette sugli empi heavenly lightning on the unworthy intento. intention.
scoppierà! people!
Ratti dell’armi al sonito dè Oh good [druid] people, depart the C: E finger sempre? Must we always pretend?
boschi uscite, o Forti, chè dio woods swiftly with your guns, since O: Cruda legge! Il sento. It is a cruel command. I feel it.
à più liete sorti v’apella e a God is calling you to a brighter future,
libertà! inciting you to freedom! O: Ah! del Tebro al giogo indegno I too rage at being under the Roman yoke,
fremo io pure, all’armi anelo; ma and long for battle.
Sulle Gallie alfin risplenda al The enemy should experience a day of nemico è sempre il cielo, ma But heaven is always against us,
nemico il di d’orror, e horror on the Gallic soil, and victory consiglio è simular. And pretence is advised.
sull’armi nostre scenda la and splendor should come down on C: Ah sì, fingiamo, se il finger giovi; Yes, we shall pretend if we must;
vittoria e lo splendor! our guns! ma il furor in sen si covi. But let’s cultivate anger in our breasts.
E voi tremate, o barbari, And you, barbarous people, tremble, your
dell’aquil vostre il volo fia eagles’ flight will be broken and will O: Divoriam in cor lo sdegno, Let us swallow the anger in our hearts so
tronce e infranto al suolo, il crash upon the soil, the ignoble slavery tal che Roma estinto il creda. Dì that Rome thinks it has died. But the day
giogo vil cadrà! will end! verrà, sì, che desto ei rieda più will come when it will waken and return

ð ð
tremendo, sì, a divampar. blazing more fiercely.
C: Guai per Roma allor che il Heaven help Rome when the altar gives the
segno dia dell’armi il sacro altar! signal for battle!
Sì, ma fingiam, se il finger giovi, ma But yes, we shall pretend if we must,
il furore in sen si covi. Yet anger will be hidden in our breasts.
O = Oroveso O: Simuliano, sì, ma il consiglio è il We shall pretend, yes, pretence is advised.
C = Chorus of Druids simular.
O / C: Ma fingiamo, è consiglio il But we shall pretend, pretence is advised,
simular, Sì, fingiamo. yes, we shall pretend.
 Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling 165

In many respects Wagner’s and Bellini’s aria themes share the hallmarks of
early nineteenth-century Italianate shaping: periodic phrasing,118 patterned
rhythmic profile, and a balanced pitch contour comprised mostly of stepwise
motion and gap-filling. Correspondingly, Wagner’s 1837 essay emphasizes
broad melodic outline over constituent details:
[T]he instantaneous, clear apprehension of a whole passion on stage is made far
easier when, with all its allied feelings and emotions, that passion is brought by one
firm stroke into one clear, comprehensible melody, than when it is obscured by a
hundred tiny commentaries, with this and that harmonic nuance . . . until at last it is
doctored out of sight.119

In the context of a discourse hostile to borrowing, Wagner’s statement can be

read as profoundly anxious in that it postulates an a priori stroke of natural
melodic genius. Criticisms of overly nuanced harmonic expression were
commonplace, and it was probably with this in mind that Wagner composed
his melody in 1839. Examples 3.5a and 3.5b compare the principal themes.
Wagner’s use of angular rising minor sevenths and a rising perfect fourth
and fifth distinguishes his melodic intervals from Bellini’s sixths and thirds,
establishing difference, yet he studiously adopts his model’s gap-filling tech-
nique, alternating leap with contrary step in almost academic fashion. There
are notable correspondences between the themes: the anacrusis, maintaining
d1 as the peak pitch, an almost identical, fifth-based harmonic vocabulary, use
of formulaic accompanimental patterns (though these are different enough to
avoid thoughts of plagiarism and monotony, such as Fétis had leveled at
Verdi’s accompaniments),120 maintenance of a pervasive dotted rhythm, and

118
It was the subtle periodicity in Norma that Wagner praised above all in a review of a
performance in Königsberg on March 8, 1837. “It is this very merit – there is style in this
music – that makes it so important in our age of confusion and formlessness. The
musical periods are built along assured and measured lines, agitation is followed by calm;
and even if the manner of all Italian opera composers suited Bellini, too, so that each aria
and each duet has its regular periodic structure, we must recognize all the more clearly
that a manner that had become stuck in a rut thanks to Rossini was ennobled in this
work.” The German text is printed in Friedrich Lippmann, “Ein neuentdecktes Autograph
Richard Wagners: Rezension der Königsberger ‘Norma’-Aufführung von 1837,” in Musica
scientiae collectanea: Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed.
H. Hüschen (Cologne, 1973), 373–79. It is unknown whether the review was actually ever
published in 1837.
119
SSD 12: 20. Cf. PW 8: 68–69.
120
“If the fashionable maestro [Verdi] lacks originality and invention in melody, his imagination is
no richer in the orchestration and rhythm of his accompaniments. There is only one manner,
one formula for each thing, and from his first score to the latest, he shows himself everywhere
the same, with a desperate obstinacy. For his arias and duets, he seized a form of
accompaniment for the themes put in use by Bellini and Donizetti.” Fétis, “Verdi,” Revue et
gazette musicale de Paris 17 (1850), 323. Cited in Giger, Verdi and the French Aesthetic, 74.
166 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.5a The principal theme from Oroveso’s aria “Ah del Tebro”
in Bellini’s Norma (1831).

Example 3.5b The principal theme from Wagner’s insertion aria for Oroveso in
“Norma il predisse, o Druidi” (1839).
 Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling 167

Table 3.3 Structural comparison of the aria themes (Arabic figures indicate
number of measures; Roman numerals indicate harmony)

Wagner 4/4 4/4 4/8

I / I→V III / IV V / V→I

Bellini 4 4
I vi. . .→I

the use of a chromatic neighbor (Bellini = C – C] – D; Wagner = C – B\ – B[)

to characterize vocal lightness. Such correspondences speak to a composi-
tional pre-history where Wagner worked with the details of Bellini’s aria in the
manner suggested by theorists such as Lobe where autodidactic composers
were encouraged to dissect and reconstruct models to study melodic compo-
sition. Did he alter Bellini’s parameters of musical expression in the same way
as Examples 2.5–2.6? We may never know, but the residual thematic affinities
between the two arias indicate a similarly close engagement.
Wagner begins to emerge as a distinct melodist through a larger
ambitus (a major ninth rather than Bellini’s major sixth)121 and an
expanded thematic structure, as Table 3.3 shows. He repeats both the
antecedent (mm. 5–8) and consequent phrases (mm. 29–32), before proc-
eeding to an eight-measure dominant prolongation. The net effect is to
more than double the length of the thematic material used by Bellini,
arguably overbalancing the scena into which the aria was intended to fit.
To regard this as insensitive would be to confuse analytical perspectives,
however. The advantage of thinking of Wagner’s aria as compositional
training, as a fragment from an absent whole, is that it obviates the need to
find compelling logic and unity in it or its relation to the opera. (One
might simply observe, of course, that Wagner had to persuade Lablache to
accept his aria in the first place, and that appeals to Lablache’s ego
motivated its larger scale, not to mention that Wagner was salivating for
a coup de théâtre in Paris.)
But the flipside of the didactic element in Wagner’s imitation is its
confrontationalism. The very act of seeking to perform a melodic imitation
within its original context is itself antagonistic to the extent that it reveals

121
Henry Chorley reports that in 1830 Lablache’s range was “about two octaves – from E to E.”
Wagner’s aria employs this almost entirely, spanning F to e’, whereas Bellini’s aria has a
compass of just c to d’. See Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections [1862], ed.
Ernest Newman (New York: Vienna House, 1972), 12.
168 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Bellini can be successfully imitated, i.e. it becomes a form of reification and

prosthesis. By humanizing a formerly divine melodist, Wagner effectively
reduces the composer to “prosthetic Bellini,” which arguably entails a loss of
status in the formerly untouchable melodies of the precursor. This reading
supports the view stated earlier that the ersatz Italian aria is not what it
seems, it is not “mere” imitation.
With overtones of the Percunos contrafactum, Wagner’s metaphor for
degrading one’s capacity to express through melody was the absolute
musician who is forced to discard “all [original] emotional expression”
inherent in the natural form of that emotion by “counterfeiting some
outward object” for the vehicle of that expression. His key statement
reads: “Music thus resembled the good God of our legends, who came
down from Heaven to earth, but, to make himself visible there, must
assume the shape and outward appearance of a common, everyday
man.”122 To clarify Wagner’s slightly awkward biblical conceit: (infinite)
God is to (finite) Jesus what true emotional expression is to a predefined
“object” of musical form (such as Bellini’s aria). In appropriating
Bellini’s melodic idiom, i.e. humanizing the divine, Wagner engages in
a particular kind of musical metonymy in which the basic external aspect
of a thing is substituted for the thing itself: such as Bellini’s chromatic
neighbor figures, harmonic rhythm and vocabulary, gap-filling patterns,
and periodicity. Structurally, Wagner’s act of imitation is ominously
close to his subsequent critique of inadequate musical expression. Both
take an idealized, fluid original and house it in a restrictive, received,
artificial shell. As unintentional autobiography, the deep homology
between overt imitation and meaningless expression is telling for
Wagner’s understanding of melody: the logical trap in which he is snared
is that deriving material of any kind only results in a cynical reduction to
nothingness.
Beyond the thematic correspondences, his decision to incorporate
Bellini’s most unmelodic material from the original as his only direct
borrowing seems counterintuitive, aesthetically. For a quintessential melo-
dist who became synonymous with nineteenth-century melody in the
strong sense of the term, Wagner’s interest in four unison chromatic half
notes nevertheless seems odd at first. Yet it makes perfect sense in the
post-1837 legal context where melody was an abstraction of property.
This is reproduced in Example 3.6.

122
SSD 4: 139–40. Cf. PW 2: 278.
 Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling 169

Example 3.6 Bellini’s chromatic descending minor third on Oroveso’s text

“Simuliamo.”

This passage is striking as the first strict unison passage in Bellini’s aria,
played tutti (except for the flutes) in its steady descent to C.123 Recall that
Marx (and Lobe) both argued that “any combination of two or more sounds,
of equal or unequal durations, may serve as a motif” for melodic develop-
ment.124 Before seeking to answer the question of why Wagner was
attracted to this chromatic lead weight on the verb “to pretend or simulate,”
let us first explore how and to what extent it becomes an operative melodic
cell in Wagner’s aria.
As Example 3.7 shows, the first allusion occurs in the introduction
(mm. 1–15), where Wagner repeats the opening phrase on C up a tone
(on D), finally rising to E[ before outlining Bellini’s full chromatic descend-
ing minor third. The effect is an expansion and reinterpretation of these
anti-melodic pitches. Arguably, Bellini’s unison texture is acknowledged
and deliberately modified by Wagner in mm. 10–12, where he first adopts
unison octaves (m. 10), but then fully harmonizes the movement from D[ to
C with a French sixth to dominant progression (mm. 11–12).
Whereas Bellini’s chromatic octaves interrupt the otherwise diatonic flow
of his melody, Wagner introduces a full chromatic scale gradually (see

123
It is underscored by the subito pianissimo appearance of the trombones, the usage of which
David Kimbell finds “bizarrely reckless” in Bellini’s operas, underscoring the singularity of this
passage. See Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 523.
124
“Jede Notenzeile bietet deren, jede Verbindung von zwei oder mehr beliebigen Tönen in
beliebiger Geltung kann als Motiv dienen.” Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition,
praktisch theoretisch, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1868), 33.
170 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.7 Wagner’s first use of Bellini’s chromatic figure, mm. 9–12.

Example 3.8 Wagner’s two initial chromatically rising 5ths in “Norma il

predisse, o Druidi” (1839), mm. 3, 7.

Example 3.8). Viewing Wagner’s heightened use of chromatic motion as an

outgrowth, expansion, or intensification of Bellini’s smaller motif is sup-
ported by the fact that Wagner moves progressively away from the limiting
dimensions of his four-note model: the full scales first emerges as an
extension of a chromatically rising fifth (mm. 11–12); as Example 3.9
shows, it reappears as an accompaniment to the thematic consequent
(Example 3.9a); and finally, as the bass soloist’s accompanimental line
(Example 3.9b). This progressive extension and melodicizing of the chro-
matic unit would seem reminiscent of Lobe’s advice that “there can really be
no bad melody that cannot be improved by this or that alteration, or be
transformed into a better melody through a simultaneous combination.”125
By emancipating the unmelodic material that Bellini had used to contrast
with his otherwise mellifluous tunes, Wagner reinterprets Bellini’s half
steps, raising the figure to new independence in a moment of chromatic
hyperbole. By taking an expressly un-mellifluous figure and using it to forge

125
“es [könne] eigentlich gar keine schlechte Melodie geben . . ., die nicht durch diese oder jene
Umbildung, oder durch mehrere zugleich in eine bessere zu verwandeln sey.” Lobe,
Compositions-Lehre, 47–48,
 Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling 171

Example 3.9a Wagner’s full chromatic scale as instrumental accompaniment to

Oroveso’s vocal line, “Norma il predisse, o Druidi” (1839), mm. 29–32.

Example 3.9b Wagner’s chromatic scale as vocal accompaniment itself, “Norma il

predisse, o Druidi” (1839), mm. 50–52.

melodic material, Wagner recasts the concept of operatic melody negatively,

as that which is not noticeably borrowed (a procedure that chimes guiltily
with his 1880 dismissal of Sgambati’s concerto as the fear of “perhaps having
stolen [melodies] from someone else”). In antagonistic terms, Wagner’s
action suggests Bellini’s relative weakness for not utilizing the potential of
the figure, but he purchases this only at the cost of an individuating with-
drawal from his melodic self in the first place, a process Wagner began
simply by deciding to write an aria in Bellini’s style.
But ironically, Wagner makes as much “original sense” (to borrow
Kant’s term) out of the chromaticism as possible. Consider two further
172 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.10 Wagner harmonizes (mm. 44–45) his chromatic motif from its
initial unison (mm. 37–39).

(a)

(b)

instances in which he engages with Bellini’s unharmonized unison

octaves. The first – Example 3.10a – is a striking unison between trumpet,
horn, and soloist (mm. 38–39), which plays with a variant of Bellini’s
chromatic figure and leads – like Bellini – to a dominant prolongation.
Later in the aria (m. 44), Wagner reinterprets the absent harmony of
Bellini’s unison by harmonizing the chromatic progression with a
German sixth (Example 3.10b), thereby perhaps rendering it more out-
wardly “German” in its enriched harmonic palette. As if to underscore a
corrective need, the need for harmony, the aria returns to this progres-
sion, but – as Example 3.11 shows – seems to become stuck on the unison
octaves between B\ and C (prepared through prior phrasal repetitions on
the chromatic neighbors A\ and B[), thereby heightening the pre-
cadential tension through the “mistakenly” bare octaves, before the
requisite dominant prolongation is resolved.
Wagner’s second engagement with Bellini’s octaves, given as Example 3.12,
concerns the repeated peak pitch (E[). This is the highest point in the original
aria (sung by the chorus of druid soldiers) as well as the immediate prepara-
tion for the chromatic descent examined above. Wagner almost quotes
Bellini’s dotted rhythm verbatim when he repeats the note for the second
 Norma “simuliamo” and the pedagogy of remodeling 173

Example 3.11 Wagner’s chromatic octaves, which become “stuck,” delaying the
harmonic resolution, “Norma il predisse, o Druidi” (1839), mm. 77–85.

Example 3.12 Wagner’s peak pitch (E[–E\) contest with Bellini, “Norma il predisse,
o Druidi” (1839), mm. 108–10.
174 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.13 Wagner’s over-rhetorical close.

(a) Bellini’s final measures.

(b) Wagner’s final measures.

time (m. 108), but he exceeds it with a revisionist prerogative, rising to a

sustained E\ so as to trump his model as though in corrective “hyperbole” of
its perceived weaknesses.
The close of Wagner’s aria operates in much the same fashion. As
Example 3.13 shows, Wagner reproduces Bellini’s ending exactly in pitch,
rhythm, and orchestration (the only difference being the timpani register and
the presence of trombones and serpent in the orchestra), but again exceeds it
by adding two further chords, alluding to a more Beethovenian close.
And one final instance of Wagner’s part agonistic, part didactic interaction
with Bellini’s original concerns the accompaniment. For eighty-four measures
Wagner avoids triplets / sextuplets. It is a loud absence given that pizzicato
triplets are the main signifier of Bellini’s accompaniment, permeating all but
six measures of the original aria. After Oroveso’s emphatic chromatic octaves
(Example 3.11), Wagner finally does include sextuplets in the lower strings
creating a climactic effect in which “Bellini” returns as though his voice had
somehow been lost, and yet the material is singularly different: arco, accented,
forte not piano, performed by the violas and cellos rather than the violins. It is
the fitting climax to Wagner’s strategy of self-effacing difference through
simulation.
Let us return briefly to the puzzling chromaticism of “simuliamo.”
Holtmeier’s study of Das Liebesverbot sheds further light on Wagner’s
chromatic tendencies in the 1830s. Drawing on Ernst Kurth’s concept of
melodic chromaticism,126 he argues that “the harmonic basis of Italian opera

126
Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan (Berlin: Hesse,
1920), 44. Only excerpts are available in translation. See Kurth, “Romantic Harmony and its
 Chromatic continuations 175

is fundamentally of ‘melodic chromaticism,’ which German Romantic opera

and ‘German’ instrumental music appropriated as ‘harmonic chromati-
cism.’”127 However generalized, Holtmeier’s insight is the existence of a struc-
tural link between Italian and German melodic traditions. This rests on a
distinction, drawn from Kurth’s analysis of Tristan, between melodic (kinetic)
and harmonic (potential) motion as the arbiter of chromatic forms: (i) where a
melodic factor, i.e. the constant stepwise ascent or descent “is already the bearer
of the harmonic development . . . melodic energy is the primary feature, the
impelling content that causes the manner and order of the harmonic progres-
sions”;128 and (ii) where harmonic shading by chromatic voice-leading
produces “effects of luminescence . . . [which] are not at all actually kinetic
motion in the larger melodic current but rather their mere urge toward
motion.”129 In his Bellini aria, Wagner clearly retained melodic chromaticism
in Kurth’s first sense (witness the phrasal repetitions up a semitone alongside
the explicit, snaking chromatic scales); but this stepwise (“Italianate”)
chromatic motion arguably also becomes a source, as it were, in Kurth’s second
sense, for chromatic voice-leading in Wagner’s later works. Either way, some
listeners continued to respond skeptically to Wagner’s chromatic innovations;
in the case of Tristan, they would be dubbed “the spasmodic strife to be original
in music,” a charge whose veracity would seem rooted most evidently in
Wagner’s magnification of “simuliamo” in his Bellini pastiche from 1839.130

Chromatic continuations

By the early 1850s, one of the paradigmatic melodies associated with

Wagner’s Dresden years was Wolfram’s cavatina “O du mein holder
Abendstern” from Tannhäuser (given as Example 3.14) popularized in
part through Liszt’s finger-friendly piano transcription from 1849.131 The
harmonic motion between II–[III–V7–VI in which the arrival on [III pivots
between the implied chromatic motion in the bass between A–B[, as well as
preparing the actual chromatic motion between D and E[ – all in contrary
motion to Wolfram’s stepwise chromatic descent – would seem to strike a
crises in Wagner’s Tristan,” in Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Lee A. Rothfarb
(Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97–150.
127
“Die Harmonik der italienischen Oper ist grundsätzlich von ‘melodischer Chromatik,’ die der
deutschen romantischen Oper, der ‘deutschen’ Instrumentalmusik von ‘harmonischer
Chromatik’ bestimmt.” Holtmeier, “Von den Feen zum Liebesverbot,” 54.
128
Kurth, “Romantic Harmony and its Crises in Wagner’s Tristan,” 136. 129 Ibid., 106.
130
Anon, “Symphony Concerts,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 34 (January 9, 1875), 366–67, here 367.
131
As Liszt notes in a letter to Wagner: “the scene of the ‘Abendstern’ should be within easy reach
of second-class pianists.” Liszt to Wagner, February 26, 1849, in Correspondence, 19.
176 Wagner in the melodic workshop

Example 3.14 The principal theme from Wolfram’s cavatina “O du mein holder
Abendstern,” from Tannhäuser, act 3, scene 2, which was received as Wagner’s
quintessential chromatic melodic of the 1850s.

balance between Kurth’s two senses of melodic chromaticism, without quite

falling under the terms of either.
Taking a step back, we might wonder to what extent a causal relation exists
between Bellinian Italian melody and the chromatic intensification between
the ersatz aria (1839) and Wolfram’s cavatina (1845). While the tendency
toward increasing chromatic harmony – documented most publicly in
Brendel’s 1859 competition in the Neue Zeitschrift for new approaches to
harmonic analysis132 – took impetus from a Neudeutsch aesthetic as well as
increasingly theoretical investigations into chromatic chordal functions,
melodic chromaticism itself remained relatively uncharted as a theoretical
principle. This was not for lack of chromatic melodies. Other notable exam-
ples exist such as the principal theme of Liszt’s “Dante” sonata (premiered in
the same year Wagner worked up his Bellini aria), and the topic of chromatic

132
The full proposal of Brendel’s competition reads: “Erklärende Erläuterung und musikalisch-
theoretische Begründung der durch die neuesten Kunstschöpferungen bewirkten Umgestaltung
und Weiterbildung der Harmonik.” Franz Brendel, “Zur Eröffnung des 50. Bandes der
Zeitschrift,” NZfM 50 (1859), 1. The most celebrated entrants to the competition were Carl
Friedrich Weitzmann and Ferdinand Graf Laurencin. Between 1853 and 1854, Weitzmann
published three studies: on the augmented triad, the seventh, and the diminished seventh chord,
Der übermässige Dreiklang (Berlin, 1853), Geschichte des Septimen-Akkordes (Berlin, 1854), and
Der verminderte Septimen-Akkord (Berlin, 1854). Formal studies of Weitzmann’s work have
appeared in several articles within the last decade, but there remains no single extended study.
See Robert Wason, “Progressive Harmonic Theory in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of
Musicological Research 8 (1988), 55–90; Richard Cohn, “Weitzmann’s Regions, My Cycles, and
Douthett’s Dancing Cubes,” Music Theory Spectrum 22 (2000), 99–104; R. L. Todd, “Franz Liszt,
Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, and the Augmented Triad,” in The Second Practice of Nineteenth-
Century Tonality, ed. W. Kinderman and H. M. Krebs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996), 153–77. The beginnings of a biographical study appeared a century ago (i) in Allgemeine
deutsche Biographie 41 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot 1896), 635; and (ii) in Paul Bekker’s “Zum
Gedächtnis K. Fr. Weitzmann,” AmZ 35 (1908), 577.
 Chromatic continuations 177

(a) recto

(b) verso
3.1 Berlioz’s two-page entry in the Album of Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein, entitled
Valse chanté par le vent dans les cheminées d’un de mes châteaux en Espagne (1855).
Reproduced by permission of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar (GSA 60/Z 170).
Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
178 Wagner in the melodic workshop

melody even formed the basis of self-deprecating humor, as in Berlioz’s ironic

composition for Liszt’s de facto stepdaughter, Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein,
in 1855: “Waltz sung by the wind in the chimneys of one of my castles in
Spain” (Figures 3.1a–b), on the manuscript of which Berlioz jokes that “Liszt
is requested to provide the bass line!!”133
To be sure, definitions of melody were expanding in this direction. The
critic J. B. Allfeld, in a review of Tristan und Isolde, recalled the complaints of
an “enharmonic cry of pain” from the Munich audience in 1855 when they
first heard Wolfram’s opening half steps; nowadays, Allfeld shrugs in 1865, it
is accepted as a bona fide melody.134 By 1899 Wolfram’s cavatina had even
become a paradigm of melodic chromaticism, and at least one theorist
described it as a model of the limits of acceptable chromatic construction,
where any “greater extension of a chromatic sequence of tones, even with
correct voice-leading . . . will not make for effective melody either in a calm or
still less in a lively tempo.”135 It is tempting to view the opening gambit of
Wolfram’s main theme in light of Wagner’s curiously original borrowing
from Bellini. It became quintessential Wagner, though it is rooted in Bellini in
more than one sense. The simultaneously didactic engagement with Bellini as
a model, and competitive recasting of his aria in aggrandized terms, outlined
above, point to a deeper antagonism within the surface imitation that can be
interpreted as more than admiration for the Italian.
* * *
Wagner’s earnest endeavors in the melodic chromaticism of “Norma il pre-
disse” would seem to offer a singular instance of the merger of Italian influence
with a systematic approach to melodic pedagogy by imitation. As unequivocal
Stilübung, it initiates a discursive network of transnational, musical signifiers
through borrowings that were stylistically overt, though concealed in their
details. Did this concealment reflect a legal awareness? We may never know.
But in this vein, the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo asked in 1855 what would
happen if a celebrated composer was inspired by Bach’s Matthäus Passion, and
wanted to create “similar effects.” To stamp his own invention on the music
and avoid actually copying Bach, the composer might give the Evangelist part
133
The title is given as “Valse chantée par le vent dans les cheminées d’un de mes châteaux en
Espagne” and Berlioz’s quip reads: “Liszt est prié d’écrire la basse!!” This whimsical two-page
composition is written into the Album of Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein, see GSA 60 / Z 170,
Weimar.
134
J. B. Allfeld, Tristan und Isolde von Richard Wagner. Kritisch beleuchtet mit einleitenden
Bemerkungen über Melodie und Musik (Munich: C. Fritsch, 1865), 10–11.
135
“Grössere Ausdehnung von chromatischer Tonfolge wird aber selbst bei korrekter
Stimmführung . . . weder im ruhigen und noch weniger im belebten Zeitmasse in der Melodie
gute Wirkung machen.” Jadassohn, Das Wesen der Melodie in der Tonkunst, 16–17.
 Chromatic continuations 179

“to a female voice!” Equally, an opera composer inspired by the storm from
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony might situate his imitation in the overture, to
mark a point of difference. “These would be examples,” the article concludes:
of appropriating foreign material without any real reason, in spite of all individual
melodies and thoughts in it being perhaps [the composer’s] own invention. Even so,
these would more rightly and by greater standards deserve to be held up as
plagiarism than all of the often unavoidable ‘reminiscences,’ provided that the latter
emerge from the context, and the character of the intended sentiment is reproduced
completely and unalloyed.136

Under the terms of this apologia for melodic reminiscence, Wagner’s aria
remains overt plagiarism, not of phrasal details, but of “foreign material”
regarded abstractly as an overall source of inspiration. The discrepancy with
Gaillard’s 1844 description of melodic form as a composer’s “most noble
richness” – precisely its copyrightable phrasal details – underlines the incon-
sistency and contingencies pervading the contemporary journalistic debate.
In some ways, a legal mentality is beside the point. A few months after
composing “Norma il predisse,” Wagner’s comments “On the essence of
German greatness” (1840) link the weakness of invention-by-imitation to
weak nationalism among German composers. Like earlier German critiques
of Mozart, he ascribes universality to the German genius only when a
composer retains their national identity having absorbed foreign elements:
the German genius would almost seem predestined to seek out among its neighbors
what is not native to its motherland . . . and thus make something universal for the
world. Naturally, however, this can only be achieved by he who is not satisfied to ape
a foreign nationality deceitfully [sich in eine fremde Nationalität hineinzulügen], but
keeps his German birthright pure and unspoilt, and that birthright is purity of
feeling and chasteness of invention.137
This dialectic of national style, with its emphasis on the final integrity of
invention, would seem an apt statement for Wagner wanting to “move on,”
after having failed to secure a performance of his aria for Norma.
But perhaps we are focusing too narrowly on a small piece of juvenilia. In
1980, Charles Rosen was skeptical about the merits of studying immature

136
“Dies wären Beispiele von Aneignung eines fremden Stoffes, ohne recht eigentliche
Begründung, welche, trotzdem vielleicht alle einzelnen Melodieen und Gedanken in denselben
eigner Erfindung sind, dennoch gewiß mit mehr Recht und in großartigerem Maaßstabe
verdienen, als Plagiate hingestellt zu werden, als alle oft unvermeidlichen ‘Reminiscenzen,’ so
lange dieselben aus dem Zusammenhange hervorgehen, und den Charakter der beabsichtigten
Stimmung vollständig und ungestört wiedergeben . . . geworden sind.” In “Über Plagiate und
Reminiscenzen,” 59. Emphasis added.
137
SSD 1: 160. Cf. PW 7: 95.
180 Wagner in the melodic workshop

works. “In discussing Influence in music,” he explained, “it would be wise to

refuse in advance to consider the work of adolescent composers . . . a very
young composer has no style of his own, and he is forced to get one some-
where else.”138 This would seem to apply to almost all Wagner’s works before
Der fliegende Holländer (1843); the peculiarity of Wagner’s situation is that he
was an extraordinarily late bloomer whose doubts about his capacity for
original expression continued to plague him even into his Dresden period,
and, as witnessed by the Sgambati episode, the painful memory of his early
struggles evidently stayed with him into his final years.139
It seems that Wagner’s stylistic imitations defined a protracted “adoles-
cence” which led critics such as Lobe and Hanslick to argue that imitation
was more germane to his basic compositional aesthetic than Wagner was
willing to admit. After all, it contradicted the “complete opposition between
genius and the spirit of imitation” disseminated by Kant. By yielding to the
popular attraction of Italian song during the 1830s, Wagner monumental-
ized the problem of German melodic composition for his epoch. Yet he
increasingly rejected the notion that musical imitation – however small-
scale – could be adequately expressive. After April 1842 when he returned to
Saxony, his environment (bifurcated by Dresden’s heritage of Weber’s
German, and Morlacchi’s Italian opera companies) was suffused by atti-
tudes that defined melody according to a pedagogical license to imitate
model compositions, and a Beethovenian authority to work at melodic
invention. The resulting clash – between the national impulse to character-
ize German Melodik by poetic declamation, and an abiding desire to retain
the sensuous expressivity widely attributed by German critics to Italian
opera – forced the composer into new aesthetic territory. In acknowledging
the want of expressivity of both his overt Bellinian imitation and his dry
speech mimicry in Lohengrin, Wagner explains he was led to the sensuality
of language as the central problem for expressive melody. Hence, a dialectic
of nationalism and Italianate imitation in Wagner’s Melodik ultimately gave
some ground to the former as the compositional category of “melody”
expanded exponentially in the direction of verbal language and philology.
And we will explore the two different sides of this development in
Chapters 4 and 5.
Rosen – alluding to Kantian “original sense” – argued paradoxically that
“the most important form of influence is that which provokes the most

138
Rosen, “Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration,” 19th-Century Music 4 (1980), 88.
139
Wagner was 26 when he composed “Norma il predisse”; he had already lived a year longer than
had John Keats (1795–1821), and was fully ten years older than Mendelssohn when the latter
composed his Octet in 1825.
 Chromatic continuations 181

original and most personal work.”140 As Wagner’s experience with Bellini’s

aria from Norma shows, he was guided in 1839 both by a natural tendency
toward chromatic forms of expression and by a desire to imitate. The result
thus documents perhaps his most slavish and yet paradoxically his most
self-consciously original composition.

140
Rosen, “Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration,” 88.
 Excursus: Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy

Bellini wrote melodies lovelier than one’s dreams.

Richard Wagner (1872)1

In 1880, Bellini’s close Neapolitan friend, Francesco Florimo, reports

Wagner’s profession of sustained infatuation for the Italian’s music:
They all think me an ogre with regard to Italian music and place me in opposi-
tion to Bellini. But no, no, a thousand times no. Bellini is one of my predilections:
his music is all heart, closely, intimately linked to the words. The music I hate is
that vague, indeterminate music which laughs at the libretto and at the
situation!2

Far from the quirk of a “rebellious phase”3 of pro-Italian sentiments

during the 1830s, then, the longevity of Wagner’s attachment to
Bellinian melody would seem assured, at least in part, because of his
perception of a special bond between text and music. As is well known,
however, by the mid-1840s his allegiance had shifted somewhat. During
Wagner’s tenure at Dresden, and a decade after Bellini’s death, his new
stance was quite different:

The downfall . . . [of sacred polyphony] in Italy, and the simultaneous rise of opera
melody among Italians, I can call nothing but a relapse into Paganism . . . Italian
opera melody has contented itself with such a cheap periodic structure . . . that the
educated musician of our times stands sorrowfully astonished before this thread-
bare, almost childish art form, whose narrow confines condemn even the most
talented composer . . . to total formal–metrical stability.4

1
CT (August 3, 1872).
2
“Tutti mi credono un orco in riguardo alla musica italiana, e mi pongono in antitesi con Bellini.
Ma no, no, mille volte no. Bellini e una delle mie predilezioni: la sua musica e tutta cuore, legata
stretta intimamente alle parole . . . La musiche io abomino e quella vaga, sconclusionata, che si
ride del libretto e della situazione.” Francesco Florimo, La Scuola musicale di Napoli (Naples,
1881–82), 3: 198–99. Emphasis added.
3
Thomas Grey’s apt description of Wagner’s pro-Italian years during the 1830s, in Millington, The
Wagner Compendium, 67.
4
182 SSD 7: 107. Cf. PW 3: 314–15.
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 183

This set the tone for what became a common perception of Wagner’s
cultural Italianophobia during the late nineteenth century. Elsewhere,
Wagner appends complaints about Italian audiences who “seek nothing
but sensuous distraction,”5 and protests that Italian vocalism has trans-
formed music into “an art of sheer agreeableness.”6 Such humorlessness
reached its zenith when Wagner forcibly excised his earlier literary self,
editing out a number of pro-Italian comments from his earlier essays for
publication in 1871 as part of his collected writings;7 equally, the three
explicitly pro-Italian essays of the 1830s – “Die deutsche Oper” (1834), “Der
dramatische Gesang” (1837), and “Bellini: ein Wort zu seiner Zeit” (1837) –
were silently excluded, not considered part of his intellectual corpus. By the
decade of German unification, such infractions of national identity had
simply become incongruous with his public image.
When, shortly after Wagner’s death, these early pro-Italian essays were
reprinted in the Bayreuther Blätter, and news broke of his deep admiration
for Bellinian melody, it sent a seismic shock through the critical orthodoxy of
Wagnerism by undermining both his famed anti-Italianism and supposed lack
of melody.8 “We now, therefore, stand face to face with the fact, on Wagner’s
own showing, that the protoplasm of some portion of the charm of his music is
to be found in the Italian style of its melody,” balked The Musical Times in 1886.
Following nearly half a century of diatribes against Wagnerian melody, this
revelation initiated a renewed consideration of the opposite, his melodiousness:

[O]f all the many constituents which together go to make up the complex of a
Wagner Opera, is it not principally due to the melodiousness – we will not say the
set tunes, for these are few and far between – by which each is pervaded, that
Wagner’s music has gained so strong a hold upon the public ear?9

The implications of this historic reversal have arguably not been fully
explored. The pro-Bellini essays were issued only with explanatory disclaim-
ers by Hans von Wolzogen and Carl Friedrich Glasenapp.10 And as late
as 1971, we read Herbert Weinstock reflecting a certain strand of received
5 6
SSD 5: 26. Cf. PW 3: 31. SSD 8: 255. Cf. PW 3: 116.
7
For further comment on this, see Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 12ff.
8
“Pasticio von Canto Spianato (1834),” Bayreuther Blätter 11 (1884), 337–42; “Bellini (1835),”
Bayreuther Blätter 12 (1885), 363–64.
9
“Wagner on Bellini,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 27 (1886), 67–68.
10
“Admittedly, he still did not possess the saving sword of the new, dramatic style that he had
first to weld from pieces of noble ancestors – a community of heroes; he still didn’t know from
plainly obvious examples what ‘melody’ actually and completely should be, which would
achieve musical, i.e. ideal expression for the German spirit.” [“Noch freilich besass er nicht das
Rettungsschwert des neuen, dramatischen Styls, das er selbst erst aus Stücken edler
184 Excursus

mid-nineteenth-century opinion, namely that: “Wagner attacked bitterly

almost all Italian opera.”11 While Wagner undoubtedly posited Rossini’s
music negatively, as the archetype of absolute melody, and lamented a
reliance on formulae in Bellini,12 it is striking that, in his voluminous literary
output, Wagner appears never to have criticized Bellini’s melodic expression.
Whether or not his scattered pejorative comments indicate he was in two
minds on the matter, Bellini’s melodies seem to have occupied a privileged – if
discreet – seat in his pantheon of forebears, one that was awkwardly impli-
cated in the normative politicized hierarchy of a German Kunstreligion
defined in opposition to the “ear-tickling” of Italian opera.13
This knowledge has implications for how we understand the unicum of
Wagner’s “Norma il predisse, o Druidi.” If he sought to simulate Bellini in
1839 as part of a didactic strategy for improving his “melodic” composition,
what was the worth of that strategy? What did Bellini’s identity signify to
Wagner in this context? We can begin to answer these questions by return-
ing to the occasion on which Wagner confessed to melodic inadequacy in
Lohengrin. Wagner rarely admitted such weakness. It was alien to the
immense energy of his character. His singular confession to Adolf Stahr
in 1851 about the opera’s “monotonous, unrhythmical melody” points to a
problem that could ostensibly be remedied by “a substantial, sensory [sinn-
liche] relationship” between musical expression and language. If, in the
Wagner biography, a familiar solution was alliterative verse, the vocabulary
of his confession – invoking Sinnlichkeit – offers a glimpse of another aspect
easily overlooked in the heady nationalism of the Wagnerbild: the German
reception of Italianate identity.14 If we dig through the sedimented

Ahnen – Heldenschaft sich schweissen musste; noch wusste er nicht vom sinnlich offenbar
gewordenen Beispiele her, was die ‘Melodie’ wirklich und völlig sei, welche dem deutschen
Geiste im Drama den musikalischen, d.h. idealen Ausdruck schaffen werde.”] In Wolzogen,
“Nachwort,” Bayreuther Blätter 8 (1885), 365–67; and Carl Friedrich Glasenapp explained that
“only beyond his de-Germanified floor did he find the power and strength in himself to renew
[German theater] from the very bottom up. All the consequence of these approaches occurred
because of the greater distance from our public art institutions.” [“Nur abseits von seinem
entdeutschten Boden fand er sich in sich selbst Kraft und Stärke, um es von Grund aus zu
erneuen. Jede folgende dieser Annäherungen geschah aus grösserer Entfernung von unseren
öffentlichen Kunst-Anstalten.”] See Glasenapp, “1834–1884. Ein Nachwort,” Bayreuther
Blätter 7 (1884), 343–47.
11
Herbert Weinstock, Vincenzo Bellini: His Life and Operas (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971), 447.
12
CT (March 22, 1880).
13
Wagner’s reference to clichéd German complaints about Italian opera, which he counterpoints –
tongue-in-cheek – with the “eye-ache” [“Augenjucken”] of staring at dry German opera scores.
SSD 12: 19. Cf. PW 8: 67.
14
Following Friedrich Lippmann’s pioneering “Wagner und Italien,” Analecta Musicologica 11
(1972), 200–47, more recent scholarship that has begun to address this blind spot includes
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 185

discourse, an archeological perspective would suggest, in short, that

Wagner’s Bellinian ideal of a “clear, graspable melody” and sensualized
melodic verse were connected.
Writing in the conservative Prussian capital, A. B. Marx equated the
essence of Italian opera in 1826 with the principle of sensuality
(Sinnlichkeit). Back in 1784, Herder had cited the capacity for sensory
perception as part of a common humanity, yet drew upon Sinnlichkeit as a
variable within human physiognomy to differentiate race according to cli-
mate.15 Marx adheres to Herder’s environmental determinism, where the
“hotter sun, radiating . . . has given the Italian a lighter, more excitable, but
also less fixed and imitative [widerhaltige] nature,”16 to claim that “the Italian
composer . . . gives nothing but the expression of his own individuality, of the
sensual nature of his fellow countrymen in his works,”17 a view in dialogue
with his second principle for Italian opera – after Sinnlichkeit – namely “the
most total freedom in performance.”18 For Marx, this willing absorption of
the sensorium into the performer’s ego dominates and subordinates “a
higher principle” that German readers would have understood as truth of
expression, but, in dialectical fashion, he later admits that “[i]n the highest
expression of sensual passion, the Italian principle then [itself] becomes
raised to another and higher sphere.”19 Both Wagner’s 1837 essay on
Bellini and his review of Norma from Königsberg earlier that year underline
his attraction to the sensual power of Bellini’s melody built on the security of
uninhibiting periodic construction. If Lohengrin’s melodies failed for want
of a “substantial, sinnliche relationship” between tone and word, it would
seem that Marx’s Italian principle – Sinnlichkeit – functioned here as some-
thing of a cementing agency by which the two spheres of text and music,

Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans; “Wagner und Italie” special issue of Wagner Spectrum 1 (2010);
and John Baker, Wagner and Venice (University of Rochester Press, 2008). See also my study,
“Defending Wagner’s Italy,” in The Legacy of Richard Wagner, ed. Luca Sala (Turnhaut: Bropols,
2012), 363–98.
15
“Die Sinnlichkeit unsres Geschlechts verändert sich mit Bildungen und Klimaten; überall aber ist
ein menschlicher Gebrauch der Sinne das, was Humanität führet.” Herder, Werke in zehn
Bänden, “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,” ed. Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt
a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 6: 286.
16
“Die heißere Sonne, die durchglühtere . . . hat dem Italiener eine leichtere, erregtere, aber auch
weniger befestigte und widerhaltige Natur gegeben.” Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges [1826], 196.
This comment was reprinted from BAmZ 20 (1825), 158.
17
“Der italische Komponist . . . giebt in seinen Werken nichts, als den Ausdruck seiner eigenen
Individualität, des sinnlichen Naturells seiner Landsleute.” Ibid., 196.
18
“Eine zweite Bedingung vollkommenen Erfolges ist, aber die vollkommenste Freiheit der
Leistung.” Ibid., 203.
19
“In dem höchsten Ausdruck sinnlicher Leidenschaft wird dann das italische Princip einer andern
und höhern Sphäre nahe gehoben.” Ibid., 204.
186 Excursus

regarded independently, were to be sealed together. That is, a quality of

sensation would collapse any lingering distinctions between the two, where –
in media-historical terms – Sinnlichkeit is nothing but the carbon-based
reception of stimuli.
This noun – Sinnlichkeit – is of course something of a floating signifier. In
his discourse on the nature of music and sensuality, Søren Kierkegaard
clarified the relationship Wagner felt he had failed at in Lohengrin, namely
that “in language the sensual is, as medium, reduced to the level of mere
instrument and constantly negated.”20 On the other hand, music itself,
Kierkegaard argues, can express the “sensual erotic” for it is the art form
predisposed to evoke desire within us “in all its immediacy.”21 In these
terms Wagner’s mid-century project becomes explicitly the sensualizing of
language and it is no coincidence that Kierkegaard’s exemplary instance of
the sensual erotic is one of Mozart’s Italian operas. Just as for him, Don
Giovanni enacts narratives of seduction, so Marx visualized the principle of
Italian vocal melody embodied in the physical presence of its female singers.
Unlike “prudish” German dismissals of “ear-tickling,” Marx regarded
Italianate sensuality as palpably somatic and inherently audio-visual in
performance, where its “sensual passion” was gendered female within
patriarchal Prussian narratives of Italian identity:

For female singers who evidently devote themselves to performance, especially on

the stage, it must be said that youth and external beauty are almost indispensable, if
the highest peak of Italian artistic achievement and the song as the most individual
subjective expression of a fresh, sensory beauty and of rich nature is to be estab-
lished – wherewith the public’s general preference for younger and more beautiful
female singers over musically able ones appears completely justified in the context
of the Italian essence.22

By coupling the sexual imagination of a listener with the principle of Italian

opera, Marx sublimates the spectacle of feminine erotic appeal within
German notions of Italian singing. This is none other than the sexual gaze
of psychoanalytic theory – sexual because the spectator imagines possessing

20
Søren Kierkegaard, Either / Or, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 78.
21
Ibid., 75.
22
“Ja, für Sängerinnen, die sich öffentlichen Leistungen, zumal auf der Bühne widmen, muß
ausgesprochen werden, daß Jugend und äußerliche Schönheit fast unerläßlich sind, wenn der
höchste Gipfel italischer Kunstleistung erreicht und der Gesang als eigenste subjective
Aeußerung eines frischen, sinnlich-schönen und reichen Naturells aufgenommen werden soll:
womit denn die allgemeine Vorliebe des Publikums für jüngere und schönere Sängerinnen vor
musikalisch-fähigern, im Gebiete des italischen Wesens vollkommen gerechtfertigt erscheint.”
Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, 203. Emphasis added.
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 187

the object of his gaze, only this is not the beauty of a young female body as
such, but an embodiment of the sensual principle enacted within the music.23
As Marx’s formulation suggests, the spectator needs to be in direct
scopophilic contact with the female body for the “essence” of Italian
music to be experienced, connoting a role of looking that Laura Mulvey
defines starkly as “pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual
stimulation.” She continues:

[T]he determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is
styled accordingly . . . [and] coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they
can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.24

In this context, it is suggestive that Wagner repeatedly confessed he was

singularly drawn to Bellini’s music by a “wonderful woman,”25 Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient, about whom he later admitted to Cosima: “she was no
longer very reputable when I started to associate with her, but for a person
possessing such tremendous talent, there was only one compensation, and
that was her sexual allure [Sinnlichkeit].”26 And of course, music itself – like
the sensual “essence” of Italian opera – is emphatically gendered female for
Wagner. In light of this sensual–sexual frame of reference, his complaint that
“we [Germans] are too intellectual and much too learned to create warm
human figures” appears in a slightly different light, reinforcing almost with
sexual envy his statements about the “sensuously warm” beauty that German
singers lacked. Accordingly, in a letter to Theodor Uhlig from 1852 Wagner
aligns himself unequivocally with Italy, as a “hot-blooded son of the south.”27
Reading these statements archeologically in this way is not arbitrary. The
Viennese physician Heinrich Kaan argued as early as 1844 that “the sexual
instinct governs all physical and mental life.”28 His Latin treatise
Psychopathia sexualis observed further that the sexual instinct overflows
its natural end, and does so naturally. The displacement of sexual instinct
into Italianate “sensuality” thus potentially becomes a fact of reception.29

23
This principle entered the psychoanalytic discourse after Sigmund Freud’s “Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality” (1905), see Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 7: 125–244, esp. 149–59.
24
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 18–19.
25
SSD 9: 219. Cf PW 5: 218. 26 CT (December 9, 1869).
27
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, July 22, 1852, Lugano, in SB 4: 419.
28
Cited in Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, trans.
Graham Burchel, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (New York: Picador, 2003),
282–83.
29
In using the term “fact,” I allude to epistemological distinctions made by Mary Poovey between
interpretation and description of knowledge in the use of statistics, where numerical forms of
representation gain authority by their duplication (as in double book-keeping) but remain
188 Excursus

In a lecture from 1975, Michel Foucault identified Kaan’s work as the point
when sexuality first emerged in the psychiatric field because it established a
direct link between the imagination and sexual instinct, where the former
functions as the site that makes sexual aberration possible.30 The “fresh
sensory beauty” that Marx attributes to young female singers of Italian
opera can be read as a displacement of desire; that is, as part of what
Foucault terms “rituals of confession” that enacts the “transformation of
sex into discourse.”31
This slippage, though newly framed, is not entirely new to the Wagner
literature. Thomas Mann regarded Nietzsche’s question – “who dares to
speak the word, the real word to describe the ardeurs of the Tristan
music?” – as “old-maidish” in 1933; his blunt answer establishes a corre-
spondence with the critical vocabulary assigned to Italianicity a century
earlier: “Sinnlichkeit, unbounded, spiritualized Sinnlichkeit, raised to a
mystical order of magnitude and portrayed with the utmost naturalism,
Sinnlichkeit that will not be appeased by any gratification.”32 Thus, while
not constituting tangible or even conscious knowledge, the flipside of
Marx’s critique of “the Italian principle” and Wagner’s effusive embrace
of the same during the 1830s is a confession about projected desire. It was
a displacement of sexual instinct (as Nietzsche and Mann recognized) that
one could argue infiltrated Wagner’s imagination and, at an interpretive
push, finally migrated to depictions of eros in his musical composition.
Reading Italian opera as the fount of Wagner’s musico–erotic sensual
imagination complements the notion, recently advanced by Laurence
Dreyfus, that Wagner’s depiction of desire and sexual fantasy was
quite deliberate: “in composing music representing ‘sensuality’ . . .
[i]t seems Wagner knew exactly what he was doing.”33 In light of the
melodic chromaticism we saw in Wagner’s Bellini aria, it is surely no
coincidence that the desire motif of Tristan – G]–A\–A]–B\– is also a

contingent and have not “always seemed free of an interpretive dimension”; and to Dahlhaus’
distinction between historical facts and data. Whereas data (datum) are given, facts (factum) are
made, hence Dahlhaus’ warning is that the word “fact” does not refer to something tangible but:
“is nothing more than an hypothesis.” See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact
(University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiiff; and Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History,
trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 35.
30
Foucault, Abnormal, 278–87.
31
Ibid., 167; and Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990), 28ff., esp. 58–63.
32
Mann, “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” 130. Here I substitute Mann’s
“Sinnlichkeit” for Blunden’s “sensuality.”
33
Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010), xi.
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 189

linear chromatic minor third, inverting that of 1839; now no longer treated
as a melodic cell, it appears as the quintessential mimetic depiction of melodic
yearning, or as Berlioz would have it: “a kind of chromatic moan” atop its
unresolved harmonies.34 Irrespective of the difficult brevity of this argument,
the salient point is that, for the mature Wagner, Bellini’s vocal-melodic
sensations transgressed the semantic divide: “all heart, closely, intimately
linked to the words.” That is, within this discursive hypertrope linking nubile
bodies, German constructs of Italian opera and climate, and sexual desire,
text–melody relations figure as a wholly sensory phenomenon. (It may be
worth recalling here that it was to his librettist, Carlo Pepoli, that Bellini
related the physical effect of vocal–verbal sound, imploring: “Grave on your
mind in adamantine letters: the [opera] must make people weep, shudder and
die through the singing.”35) In short, it would seem to be the sensory quality
Wagner ascribed to Italian melody that permanently welded together vocal
text, melody, and displaced sexual–sensuality in his imagination.
To be sure, it was only in the imagination. Wagner did not physically set
foot in Italy until August 1853. His trip that summer to the cities of Turin,
Genoa, and La Spezia would assume official status as “my Italian journey”
(a sarcastic reference to Goethe),36 and, prior to setting off, the composer
was bubbling with expectation: “a great deal, I expect a great deal from
Italy,”37 he remarked, later reflecting in Mein Leben over the “indescribable
visions of what was awaiting me and the manner in which my hopes would
be fulfilled.”38 So what horizon of expectation informed that ardour?
It seems Wagner read travel literature on Italy with a certain envy during his
20s. As a young man, he could not afford an Italian Kavalierreise in the manner
of Goethe, Byron, or Mendelssohn; during the 1830s he was neither inclined to
elope, as Liszt, nor did he receive the Prix de Rome, as Berlioz. Thus, he never
initiated himself in this cultural rite of passage, relying instead on the travel
writings of Goethe and Germaine de Staël, among others. Taking de Staël as an
example, her novella Corinne ou d’Italie (1807) concerns the experiences of
Oswald Lord Nelville, a Scottish peer, as he witnesses Corinne – a celebrated
poet, “the image of our beautiful Italy . . . an admirable product of our climate
and of our arts” – return triumphantly to Rome, meets her and is enchanted by
her poetry and physical beauty, takes her for a mistress and explores the history
and art of Italy with her, but finally abandons her for another, less independent

34
“une sorte de gémissement chromatique.” Hector Berlioz, A travers chants, ed. Léon Guichard
(Paris: Gründ, 1971), 327.
35
Cited in Weinstock, Vincenzo Bellini, 170.
36
Richard Wagner to Franz Liszt, September 12, 1853, Zurich, in SB 5: 424.
37
Wagner to Otto Wesendonck, July 13, 1853, Zurich, in SB 5: 356. 38 ML 498.
190 Excursus

woman.39 The nubile poetess is an allegory for Italy, and throughout the
narrative female beauty is equated with Italy’s superiority within the aesthetic
sphere in general. De Staël’s emphasis is backed up in this regard by numerous
other texts concerning Italy. Stendhal’s Rome, Naples et Florence (1826) con-
structs Italy as an earthly, carnal paradise, deploying the male gaze through
voyeuristic fantasies of Italian women;40 Goethe’s Roman Elegies and Venetian
Epigrams evoke similar situations, all of which arguably fed Wagner’s imagi-
nation. He brazenly remarked en route to Italy in 1852 that “there are gorgeous
women here . . . but only for looking at.”41 (It was of course an age-old
association, inscribed in the palindrome Roma tibi subito motibus ibit Amor
[“Rome, to you love will suddenly come with its tumults”], which appeared
fragmentarily as graffiti during the second century ad in such disparate places
as Ostian and Aquincum, while the play on Roma–Amor exists even on coins of
the Constantine period.42)
Back in the nineteenth century, congruent readings of Italianicity led to a
degree of stereotyping; the specific equation of Italian femininity with European
ideals of beauty arguably intensified during the 1840s, that is, just as Wagner was
achieving a degree of professional stability.43 Artists such as Francesco Hayez
adopted female figures of Italy, similarly depicted as sensuously beautiful, and
posed his subjects as allegories for the nation’s condition, manipulating their
iconographic status. Figure 3.2, Meditations on the History of Italy (1850) –
originally called Meditations on the Old and New Testament, but renamed
according to the book in the subject’s hands, clearly entitled “Histories of
Italy” – reveals the aesthetically beautiful but disheartened, crest-fallen female
form, following the failure of the first war of Italian independence (1848–49).
Her partial nakedness, in reference to Delacroix’s iconic La Liberté guidant le
peuple, now suggests vulnerability rather than power; a violated, rather than a

39
Germaine De Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick and London:
Rutgers University Press, 1987), 25.
40
“Cette jeune femme si tendre a pu connaître les passions, mais n’a jamais perdu la pureté d’âme
d’une jeune fille.” Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence, 3rd edn. (Paris: Delaunay, Libraire, Palais-
Royal, 1826), 1: 143.
41
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, July 15, 1852, Meiringen, in SB 4: 409.
42
On the coins, see H. Dressel, “Numismatische Analekten,” Zeitschrift für Numismatik 23 (1900),
36ff. Regarding the palindrome, see M. Guarducci, “‘Il misterioso ‘quadrato magico’:
l’interpretazione du Jérôme Carcopino, e documenti nuovi,” Archeologia Classica 17 (1986),
219–70, here 249; and J. Szilagyi, “Ein Ziegelstein mit Zauberformer aus dem Palast des
Statthalters in Aquincum,” Acta Antiqua 2 (1953–54), 305–10.
43
See Isabel Skokan, Germania und Italia: Nationale Mythen und Heldengestalten in Gemälden des
19. Jahnhunderts (Berlin: Lukas 2009), 71ff. For a broader discussion of paradigms within de
Staël’s writing, see Robert Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of
Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 191

3.2 Francesco Hayez, Meditations on the History of Italy / Meditations on the Old
and New Testament (1850), Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna E Contemporanea Di
Palazzo Forti.

revolutionary, female form. Responding to this image in 1850, the Verdi

librettist Andrea Maffei maintains a strictly religious interpretation of Hayez’s
subject, but the popular, emotive political reading was never officially denied.44
What does all this have to do with Wagner? We know from Mein Leben
and from Cosima’s diary that his reading of Goethe and de Staël informed
his conception of Italy.45 So the composer’s exposure to literary

44
“Cara angelica donna, in qual pensiero / Hai tu la sconsolata anima assorta? / Che ti afflige così,
che ti sconforta / Nel lieto fior degli anni tuoi?. . . mistero. / Quella croce che stringi e quel severo /
Volume, ove il mesto occhio si porta / Dicono che per te la gioia è morta, / Né t’offre il mondo che
il suo tristo vero. / Sì, la bibbia e la croce! util consiglio / All’età sventurata, in cui sul buono /
L’impudente cervice alza il perverso. / Ferma in que’ segni di riscatto il ciglio, / Cara, angelica
donna; essi ti sono / Un rifiuto al dolor dell’universo.” Gemme d’Arti Italiane, 5 (1852), 37; See
http://gemmedartitaliane.com/texts/Andrea%20Maffei/La%20Meditazione.pdf.
45
Following Wagner’s failure to secure funding to improve the municipal orchestra in Zurich, the
composer draws on Goethe’s Briefe aus der Schweitz to express his chagrin: “And the Swiss call
192 Excursus

projections and allegorical images of Italy, the continuity between de Staël’s

Corinne and the stereotypes embraced by nineteenth-century travel writers, is
unquestioned. While the tracing of influence always remains contestable,
two related points of contact between Wagner’s aesthetics and German
Italianism are suggestive for his early pro-Italian stance: first, the primacy of
an instinctive–emotional trigger and delegitimizing of intellectual reflection in
artistic conduct; second, the female gendering of Sinnlichkeit as a privileged
mode of communication within the nexus of art as a corporeal, quasi-
Dionysian experience. Wagner’s writings indicate he saw the two as interde-
pendent. The necessity of “physical realization” (sinnliche Erscheinung) was
precisely its capacity to access feelings directly: “the very essence of every
physical portrayal [sinnliche Darstellung] consists in this, that it should exert
a sure and definite impression upon the feeling.” In other words, Wagner’s
belief in the priority of sensory experience over ideation – i.e. in sensory
melodic verse – bears a structural relation to received ideas of Italianicity.
It will be helpful here to trace a genealogy of Wagner’s ideas. First, recall
the lengthy theoretical exposition of “sensory feeling” from Oper und Drama:
Feeling grasps nothing but the actual [das Wirkliche], what is physically enacted,
perceivable by the senses: to it one can only impart the complete, the concluded,
what is just entirely that, which it can be at this moment . . . [W]hatever is at
variance with itself, what has not yet reached an actual and definite manifestation
confuses feeling and makes thought necessary, leading to a combined act which
negates feeling. / In order to convince it, the poet who turns towards feeling must
already be so at one with himself that he can dispense with any help from the
mechanism of logic, and address himself with full consciousness to the unmistak-
able receptive agency [Empfängniss] of unconscious, pure human feeling. With this
message of his he has therefore to proceed as plainly and (in view of sensory
perception) as unconditionally as feeling is addressed by actual phenomena – such
as warmth, the wind, the flower, the animal, the man.46

Now consider Wagner’s earlier, less abstract statements of the same from the
mid-1830s, specifically framed as a battle between German and Italian identity.
In such a reading, Sinnlichkeit equates to warmth (just as Goethe had referred
to the “sensual people” of a “warm and beautiful country”),47 and Wagner
specifically prioritizes warmth as the first example of that which “touches”
human feeling:
themselves free! These smug bourgeois shut up in their little towns, these poor devils on their
precipices and rocks, call themselves free!” ML 531; and Cosima confirms that Wagner read de
Stäel, see CT (June 29, 1870).
46
SSD 4: 69–70. Cf. PW 2: 198–99.
47
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), 29, 35.
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 193

We [Germans] are too intellectual and much too learned to create warm human
figures . . . The Italians have an immeasurable advantage over us . . . their creations
are . . . sensuously warm.48

And later:
Why is it that no German opera composer has come to the fore of late? . . . because
none has grasped true warm life as it is . . . Give us passion! Man is only drawn to
what is human; the dramatic singer can only represent what is humanly tangible
[das menschlich Fühlbare].49

Though Wagner’s emphasis on the physical–sensory basis of any artistic

understanding undoubtedly draws on the materialist doctrines of Germanic
figures such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Johannes Müller (as our final chapter
will explore), his belief in “feeling” as the requisite currency of sensory
perception finds an earlier analogue in the superiority of Italianate “warm
human figures” and “sensuously warm” artistic creations, i.e. properties of a
physical existence, a pathos of the body.
With this association in mind, Wagner’s chauvinistic musical metaphors
now come into focus. In a familiar alliance between music and femininity,
he pointedly invokes biology as a medicalization of sexuality where the
poetic aim quite literally inseminates music as “the womanly, bearing
element.”50 “Melody” is quite logically then fertilized by the procreative
seed of the word. While more properly dependent on discourses of bour-
geois health – what Foucault called “the menaces of heredity”51 – Wagner’s
conceit segues immediately into a description of Italian opera as a prostitute,
thereby drawing on a further construction of femininity associated with
Italy, which by older customs of cicisbeism, and the mid-century perception
that Italian cities “were being swamped with prostitutes” had lent the
Kavalierreise an element of sexual tourism.52
But Wagner’s metaphors do not always interlock, suggesting his displace-
ment of desire was not specifically aimed at forming a calculated, gendered
conceit. His characterization of the historic commingling of music and
drama as a quasi-sexual union follows a more overt fantasy of the “three
primeval sisters” representing the individual arts of music, poetry and
dance. This ostensibly invokes the three ancient muses of Plutarch, but
arguably derives its imagery more immediately from Italian representations

48
SSD 12: 1. Cf. PW 8: 55. 49 SSD 11: 11–12. Cf. PW 8: 65–66.
50
SSD 4: 155–56. Cf. PW 2: 296. 51 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 125.
52
Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915, 2nd edn. (Columbus, OH: Ohio
State University Press, 2000), 3.
194 Excursus

of the three Graces, leaving a decidedly Italianate trace of his metaphor-

driven imagination. Might these merit consideration as prompts to his
imagery? Over and above Botticelli’s Primavera (1482) with its daintily
touching finger-tips, the interlocking embraces of naked female forms in
Antonio Canova’s Three Graces was a widely disseminated image, appear-
ing in engravings and periodicals during the early nineteenth century
(Figure 3.3). Stendhal refers to it as “the three sisters, gently interlacing
their arms with each other” in Promenades dans Rome (1830), claiming this
as an unforgettable visage of Italy, and his sole reason for visiting Rome.53
Wagner himself described his melody for the three Graces in Tannhäuser
(Paris revisions) as “sensuousness transformed into beauty,”54 and it is
certainly plausible that he was similarly acquainted with Canova’s sculpture
prior to conceiving his own metaphor:
As we gaze on this entrancing round dance of the . . . Muses of artistic man, we now
see the three stepping forward, each with her loving arm curled around her sister’s
neck; then, first this one and now that, loosing herself from their interlocked
embrace – as though to show the others her beauteous form in full autonomy –
and only just brushing with her very finger-tips the others’ hands . . . until at last all
three, tightly embracing, breast on breast, and limb to limb, grow together in
amorous love kisses into a single, sweetly undulating [wonnig-lebendige] form.55

As Mary Ann Smart has emphasized, the dancing body itself – whether
fantasized naked sisters or actual danseuses – figures as a sexual signifier in
the Wagner discourse. Pushing Marx’s “sexual gaze” to its logical extension,
Wagner characterized the animated stage bodies of the Parisian cancan as
“the immediate act of procreation . . . symbolically consummated,”56 while
the poet Pierre Louÿs – as Smart points out – projects Wagner’s represen-
tation of movement onto a vision of ballerinas intimately engaged “in
imaginary intercourse with Wotan” behind the curtains of the Opéra.57
If these allegories yield little specific to Italy, Wagner’s infamously

53
“Avant-hier nous sommes venus à Rome tout exprès pour voir Les Graces, groupe célèbre de
Canova . . . Je n’ai pas recontré dans tout notre voyage d’Italie, de statue qui m’ait fait
l’impression du groupe des trois Graces de Canova . . . Les trois soeurs, légèrement enlacés dans
les bas l’une de l’autre.” Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome (Brussels: Louis Hauman, 1830), 1:
150–51. It is also true, however, that Wagner never commented on specific representations of the
Graces. Any hypothesis of a connection between Canova and Wagner’s “primeval sisters” must
remain tenuous, therefore, in light of Wagner’s admission that he “would never be worth
anything as a judge of paintings, for once the subject matter reveals itself to me clearly and
agreeably, it settles my view and nothing else counts.” Wagner, ML 584.
54
CT 2 (January 8, 1880). 55 SSD 3: 67–68. Cf. PW 1: 96. 56 SSD 9: 53. Cf. PW 5: 48.
57
Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004),
167, 163.
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 195

3.3 Antonio Canova, The Three Graces: Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia
(1815–17) © National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.

explicit metaphors for differentiating operatic nationalities are more infor-

mative. Before labeling Italian opera a prostitute (Lustdirne), he dubbed
French opera a coquette (Kokette), and German opera a prude (Prüde).58
The sexist elaboration of the Italian role parallels Wagner’s comments above

58
SSD 3: 317–18. Cf. PW 2: 111–13.
196 Excursus

on sensuous physicality (Sinnlichkeit) as the primary condition of all art that

communicates to “feeling.” It therefore seems, on this reading, that the
rhetoric of Wagner’s images of music, women, and Italian opera may be
more intimately bound up than previously assumed.
Gutrune’s phoney union with Siegfried in Götterdämmerung depicts a
purely sensuous–physical relationship: their love is chemically induced by
Hagen’s potion. Wagner ventriloquizes his view in Brünnhilde’s righteous
assertion: “you [Gutrune] were never truly [Siegfried’s] wife; you only
served him as a paramour [Buhlerin].”59 While Siegfried and Gutrune
never have sex, Wagner clarifies in Oper und Drama:
In the embraces of a paramour [Buhlerin] the woman is not present, but only a part
of her physical [sinnliche] organism: she conceives no individuality by loving, but
gives herself in general to the general world. Thus the paramour [Buhlerin] is an
undeveloped, neglected woman: yet she at least fulfills the physical functions of the
female sex, by which we can still – albeit regretfully – detect the woman in her.60

Extrapolating back to music, the empty physicality of such an embrace is the

necessary but insufficient condition of Wagner’s “realizing moment of an
artwork,” i.e. a literal, sensory existence. It is corporeality in excelsis and
nothing else. At a reductive extreme, Wagner’s music, as “a woman,”
requires a sensory–physical reality – “the embraces of a paramour” – to
communicate or function. Whereas music and “women” are typically
enlisted to signify an alternative or unstable discourse, they nevertheless
tend, as Susan Berstein has noted, “to reinstate stability at the very moments
when they are enlisted to undo it.”61 This seemingly is the rhetorical
function of Wagner’s Italian “prostitute”; it stabilizes the discourse of
music’s most extreme form of sensuousness as a stereotype of Italianicity.
The radicalism of Wagner’s position, as a Saxon born and bred, is high-
lighted by Marx’s suggestion that Germans may be congenitally predisposed
to dislike the sensuous nature of Italian opera: “we should not forget that
much of what appears to us Germans as luxuriance, dissipation, overload, in
other words as unhealthy and improper, may be entirely natural for the more
excitable and weaker southerners.”62 Decades before the degenerationists,

59
“Sein Ehrweib warst du nie, als Buhlerin bandest du ihn.” Götterdämmerung, Act 3, scene 3.
60
SSD 3: 317–18. Cf. PW 2: 112
61
Susan Bernstein, “Fear of Music?” in Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter J. Burgard (University
of Virginia Press, 1994), 104–34, here 106.
62
“Auch sollen wir nicht vergessen, daß manches, was uns Deutschen an ihm und sonst am
italischen Gesange als Üppigkeit, Ausschweifung, Überladung, also als ungesund und ungehörig
erscheint, im erregtern und – schwächlichern Süden ganz naturgemäß sein mag.” Marx, Die
Kunst des Gesanges, 198.
 Bellini’s Sinnlichkeit and Wagner’s Italy 197

this discrepancy assumed a racial, quasi-biological rationale in Marx’s read-

ing: “There are those – without a rich, powerful, and agreeably formed sensory
organization and without a consolidation in the sensory element – in whom
pure subjectivity and sensuality [Sinnlichkeit] cannot achieve anything
significant.”63 Thus, where Wagner aspires to simulate, and ultimately, to
master “the Italian principle” or “the good Italian cantabile style” that in 1834
he held as necessary to “re-establish . . . the shattered unity of poetry and
song,” Marx acknowledges its contingent merits, but declares it alien to the
German condition.64 Wagner, it seems, was altogether more pragmatic.
His hint at the need for a “sensory relationship” between melody and
verse is far from a banal comment on text setting, then; a single adjective –
sinnlich – offers us a glimpse through this historical keyhole. It implicates a
network of associations within the literary imagination that characterize the
German etic construction of Italy and thereby perhaps encapsulate part of
Bellini’s enduring relevance for Wagner.

63
“Es wird jedoch in jenem, der reinen Subjektivität und der Sinnlichkeit eigenen Gebiete ohne
eine reiche, kräftig und wohlthuend gestaltete Sinneorganisation und ohne eine Vertiefung in das
Element der Sinnlichkeit nichts Bedeutendes geleistet werden können.” Ibid., 203.
64
SSD 12: 9. Cf. PW 8: 64
 4 Hearing voices: Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient
and the Lohengrin “recitatives”

PART 1

Adolescent ears

Wagner must have been a good listener. “The ear is no child,” he declared in
1851.1 Embracing the psychology of cognition, he clarified that listening to
alliterative verse is not merely a passive reception of sound, but an active task
that depends on an inherent human ability to organize sound information.
“The capacity of immediately receptive hearing is so unbounded,” he
explains, “that it knows to connect the most diverse sensations as soon as
they are brought into physiognomic resemblance, and to assign them to
feelings for the purposes of all-encompassing absorption as related, purely
human emotions.”2 In this process the ear transforms the raw sound data
from something particular into something universally human. That is,
in addition to the semantic sense transmitted in melodicized poetic verse, a
second layer of sensation crystallizes as collective emotion within the listener.
Rather than resembling a prosthetic microphone, Wagner’s “completely
understanding ear”3 is closer to a body-generic processor that transforms
sounds – seemingly randomized within the phonemic matrix of language –
from signifying patterns into emotion according to their inherent similitude.
This attributes considerable agency to ears confronted by art, in effect an art
that endlessly solicits cognitive persistence.
Wagner’s claims don’t stop there. The “all-embracing, all-uniting power”4
of the ear does not even require alliterative patterning to transform linguistic
sound into emotion. Corrupted modern prose is good enough:
[The ear] can take the subversive understanding’s millionfold tatters and
severed strands, remake them as purely human, as an original unity, and
evermore unified, and offer them to our feeling for its highest, most ravishing
delectation.5

1 2 3
SSD 4: 133. Cf. PW 2: 271. SSD 4: 132. Cf. PW 2: 270. SSD 4: 136. Cf. PW 2: 274.
4 5
198 SSD 4: 132. Cf. PW 2: 270. SSD 4: 132–3. Cf. PW 2: 274.
 Adolescent ears 199

At stake in Wagner’s interest in sensory mediation is the transmission that

takes place in live performance between creative activity and active
observer. His comments in Oper und Drama betray a desire to take total
control of this transmission as a means of fulfilling the rhetorician’s primary
task: to persuade.
But this chapter is not about Wagner’s theory of language, it is about his
theory of hearing and the tensions between this and his attempts to tran-
scribe what is accomplished by the ear. Making sense of – i.e. “knitting
together” – the sounding “physiognomic resemblance” of alliterative verse
on hearing it spoken or sung, demands a theory of communication based on
the aural recipient, in which the listener realizes the sound, as well as the
sound itself being – in some measure – a realization of Wagner’s text (or
score). “I am concerned here only with the impression . . . melody must
make upon the listener,” he explained in 1860 of the later principle of
endless melody.6 Far from obeying a one-way circuit between performer
and listener, this theory destabilizes the concept of a musical signifier
because what is signified is not static, but becomes absorbed dialectically
as “purely human” emotion by the interpretant. Listening, in such a theory,
is explicitly a two-way street (though as we shall see, Wagner’s calls for
freedom are covertly built on close monitoring and control. So here, for all
his rhetoric, Wagner ends up dictating meaning rather than allowing for its
construction by the listener).
To reinforce his communicative model, Wagner co-opts a second sense,
arguing for the need to persuade both “the eye and ear of hearing,” which is
less a claim for synæsthesia than a belief that seeing alphabetic letters affects
the way we hear and recite text.7 The “physiognomic resemblance” of alliter-
ative consonants is also a visual cue for the eyes, in other words. With this,
Wagner effectively distinguishes a Lacanian visuality (“a screen of signs
[inserted] between the retina and the world”8) from unmediated vision in
the reception of sound. If vision usually dominates perception,9 its ancilla

6
SSD 7: 131. Cf. Three Wagner Essays, 40–41. 7 SSD 4: 136. Cf. PW 2: 274.
8
Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 91.
9
For a historical account of visuality in the nineteenth century see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of
the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992). Debates over the historical priority of senses continue today with Paul Virilio’s pioneering
work on the primacy of vision in modern culture on the one hand (War and Cinema: The Logistics
of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller [London: Verso, 1989], 7ff), and recent volumes
redressing a perceived ocular dominance, on the other, including Veit Erlmann, Reason and
Resonance; Viet Erlmann (ed.), Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity
(New York: Berg, 2004), and Michael Bull and Les Black (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader
(New York: Berg, 2003).
200 Hearing voices

role (as handmaiden) to audition here can perhaps be explained by the fact
that nineteenth-century German infants, schooled in reading through the
emergent science of phonetics by their mothers, “would not see letters
[when they read silently] but hear, with irresistible longing, a voice [her
voice] between the lines,” as Friedrich Kittler famously argued.10 Accepting
this, the intimacy of the experience serves to demote letters as textual signifiers
below both the sound of a voice and the new image of an enunciating mouth.
The outcome, put in its most radical terms, is a situation where “only the
mother’s pointing finger retained any relation to the optic form of the letter.”11
If we take Wagner’s ear-dominated “eye of hearing” seriously, it is no
surprise that musical notation and handwriting – the demoted signifier –
formed something of a bête noire for Wagner. In a letter to Robert Franz,
he complained of the lifelessness of Lohengrin as a printed score, explicitly
bemoaning the inadequacy of notation as “something which no one feels
more keenly than I . . . [for] even a printed drama or an engraved opera
score is, after all, simply an example of the written word.”12 In this mind-
set, he simply refused to send Liszt the verse draft of Siegfrieds Tod because
he feared it could only be misunderstood as writing. “But if I could recite it
to you full voiced, suggestively, as I intend,” Wagner qualified, “then I
would be satisfied as to the desired impression of my poem on you . . .
The written word is . . . entirely insufficient for my intention.”13 At this
time of controversial operatic reforms, eradicating a listener’s
misunderstanding was precisely the point for Wagner. Irrespective of
whether scores or written script are at stake, the principle of a listening
perspective, or “recipient epistemology,” remains. In both instances the
listener remains the agent and, to a disproportionate extent, the arbiter of
melodic “sense.”

10
Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800–1900, 34. Kittler compares philosophical assessments of
stenography at the turn of the nineteenth century to critique “a metaphysics of silent reading” in
which, he claims, the written word triggers in the reader the aural sensation of hearing speech:
“A voice, as pure as it is transcendental, rises from between the lines . . . the hallucination
becomes optical as well as auditory . . . It is not hard to say to whom it belongs. The only
alphabetization technique in which one seems to hear what has been read is the phonetic
method from the Mother’s Mouth.” Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800–1900, 65. Attempts to
apply this to melodic theory include Alfred Cramer, who claimed that for Berlioz, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, and especially Wagner: “melodies evoked pen strokes, and . . . they evoked
meanings and images much as pen strokes did.” With specific reference to Wagner’s melodies,
Cramer’s claim is daring: “that music created a sense of voice using gestures and shapes, and that
in nineteenth-century culture melodic shapes could evoke voice because similar shapes had this
effect in handwritings.” See Cramer, “Of Serpentina and Stenography,” 135, 163.
11
Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800–1900, 34.
12
Wagner to Robert Franz, October 28, 1852, Zurich, SB 5: 87.
13
Wagner to Liszt, June 29, 1851, Enge/Zurich, SB 4: 67.
 Adolescent ears 201

So far so good. But consider a foil to Wagner’s model of sensory medi-

ation. The literary theorist Wolfgang Iser has supplied a framework for
literature whose “sense” congeals between writing and reading. What he
terms the “artistic” and “aesthetic” poles of Konkretisation refer respectively
to a text created by the author, and the realization accomplished by a reader.
While an irreconcilable difference of medium between sound and text
undermines their structural comparison, Iser’s notion of a convergence
between text and reader is useful for Wagner’s theory of listening because
the convergence Iser intimates “can never be precisely pin-pointed, but
must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality
of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader.”14 In other words,
it sits inscrutably between immanent knowledge and epistemology as a
structurally indeterminate site. The aim of Iser’s phenomenological
approach is to vary each text in the imagination until we discover what is
invariable about it, abstracting what Husserl – after Plato – termed its eidos
(type), or in this case, its frame of convergence. But where Iser rejects both
poles in extremis – artistic and aesthetic – in favor of a dynamic merging of
author–reader imagination, Wagner’s model traces convergence back to an
ill-defined eidos of primordial Teutonic sounds. Both concern imagination,
but Wagner’s is considerably less democratic: he pinpoints the convergence
with old-fashioned auctoritas by claiming that listeners must “‘feel back’
[the words’] sensations,” sensations that he intuited and orchestrated, and
“reach their original truth . . . [in order] to grasp the sensuous substance of
our roots of speech.”15 By alluding to an unknowable historical mode of
listening, Wagner brings the site of convergence securely into his own
audio-visual imagination; it is a panopticon of authorial perception (though
Wagner would probably have seen this in terms of the Fichtean universal
mind). I am arguing, in a nutshell, that – unlike Iser’s inscrutable conver-
gence – Wagner models how to listen to his verse by dictating how he wants
to be heard according to his beliefs about the origins of language.
Paradoxically, for Nietzsche this resulted in a kind of magical incompre-
hensibility, a powerful, “unexpected and utterly unintelligible effect” that
never quite reaches conscious, conceptual comprehension: “like a myste-
rious star, [the feeling] expired after a moment’s gleaming.”16

14
Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Reader–Response
Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 50.
15
SSD 4: 127. Cf. PW 2: 264.
16
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music [1872], trans.
Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2003), 109.
202 Hearing voices

Why does this matter? Rather than dismissing another act of Wagnerian
tendentiousness, two related questions arise: first, Wagner’s emphasis on
the sensory, communicative capacity of alliteration was a singular mid-
century response to preceding, beleaguered attempts at melodic theory; but
why did an intuitive connection between verbal sounds suddenly appear to
offer an answer, a way out of what had become an extraordinary aesthetic
quagmire of German text setting? Second, at the level of his verse compo-
sition, Wagner decisively factored the listener into his musical equations,
but when did the master of Bayreuth first draw a distinction – adapting
Iser – between “artistic” and “aesthetic” listening, between aurally receiving
a composer’s music and the cognitive task of making sense of it? When did
he first awaken into an adolescence, that is, in which the ear is “no child”?

Die richtige Sängerin

Wagner’s own ears had only made sense of Bellinian melody on June 10, 1834
through the voice of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, a German “dramatic
soprano” whose influence on Wagner’s career is well documented.17 Before
her guest appearance in Leipzig as Romeo (I Capuleti e i Montecchi), Wagner’s
autobiographical sketch recounts that he had heard the Italian’s music as
trivial. As a listener, he reports being taken aback by the soprano’s “extra-
ordinary achievement” given Bellini’s “thoroughly insignificant music.” It was
evidently an awakening of sorts:
I was far from granting Bellini any great merit; nonetheless, the material out of
which his music was crafted appeared to me more successful and more suitable to
radiate warm life than the anxiously concerned conscientiousness with which we
Germans mostly brought about only a tormented semblance of truth.18

Later, in Mein Leben, Wagner openly characterized the experience as a

prompt “to ruminate on the causes of the ineffectuality of . . . German
music used hitherto in drama.”19 This included his own music. If a

17
Two relatively recent studies of Schröder-Devrient are: Karl-Josef Kutsch and Leo Riemens,
Großes Sängerlexikon, vol. 2 (Bern and Stuttgart: Franke 1987–1994), 2670–72; and
Stephen Meyer, “Das wilde Herz: Interpreting Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,” Opera
Quarterly 14 (1997), 23–40. A similar claim to Wagner’s experience of Bellini concerns
Schröder-Devrient’s role in the reception of Fidelio. According to Alfred von Wolzogen, it was
only after German critics heard her sing Leonora in November 1822 that the formerly “frosty
coldness” of Beethoven’s music was accorded “more and more effusive praise,” leading
Wolzogen to assert that “she created the role” [créer un rôle] in the truest sense. See Alfred von
Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1863), 54–55.
18
SSD 1: 9. Cf. PW 1: 8. 19 ML 81.
 Die richtige Sängerin 203

particular performer allowed him to “hear” Bellini’s melodies as compelling

rather than crass, to what extent had Schröder-Devrient become, in effect,
Wagner’s signifier for performative melody, i.e. melody that only truly
realizes its identity in the act of its delivery? On that night in Leipzig his
ears made sense of Bellinian “sensations” seemingly for the first time
through a voice type, not a verse type. We may wonder how measurably
this led him to factor the performer’s melodic delivery into his melodic
composition. This would seem what the final act of Meistersinger thematizes
all too openly when Walther trumps Beckmesser’s feeble attempt with
ostensibly the same poem:
meistersinger: Yes, indeed! I see, it makes a difference if one sings it wrong or
right.
volk: That’s something else, who’d have thought it?
What a difference the right words and the proper delivery make!20

In reality, of course, Beckmesser is not just singing Walther’s composition

badly, he is actually singing a different “text” – both words and music are
different from the Prize Song. This would seem Wagner’s way of presenting,
to the ears of the theater audience only, an experience of “Beckmesser
singing Walther’s exact composition, but badly” that is audible only in the
stage world. Adopting Carolyn Abbate’s terms, it is a scene of “phenomenal”
performance – singing heard by its singer – but one contrived to distort the
sound for listeners in the theater in order to illustrate the absence of “proper
delivery.”21
We can first begin to address this topic through a recollection. It is
likely that a cryptic entry in Cosima’s diary as late as March 7, 1878 refers
back to Schröder-Devrient’s importance for Wagner’s hearing of “Bellini”
in 1834:
R. played various Italian themes, from Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La Straniera
and Norma, and said: “For all the poverty of invention, there is real passion and
feeling there, and the right singer has only to get up and sing it for it to win all
hearts. I have learned things from them which Messrs. Brahms & Co. have never
learned, and they can be seen in my melodies” . . . After playing the C-sharp Minor
Prelude [WTC I], he observes, with reference to the Italian melodies . . . “That is
pour le monde, but this (the Prelude) is the world itself.”22

20
“[Meistersinger]: Ja wohl, ich merk’, ’s ist ein ander Ding, / ob falsch man oder richtig
sing’. / [Volk] Das ist was andres, wer hätt’s gedacht; / was doch recht Wort und Vortrag
macht!” Act 3, scene 5.
21
See Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton University Press, 1991), 5ff.
22
CT (March 7, 1878).
204 Hearing voices

The anecdote reveals a fracture in Wagner’s musical Weltanschauung that

relates to different ways in which music can be heard. Bach’s Prelude is cast
as a composer’s inner musical world, central and all-encompassing, entirely
complete in itself (redolent of Wagner’s ecstatic claim for his lovers’ unity in
Tristan: “Selbst dann bin ich die Welt”);23 Bellini’s themes, by contrast,
communicate to the outer world by actively enrapturing an audience. The
one is self-contained and inert, the other is an open, dynamic process; at
root their contrast articulates a broad distinction between the assignment of
meaning to a state of being or an act of conveying, conditions of status and
passage. This raises doubts about the extent to which it is the themes
themselves – melodies as inert, “plastic” shapes – that communicate or
are innately beautiful (an idea defeated by the melodic theorists who
accepted notions of plural listening), and lends a new dimension to
Wagner’s intended criticism of “absolute” melody: “fine art can only display
the finished, i.e. the motionless; it can never make of the beholder a con-
vinced witness to the becoming of a thing.”24
This division assumed national connotations as part of a wider dis-
course on the split between the composition of melodic shape and an
aesthetics of singing we saw in Chapter 1. For some critics, Italianate
music posited an antithesis between predefined melodic structure and the
singing voice, where the former is self-sufficient and independent of the
latter’s spontaneous freedom to communicate to an audience. “Italian
song . . . [is] always beautiful in its substance,” Pietro Siciliani declared in
1868, “whether you hear it sung by the uncouth voice of a yokel or by the
most able artist.”25 German melody, by contrast, typically posited a
dependence between these two, a synthesis of expression and composi-
tional work where the predefined melodic shape contains its charact-
eristic expression within it, permitting considerably less freedom in
performance.26

23
Tristan and Isolde sing this iconic line together in Tristan, act 2, scene 2, mm. 1188–93.
24
SSD 4: 192. Cf. PW 2: 337. It was Wagner, of course, who first coined the term “absolute
melody.” A recent, historiographic study of the term is Sanna Pederson, “Defining the Term
‘Absolute Music’ Historically,” Music and Letters 90 (2009), 240–62; see also Carl Dahlhaus
and L. U. Abraham, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
25
“il canto italiano . . . [e] sempre bello nella sua sostanza, sia che lo sentiate modulato dalla rozze
voce del bifolco, sia dal più abile artista.” Pietro Siciliani, Sulla differente ragione estetica
nell’indole della musica tedesca e della musica italiana: Dialogo fra un critic ed un filosofo [1868],
quoted in Mazzucato’s review of the book in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano 23 (1868), 209–10.
26
Lobe’s Musikalische Briefe offers an animated discussion of these alternative principles. See in
particular the chapters “Deutsche Musik” and “Die neuern deutschen Componisten im
Allgemeinen,” Musikalische Briefe, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1860), 16–32.
 Die richtige Sängerin 205

In the lecture notes for his Aesthetics, Hegel couched this in terms of
producing (Rossinian), and reproducing (Weberean) melody in performance:
When it is said, for instance, that Rossini makes things easy for the singers, this is
only partly correct. Indeed he makes it really difficult for them by so often referring
them to the activity of their own musical genius. If this really is genius, the resulting
work of art has a quite peculiar attraction, because we have present before us not
merely a work of art but the actual production of one.27

This also implies that a melody created in the moment of its delivery
becomes increasingly unwritable: its intricate, improvisatory means of
expression are sensible to the listening ear, but largely illegible to the eye
presented with the dyslexic imprecision of a five-line stave. Notation, we
recall, was “entirely insufficient” for Wagner, and in arguing that the
German mistake is to prescribe all raw musical expression exclusively for
the orchestra, the Leipzig-based music theorist Lobe thinks it a “hugely
obvious fact” that “passion can only be truly, movingly portrayed in opera
through the human voice.”28 Schröder-Devrient is again his exemplar of
choice.29 Since her performances function not as a detail, but as a mighty
hinge for the German discourse on vocal melody, the criticism surrounding
her reception bears closer scrutiny.
We tend to think of her as a card-carrying German artist whose combi-
nation of mimetic stage talents and vocal idiosyncrasies embodied the
modern goal of unifying tragic acting and modern opera – a figure who
comfortably flitted between speaking and singing at decisive moments in
performances that were always driven by the portrayal of character. This
certainly describes her ideological reception in mid-century Germany.
Reviewing her performance as Leonore (Fidelio) from 1831, the German
poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab illustrates this familiar reading. Like many
others, he interpreted the disconnect between her charismatic acting
and poor vocal timbre and technique as an educational deficiency. But he
went further in claiming that her early training as an actress and lack of

27
Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 957.
28
“Die Leidenschaft kann in der Oper nur durch die menschlische Stimme wahrhaft ergreifend
dargestellt werden.” Lobe, Musikalische Briefe, 40.
29
In her prime, Schröder-Devrient was reputedly without equal as Leonore, a role with which she
was most closely associated and received her greatest acclaim after she first sang the part in
November 1822. Lobe’s adulation therefore reinscribes a link between her artistry, the reception
of Fidelio, and the Beethovenbild: “Many have heard the great Schröder-Devrient in Fidelio where
in the dungeon scene, with a mostly silent orchestra, she hurls out the words: ‘Tödt’ erst sein
Weib!’ and each who hears this surely shivers through the soul still with the memory of the
extraordinary effect of these few sung notes.” See Lobe, Musikalische Briefe, 40.
206 Hearing voices

sheer vocal prominence rebalanced her stage presence between the kindred
institutions of opera and theater, leading to an embodied artistic unity, a
kind of realist Gesamtkunstdarstellung which admittedly played into existing
models of artistic synthesis, but which also had obvious connotations for
Wagner’s future:
Never have we seen an artist unite all the various aspects of her performance like this
one did. Dialogue, pantomime, gesture, song all lift up and inform each other . . . It
will never be the natural power of the tone itself that enraptures us, indeed, we often
even see her struggle with hindrances in her technique that are not inconsequential.
And yet she creates a soul for the sound, gives it a heart, so that, flowing out from the
innermost recesses of her breast, it irresistibly penetrates into the deepest depths of
her heart.30

As Stephen Meyer has argued, this unified performance aesthetic reflected

a new “spiritual outlook” for liberal criticism and became a trope of
Schröder-Devrient’s reception in Germany in the 1830s,31 with the con-
temporary critic Heinrich Laube even claiming for her a revolutionary
status as “truly the prototype of a new era of Art; her Fidelio is the
enchanting bright night, when the old god Poesis, in his eternal youth,
presses Music, the euphonious lotus flower, in his immortal arms.”32
A review of her opera debut from January 20, 1821 in the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung set a prognostic tone, describing her creation of “a
pure ideal-poetic side from prosaic poetry,”33 an accolade that resonates
with none other than Wagner’s project for Versmelodie. And with unam-
biguously rhyming rhetoric, the mythology surrounding Wagner’s debt to
Schröder-Devrient spawned many fanciful accounts of his “decisive”
artistic encounters with her.

30
“Noch nie sahen wir eine Künstlerin so die Gesammtheit aller Mittel zu einer Leistung
vereinigen wie diese. Dialog, Mimik, Plastik, Gesang, Alles hebt und trägt sich gegenseitig . . .
Niemals wird es die Naturgewalt des Tones an sich sein, womit sie uns hinreißt, ja wir
erblicken sie sogar häufig im Kampfe mit nicht unbedeutenden Hindernissen in ihren Mitteln;
allein sie schafft dem Klange eine Seele, gibt ihm ein Herz, und so, aus dem Innersten der
Brust entquollen, dringt er unwiderstehlich in ihre tiefsten Tiefen ein.” Ludwig Rellstab,
Musikalische Beurteilungen [1848]; rpt. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861), 172.
31
Meyer, “Das wilde Herz,” 32ff.
32
“Sie ist wirklich der Prototyp einer neuen Aera der Kunst, ihr Fidelio ist die reizende
Brauntnacht, wo der alte Gott der Poesis in seiner ewigen Jugend die klingende Lotusblume
Musik in seine unsterblichen Arme drückt.” Heinrich Laube, “Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,”
Zeitung für die elegante Welt 6 (1833), 21.
33
“[es] gelang vielleicht noch nie einer Mime, der prosaischen Poesie eine rein idealisch-poetische
Seite [abgewonnen hat], wie dieser hoffnungsvollen Schülerin.” AmZ (January 20, 1821), quoted
in Claire von Glümer, Erinnerungen an Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Leipzig: Johann
Ambrose Barth, 1862), 23.
 Die richtige Sängerin 207

By far the most adventurous anecdote – given by the (occasionally unreli-

able) biographer and theater critic Carl Hagemann – purports to quote
Wagner’s sister-in-law, Cäcilie Avenarius, who recounts a visit by Schröder-
Devrient to the Geyer family in Leipzig when Wagner was a teenager. There is
no evidence that such a visit took place, though it remains possible, for Wagner
does mention in Mein Leben that famous singers visited their household while
his younger sister, Clara, sang at the Leipzig opera. Whether or not parts of the
story are fact, Avenarius’ account sits at the apex of creative Wagner–Devrient
mythology and is worth quoting at length:

[The famous female guest singer] came and sang quite incomparably. Albert, the
older brother, accompanied her, and leaning silently in the deep window balustrade,
Richard Wagner stood motionless and let the entire magic of the tones act upon
him. It was as though a veil fell from before his eyes . . . for the first time he felt the
essence and effect of dramatic expression. He was awoken from an unconscious
dream. His eyes gleamed and his slim delicate face was deadly pale from excitement.
He crept from the room as though anesthetized and hid for the rest of the evening.
While the wondrous singing resounded, he sat in his small room with eyes wide
open: and his artistic path rose before him . . . Now he saw clearly and purely for the
first time what he ought to – must do in the world. Not only the artist but the
prophet was awoken in him. The deeply powerful experience of these few minutes
and the ensuing terrible night gave birth to the music dramatist, the new value of
German opera theater . . . and this was achieved by the rare art of Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient.34

While a claim of such magnitude almost certainly belongs to the hyperbole

of a wishful historian, it probably alludes to Wagner’s own apocryphal
claims that after hearing her Fidelio aged sixteen, he wrote a succinct but
effusive letter explaining “that my life had henceforth found its meaning . . .
that she had on this evening made of me that which I now vowed

34
“Und sie kam und sang ganz unvergleichlich. Der älteste Bruder Albert begleitete, und still in die
tiefe Fensterbrüstung gelehnt, stand unbeweglich Richard Wagner und ließ den ganzen Zauber der
Töne auf sich einwirken. Es war, als ob ein Schleier von seinen Augen fiel . . . Zum erstenmal fühlte
er das Wesen und die Wirkung des dramatischen Ausdrucks. Er war aus einem unbewußten Traum
erwacht. Seine Augen glänzten und sein schmales, zartes Gesicht war vor Erregung totenbleich. Wie
betäubt schlich er aus dem Zimmer und ließ sich für den Abend nicht mehr sehen. Während der
wundervolle Gesang weitertönte, saß er mit groß geöffneten Augen in seinem kleinen Stübschen:
und seine künstlerische Lebensaufgange stieg vor ihm auf . . . Jetzt sah er zum erstenmal deutlich
und rein, was er in der Welt sollte – mußte. Nicht nur der Künstler, auch der Seher war in ihm
erwacht. Das tief-große Erlebnis jener wenigen Minuten und die darauf folgende furchtbare Nacht
hatte den Musikdramatiker, den Neuwerter des deutschen Operntheaters geboren . . . Und die dies
mit ihrer seltenen Kunst vollbrachte, war Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient.” Carl Hagemann,
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1904), 6–7.
208 Hearing voices

to become.”35 In light of this, the association of her performance aesthetic

with the cliché of Gesamtkunstwerk was as easy for uncritical biographers of
the last century as it was simplistic. Against such conformism, I will seek in
part to reset her cultural memory with the argument that she principally
affected the way Wagner heard and notated voices.

Revising the Wagner–Devrient relationship

Both Wagner’s divided world and his acknowledgement of the richtige

Sängerin recognize the imperative of performance acts in communicating
“real passion and feeling” through melody. Was this what he learned that
“Messrs. Brahms & Co.” apparently did not? If so, it underscored his view
that the impulse to communicate dramatic feeling was bound to the struc-
turing of melody, conceived as an active process between singer and listener;
as such, it was not entirely written down, which is to say, not entirely in the
hands of the composer.
In this reading, Wagner’s melodies were intricately bound to the voices
that would sing them, not in the sense of composing parts for a particular
voice (Handel’s Cuzzoni, Mozart’s Constanze) but of conceiving – and
subsequently composing – a vocal aesthetic according to the experience of
a prior performance by a particular voice. Of course, I rehearse a common-
place to state that Wagner (and his uncritical biographers) consistently
claimed Schröder-Devrient’s 1834 performance as Romeo made an “over-
whelming impression” on him.36 If we put some pressure on this reading,
however, it turns out that Wagner mostly discusses his changed opinion of
Bellini in that passage from the Autobiographische Skizze. Indeed, on closer
inspection, all sorts of cracks begin to appear in the Schröder-Devrient
myth: less than a year after hearing Schröder-Devrient’s Romeo, Wagner
had relativized her achievement, comparing it to Amalie Planer’s

35
ML 37. On the basis of strong documentary evidence, John Deathridge doubts this
performance actually took place, while Klaus Kropfinger points out equally that “there is no
positive proof that it never happened.” Complicating our credence in Wagner’s claims,
Mein Leben reports that Schröder-Devrient recited the teenage Wagner’s letter “word for
word” during rehearsals for Rienzi. This would have required her to recall or file away this fan
mail from an unknown boy for some fourteen years, which is possible but unlikely. See
Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner (New York: Norton, 1984), 7; Kropfinger,
Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner’s Reception of Beethoven [1974], trans. Peter Palmer
(Cambridge University Press, 1991), 32–33; Wagner, ML 37.
36
Ernest Newman’s description in Wagner as Man & Artist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1924), 157.
 Revising the Wagner–Devrient relationship 209

performance of the same role;37 his tendency during the early 1840s,
furthermore, was to refer to Schröder-Devrient together with her operatic
partner, Josef Tichatschek, indicating that her artistic significance was
equatable with his for Wagner at this time.38 Though he certainly had hailed
her (as Romeo, Norma, and Amina) in 1837 as “the greatest living German
dramatic singer,”39 by 1843 he aligned her efforts with more nationalistic
German taste, speaking of the “forced enthusiasm” with which she por-
trayed these same Bellinian heroines that inspired his initial endorsement;40
it was only after her death in 1860, moreover, that Wagner began to posit
her real causality, namely “a magic that was to determine the whole direc-
tion of my career,” wherein “there arose in me a consistent image, not only
of what a singing and acting performance should be, but also of the poetic
and musical shape of a work of art.”41 While she was still alive, albeit retired,
Wagner barely mentions her in his Zurich essays, and it is not until Mein
Leben (1865–80) that he actually specifies in detail her performances of
Beethoven and Bellini as artistic epiphanies for his life’s work. The
construct, in other words, was fully realized more than three decades after
the original “moment of intensity,” to borrow Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s
phrase.42

37
“Rarely can a débutante have caused such a great sensation as she did [Amalie Planer as Romeo in
Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi]; people were beside themselves with enthusiasm; the opera had
to be repeated immediately afterwards, and the house was once again packed to the rafters, and
the noise was as deafening as that which normally greets Devrient.” Wagner to Theodor Apel,
October 26–27, 1835, Magdeburg, in SB 1: 225–26.
38
“Tichatschek & Devrient are well-suited to their parts [in Rienzi].” Wagner to Apel, September
20, 1840, Leipzig, SB 1: 410. Writing to Tichatschek himself, Wagner engages the tenor for Rienzi
as part of a required duo: “the opera’s success lies principally in the best possible casting of the
two main roles (and in no other theater in the world do I know artists whom I would be more
justified in expecting to fulfill the boldest wishes I entertain for the success of the opera than Mad.
Schr.-Dev. and you yourself – my very dear Sir.” Wagner to Tichatschek, September 6–7, 1841,
Dresden, in SB 1: 506. Both in preparation for, and following the success of, Rienzi, Wagner
continued to think of the pair as an artistic unit: “of Devrient I need only say that I am assured she
has never studied la rôle with such enthusiasm, since she almost always finds it uncommonly
difficult to familiarize herself with anything new straightaway: at the very end of the opera she
intends to come galloping onto the stage on horseback, riding cross-saddle! – Tichatschek has
given up the holiday in Salzburg on my account: vocally he is made for the part.” Wagner to Ernst
Benedikt Kietz, September 6, 1842, Dresden, SB 2: 147; “The performance was ravishingly
beautiful – Tichatschek – Devrient – everything – everything was more perfect than has ever
been seen here previously!” Wagner to Eduard and Cäcilie Avenarius, October 21, 1842, Paris, in
SB 2: 167–68.
39
SSD 12: 17. 40 Wagner to Robert Schumann, February 25, 1843, Dresden, in SB 2: 221.
41
SSD 7: 97. Cf. Jacobs, Three Wagner Essays, 19.
42
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence (Stanford University Press, 2004),
97ff.
210 Hearing voices

What scant evidence exists about their actual contact during artistic
collaborations supports this reinterpretation. Despite the fact that
Schröder-Devrient created the roles of Adriano, Senta, and Venus under
Wagner during the 1840s, there is little reason to suspect that she advocated
his music or associated her national loyalties with his. Indeed, after being
unable to master a section from the role of Adriano in 1842, she reputedly
threw the score of Rienzi at the composer’s feet during a rehearsal, saying:
“You can sing your own crap!”43 Wagner himself indicates in Mein Leben
that Schröder-Devrient often did not see eye to eye with him. During
rehearsals for the premiere of Tannhäuser, they specifically disagreed on
the possibility of inscribing declamation into the plastic form of a melody.
After declaiming the text aloud “with great feeling and force,” Schröder-
Devrient called Wagner naïve (he reports) and explained that Tichatschek
would be quite incapable of learning this manner of delivery:
I tried to bring her attention and my own to bear upon the nature of the music,
which was written so clearly in order to bring out the necessary accent that, in my
opinion, the music actually spoke for him who interpreted the passage, even if he
were only a musical singer and nothing more. She shook her head, saying that this
would [only] be all right in the case of an oratorio.44

Wagner’s implied response – tucked away in his 1872 essay on acting – was
that “the Tannhäuser I myself conceived has never been performed at all,”
and that “whoever may choose to think that I meant to fetter the life of a
spirited performance by mechanical minutiae . . . [is wrong because] those
marks are but the picture I hold up to [singers] to follow.”45 This robust
disagreement over notation also informs the first section of his 1852 essay
“On the Performance of Tannhäuser,” suggesting that it was precisely at this
time, in the wake of his Zurich essays (1849–51) and the aborted musical
sketches for Siegfrieds Tod (1850), that her influence on him is traceable,
specifically in relation to vocal notation.

43
“Singe er seinen Quark selber!” The anecdote is recorded in Glümer, Erinnerungen an
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 121.
44
ML 367. In the same passage, Wagner seeks to vindicate his own views on prescribing vocal
declamation by recounting his success in tutoring Anton Mitterwurzer, the baritone who created
Wolfram for the 1845 premiere: “During several rehearsals he [Mittelwurzer] only sang in a
whisper in order to get over the difficulty [of adopting Wagner’s explicit declamatory
intonation], but at the last rehearsal he acquitted himself so admirably of his task, and threw
himself into it so heartily, that his work has remained to this day as my most conclusive reason
for believing that, in spite of the unsatisfactory state of the world of opera today, it is possible not
only to find, but also properly to train, the singer whom I should regard as indispensable for a
correct interpretation of my works.” Ibid., 370–71.
45
SSD 9: 212–3. Cf. PW 5: 211.
 Revising the Wagner–Devrient relationship 211

Celebrated idealist commentaries about Schröder-Devrient suddenly

speaking the words “Tödt’ erst sein Weib!” in Fidelio, or suddenly laughing
convulsively, tend to obscure the fact that it was only after hearing
Schröder-Devrient fail in this trademark strategy of breaking operatic
codes – Wagner explains – that he realized the significance of her earlier
impression on him. Her later efforts as Julia in Spontini’s La Vestale:
frequently led to some exaggeration and at one crucial point even to a truly deplorable
instance of over-acting . . . [With] . . . the words “Er ist frei!” she let herself be tempted
into speaking the words instead of singing them. She had often previously demon-
strated what overwhelming effect can be produced by tones approaching pure speech
in Fidelio . . . The tremendous effect, to which I, of all people, was particularly sensitive,
was derived from the strange shock, like the blow of an executioner’s axe, which
I received at being abruptly brought down from the exalted sphere into which music
lifts even the most gruesome situations to the bedrock of harshest reality . . . [I]n
recalling this feeling, I can only describe the instant like a flash of lightning . . . The
tremendous significance of such a moment, and the fact that there should be no trifling
with it, was revealed to me in this performance by the complete failure of this great
artist to produce the desired result.46

The changing reality of her ageing vocal cords is multiplied by the “harshest
reality” that Wagner (wanted to have) heard in her earlier utterances. The
claim for an epiphanic bolt of lightning, in other words, is retrospective and
can therefore appear to us as self-serving.
Consider the following: Wagner continued to laud Schröder-Devrient’s
stage talents for a suspiciously long time (given his mutable aesthetic prior-
ities since Magdeburg and her vocal decline from ca. 1840 onward), right up
to 1872 in fact, when he dedicated the essay “Über Schauspieler und Sänger”
to her memory, thereby associating her imago with the moral authority of
his call for theatrical reform. By this stage, twelve years had passed since her
death on January 26, 1860, allowing Wagner to preserve the pure memory
because there was nothing to disturb it.47 Under these circumstances,
Wagner could safely make his most decisive claim: “she had the gift of
teaching a composer how to compose.”48 The sincerity we ascribe to this
and similar retrospective comments must remain an open question. By
contrast, the effect of Liszt’s longevity on his once-white-hot relationship

46
ML 285.
47
The scandal of her three husbands, double bankruptcy, staunch liberalism, and brief
imprisonment had faded, while her apocryphal pornographic memoirs were so salacious that the
question of their authenticity was simply not taken seriously, however much they fascinated
readers. Anon., Aus den Memoiren einer Saengerin (Altona: n.p., 1862).
48
SSD 11: 221. Cf. PW 5: 219.
212 Hearing voices

with Wagner was quite different because Liszt subsisted and continued to
compose new music, becoming “just like King Lear, his acquaintances the
one hundred knights, and his arrangements the Learisms,”49 whose latest
works amounted to “budding insanity.”50 Not coincidentally, Wagner’s
sustained estimation of “this wonderful woman”51 parallels his admiration
for Bellini (post-1834), as mentioned in Chapter 3: both were lifelong
and, despite some occasional harsh words about Bellini, both remained
unqualified to the extent they were self-serving.52 To my knowledge, there
were no other living contemporary musicians – Liszt and Tichatschek
included – about whom these conditions held true for Wagner.
The power of literary memory organizing Wagner’s understanding of
past performances plays into a trope of Romantic autobiography predicated
on the concept of continual reassessment through the passage of time.
Wordsworth opined that it is nearly impossible to extricate “the naked
recollection of [past] time” from the incursions of “after-mediation,”53
making it quite literally poetic, therefore, that Wagner’s actual correspond-
ence with Schröder-Devrient is lost. As Deathridge first pointed out, more-
over, Mein Leben notoriously refers to a fictional performance by Schröder-
Devrient of Fidelio in Leipzig during 1829.54 It seems Wagner backdated his
first real experience of her singing (from 1834 in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i
Montecchi), and switched the composer from an Italian fop to a Germanic
titan, comparing the imaginary musical epiphany of a sixteen-year-old boy’s
understanding of Beethoven only to his later experience of the Ninth
Symphony under François-Antoine Habeneck in Paris (ca. 1840), another
event Deathridge has shown to be more wishful than real.55 Rather than

49
CT (November 29, 1883). 50 CT (June 1, 1883). 51 SSD 9: 219. Cf. PW 5: 218.
52
Typically, even Wagner’s harshest criticism of Bellini’s music allows for its improvement
through Schröder-Devrient’s performance. See, for instance, his statement in 1871 that: “We
only need recall the performance, surely unforgettable by many still alive, once given by
Schröder-Devrient of ‘Romeo’ in Bellini’s opera. Every fiber of the musician’s being rebels against
acknowledging any kind of artistic value in the poor, utterly threadbare music here hung upon an
opera poem of grotesque barrenness; but ask anyone who saw it what impression he received
from the ‘Romeo’ of Schröder-Devrient as compared with the Romeo of our very best actor in
even the great Briton’s piece?” SSD 9: 140. Cf. PW 5: 141.
53
Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” III 644–68. This work proved unfinishable; see particularly Susan
Wolfson’s argument for a decentered Prelude in a study of its dynamic, fragmentary status, in
“Revision as Form: Wordsworth’s Drowned Man,” in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, ed.
Stephen C. Gill (Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–122.
54
See Deathridge, “Early Life” in The New Grove: Wagner (New York: Norton, 1984), 7.
55
“[T]here is no evidence that Wagner heard Beethoven’s Ninth when he said he did.” Deathridge
argues that it was most likely Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette overture that influenced Wagner’s
composition of the Faust overture, which Wagner wanted to posit as “a profoundly ‘German’
work.” See Ibid., 20. For Wagner’s claims, see ML 174–75.
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 213

outright deceit, this properly accords with Wagner’s tendency publicly to

construct symbols of his life, a tendency characterized by the creative
interplay of memory and imagination that uncovers and expands on the
perceived significance of life events. In a discussion of “the crisis autobiog-
raphy,” M. H. Abrams captures this nexus of recollection and revisionism:
In such a recovery of former experience [the narrator / Wagner] not only has the
power to live and enjoy the essence of things “entirely outside of time,” but also to
create a new world, an eternal world of art, out of the “resurrection” of his fugitive
time-bound past. Only now is he able to recognize that an implicit design had been
silently governing his seemingly haphazard and wasted past . . . art is “the genuine
Last Judgment,” for by extricating essence from time, it is able to recover the past in
a new creation – an aesthetic world which is a regained paradise.56

Whether or not we ascribe agency to the “implicit design” governing Wagner’s

“seemingly haphazard” early development, this remains a retrospective “new
creation,” and the construct must remain a type of revisionism.
We have seen Wagner’s fascination with manipulating the process of
translating sound into sentient response, and the fact that Schröder-
Devrient’s importance to Wagner’s “aesthetic world” therefore lies arguably
outside the familiar twentieth-century readings of “the most powerful
[artistic] impression he ever received.”57 Let us replace a hermeneutical
question with a substantialist one, asking not what she “means,” but what
she “is” to Wagner’s Melodik.

Expressing with “no ‘voice’”

In the very essay Wagner dedicated to his richtige Sängerin, his irritation at
suspicions about her innate vocal quality suggests a misalignment of perspec-
tive, which is to say, an inappropriate question:
Concerning this artist I have again and again been asked if her voice was really so
remarkable, since we glorified her as a singer . . . It constantly annoyed me to answer
this question, for I was incensed at the thought of the great tragedian being in a
hierarchy with the female castrati of our opera. Were I asked again today, I should
answer somewhat as follows: No! She had no “voice” at all; but she knew how to use
her breath so beautifully, and to let a true womanly soul stream forth in such
wondrous sounds, that we thought neither of voice nor of singing!58

56
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York: Norton, 1973), 81–82.
57
Bekker, Richard Wagner: His Life in his Works, 80. 58 SSD 9: 221. Cf. PW 5: 219.
214 Hearing voices

By reluctantly disclosing a fissure between voice, singing, and breath, Wagner

compensates by foregrounding the impression of her unified subjectivity on
stage (“true womanly soul”), allowing breath, diction, and enunciation to
paper over the absent qualities of cantabile song. But this is an unwilling
exchange that plays on a somewhat fraught eighteenth-century cooperation
between speaking and singing that continually called the unified subjectivity
of a voice into question; like oil and water, Atem and Gesang were constituted
and behaved similarly, yet they did not mix, except perhaps at very high
temperatures.59
Descriptions of such unusual vocal expressivity play into a mid-nineteenth-
century discourse of what the Dresden novelist and playwright Otto Ludwig
termed “poetischer Realismus,” whose combination of verisimilitude and
idealized detailing of the real world can function for our purposes as a synonym
for Schröder-Devrient’s expressive utterances.60 In his Dramaturgische
Aphorismen, Ludwig defined this oxymoronic concept as a heightened or
corrected vision of reality that would include the naturalist’s objective reality
and the idealist’s ethical, morally ideal content; implicit in this was the realist,
“concrete portrayal” of character, rather than “reflections on it,” which entailed
a “dramatic objectivity,” in which – by extrapolating to the stage – inner feelings
would be acted out through seemingly unfeigned gesture, utterance, and action.
In principle, Ludwig explains, this entails a reconciliation of opposites:
“Naturalists are more concerned with plurality; Idealists more with unity.
These two directions are partial, artistic realism unifies them in one artistic
center.”61 This reconciliation forms part of a shift in attitudes to literature, and

59
Historically, even when reduced to a division between enunciating and intoning, the fissure was
uncomfortable enough for Christoph Martin Wieland to renounce the possibility of
overcoming the divide in Singspiel; instead he advocated simply the abandonment of speech. For
Wieland, the problem of juxtaposing speech and singing was obsolete by 1775, and he advocated
instead fully musical opera in German “because in Singspiel everything is music” [“weil im
Singspiel Alles Musik ist”]. See Wieland, Versuch über das teutsche Singspiel und einige darin
einschlagende Gegenstände (first published in: Der Teutsche Merkur 1775), in: Christoph
Martin Wieland, Sämtliche Werke, 52 vols. (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1824–28), 38: 126–53.
60
The term “poetic realism” was itself first applied to literature in this sense by Per Daniel
Amadeus Atterbom (“poetisk realist”) in 1838; it entered the German discourse via Carl August
Hagberg seven months later. For a detailed critique of the concept in the nineteenth century,
including Ludwig’s position in a canon of authors espousing the term (beginning with Friedrich
Schlegel in 1802), see Roy C. Cowen, Der Poetische Realismus: Kommentar zu einer Epoche
(Munich: Winkler, 1985). See also Clifford Bernd, “The Emergence of Poetischer Realismus as a
term of Literary Criticism in German,” in Thematics Reconsidered, ed. Frank Trommler
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 229–36.
61
“Dem Naturalisten ist es mehr um die Mannigfaltigkeit zu thun, dem Idealisten mehr um die
Einheit. Diese beiden Richtungen sind einseitig, der künstlerische Realismus vereinigt sie in einer
künstlerischen Mitte.” Otto Ludwig, Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Fr. Wilh. Grunow,
1891), 5: 458–62, here 459. For a study of Ludwig’s novels and other writings from the 1830s–50s,
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 215

by extension, to acting. Wagner explicitly cited Schröder-Devrient's occasional

switch between song and speech as a migration between the ideal and the real in
this sense; the moment of changeover is then a “flash of lightning, a glimpse
into the nature of both spheres at once . . . Obviously, for an instant the ideal
was unable to bear a certain load, and discharged it onto other.”62 In more
measured tones, Laube observed that Schröder-Devrient “is not a singer who
acts, but an actress who sings. We no longer detect the artificiality of opera.”63
With Ludwig, then, a circle of writers and dramatists in Dresden found a term
for the heightened mimicry on stage of what was considered to be “real” life
speech that gifted the accolade of dramatic “expressivity” to a voice that was
neither beautiful nor inherently musical. (Of course, terms such as “real” and
“expressive” are to some extent floating signifiers with no objective status in the
discourse of dramatic theater, but the positively conceived dyad “real–expres-
sive” remains broadly defined in opposition to “ideal–representational” in
Ludwig’s aphorisms.) But from a listener’s perspective, the realist voice – as a
lone aural medium – also created (rather than reflected or expressed) a reality
for its auditors. As Gary Tomlinson points out, “voice” connects its bearers and
hearers “to ordinarily supersensible realities”64 and, phenomenologically
speaking, in spoken theater it effectively constitutes the perceptible reality it is
supposed to express. In this realist portrayal of character, then, an uncertainty
remains over artistic origins: if the speaking, declamatory voice of poetic
realism constitutes the very “reality” it purports to express, it simultaneously
negates the poetic origin of that expression, leaving a void at its center that
could never be filled, only concealed. This, however, is nothing but a sonorous
excess, in which the sensuality of vocal sound itself becomes the medium of the
poetic realist.65
Spearheading the impetus toward realist acting in Dresden was Bogumil
Dawison (1818–72),66 a Polish-born German character actor, championed
by Laube in Vienna, and whom the contemporary commentator Robert
see William McClaine, Between Real and Ideal: the Course of Otto Ludwig’s Development as a
Narrative Writer (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1963).
62
SSD 9: 152. Cf. PW 5: 152,
63
“Sie ist nicht eine Sängerin, welche spielt – sie ist eine Schauspielerin, die singt . . . Man kann die
Unnatur einer Oper nicht mehr erkennen.” Laube, “Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,”
Zeitung für die Elegante Welt 6 (1833), 23.
64
Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton University Press,
1999), 4.
65
Of course, the historical opposition to poetic realism on stage was embodied in the socially and
politically idealized Tendenzdramen (topical, often explicitly political plays), for which the stage
functioned only as a means, and whose crafted “messages” reinforced a link between what was
commonly understood to be falsified life and art.
66
A brief biographical entry by Josef Kürschner for Dawison can be found in the Allgemeine
deutsche Biographie, 56 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875–1912) 4: 787–89. The most
216 Hearing voices

Prölss credited as bringing a “new manner of acting” to the Dresden stage,

one that contrasted with the outgoing producer and actor, Eduard Devrient
(Wilhelmine’s brother-in-law):
Dresden had not seen such daring of actor’s intuition for a long time, perhaps never
before . . . [Dawison’s] face was not pretty, not even noble, his frame, his walk hardly
raised him above the norm – but what was he not able to do with these materials
through the wealth of his creative power of embodiment!67

Descriptions of how exactly Dawison spoke or declaimed the Trauerspiele of

Tieck, Shakespeare or Ludwig parallel Wagner’s descriptions about Schröder-
Devrient using her “breath so beautifully,” underscoring the shared critical goal
of excising artificiality from a self-identifying “German” stage. Like the dra-
matic soprano, Dawison – the dramatic actor – apparently lacked an innately
sonorous voice (“when passionate, his tone was very powerful and dreadfully
energetic, though far more sharp and cutting than round and full”),68 but this
only emphasized its function as a signifier of dramaturgical expressivity:
His speech was not completely free from foreign Slavic echoes; at first there was
hardly anything appealing about the tone of his voice, but what riches of color he
was able to display, how compellingly he harnessed this, enrapturing through the
magic, through the energy, through the dialectical power of eloquence and of
dramatic expression! . . . This was so different from that which one previously
regarded as beautiful and great that one had to throw out the question in astonish-
ment: which of the two is now correct?69

Leaving aside the concept of “correct” declamation for the moment, the para-
dox of singing with “no ‘voice’” became quite literal for Schröder-Devrient

extensive study is Peter Kollek, Bogumil Dawison: Porträt und Deutung eines genialen
Schauspielers (Kastellaun: A. Henn, 1978).
67
“Seit lange nicht, vielleicht selbst noch nie hatte Dresden einen Darsteller von dieser Kühnneit
der schauspielerischen Intuition . . . Sein Gesicht war nicht schön, ja nicht einmal edel, seine
Gestalt, sein Gang hoben ihn für gewöhnlich kaum über das Gewöhnliche hinaus – allein was
vermochte er in der Fülle seiner Gestaltungskraft aus diesem wiederstrebenden Material nicht zu
machen!” Prölss, Geschichte des Hoftheaters zu Dresden von seinem Anfängen bis zum Jahren
1862 (Dresden: Wilhelm Baensch, 1878), 565.
68
“in der Leidenschaft [war sein Ton] zwar von großer Kraft und furchtbarer Energie, aber viel
mehr scharf und schneidend, als rund und voll.” An anonymous review cited in Kollek, Bogumil
Dawison, 154.
69
“Seine Sprache war nicht ganz frei von fremden, slavischen Anklängen, der Ton seiner Stimme
hatte zunächst kaum etwas Anziehendes, aber welchen Reichtum der Farbe vermochte er darin
zu entfalten, wie unwiderstehlich durch den Zauber, durch die Energie, durch die dialektische
Kraft der Beredtsamkeit und des dramatischen Ausdrucks zu fesseln und hinzureissen! . . . das
Alles war so verschieden von dem, was man bisher für schön und gross hier gehalten hatte, dass
man erstaunt die Frage aufwerfen musste, welches von beiden nun wohl das Richtige sei?” Prölss,
Geschichte des Hoftheaters zu Dresden, 566.
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 217

shortly before she died. After the end of her public career in 1847 she returned
to the stage in autumn 1858 to sing Schubert’s “Der Wanderer.” Listening to
this, the dramatist and biographer Claire von Glümer reported being “deeply
shocked” by the experience because Schröder-Devrient “cannot sing
anymore! . . . the sound was faint, with no body, no metal.” Crucially (and
like descriptions of Dawison), this appeared not to affect her capacity to
express, and Glümer proceeds to draw an obvious though counterintuitive
conclusion that corroborates Wagner’s own judgment: “even without a voice,
she would have remained the greatest singer.”70
Henry Chorley’s remarks about her emotive performance of Fidelio in
London during 1833 locate her reception firmly within the category Ludwig
would call poetic realism: “It was impossible to hear the ‘Prisoners’
Chorus’ . . . to see the eager woman as she unclosed cell after cell . . . ques-
tioning face after face, all in vain, without tears.”71 In separating the ocular
and aural, the Englishman mobilizes a tension between acting and singing,
judging each aspect independently in a dislocation that contravened
Wagner’s “eye and ear of hearing” and would antagonize his stance in
1872. Yet it was a resolute dislocation; Beethoven’s very deafness offered a
site for Romantic authors to write the division of seeing and hearing into the
composer’s response to Schröder-Devrient’s Leonore, constructing an idealist
melodic synesthesia in their assessments: “[Beethoven] saw his Fidelio before
him as he had pictured to himself in his melody-filled dreams.”72
The cold reality, however, was that listening to Schröder-Devrient was
very different to seeing her, as Chorley explains:

Such training as had been given to [her voice] belonged to that false school which
admits of such a barbarism as the defence and admiration of “nature-singing.” . . . A
more absurd phrase was never coined by ignorance conceiving itself sagacity . . .
[A] woman, supposing she can correctly flounder through the notes of a given
composition, has been allowed, too contemptuously, to take rank as a singer. Such a

70
Glümer’s full statement reads: “Sie kann nicht mehr singen! Dachte ich – der Ton war matt, ohne
Fülle, ohne Metall – aber . . . hatte sie gesiegt . . . so darf von Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient
behauptet werden, daß sie auch ohne Stimme die größte Sängerin geblieben wäre.“ Glümer,
Erinnerungen an Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 2.
71
Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 39. Elsewhere, Chorley corroborates Wagner’s
reluctant disclosure about Schröder-Devrient, placing emphasis on her ability to convey pathos,
not through “canto,” but through parlando enunciation, crafted gestures, and intensity of
physical expression. His animated descriptions are often explicitly visual. For intensity of
physical expression, he records, Schröder-Devrient drew on her “superb figure,” and “profuse
fair hair” which – the critic indulges – in moments of heightened emotion she would “fling loose
with the wild vehemence of a Moenad.” Ibid.
72
Karoline Bauer, Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, 4 vols. (London: Remington & Co.: 1885), 4: 104.
218 Hearing voices

woman was not [Henriette] Sontag – neither, of later days, [Jenny] Lind. The two
had learned to sing; Madame Schröder-Devrient not. Her tones were delivered
without any care, save to give them due force. Her execution was bad and heavy.
There was an air of strain and spasm throughout her performances, of that struggle
for victory which never conquers.73

Over and above the rhetorical excess of Chorley’s polemic, later biographers
indicate that Schröder-Devrient was well aware of her vocal deficiency and
considered it a problem. Writing in 1904, Hagemann explains that when-
ever she returned to Dresden from guest appearances elsewhere and tours,
she continued to take lessons from Johann Aloys Miksch, the choral direc-
tor; and that, where possible, she tried to meet visiting Italian colleagues to
“learn what she herself was lacking.”74
In 1853, Friedrich Wieck similarly describes Schröder-Devrient’s diligent
attitude to study, as well as ascribing to her the great singer cliché of tracing
a lineage back to the castrati:

She was not at all surprised when [J. A.] Miksch called her attention to this deficiency [in
German vocal education]. She devoted herself thoroughly to the primary formation of
the tone under the instruction of Miksch, and must still remember the old master, and
his extraordinary practice in this particular. Miksch learned it from [Vincenzo] Caselli,
a pupil of [Antonio] Bernacchi.”75

But several of Schröder-Devrient’s surviving part books reveal the extent of

her technical shortcomings; most of the more florid, vocally challenging
passages were simplified or eliminated altogether.76 This formed the very
antithesis of popular expectations regarding Italian prima donnas. Then
again, it is precisely coloratura passages wherein logos is notoriously absent
from singing, for they offer no opportunity for melody conceived as a
heightened delivery of speech. Irrespective of whether the simplified
music in fact reflected Schröder-Devrient’s modest technique, it projected
her theatrical orientation. Despite this, even comparisons with native

73
Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 39.
74
“Sie nahm jedesmal, wenn sie von ihren Gastspielen nach Dresden zurückkehrte, wiederum
Uebungsstuden bei dem altbewährten Chordirektor Miksch . . . Auch hat sie sich später beim
Zusammentreffen mit bemüht, ihren Kollegen und Kolleginnen von der italienischen Oper das
nach Möglichkeit abzulernen, was ihr selbst fehlte.” Hagemann, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 28.
75
“[Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient] wunderte sich nicht wenig, als Mieksch sie auf diesen
Mangel aufmerksam machte. Sie machte darauf bei Mieksch diese erste Tonbildung durch und
wird sich noch wohl des alten Meisters erinnern und seiner außerordentlichen Praxis darin.
Mieksch lernte es von Caselli, dem Schüler Bernacchi’s.” Friedrich Wieck, Klavier und Gesang:
Didaktisches und Polemisches, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: F. E. C. Leuckart, 1878), 76.
76
One example, cited in Meyer, of the simplification of coloratura would be the Dresden parts for
La Juive, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Mus. 4895-F-504A.
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 219

sopranos were unflattering; in her memoirs of the German stage, the

Biedermeier singer and actress Karoline Bauer recalls that Schröder-
Devrient was “far-surpassed by [Nannette] Schachner in the rich metallic
ring of her wonderful voice, and by the perfect technique of [Henriette]
Sontag’s singing.”77 And, as Meyer observes, later in her career, many arias
also had to be transposed down to accommodate her ailing ability.78 If
Wagner took Schröder-Devrient as a vocal-melodic idol, it seems he chose a
singer whose stage talents extended to everything but Gesang and bel canto,
leading to a farcical situation in which critical orthodoxy pointed to a
composer who could not write “melodies,” composing for a singer with
“no voice.” For present purposes, the key question is why Schröder-
Devrient’s weakness as a singer should make her attractive for, and
amenable to, appropriation as “German opera”. What was it that defined
her vocally ambivalent status?
The answer concerns different ways of hearing texted opera. A vigorous or
exaggerated utterance conveys a non-verbal meaning whether or not we grasp
its verbal content. This might be the case when listening to quick-fire
recitative in a foreign language, or if the text becomes obscured in arioso
passages by melodic elongation that causes verbal fragmentation. In this
sense, Mladan Dolar is right that “singing is bad communication. It prevents
a clear understanding of the text.”79 Most of Schröder-Devrient’s perform-
ances were in German, either as translations of foreign librettos or as German
originals, but the special character of her delivery appeared to transcend the
need for verbal comprehension, making the language less important than the
manner of its performance, far more so, at least, than was customary in opera.
While even her first critic had recorded her “pure and simple”80 elocution as a
fifteen-year-old actress, the Parisian Journal des débats articulates something
of her supralinguistic quality in a review of Fidelio from 1830, commenting
that the soprano “occupied herself just as carefully with dialogue as with
singing, and her pronunciation is so pure that its magic does not escape even
for the people who only have a distant idea of German.”81

77
Bauer, Memoirs, 4: 93. 78 Meyer, “Das wilde Herz,” 24.
79
Mladan Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 20ff.
80
Quoted in Bauer, Memoirs, 4: 101. This was partly a maternal gift, for her mother, Sophie
Schröder, was an actress whose declamatory expression in tragedy lifted her to national fame. A
sketch from 1845 describes her accordingly: “one of Germany’s greatest tragic actresses, so far as
declamation and expression are concerned.” See “Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient: A Sketch,” The
United States Democratic Review (March 1845), 262. Wagner himself also speaks briefly of “the
genius of the great Sophie Schröder,” SSD 9: 230. Cf. PW 5: 228.
81
“sie beschäftigt sich ebenso sorgfältig mit dem Dialog als mit dem Gesang, und ihre Aussprache ist so
rein, daß der Zauber derselben sogar denjenigen Personen, welche von dem Deutschen nur einen
220 Hearing voices

What these critical responses to Schröder-Devrient are picking up on is

the power of an intent to communicate, whether the language sung is known
or unknown. The struggle to form words amid the athleticism of operatic
singing is perceived as the flinty expression of will, and as such is allied to
both the linguistic and the performative.
Linguistic: as Paul Robinson once pointed out, we won’t tolerate hours of
pure vocalise, but we do listen contentedly to hours of staged singing where the
words are consistently obscured or unfamiliar to us, and we take something
away from this experience because the very presence of words “identifies the
singer as a human actor with specific feelings, giving voice to specific
thoughts.”82 In other words, it matters that the intent to communicate is
embedded within the linguistic phenomenon, even when we have no idea what
is being communicated;
Performative: the very practice of “acting” and “expressing” – rather than just
emitting sounds without engagement or emotion – indicates the performer’s
acknowledgement that there is an audience listening, and that his / her
utterance is not solipsistic, not mere meaning in a vacuum.

On the basis of these tacit assumptions, then, what the Journal des débats
called Schröder-Devrient’s “magic” pronunciation encapsulates a consistent
theme in her reception, and leads to a subdivision within the critically
self-serving, symbolic usage made of her performance of vocal melody,
one that hinges on the distinction between language and music, speech
and song, and ultimately between semantics and sensation, which is to say
between the nineteenth-century disciplines of Philologie and Physiologie.
In this context, modes of hearing sung melody can be divided into at least
two types.
(Philology) First, what I will term “expressive melody” is that which
says what voices say with their words; it is a signified of melody condi-
tioned by the assumption of an a priori poetic content, whether or not this
exists as text. Imagine hearing text sung in your mother tongue where the
remaining voice, as a kind of surplus by-product to the linguistic message,
has no inherent significance, becoming at best a material texture recalci-
trant to meaning, without analogical or symbolic relationship to its verbal
platform. Based precisely on what can be said, expressive melody thus
relies on the hermeneutic category of an embedded meaning. It is coded
by language, not physical sensation. Given the embeddedness of this

ganz entfernten Begriff haben, nicht entgangen ist.” From “Chronique musicale,” in Journal des
débats (May 8, 1830). Cited in Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 152. Emphasis added.
82
Paul Robinson, Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters (University of Chicago Press,
2002), 50–51.
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 221

meaningful content, however, it requires an act of listening for on the part

of the observer – wilfully or instinctively – and therefore is neither
intuitively comprehensible (Wagner’s gefühlsverständlich) nor embodied
in the “cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages” of Barthes’
vocal grain.83 An illustrative example would be Telramund’s breathless
recitations in act 2 scene 1 of Lohengrin or Wotan’s monologue in act 2,
scene 2 of Die Walküre: exact pitches are not important here compared to
relative intonation and closely determined rhythm; it is essentially
melodramatic speech written as recitative, where any and all “melody”
is in the service of expressing the sonorous word, rather than the body of
vocal sound.
(Physiology) Second, what I term “iconic melody” means melody as
sounding material that signifies nothing but the singing voice, where this
is non-symbolic, non-expressive of any prior lexical substance. Imagine
hearing an unfamiliar tune sung movingly in a language that shares no
etymological roots with those familiar to you. The wordless, sometimes
unnotated screams, shouts, laughter, and cries that pervade Wagner’s
oeuvre would fall into this latter category because they transcend text,
but are not the exclusive constituents of the concept (Sieglinde’s melis-
matic reaction to mention of her unborn son in Die Walküre – Wagner’s
“glorification of Brünnhilde” – would come close to iconic melody in
the sense of a maternal cri de coeur whose meaning is precisely the
passion of its delivery, wherein various factors conspire to obscure
the text: “O hehrstes Wunder!”).84 Iconic melody connotes an infinitely
self-referential vocal sound, it is melody qua melody, which is to say, an
icon of itself: redolent of a pre-linguistic utterance, but formulated
(ahistorically) as a logical short circuit that cancels distinctions between
meaning and medium. Iconic melody places an emphasis on hearing
texted melody as sheer vocal sonority rather than a constituent of some
content that is only embodied by aural presence. Rather than an act of
listening for, iconic melody requires an intuitive surrender within the

83
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 181.
84
There are three unnotated screams in Lohengrin, for example. Singers often omit these in
performance due to a lack of definite notation, but they are nevertheless written into the stage
directions of act 1, scene 3 “Hier hat Elsa sich ungewandt und schreit bei Lohengrin’s
Anblick laut auf,” and act 3 during the wedding chamber scene “nach einem Schrei.” At the close
of the final act, Ortrud too “sinkt bei Gottfrieds Anblick mit einem Schrei zusammen.”
Furthermore, the nonsense cries of the Valkyries, as well as the shrieks and laughter of
Kundry, are perhaps more familiar instances. The most direct study of this in English is
Friedheim, “Wagner and the Aesthetics of the Scream,” 63–70.
222 Hearing voices

sonority, having already “sensualized away” the a priori of any semantic

content.
In keeping with Wagner’s “understanding ear,” this distinction between
expressive and iconic melody is explicitly listener-oriented and defines
two ways of hearing mid-century opera rather than two discrete composi-
tional categories. (Such ways of hearing are not mutually exclusive, of
course, while, equally, the same vocal-melodic event could be heard in
different categories by different people.) To an extent, the contemporary
rationale for such a division had been summarized decades earlier in
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s celebrated “dual nature” of language. This
cleared the way for the concept of a sensuous vocal sound that could
stimulate intuitive “thoughts” in auditors, thoughts which no verbal
language would be able to stimulate. (Wagner’s schema for communica-
tion in Oper und Drama ascribes this to humanity’s “instinctive power of
feeling” [unwillkürliche Gefühlsvermögen], as the faculty of “inner under-
standing” triggered by a build-up of sensory feeling within melodicized
language.85) By recognizing coexisting sensual and semantic qualities in
speech, Humboldt was led to acknowledge a mutually reversible relation
between thought and sound. Though for him, the capacity for logical
thought in any given nation resulted primarily from a symbiotic
development of the particular grammatical structure of its language and
an essential nature, sound itself also influenced thought, he claimed: “the
delicate alertness which lets tuning through sound give thought a
multiplicity of forms . . . the mind alone, coming from above, would
never have been able to produce through any process of logical
distinction.”86 The complementarities of each side of this “dual nature”
lend weight to iconic listening and Wagner’s implicit belief in a unified
mode of verbal–vocal-melodic expression, considerably reducing the
erstwhile gap between his philology and Schröder-Devrient’s reception.
Humboldt articulates the theory most clearly:
language forms concepts, introduces the rule of thought into life, and achieves this
through sound. The mental stimulus it brings about can lead to the position where,
responding primarily to thought, one attempts to grasp this equally by some other,
more direct means, either more sensuously, or more purely, more independently of
what may appear arbitrary sound; in such a case the word will be treated only as an
auxiliary device. But, on the other hand, it is precisely thought, clothed in sounds,

85
SSD 4: 143. Cf. PW 2: 246–47.
86
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Essays on Language, trans. John Wieczorek and Ian Roe, ed. T. Harden
and D. Farrelly (Frankfurt am Main and New York: P. Lang, 1997), 80.
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 223

which can have the greatest effect on the mind, and precisely sound, formed into a
word, which can fill with inspiration.87

The slippage between “what may appear arbitrary sound” and that which
can “fill with inspiration” is synonymous with Wagner’s belief in the
aboriginal communicative agency of Old High German root syllables
that needed to be reawakened through the sensual sounding of language:
a particular word may have conceptual content, but is “forced upon
[the poet] by his feeling,” and within this chosen word, Wagner posits a
“constraining force in the root,” where he locates its “original truth.”
Thus Wagner reverses the direction of Humboldt’s thesis – i.e. from sonic
sensations to intuitive concept – arguing that understanding dramatic
expression begins with the “sensuous substance of our roots of speech”
which in turn rises to an older, purified, conscious idea, or “original
truth.”88
Before interrogating any such propositions in detail (a project reserved
for Chapter 5), suffice to say the claim I am making is not that Wagner
mimicked or codified an extant practice that he observed through Schröder-
Devrient’s performances, but that she became for him the embodiment of a
successful concept of intuitively comprehensible German melodic sound
that subsumed both French and Italian (particularly Bellini’s) traditions by
performing their vocal lines in her unique manner. She was not, in other
words, the origin of Wagner’s specific desire to bridge what he termed
Wortsprache and Tonsprache as Avenarius’ second-hand anecdote pur-
ports, rather her very existence demonstrated that the performance of
“Germanicized” melodic expression was independent of other national
models. Her innate incapacity for bel canto foregrounded the perception
of her complementary ability for “truthful” dramatic expression qua
German by an international cast of critics, reinscribing a dialectical model
of operatic singing between artful tone and truthful declamation that
effectively denied “melody” in the strong sense to German self-identity.89

87
Ibid., 79. Emphasis added. 88 SSD 4: 127, 129. Cf. PW 2: 266, 264.
89
A French critic reviewing Norma from 1836 put the condition politely: “she does not sing as
other artists sing . . . she sings more with the soul than with the voice, her tones come more from
the heart than from the throat, she forgets the public, she forgets herself, and enters completely
into the character that she portrays.” [“Sie singt nicht, wie andere Künstler singen . . . Sie singt
mit der Seele noch mehr als mit der Stimme; ihre Töne entquellen mehr dem Herzen als der
Kehle; sie vergißt das Publikum, sie vergißt sich selbst, um ganz in dem Wesen aufzugehen, das
sie darstellt.”] Cited in Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 148. Karoline Bauer made an
identical observation in her memoirs using a comparison with Sontag and Schechner: “Both
these highly famous songstresses sang, it is undoubted, with their brilliant throats – Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient sang with her burning soul.” And Hagemann parroted essentially the same
224 Hearing voices

It is worth bearing in mind that in any act of listening – whether iconic or

expressive – Wagner insists on the importance of cognizing a poetic idea. In
1852 he likened listening to pure “speech sound” (Sprachklang) in a
language that neither the reciter nor the listener understands to modern
conductors who comprehend only the letter of a Beethoven score and miss
its “poetic content.” In their anti-rational isolation, purely sensuous pho-
nemes voided of their historical etymological basis remained uncommuni-
cative – incomprehensible, as Wagner opined to Theodor Uhlig.90 An
anecdote about Wagner’s own, decidedly informed reading of Die
Walküre a year later suggests that it was a combination of non-verbal
expression and half-intuited speech sounds that enabled the kind of iconic
listening described above. Marie zu Hohenlohe (the daughter of Liszt’s
long-term partner, Carolyn zu Sayn-Wittgenstein) recalls: “I was only
sixteen and understood little . . . but Wagner’s vibrant voice affected me
deeply, and I gained an inkling of [the work’s] underlying poetry . . . [W]hen
he finished reading . . . I was barely able to suppress my tears.”91 Here,
Wagner’s vocal pathos is explicitly non-verbal. In latching onto the emotion
of the occasion rather than the verbal message, Marie’s response suggests
the extent to which (Wagner’s) inflected vocal sonorities could elicit power-
ful emotional reactions by opening up what we might call a pre-semantic
channel of communication.
This is why Schröder-Devrient’s status is significant for Wagner. She was
widely celebrated as “expressing” poetic content through her melody even if
her audience did not actually understand the words; her reception also
suggests that she was heard as an iconic voice whether in French, Italian,
English, or German. That is, she bridged the gap between these categories by
potentially rendering expressive melody iconic in any language – sensualiz-
ing the linguistic component into an alternative medium – which is to say,
she allowed semantic expression and plastic melody to blend within the
moment of an unconventional vocal utterance which listeners heard as

idea when summing up Schröder-Devrient’s ideological reception for German drama in 1904:
“For her there was always only one question, and that is: what is truth? What is truth for the
interpretation of just this artistically conceived character?” See Bauer, Memoirs, 4: 93; and
Hagemann, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 10.
90
“Man urtheile nun, wie das Verständniß eines Dichters ausfallen müßte, wenn vom
Deklamirenden, wie vom Zuhörer, nur der Sprachklang wiedergegeben und vorgenommen
würde, wie dieß gar nicht anders der Fall sein könnte, wenn das Gedicht in einer Sprache zum
Vorschein käme, die weder der Deklamator (der sie eben nur dem Klange nach auswendig
gelernt hätte) noch der Zuhörer verstünden.” Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, February 15, 1852,
Zurich, SB 4: 286.
91
Marie Fürstin zu Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner (Weimar: Herm. Böhlaus
Nachf., 1938), 13–14; cited in Spencer, Wagner Remembered, 79–80. Emphasis added.
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 225

sheer sonority (her “magic” locution). Ironically, therefore, for listeners in

the iconic mode, her half-spoken, half-voiced, dramatized sounds came to
define melody in its German aspirations for true expression.
But what did it sound like? Less than a year after Schröder-Devrient’s
singing persuaded Wagner – as he explains – of Bellini’s melodic value,
Julius Epstein gave a revealingly detailed account of her singing in the
Breslauer Zeitung:

She regarded singing as nothing but a translation of speech into a higher language and
modulated the sound to the freest echo of her feeling. While other, even the most
famous, prima donnas understand no nuance other than singing now with full voice,
now with half, our artist decided on the momentary emotion of every content, the
qualitative volume of tones. So she gained a true speaking expression, quite apart from
the content of the words; so they became an interpreter of her soul; a single accent
often painted an entire order of feelings. Her performance won therewith such a
manifold color and gradation, such a soulful inwardness, such a magical intensity of
expression that one did not miss the metal timbre of the voice at all.92

Such rhetoric essentially came to define Schröder-Devrient as German in a

debate between German and Italian style. While Epstein ostensibly credits
Schröder-Devrient with epitomizing an expressive–iconic merger (“a trans-
lation of speech into a higher language”), his description indicates that, even
for Germans, her vocal lines were heard as intuitively comprehensible (“true
speaking expression, quite apart from the content of the words”). What he
venerates as the “magical intensity of [her] expression” and what the Journal
des débats in 1830 called the “magic” of her pure pronunciation, could
surely refer only to its meaning beyond language. The key point is that, in
contrast to gesangvoll performances of untranslated foreign opera in
Germany which might comfortably be more iconic (in German singers)
or more expressive (in native voices), blending iconic and expressive mel-
ody became associated above all with German sounds for an international
audience, and by extension (for Wagner), with German melody.

92
“Sie betrachtete den Gesang nur wie eine Übersetzung der Rede in eine höhere Sprache und
modulierte den Ton zum freiesten Widerhall ihres Gefühls. Während andere, selbst
hochberühmte Sängerinnen keine andere Nuancirung verstehen, als daß sie bald mit ganzer,
bald mit halber Stimme singen, bestimmte bei unserer Künstlerin die momentane Empfindung
den jedesmaligen Gehalt, das qualitative Volumen des Tons. So gewann derselbe einen wahrhaft
sprechenden Ausdruck, ganz abgesehen vom Inhalt der Worte; so ward er zum Dolmetscher ihrer
Seele; so oft ein einzelner Accent eine ganze Reihenfolge von Gefühlen. Dadurch gewann ihr
Vortrag eine so mannigfaltige Färbung und Abstufung, eine so seelenhafte Innigkeit, eine so
bezaubernde Intensität des Ausdrucks, daß man den Metallklang der Stimme gar nicht
vermißte.” Julius Epstein, Breslauer Zeitung 122 (1835). Quoted in Wolzogen, Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient, 114.
226 Hearing voices

Though there is less evidence than one might expect to suggest that
Schröder-Devrient’s manner of enunciating was identified openly with
being German, Friedrich Tietz spoke of the “strangely emotional effect”
that her “truly German singing style”93 created in Weigl’s Schweizerfamilie,
indicating that this was variously cast at least in opposition to extant Italian
traditions. Reports suggest that Schröder-Devrient was decidedly patriotic
in this respect,94 and she became acutely aware of her own national associ-
ations, confessing that her artistic standing was indivisible from her ambas-
sadorial role for nothing less than German opera itself. “I had not only my
own reputation,” she recalls of her Paris debut, “I had to represent German
music; if this artist failed to please, then Mozart, Beethoven, Weber had to
suffer.”95 The sentiment was beyond modesty; other German sopranos such
as Henriette Sontag and Nannette Schechner rivalled her in this capacity,
but it was the particular link of declamatory enunciation with realist acting,
resulting in a merger of expressive and iconic melody, that cemented
Schröder-Devrient’s association with “truthful” expression, which in a
liberal Vormärz context, as mentioned above, translated with increasing
clarity into “German” melodic expression.96

93
Quoted in Bauer, Memoirs, 4: 109.
94
Evidence suggesting that the simmering national tensions in Wagner’s Dresden opera were
personal exists principally at the level of anecdote. Glümer records that Kapellmeister Francesco
Morlacchi became angry with the chorus: “The passage was bad”; he shouted, “the chorus sang
like pigs, like German pigs!” Most onlookers were terrified, Glümer continues: “Only Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient stepped forward with blazing eyes from the background. ‘If you speak but
once of pigs,’ she cried, ‘I will only say to you that you can sing your Italian pig-music yourself!’
With that she threw her score at the Kapellmeister, turned her back on him and went home,” in
Glümer, Erinnerungen an Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 120–21.
Whether or not this diva fit actually happened as Glümer reports, its circulation is indicative of
German sensitivities to the perception of Italian operatic hegemony, an inequality traceable
particularly through attitudes towards language and pay. See Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber
and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2003), 25ff.
95
“Ich [Schröder-Devrient] hatte nicht allein meinen eigenen Ruf, ich hatte die deutsche Musik zu
vertreten; wenn die Künstlerin nicht gefiel, so mußte Mozart, Beethoven, Weber darunter
leiden.” Quoted in Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 145. That Schröder-Devrient was
aware of her own continued patriotism is evident in a letter she wrote to an anonymous
benefactor from Berlin who sent her a sum of money in 1848 after her divorce proceedings with
her second husband (von Döring) left her almost bankrupt: “You are the only person who, in our
great German fatherland, has thought that a German artist could be in need. Certainly you are a
great exception, for I have not yet experienced that Germans consider it a national matter not to
allow their native artists to sink, an example often given to us by other countries, but which has
found no imitation in Germany.” Cited in Glümer, Erinnerungen an Wilhelmine Schröder-
Devrient, 194.
96
Chorley reports unabashedly that “Madame Schröder-Devrient resolved to be par excellence ‘the
German dramatic singer,’” and as the unofficial creator of Leonore (Fidelio), and an
 Expressing with “no ‘voice’” 227

Critics such as Wolzogen did not associate Wagner and the concepts of
Worttonsprache or Versmelodie with Schröder-Devrient’s declamatory vocal
manner because they remained unappealing to writers versed in French and
Italian melodic idioms: “Of course, we absolutely cannot think of Wagner
here,” he cautions backhandedly, “for what little there is to sing in his
music . . . is not clear to us.”97 But over and above the debates about
Wagner’s tuneless melodies, the vocabulary of criticism surrounding
Schröder-Devrient nevertheless bears a striking resemblance to that of
Wagner’s description of his ideal Melodik in parts 2 and 3 of Oper und
Drama. The Parisian Feuilleton reviewed her performance of Fidelio stating –
in Wolzogen’s translation – that her “dramatic action harmonizes so well with
her Wortsprache and Tonsprache,”98 while Wagner theorizes (apparently in
the abstract) that “Tonsprache is the beginning and end of Wortsprache,”99
later emphasizing implicitly what Schröder-Devrient embodies, namely “the
endless capacity for enhancement through interaction between the inner
expression of the voice and the outer expression of gestures.”100 While
Wagner’s point of contrast – pure voice with no accompanying gestures – is
a woodland bird rather than a virtuosic Italian soprano,101 his description of
Tonsprache as “the most spontaneous expression of inner feeling”102 closely
echoes the many accounts of Schröder-Devrient singing “more from the soul
than from the throat.” With such a close mapping at hand, there is good
reason to pursue Wagner’s actual melodic composition during the later 1840s
in light of descriptions surrounding Schröder-Devrient’s iconic–expressive
vocal manner. In particular, his tendency in Lohengrin, written between
August 3, 1845 and April 28, 1848, toward recitational melody over static
accompaniment, sits well with descriptions of a performance aesthetic in
which “a single accent often painted an entire order of feelings.” The notation
of such “melodies” would seem to provide a musical setting that allowed for
those very half-enunciated emotional utterances that characterized Schröder-
Devrient’s aptitudes.

internationally successful exponent of Agathe (Freischütz), Euryanthe (Euryanthe), Rezia

(Oberon), Emmeline (Schweizerfamilie), Emmy (Vampyr), Rebecca (Templer), Pamina
(Zauberflöte), among others, she had good reason to consider herself the de facto voice of
German opera. See Chorley, Modern German Music, 1: 342.
97
“an Wagner ist natürlich hier gar nicht zu denken, denn was an seiner Musik überhaupt zu
singen sei, es wäre denn der ‘Holde Abendstern’ und der ‘Liebe Schwan,’ will uns bis auf den
heutigen Tag nicht recht einleuchten.” Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 151 (fn).
98
“Die dramatische Action der Madame Devrient harmonirt so gut mit ihrer Wort- und
Tonsprache,” in Le Feuilleton de Paris: journal de littérature amusante (May 10, 1830). Cited in
Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 156.
99
SSD 4: 91. Cf. PW 2: 224. 100 SSD 4: 92. Cf. PW 2: 225
101
See Wagner’s footnote in Ibid. 102 SSD 4: 91. Cf. PW 2: 224.
228 Hearing voices

PART 2

The Lohengrin recitatives

The final role that Wagner composed with the expectation that Schröder-
Devrient would create it was Elsa.103 Lohengrin had been advertised in
January 1849 as a coming “brilliant production” in Dresden, but Wagner’s
participation in the May uprising and his rapid escape to Switzerland put
paid to that.104 If he composed the work with her expressive caliber in mind,
what exactly in Lohengrin relates to the nexus of breath, utterance, and
Gesang that characterized Schröder-Devrient’s international reception?
Most revealing are Wagner’s suppositions about what went wrong at the
eventual premiere under Liszt in Weimar on August 28, 1850. Though absent
from the performance, he initially received an unfavorable report from Baron
von Zigesar (Intendant at Weimar’s Hoftheater) about its length and execu-
tion on a small stage and with an undermanned chorus: slow, meandering,
inarticulate singing – particularly from the tenor (and former pastry chef)
Carl Beck who created the title role – was the principal reason, he surmised,
for the performance lasting about seventy-five minutes longer than antici-
pated.105 In tandem with Franz Dingelstedt’s uncomprehending review in the
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung,106 this persuaded him that the first perform-
ance had bored the audience, had been theatrically weak, and must have
lacked adequate declamation without Schröder-Devrient or the “peculiarly
sharp ‘speaking’ tone” of Tichatschek.107 He responded frantically to Zigesar:

103
Richard Pohl corroborates this in a review article from 1873 of a performance of
Lohengrin in Mannheim, stating: “[Lohengrin] kam in Dresden, wo doch Rienzi, Holländer und
Tannhäuser unter des Meisters eigner Leitung zuerst zur Aufführung gelangt waren, in
Dresden, für dessen damals eminente Opernkräfte (Schröder-Devrient, Johanna Wagner,
Tichatchek und Mitterwurzer) Lohengrin zunächst gedacht und bestimmt war . . .” See Pohl,
“Lohengrin in Mannheim,” in Richard Wagner: Studien und Kritiken (Leipzig: Bernhard
Schlicke, 1883), 69–70. Johanna Wagner sang Ortrud in the 1859 Berlin production of
Lohengrin, indicating that this, not Elsa, was her intended role.
104
“Nächstens soll hier Kapellmeister Wagner’s Oper ‘Lohengrin’ mit brillanter Ausstattung in
Scene gehen,” Kleine Musikzeitung 10 (1849), 19. Cited in Helmut Kirchmeyer,
Situationsgeschichte der Musikkritik und des musikalischen Pressewesens in Deutschland: IV.
Theil. Das zeitgenössische Wagner-Bild. Dritter Band: Dokumente 1846–1850 (Regensburg:
Gustav Bosse, 1968), 3: 531.
105
Wagner to Liszt, September 8, 1850; and to Zigesar, September 9, 1850, Zurich, SB 3:
384–401.
106
Franz Dingelstedt, “Weimarischer Festkalender,” Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung 247
(September 4, 1850), 3947b–3949a; rpt. Kirchmeyer, Situationsgeschichte der Musikkritik und
des musikalischen Pressewesens in Deutschland. IV. Teil, 3: 691–97.
107
ML 368.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 229

the actors remained far behind their task . . . If in future the so-called recitatives are
sung as I have asked Liszt to insist upon their being sung, the halting and freezing
impression of whole, long passages will disappear, and the duration of the perform-
ance will be considerably shortened . . . I can imagine, for instance, that the speeches
of the king and the herald may have made a fatiguing impression . . . this was the
case because the singers sang them in a limp, lazy manner, without real utterance . . .
Art and artists will be equally benefitted only if those singers are earnestly requested
to perform those speeches with energy, fire, and determined expression.108

Wagner’s choice of terms – “real utterance . . . energy, fire, and determined

expression” – could easily have been plucked from a review of Schröder-
Devrient’s Leonore or Agathe. The occasion lays bare Wagner’s personal
prejudices about German voices; the restrained fury of his letters after the
premiere speaks from the perspective of a composer–listener in absentia, who
theorizes the faults of execution through information gleaned from second-
hand reports (Zigesar and Dingelstedt). The content of these revealing and
understudied letters – later to be expanded upon in the final section of Oper und
Drama – thus reflects more the composer’s own presuppositions and imagi-
nation than the reality of the Weimar premiere. (It was only after Karl Ritter
arrived in Zurich with a rather different report on September 10 that Wagner
conceded Liszt had in fact maintained tempo in the recitatives and sought to
marshal the singers’ delivery accordingly.109) As his later correspondence with
Liszt shows, however, he remained uneasy about his “recitatives” in Lohengrin,
which he feared would continue to be badly served by German singers. This
anxiety, that German voices are inept on stage, is the central message that
emerges from Wagner’s response to Lohengrin’s premiere, making Schröder-
Devrient all the more symbolic for his ambitions at this time.
Like A. B. Marx in 1826,110 he had complained early on that Germans lacked
a natural aptitude for declamation and dramatic song. They should train vocally,
he had urged in 1837, to compensate for their congenital “deficiency” instead of
blathering “so much muddle and vulgarity” about the aesthetics of singing.111
At that time, Wagner was a young man infatuated with Schröder-Devrient’s

108
Wagner to Baron von Zigesar, September 9, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 398–99.
109
Wagner to Liszt, September 11, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 401–03.
110
Marx’s treatise Die Kunst des Gesanges (Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1826) was
conceived as part of an attempt to raise the standard of German vocal music, both in
composition and performance, and to respond – as the opening of the preface explains – to
the perceived “end of a musical age in which Italian music preoccupies all countries,
even Germany, and almost makes us forget what German art is, and what music is for
Germans” (iv).
111
SSD 12: 15.
230 Hearing voices

stage talents;112 but he would maintain essentially the same sentiment fourteen
years later in his first communication after the premiere of Lohengrin. The
following comment to Liszt is typical in laying the problem squarely at the
doorstep of bad German translations grafted onto foreign melodies:
Owing to the deplorable fact that at our German theatres scarcely anything but operas
translated from a foreign language are given, our dramatic singers have been most
unspeakably demoralized. The translations of French and Italian operas are generally
made by blunderers . . . The result has been in the course of time that singers have got
into the habit of neglecting altogether the connection between word and tone, of
pronouncing an unimportant syllable on an accented note of the melody, and of
putting the important word to a weak part of the bar. In this way they gradually
became accustomed to the most absolute nonsense to such an extent that it was often
quite immaterial whether or not they pronounced at all. Recitative has fared worst.113

Native Italian and French speakers formed the antithesis of Wagner’s com-
plaint. Lacking real fluency in either French or Italian, he most likely heard
those voices as more iconic but perceived them as expressive in their semantic
vigor, emphasizing what the Weimar premiere of Lohengrin lacked: “the
distinctness and energy wherewith [Italian and French singers] speak out
their words . . . especially in the drastic phrases of the recitative.”114 Wagner
unabashedly idealized such foreign voices by virtue of their birth (“a natural
instinct prevents them from ever disfiguring the spoken sense through false
delivery”),115 bringing into sharp focus the congenital void he was attempting
to fill. By the 1840s, the specter of poor translation and correspondingly inept
performance preoccupied Wagner throughout the early stages of Lohengrin, so
how exactly did he imagine such foreign “energy, fire, and determined expres-
sion” could be written into a German score? For present purposes, pursuing this
outside of Wagner’s original composition may be most revealing.
Late in 1845, Wagner had to postpone his plan to arrange Gluck’s Iphigénie
en Aulide (1774) because of his “horror at the translation”116 in his Berlin score
(F. Brissler, 1839), which passed from “grossest offences against the sound” of
the verse to a “complete distortion of its sense.”117 On December 15, Wagner

112
Over and above vocal–theatrical talent, Laurence Dreyfus has interpreted Wagner’s infatuation
within the erotic sphere, arguing that it extended to Schröder-Devrient’s “dominant
femininity,” where Wagner projects onto her an “erotic of his own passivity . . . to relinquish
and submit to sexual control.” See Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, 60–61.
113
Wagner to Liszt, September 8, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 386–87. Wagner’s caustic complaints about
foreign translations and the negative effects this had on German singers occur throughout his
early writings, and reach something of a climax in part 3 of Oper und Drama. See SSD 4: 212–13.
Cf. PW 2: 359–60.
114
SSD 4: 212. Cf. PW 2: 359. 115 Ibid. 116 ML 337. 117 SSD 4: 213. Cf. PW 2: 360.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 231

requested a French edition (unadorned by instrumental additions) from

Gottfried Anders in Paris,118 and duly revised the translation “to get the
vocal stress right.”119 While he later explained in Mein Leben that his main
aim was to shorten Gluck’s opera and make it cohere, bringing it closer to
Euripides’ drama, Wagner’s modifications to the text and rhythm reveal what
exactly he means by “correct” declamation at the very time he was working on
Lohengrin (the Gluck arrangement dragged on from December 1845 to at least
January 1847).120 Modifying recitative became something of a habit for
Wagner at this time; he also reworked a German translation of Don
Giovanni during 1850, adding his own recitative for Donna Anna and Don
Ottavio as well as other “small things.”121 This arrangement was performed at
the Aktientheater in Zurich on November 8, 1850, though details of Wagner’s
interventions are scarce: only two small manuscript fragments survive of this
self-styled “patchwork [Flickarbeit].”122
Returning to Gluck’s Iphigénie, Wagner’s copy of the Berlin piano score
contains his many handwritten alterations, inserts, and cuts, most of which
were incorporated into the printed vocal score issued by Breitkopf in
1858.123 Example 4.1 illustrates the changes that Wagner introduced to
Gluck’s translated recitative, where formerly “short syllables occurred on
lengthy notes, with longer syllables on the shorter notes; on the musical
‘ridge’ there came the verse’s ‘hollow,’ and vice versa.”124

118
Wagner to Gottfried Engelbert Anders, December 15, 1845, Dresden, SB 2: 467.
119
ML 337.
120
In the Annalen and in Mein Leben, Wagner indicates that the arrangement was completed by
the end of 1846. The full Orchesterskizze for Lohengrin, however, bears the following text:
“Nach 2 monatlicher Unterbrechung am 11. Februar 1847 hier fortgefahren,” suggesting that
it lasted into the beginning of 1847 (Musik III). Furthermore, a letter to Eduard Devrient on
January 18, 1847 reveals that Wagner’s reply to an invitation was delayed by “eine sehr
dringende Arbeit” which most likely refers to his Gluck arrangement. See Wagner to Devrient,
January 18, 1847, Dresden, in SB 2: 539. Further information on WWV 77 is given in John
Deathridge, Martin Geck and Egon Voss (eds.), Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis: Verzeichnis der
musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen (Mainz, New York: B. Schott’s
Söhne, 1986), 330–35.
121
Wagner’s fullest account of his arrangement of Mozart’s score is given in a letter to Theodor
Uhlig postmarked February 26, 1852, SB 4: 298.
122
See Chris Walton, “‘Flickarbeit’ oder Bearbeitung? Ein neuer Wagner-Fund in der
Zentralbibliothek Zürich,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung (December 12, 1996), 70.
123
Wagner owned a copy of the piano score by F. Brissler (Berlin), which he annotated
extensively. This is now held at the National Archive in Bayreuth (B I i 2 b), while a printed
piano score of Wagner’s arrangement of the opera was published in 1858 by Breitkopf &
Härtel. Its title page reads: “Iphigenia in Aulis / Oper in drei Akten / von / J. C. Von Gluck /
Nach Richard Wagner’s Bearbeitung / von Jahre 1847 / Klavierauszug / von / Hans von
Bülow.” The critical edition of Wagner’s arrangement of Gluck‘s score (WWV 77), edited by
Christa Jost, appeared as Samtliche Werke 20, IV in 2010.
124
SSD 4: 213. Cf. PW 2: 360.
232 Hearing voices

Example 4.1a Wagner’s arrangement of Iphigénie’s recitative “Vous essayez envain”

compared with Friedrich Brissler’s Berlin edition (1839); act 2, scene 1, Iphigénie en
Aulide, transcribed from NA B I i 2 b, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung,
Bayreuth.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 233

Example 4.1b Wagner’s arrangement of Achilles’ recitative “Mais vous qui m’avez
fait” compared with Brissler’s edition, act 2, scene 6, Iphigénie en Aulide, transcribed
from NA B I i 2 b, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.

Three examples show Wagner’s remedy: in Example 4.1a he follows

Gluck’s original melodic contour and harmonic outline rather loosely, and
with rather different, entirely idiomatic German text. His arrangement gives
rhythmic accentuation and a descending subsequent syllable to “Sorgen”
(m. 2), “Beleidigt” (mm. 2–3), and “klein” (m. 6) which contrasts with
Brissler’s unidiomatic emphasis on “ihr” (m. 2), “nicht” (m. 4), and “wenn”
(m. 5) in the “blundering” translation. Example 4.1b illustrates a similar
degree of intervention, where – with the exception of the first phrase –
Wagner simply modifies Gluck’s rhythm as necessary to accommodate his
German, while largely retaining his pitches. Finally, Example 4.1c shows an
unusual case of Wagner retaining Gluck’s rhythm (and Brissler’s translation),
while altering the pitches purely to better inflect the German intonation.
Such care for German pitch inflection, agogic, rhythmic declamation, and
above all correct locution, indicates that – in between drafting the
Kompositionsskizze and Orchesterskizze for Lohengrin – Wagner’s interest
in spoken language was bound to a translation of idiom, both melodic and
linguistic, in which his German verse could be “correctly” set with the “fire
234 Hearing voices

Example 4.1c Wagner’s re-inflection of Achilles’ “votre fille est à moi,” while retaining
Brissler’s German translation; act 2, scene 6, Iphigénie en Aulide, transcribed from
NA B I i 2 b, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.

and determined expression” of proto-Bellinian melody in passages from

Lohengrin, while Gluck’s melodies (and French) could similarly be made to
accommodate idiomatic German. Speaking retrospectively about the
repertoire at the Dresden Hoftheater in 1841–49, the theater historian
Robert Prölss cites Gluck’s operas as “undisputedly the most significant
events in whose great triumphs were celebrated Wagner’s conducting talent,
the power of the band, and the dramatic, embodying talent of Schröder-
Devrient.”125 It may be less than coincidence that Schröder-Devrient sang
the role of Klytemnestra in the premiere of Wagner’s arrangement on
February 24, 1847. As it turns out, this was her last performance for him.126
Neither she nor any of Wagner’s favored singers at Dresden were on hand
for Lohengrin’s premiere, of course, and in addition to blaming a predom-
inance of incompetent translations of foreign opera, Wagner cannot conceal

125
“Die bedeutendsten Erscheinungen waren unstreitig die Opern Gluck’s, in denen das
Directionstalent Wagner’s, die Kraft der Kapelle und das dramatische Gestaltungstalent der
Schröder-Devrient gemeinsam grosse Triumphe feierten.” Prölss, Geschichte des Hoftheaters zu
Dresden, 542.
126
Prölss reports that the end of Schröder-Devrient’s contract at the Dresden Hoftheater in 1847
was precipitated by her increasing demands for holiday, higher pay, and her increasingly
restricted repertoire. With each passing year, she received 100 Thalers more in her annual
pension, and in 1846, having sung thirty times that year with a princely salary of 4,500 Thalers,
was effectively paid 150 Thalers per appearance. Baron August von Lüttichau, the Intendant of
the Dresden Hof-Theater, considered whether it might be more appropriate to hire Schröder-
Devrient for a particular number of roles per year, but his request was denied by royal decree.
On March 23, 1847 Schröder-Devrient gave an ultimatum, however, requesting a six-month
vacation owing to “physical and mental agitation,” or her release from contract. On July 1, her
contract was not renewed, and her prior request to sing Valentine (Les Huguenots) as her final
role at Dresden is tinged with allegorical bitterness, for in Meyerbeer’s narrative, the Count of
Saint-Bris unwittingly orders the execution of his own daughter. The opera is not listed as
having been performed at Dresden in that year. See Prölss, Geschichte des Hoftheaters zu
Dresden, 540ff.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 235

his frustration – in the same letter to Liszt – at the corollary effect this has
brought about: undisciplined singers.
When in opera the recitative commences, it means to [German singers], “The Lord
be praised, here is an end to that bloody tempo, which every so often compels us to a
kind of rational rendering; now we can float about in all directions, dwell on any
note we like until the prompter has given us the next phrase; now the conductor has
no power whatsoever over us, and we can take revenge for his pretensions by
commanding him to give us the beat when it suits us,” etc.127

To be sure, certain German singers were in fact contracted shortly before

Wagner’s tenure at the Dresden Hoftheater solely to sing Italian opera.128
This speaks to their aptitude in delivering foreign recitative, even if better
paid native Italians continued to be engaged on an ad hoc basis.129 But
Wagner’s skepticism shines through his correspondence. Lamenting the
arbitrary tempos and bad training of German singers, he discloses that he
had wanted to overcome such problems:
Nowhere in the score of Lohengrin have I written above a vocal phrase the word
“recitative”; the singers ought not to know that there are any recitatives in it; on the
other hand, I have endeavored to weigh and indicate the verbal emphasis of speech so
surely and so distinctly that the singers need only sing the notes exactly, according to
their value in the given tempo to get purely by that means the declamatory expression.130

So what had gone wrong in Weimar? Liszt’s conducting score of Lohengrin is

filled with markings that offer a glimpse of his approach to directing Wagner’s
more declamatory passages (see Figures 4.1a–c). As the markings in Figure 4.1a
reveal, he stopped beating time during “recitatives” over tremolo chords, i.e. he
did not try to micromanage the articulate delivery of each singer, and simply
gestured for each change of chord or gave the four beats for brief orchestral
fanfares. Where the arioso accompaniments had more rhythmic interest, Liszt
tended to beat them in time, though this evidently altered bar by bar as the back-
and-forth between one and four beats in Figure 4.1b indicates. For much of the

127
Wagner to Liszt, September 8, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 387. Again, the selfsame sentiment would
later appear in Oper und Drama. See SSD 4: 214. Cf. PW 2: 361.
128
Examples include Johannes Miksch, Fräulein Hunt, Frau von Biedenfeld. See Prölss, Geschichte
des Hoftheaters zu Dresden, 45ff.
129
See “Verzeichnis des Personals der Oper und des Schauspiels des Königl. Hoftheaters zu
Dresden vom 1. Oktober 1816 bis 1. Januar 1862. II. Italiänische Oper. B. Sängpersonal,” in
Prölss, Geschichte des Hoftheaters zu Dresden, 659–60. The income discrepancy between the
German actor Carl Devrient (who married Wilhelmine Schröder in 1823 but divorced her in
1828) and the Italian soprano Matilde Palazzesi in 1831 was 2,200 Thalers: Devrient was paid
1,800; Palazzesi 4,000. See Ibid., 662–63.
130
Wagner to Liszt, September 8, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 387–88.
236 Hearing voices

4.1a Liszt’s conducting score of Lohengrin, act 1, scene 1, mm. 64–75. Goethe- und
Schiller-Archiv, Weimar (GSA 60/Z 19). Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

score, the libretto text is underlined in red pencil, suggesting that Liszt followed
it closely, and wanted to have quick reference to it during performance. In
Figure 4.1c, the emphatic vertical lines, numerical counting, and frequent
underlining of accented syllables as well as the attempt to align syllables with
the orchestral accompaniment using arrows indicate that achieving coordina-
tion during these passages was an enormous problem. (No fewer than seven
exclamation marks accompany the fourth beat of measure three in Figure 4.1c).
It is unlikely Liszt would have felt he was neglecting his duty by not
continually delineating the beat. The frequent underlining of syllables
 The Lohengrin recitatives 237

4.1b Liszt’s conducting score of Lohengrin, act 2, scene 5, mm. 2030–47. Goethe- und
Schiller-Archiv, Weimar (GSA 60/Z 19). Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

corresponds to the beats in each measure, suggesting that Liszt coached

singers to keep these in time, even if he did not beat them in performance.
In 1881, a treatise on conducting by the musical polymath and Wagner
enthusiast Hermann Zopff explains that recitative is the “most difficult”
musical material to direct, and its success depends upon “following the singers
exactly.”131 Irrespective of Liszt’s efforts to mediate between following the

131
“Am Schwierigsten ist u. a. das Dirigiren von Recitativen. Hier kommt es vor Allem
darauf an, dem Sänger genau zu folgen.” Hermann Zopff, Der angehende Dirigent (Leipzig:
Merseburger, 1881), 93.
238 Hearing voices

4.1c Liszt’s conducting score of Lohengrin, act 2, scene 1, mm. 182–89. Goethe- und
Schiller-Archiv, Weimar (GSA 60/Z 19). Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

singers and Wagner’s demand to keep them in time, Wagner’s remarks above
reveal Lohengrin’s melodies to be intentionally declamatory in their construc-
tion, and highlight a latent paradox in part 3 of Oper und Drama: German
actors and singers, who – for Wagner – lack any competitive aptitude for
dramatic recitation, were to be the vessels – in body, throat, and national
tongue – of an ideal synthesis of drama and music that would communicate
its universality more directly to the senses than any previous conception since
Aeschylus and Sophocles. The venture seems unlikely and almost counter-
intuitive when set against such complaints about German theater.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 239

The contemporary critic Friedrich Meyer captured something of the

ambivalence surrounding Wagner’s aspirations when he equivocated of
Lohengrin in 1859: “Admittedly, [Wagner] declaims the text correctly,
often very sensitively,” but qualified that “the whole nevertheless becomes
increasingly tiresome towards the end.” After lamenting an overall lack of
lyrical moment in the score, Meyer continues that even in the attempt to
mimic speech “[Wagner] does not achieve the impression of ease made by
the, as it were, winged speech of Recitative.”132 Writing less sympathetically
in 1854, the archeologist and philologist Otto Jahn declared Wagner’s
inscribed declamation “already exaggerated . . . [and] very often driven to
extremes, which violates the musically educated ear, just as when actors
recite absolutely correctly, but exaggerate accent and articulation.”133 In
these historically self-aware readings, Wagner’s attempt at poetic realism
had fallen squarely between two stools: it seemingly displayed neither
genuine spoken verisimilitude nor lyrical points of rest; that is, it was neither
realist nor poetic. Meyer’s critique represents a body of criticism in labeling
the result simply as “a ponderous, impassioned, dramatic–declamatory style
interspersed with short self-enclosed melodic thoughts.”134
Of course, it was the Weimar performers – Wagner believed initially – who
had crippled Lohengrin. Highlighting the need for tutored declamation after
the unsatisfactory premiere, Wagner recommended to the stage manager,
Eduard Genast, that the singers undertake a “reading rehearsal” in which to
“read their parts together, distinctly and expressively, from the printed
libretto . . . [while Genast himself should] explain . . . the meaning of the
situations and their connections with the music bar by bar.”135 Wagner’s
emergency technique deliberately mimicked Goethe’s practice for the first
rehearsals of spoken drama in Weimar half a century earlier. In his History of
German Acting (1848) Eduard Devrient reveals that Goethe and Schiller in

132
“Das Ganze aber ermüdet dennoch gegen das Ende mehr und mehr . . . Er declamirt
zwar die Worte des Textes richtig, oft sehr fein, aber den Eindruck der Leichtigkeit, den die
gleichsam beflügelte Rede des freien Recitativs macht, erreicht er nicht.” Friedrich Meyer,
Richard Wagner und seine Stellung zur Vergangenheit und “Zukunft” (Thorn: Ernst Lambeck,
1859), 43.
133
“Übertrieben ist schon seine Declamation, die, obgleich im Allgemeinen lobenswerth genau und
scharf, doch sehr häufig auf die Spitze getrieben ist, was ein musikalisch gebildetes Ohr ebenso
verletzt, wie wenn ein Schauspieler zwar richtig recitirt, aber im Betonen und Articulation
übertreibt.” Jahn, “Lohengrin. Oper von Richard Wagner,” 146.
134
“So bewegt sich den der Styl des Werkes fast fortwährend in einem schwerfälligen, pathetischen,
dramatisch-deklamatirischen Styl, mitunter allerdings unterbrochen durch kurze in sich
abgeschlossenere melodische Gedanken.” Meyer, Richard Wagner und seine Stellung zur
Vergangenheit und “Zukunft,” 45.
135
Wagner to Liszt, September 8, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 393.
240 Hearing voices

fact began rehearsals in this way, establishing a tone of declamation before any
roles had been assigned.136 But for Wagner (who penned a favorable review of
Devrient’s book in 1848, which was not accepted for publication by the
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung),137 such a read-through was a desperate
measure that hinted at the need for a Devrientesque “true speaking expres-
sion” in which singing – to recapitulate Epstein’s phrase – was “nothing but a
translation of speech into a higher language.” It reveals furthermore the extent
to which Wagner believed he was composing for “empty” performers who
brought little understanding to the score, and needed a composer to fix,
control, even ventriloquize the singer’s expression from the score.
This was both a deliberate and consistent strategy. As we saw above,
Wagner impelled Liszt’s singers in 1850 to “sing the notes exactly, according
to their value in the given tempo to get purely by that means the declamatory
expression,” while as late as 1882, Cosima records his comments that unlike
the effectiveness of Italian melody, “in our country everything must be
locked in . . . it must all be locked in.”138 This is nothing less than freedom
in chains. Wagner wants “freedom” in the sense of an impression of freedom
that is closely scripted and managed, via compositional text. The reason? He
believes he was writing declamatory music in Lohengrin for singers he
knows are unable to do what he wants them to do with it in performance,
so he feels compelled to over-script, and control even more.
The flipside of such determinism is Wagner’s praise for the “sublime
illusion” of actors who can fully divest themselves of ego. The “whole
essence” of an actor and singer “is reproductiveness,” he asserted in 1872,
yet this carries its own danger:
the rather gifted, perfect mime appears in that act of self-divestment to sacrifice his
consciousness of self to such a degree that, in a sense, he never recovers it even in
daily life, or never completely . . . Whoever can stand with him on the brink of that
abyss, will shudder at the peril of playing with one’s personality, that a given
moment may turn to raving madness.139

If Wagner had been aware since the 1830s that he was composing for
“empty” performers in this sense, the melodic lines he composed in

136
Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst [1848], 2 vols. (Munich and Vienna:
Langen Müller 1967), 1: 630.
137
SSD 12: 230–32. 138 CT (April 25, 1882).
139
SSD 9: 217–19. Cf. PW 5: 216–17. Wagner hints that the danger of going mad through such
complete self-divestment is not real, however. It is mere acting. Predictably, it was his stage
heroine who alerted him to this reality: “Through [Schröder-Devrient] I became acquainted, in
a truly startling manner, with the saving return of a consciousness lost in fullest self-divestment
to the sudden remembrance that it was nothing but acting.” SSD 9: 219. Cf. PW 5: 218.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 241

Example 4.2 Friedrich von Telramund’s melodic speech, Lohengrin, act 2, mm. 178–83.

Lohengrin surely aspired to “fill” that expressive gap. But how did this work
in practice?
An example from act 2 of Lohengrin illustrates the extent to which
Wagner’s melodic composition “locked in” expression. When Friedrich
asks Ortrud whether she denies having lied to him, his question (blank
verse, without a fixed number of feet) fills in the gaps of intonation that
connect different recitational pitches, as Example 4.2 shows. Over a sus-
tained diminished seventh, the inflections are written into the melodic line
as recitative through delicate grades of rhythm and pitch. The extent to
which this kind of melodic writing differs from Wagner’s more familiar
earlier composition is made clear by comparing it with a passage from
Rienzi, which – as Examples 4.3a–d show – conforms to the use of more
generic melodic shapes in recitative, ones shared by Mozart, Bellini, and
even symphonic Beethoven.
242 Hearing voices

Example 4.3a Wagner’s Rienzi, act 1, no. 1 Introduktion, mm. 126–32

(Cosima-version, 1898–99).

Example 4.3b Mozart’s Don Giovanni, act 1 scene 5, Leporello’s rectative, mm. 41–43.

Example 4.3c Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, act 1 scene 2, Capellio’s

recitative mm. 1–2.

Example 4.3d Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, iv: Presto, mm. 56–62

By way of contrast, the sung dialogue between Ortrud and Friedrich seventy
measures later offers performers the freedom to inflect – tonally, phonetically –
the melodic material. It alternates between iambic pentameter and free speech
as they quarrel over the past lies that had cajoled Friedrich into spurning Elsa
and marrying Ortrud. When the pagan sorceress finally persuades the ambi-
tious nobleman that he may yet become Duke of Brabant and turns him to her
prophecy of revenge, the vocal melody is oddly monochromatic, intoned to
recitational pitches that are neither inflected nor melodic. As Example 4.4a
shows, such expression is hardly “locked in.”
Why would Wagner, given his interest in “correct” declamation, set a
pivotal moment in the narrative with such apparent lack of vocal interest?
Friedrich’s gently rising and falling exclamation at the “crazy seer” is
accompanied by the stepwise descent of a complete chromatic octave,
which – in its abundance of pitches – is the opposite of Ortrud’s subsequent
phrases: psalmic intonations of the text with only one note per measure. In
the hermeneutic tradition, several nineteenth-century commentators hung
narrative ideas on this chromatic scale, including the transformation of
 The Lohengrin recitatives 243

Example 4.4a Lohengrin, act 2, mm. 254–72.

Friedrich’s allegiance and the doubtful wavering of his reason, though the
transfer of “melodic” line from voice to orchestra, the switching of media,
would seem the more post-hermeneutic reading today.140
In fact, Wagner’s Kompositionsskizze (completed July 30, 1846) for
Ortrud’s phrase show a yet more extreme application of the psalmic

140
See Albert Heintz, “Sie [the descending chromatic scale] soll das zweifelnde Schwanken seines
Sinnes ausdrücken, der sich bereits wieder den ränkevollen Anschlägen der Gattin nähert.”
Heintz, Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin (Berlin: Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, 1894), 40.
244 Hearing voices

principle; the original setting of mm. 266–67 was a full two-measure

recitation on A with only a B] inflection on “da.” Numerous instances
of monotone recitations exist in this dialogue, and at least one con-
temporary critic felt that the scene “makes truly enormous demands on
our ears.”141 Marx, speaking of such deliberate melodic monotony back
in 1826, made the telling observation that “the main expression is
entrusted to the spoken recitation.”142 It invites an improvisatory free-
dom, in other words, where singers are treated more as actors. Based on
the reviews quoted above, were this sung by a Schröder-Devrient, such
a passage would probably not have sounded like the uninspired monot-
ony that several of Wagner’s critics heard. (Performance traditions
documented by the earliest surviving recordings of Lohengrin do
indeed suggest a considerable degree of rhythmic flexibility vis-à-vis
Wagner’s notation, particularly among Italian singers such as Emilia
Corsi, Linda Cannetti, and Celestina Boninsegna, as Stephen Meyer’s
research has shown.143)
The visual impression of the score is misleading in this sense, and by
replacing the note heads with pitchless crosses, as Example 4.4b shows, the
potential for license in the declamation becomes clearer. This, then, is a
critique of notation as much as performance, and I would speculate that,
despite professing that his “singers need only sing the notes, exactly” for the
desired effect, in such passages Wagner may not have been able to transfer
into visual composition – the “eye of hearing” – those nuanced aspects of
declamation that inspired him, that he could not capture the kind of sinnlich
performance aesthetic for this passage he may have imagined. Drawing on
Carlo Gozzi two decades later, Wagner recommended actor–singers prac-
tice improvisation regularly, alluding to this as a legitimate means of
escaping the impossibility of transcribing a performance of character: “the
ingenious Gozzi declared it clean impossible to write out certain of his

141
“Eine Szene . . . beim Beginn des zweiten Aktes macht an unsre Ohren wahrhaft unerhörte
Ansprüche.” Meyer, Richard Wagner und seine Stellung zur Vergangenheit und “Zukunft,” 43.
142
“der Hauptausdruck hier [ist] dem Sprachvortrage anvertraut.” Marx, Die Kunst des
Gesanges, 181.
143
See Stephen C. Meyer, “Sound Recordings and the End of the Italian Lohengrin,” Cambridge Opera
Journal 20 (2008), 1–24, here 10, 12. There are two complete broadcasts of Lohengrin from the mid-
1930s: Maurice de Abravanel’s direction of the Metropolitan Opera on March 27, 1937 is available
on Walhall Eternity Series (WLCD 0011); Fritz Busch’s direction from Buenos Aires on September
17, 1936 is available on Archipel Desert Island Collection (ARPCD 0182–3). The famous new
production at Bayreuth from 1936, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, survives in fragments only.
These are available on the Archipel Desert Island Collection (ARPCD 0284).
 The Lohengrin recitatives 245

Example 4.4b Ortrud’s suggestively intoned melodic lines, Lohengrin, act 2,

mm. 261–67.

characters in prose, still less in verse, and contented himself with a mere
sketch of their scenes for the performers to fill up.”144 Wagner’s awareness
that character is not always determinable (and writable) in this sense would
seem very much to the point.

144
SSD 9: 263. Cf. PW 5: 261.
246 Hearing voices

We may wonder at the different approaches to notating the voice

here: locking in the expression on the one hand, and leaving a limited
freedom for improvising performers on the other. Why the discrepancy?
Speaking of Tannhäuser in 1852 – the very work whose “locked in” notation
Schröder-Devrient had criticized to Wagner’s face – the composer obliquely
explains his two alternatives. Echoing comments above about Lohengrin, he
talks of having “labored to denote [vocal-melodic] phrasing in exact rhythmic
accordance with the ‘aim’ of my expression” but goes on to add, perhaps with
Schröder-Devrient in mind, that if and when the singers “feel” and adopt his
directions “correctly,” then:
the strictness of the musical beat must be almost totally abandoned, which up to
then was a mere mechanical aid for agreement between composer and singer. When
that agreement has been completely attained, however, it is to be discarded as a
worn-out, useless tool that has become annoying. From the moment the singer fully
absorbs my intentions for the delivery, let him give the freest play to his natural
sensibility, even to the physical necessity of his breath in the more agitated phrases;
the more creative he himself can become through the fullest freedom of feeling, the
more delightedly grateful I will be.145

Such freedom is latent in the under-determined notation of Example 4.4,

I would argue, though, as per the recurring hypocrisy of Wagner’s “freedom
in chains,” a lot depends on what “correctly” feeling his prescribed
intentions means here. It may seem contradictory that he asked at times
for strict adherence to his rhythmic notation, and at other times for singers
to abandon the beat, yet, as he would argue in 1871, it is precisely the
dialectic between an unconscious, improvising Volksgeist (collectively
embodied in the improvising mime) and a consciously notated artistic
production that gives rise to the artwork of the future.146 It is in this
mindset, moreover, that Wagner credits the works of his two most canonic
forebears, both Shakespeare’s plays and Beethoven’s late quartets, as fixed
improvisations.147
Wagner’s naïvety in seeking to erase the difference between writing and
speaking media prompts two further observations: first, the score he used
when he first conducted Lohengrin (in Frankfurt am Main on September 12
and 17, 1862) contains numerous pencilled notes, other marginalia, and calls to

145
SSD 5: 129. Cf. PW 3: 175.
146
See particularly Dieter Borchmeyer’s enlightening discussion in Richard Wagner: Theory and
Theater, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford University Press, 2002), 250–86.
147
SSD 5: 143. Cf. PW 5: 144. See also CT (December 4, 1870).
 The Lohengrin recitatives 247

reinstate passages in his hand. As Figure 4.2a shows, for this dialogue in act 2 he
highlights the need for adequate performance, writing: “Everything is to be
performed here [i.e. not cut] except when suitable singers are not available, in
which case the entire opera should not be performed.”148 Elsewhere, he writes
simply Herzustellen! (Reinstate!) or “If the chorus is good, this must be per-
formed complete. RW,”149 though later in the second act – given in Figure 4.2b –
he iterates a similar condition for Friedrich’s interruption on the Minster steps
as he had for Ortrud’s recitation: “Whether the following passage can be
performed depends entirely on the energy [Kraft] of the singers.”150 In other
words, though the right singers are essential for any performance of Lohengrin,
Wagner imagined that Ortrud’s and Friedrich’s recitational melodies would
suffer more than most if the singers were inadequate.
Second, both Wagner’s aborted musical sketches for Siegfrieds Tod
(1850) and his Lied Der Tannenbaum (1838) indicate that Ortrud’s
“reciting tones” were clearly more than a passing experiment. The former
is similar to Ortrud’s chanting in its psalmic pitches within the Norns
scene, suggesting that, on the brink of writing Oper und Drama, Wagner
pursued this recitational style as a means of seeking a drama-driven,
declamatory verisimilitude in performance. Example 4.5a, taken from
Werner Breig’s transcription, illustrates the principle where, except for
the first interval, the chromatically ordered pitches divide each sub-clause
almost entirely by single pitches, forming a rising, speaking intensity.
Similarly, Wagner’s short Tannenbaum Lied requires the singer to recite
almost as though the tonic and flat supertonic were psalm tones defining a
church mode. Examples 4.5b and 4.5c illustrate the periodically mono-
tonal expression. We even find this kind of writing in Das Rheingold, scene
3 (1854) – Example 4.5d – where Alberich sings seventeen consecutive Bs
as he relates the fabrication of the Tarnhelm to Wotan and Loge
(cf. Mime’s version of the same in Example 1.3b). Of course, highlighting
the risk of affectation here is the ne plus ultra of vocal monotones, Peter
Cornelius’ Lied “Ein Ton” (op. 3, no. 3), which also appeared in 1854, and
consists of no fewer than eighty Bs wherein the virtuosic harmonization

148
“Hier ist alles auszuführen, außer wenn die geeigneten Sänger nicht vorhanden, in welchem Fall
dann die ganze Oper nicht gegeben werden möge. RW.” This comment occurs right after Friedrich’s
line “Du fürchterliches Weib!” For a brief discussion of Wagner’s comments see Rüdiger Pohl, “Zum
neuen Bayreuther Lohengrin: ‘Gieb die Oper, wie sie ist, streiche nichts!’” Mitteilungen der
Deutschen Richard-Wagner Gesellschaft 30/31 (1999), 1. The score is housed in the Stadt- and
Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main (Mus Wf 22/Mus Hs Opern 595 [1]).
149
“Wenn der Chor gut ist, muß dies vollständig gegeben werden. RW.”
150
“Von der Kraft des Sängers hängt es allein ab, ob die folgende Stelle gegeben werden kann.”
4.2a Wagner’s conducting score for performances of Lohengrin in Frankfurt am Main on September 12–17, 1862; act 2 scene 1 dialogue.
Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main (Mus Wf 22). Transcription: Hier ist alles auszuführen, außer wenn die geeigneten Sänger nicht vorhanden, in
welchem Fall dann die ganze Oper nicht gegeben werden möge [Everything is to be performed here except when suitable singers are not available in which case
the entire opera should not be performed] RW.
4.2b Wagner’s conducting score for performances of Lohengrin in Frankfurt am Main on September 12–17, 1862; Telramund’s speech on the
Minster steps, act 2, scene 3. Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main (Mus Wf 22). Transcription: Von der Kraft des Sängers hängt es allein
ab, ob die folgende Stelle gegeben werden kann [Whether the following passage can be performed depends entirely on the energy of the singers]
RW.
250 Hearing voices

Example 4.5a From Wagner’s aborted sketches for Siegfrieds Tod (1850), mm. 11–16.

Example 4.5b From Wagner’s Lied Der Tannenbaum (1838), mm. 13–17.

evokes a heritage of melodic games dating back at least to Purcell’s

“Fantasia upon one note” (Z. 745).
In the troublesome Lohengrin “recitatives,” the potential of performance is
what is at stake in any imagined elision between Wagner’s composition and
the echo of Devrient’s voice: her “beautiful breath” literally in-spired this
German melody, breathing life and spirit – musical pneuma (πνευμα) – into
the will to be melodic and beautiful, yet self-consciously non-Italian, non-
French. The slippage between metaphoric inspiration and literal inhalation is
Wagner’s own, for he argues in Oper und Drama that emotionally heightened
speech accents are entirely “governed by [literal] breath,”151 while critiquing
the etymological investigations of German linguistics with the call to vivify:

151
SSD 4: 120. Cf. PW 2: 257.
 The Lohengrin recitatives 251

Example 4.5c From Wagner’s Lied Der Tannenbaum (1838), mm. 27–43.

Example 4.5d Alberich chants a series of Bs over the Tarnhelm motif in Das Rheingold
(1854), scene 3, mm. 2601–07.
252 Hearing voices

the organism of speech . . . by healing up the wounds with which the anatomical
scalpel has gashed the body of speech, and by breathing into it the [metaphorical]
breath that may ensoul it into living motion.152

In this sense, Schröder-Devrient’s “beautiful breath” was the positive kiss of

life for a negatively determined concept. It resuscitated a tired theory of
inflected speech that both informed and elevated Wagner’s vocal melody. In
celebrating the articulate voice with its “infinite variety that comes from its
characteristic play of vowels and consonants” as “the oldest, truest, and
most beautiful organ of music, the organ to which our music exclusively
owes its being,” it is hard to imagine that he had anyone else in mind.153

Towards language: gas-light and candle-lamps

Music can only ever be language developed to its fullest potential.

Richard Wagner (1851)154

Breath, as Wagner’s construction of Schröder-Devrient indicates, is connected

to the production of speech as much as singing. As we have seen, these were
permeable categories that Schröder-Devrient’s declamatory aesthetic exploited,
and that critics perceived as oddly hyperemotional utterances which did not fit
cleanly within the comfort zones of either (spoken) theater or (sung) opera. By
outlining a melodic theory in Oper und Drama that drew on his experience of an
emergent practice of such dramatic singing, and was defined almost entirely in
the absence of pitch sequences, melodic contour, or normative phrase structure,
Wagner avoided the paralyzing inhibition that had dogged melody pedagogy
for thirty years.155 It was a solution that, as it were, moved the goalposts:
rather than seeking to match the prestige of metaphysical speculation or
outmaneuver Bellinian bel canto within its own stylistic bounds, he explained
a desire to communicate “purely human” emotional content by redefining
“melody” without reference to pitch or normative music theory; instead, the
speaking of the German language – considered by Humboldt (after Herder and
Hamann) as the formative substance of thought within the realm of the ideal

152
SSD 4: 127. Cf. PW 2: 265. 153 SSD 4: 166–7. Cf. PW 2: 309; and SSD 4: 4. Cf. PW 2: 122.
154
Wagner to Adolph Stahr, May 31, 1851, Zurich, in SB 4: 59.
155
The famous “poetic–musical period” Wagner describes in part 3 of Oper und Drama was
conceived as a successor to eighteenth-century periodic syntax. For an excellent critique of
Wagner’s concept of the poetic–musical period, see Thomas Grey’s chapter “The
‘poetic–musical period’ and the ‘evolution’ of Wagnerian form,” Wagner’s Musical Prose,
181–241, as well as his translation of Wagner’s own description of the concept, 375–77.
 Towards language: gas-light and candle-lamps 253

(which cannot therefore be disembodied)156 – would itself need to be sensu-

alized as a mode of emotional expression.
This move effectively refined Wagner’s vocal “melody” from a musical to a
linguistic concept, shifting it from Melodik to Philologie, and – by implication –
dismissing the non-linguistic identity of melody as “absolute.” In its new guise,
melody sought to function as a delivery system for distinctive poetic emotion,
communicating its sensory load via inflected, alliterated consonants and the
vowels of speech roots to the ears of imagined transnational listeners. In this
sense, Oper und Drama created a gap and filled a void, for Wagner expounded
a lengthy treatise on melody apparently without direct application (there is no
Stabreim in Lohengrin), answering decades of melodic composition in the
absence of any lasting melodic–theoretical basis.
While there is no shortage of writing about Wagner’s politicized mid-
century texts, relatively little attention has been paid to the contemporary
commentators who received his ideas first-hand. Since Melodik had posed
problems for German composers long before 1851, it was only to be
expected that the earliest critiques of Wagner’s treatise voiced continuing
skepticism on the matter. The Königsberg-based, Polish-American
composer Eduard Sobolewski likened Wagner’s philologically prestigious
but musically almost vacant theory to Mozart’s ambitious proposition
about aleatoric melody in Ein musikalisches Würfelspiel, paraphrasing
incorrectly that “those persons who in vain racked their brains for melo-
dies should have recourse to a game of dice, in which each person should
be allowed only two or three throws, and immediately receive a theme for a
cantata, symphony, air, or galop.”157 Wagner’s plan to derive melody from
words and syntax “is a more sensible one,” Sobolewski admits, though it
must ultimately fail, for:
Words, like tones, are capable of producing sensations by themselves; but if they are
both united, the former pale like candle-lamps before gas-light. The former may aid
in diffusing light, but it is from the latter that all the rays seem to proceed . . . in this
manner we shall have no suns shining, but, at most, candle-lamps. Trop raffiner c’est
dénaturer.158

156
“Das Denken ist aber nicht bloss abhängig von der Sprache überhaupt, sondern, bis auf einen
gewissen Grad, auch von jeder einzelnen bestimmten.” See Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaft,
1903–36), 4: 21.
157
Eduard Sobolewski, Reaktionäre Briefe aus dem Feuilleton der Ostpreuss. Zeitung
(Kotnigsberg: Schultzschen Hofbuchdruckerei, 1854); Eng trans. “Reactionary Letters.
No. II,” TMW 33 (1855), 45.
158
Ibid.
254 Hearing voices

Granted, Sobolewski’s gas-powered melodies may outshine the dim alter-

native from a Franco-Italian perspective; but the reason for shunning the
brighter option is that these candles were made wick and wax – vowel and
consonant – in Germany (while the gas was imported through foreign
“pipes” from Rome and Paris). Sobolewski’s concluding bon mot ironically
illustrates the point.
If Wagner’s aim was to achieve – in this multinational context – a character-
istically German mode of melodic expression, it was a lofty endeavor that
would equally be criticized for banality. We should keep in mind that the idea of
a national autochthony was always ancillary, and Wagner’s “archaic” language
can be seen in these terms as a means to an end that was essentially modern and
progressive: he uses the archaic form to justify a musical language that is just as
outlandish as its literary basis, which raised the suspicion of at least one
musically educated German speaker in Wagner’s circle:
Wagner came across the unfortunate idea in his most recent speculations of reawak-
ening an archaic form of diction (alliterative poetry) and is all but writing a grammar
book (as well as a lexicon, of course) in which one could find ready formed the musical
expression after the corresponding linguistic expression. Through this, one would
effectively be in a position to sing as to speak, i.e. every word receives well-nigh its
typical musical setting, and finally one would be in a most comfortable position one
morning to sight sing the Prussian Staatsanzeiger without any difficulties.159

Joachim Raff’s ironic whim of droning through the Prussian Staatsanzeiger

“at sight” is a logician’s fantasy, a droll exaggeration of Wagner’s
Worttonmelodie in opposition to bel canto demonstrating that, as so often
with Wagner, Reductio can be unhelpfully ad absurdum. The dreamt-of
operatic newspaper would depend on the composer’s undocumented
“unfortunate idea” of establishing a lexicon of musical gestures corresponding
to all known grammatical inflections. Raff probably inferred (rather than
witnessed) Wagner’s encyclopaedic intentions in this direction; far from an
arbitrary quip, however, such an inference hinted at Wagner’s debt to the
burgeoning tradition of Philologie, in particular to Jacob Grimm, though it is
unclear whether Raff is referring to the ongoing Deutsches Wörterbuch

159
“Wagner ist in seinen letzten Speculationen auf die unselige Idee verfallen, eine archaistische
Art der Diction (die Alliterationspoesie) wieder aufzuwecken und macht nicht übel Miene, eine
Grammatik (natürlich auch ein Lexikon) zu schreiben, worin man den musikalischen Ausdruck
nach dem so gestaltet sprachlichen fertig vorfinden könnte. Man würde dadurch bald in Stand
gesetzt sein, zu singen wie zu sprechen, d. h. jedes Wort erhielte nachgerade seine typische
musikalische Betonung, und schliesslich würde man eines Morgens den preußischen
Staatsanzeiger ohne Schwierigkeiten abzusingen in der höchst angenehmen Verfassung sein.”
Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 100–01.
 Towards language: gas-light and candle-lamps 255

project, or the Deutsche Grammatik (1819), part 1 of whose third edition

(1840) was contained in Wagner’s Dresden library.160
Raff’s failure to distinguish between a grammar and lexicon reveals an
ambiguity over the locus of signification in language: do intoned words acquire
meaning exclusively by their context and proximity to other words (whether
alliteration, assonance, or grammatical relationship), or do they still possess an
original sound, a “language of feeling”161 that predates the division Herder
registered between sign and referent in his celebrated 1772 essay? Raff inter-
prets Wagner’s treatise as the latter, but jokes about the boredom of the former:
recitational melody as a mind-numbing grammar book. This was not a new
question in 1854; Humboldt had suggested back in 1822 that such a division
was irrelevant in any case because the two cannot be separated in speech:
Words and their grammatical relationships are imagined as two entirely separate
things. The former are the actual objects in the language, the latter merely the links,
but speech is only possible through a combination of the two.162

In contrast to vocal pedagogy, Grimm furnished Wagner with an entirely

different lens through which to focus his ideal Melodik, and in this respect,
his theoretical work can indeed be seen as a continuation of the Grammatik
by other means, bringing it into the realm of music. If there were any doubt,
Raff’s later aside makes the connection clear: “Shame that Wagner didn’t
unify his material with that of the Brothers Grimm from the very start.”163
In one sense, Wagner was merely deepening a furrow that had already been
ploughed. The eighteenth-century link between rhetoric and music main-
tained that speech and melody shared syntactical structure and punctuational
functions: “This is a fact,” Koch asserted in 1787 “which has never yet been
called into question and therefore requires no further proof.”164 But Wagner’s
turn away from an overtly Italianate melodic idiom, I am arguing, demanded
a historically “German” alternative that was embodied not in rhetorico–
syntactical correspondence between Gänge or Perioden, but in language and
Wagner’s much-debated concept of “musikalische Prosa.”

160
Raff appears to refer to both, except that the Grammatik (unlike the Wörterbuch) was not a joint
project between both Grimm brothers, but was completed entirely by Jacob. See Curt von
Westernhagen, Richard Wagners Dresdener Bibliothek, 91.
161
J. G. Herder and J. J. Rousseau, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and
Alexander Gode (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 88.
162
See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Grammatical Forms and their Influence on the
Development of Ideas,” Essays on Language, 29.
163
“Schade, daß Wagner sein Material nicht von Haus aus mit dem der Gebrüder Grimm vereinigt
hat.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 101.
164
H. C. Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition: The Mechanical Rules of Melody [1787], trans.
Nancy K. Backer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 1.
256 Hearing voices

Notation: “entirely insufficient”165

But this linguistic turn posed the challenge of establishing a means of inscrip-
tion that would enable future performance. The apparent disappointment of
Wagner’s recitatives in Lohengrin was a blow to the composer, who had sought
to write the “energy, fire” of his declamation into the score through a dialectic of
over- and under-determined pitch and rhythm. This, he confessed, was still not
a foolproof treatment of melody. Shortly after the Weimar premiere, Wagner
ceased defending the work and actively dissociated himself from it. His future-
oriented perspective and recent, public coupling of liberal politics and artistic
reform saw him condemn his fairy-tale opera only seven months after the
premiere: “I glanced through my score of Lohengrin; it filled me absolutely with
disgust, and my intermittent fits of laughter were not of a cheerful kind.”166
Inspired by Wagner’s Zurich writings, however, several contemporaries
reversed his shift from music theory to linguistics. By scrutinizing the musical
detail in speech inflection, their ostensibly supportive approach only revealed
weaknesses of his claims in their practical application, most obviously by high-
lighting the limits of notation. A prominent case is Louis Köhler, a Königsberg-
based Wagner acolyte who advocated quarter-tones to support a broader
concept of Versmelodie within the sphere of acoustic curiosity. He first spoke
of how “refreshing” Lohengrin was in this respect, “how harmonically effective
the text alone is as a poem, this human speech in music.”167 Yet what is vocally
most expressive – whimpers, cries and screams – remains untranscribable:
Such expressions of feeling cannot be captured authentically in notation . . . the actor,
the singer must fill in such gaps of signification, he must know that true expression first
begins there where the possibility of notation ends – he must know that a thousand
more scale steps come into use than are contained by our compositional apparatus.168
The point for Wagner’s linguistic turn is that literalists such as Köhler inserted
Wagner’s theory into a long-standing German discourse on speech melody,
where, without any qualification, he could interpret speech itself as infinitely
delicate music:

165
Wagner to Liszt, June 29, 1851, Enge/Zurich, SB 4: 67.
166
Wagner to Liszt, April 28, 1851, Zurich, SB 3: 543.
167
“Wie erquickend, wie harmonisch wirkt allein schon der Text als Gedicht, und diese
Menschensprache in der Musik – – !” Köhler, “Aus Königsberg,” NZfM 36 (February 13, 1852),
75–76, here 76.
168
“Solche Gefühlsäußerungen lassen sich nicht getreu in Noten geben . . . Der Darsteller, der
Sänger muß solche Zeichenlücken ausfüllen, er muß wissen, daß der wahre Ausdruck erst da
enfängt, wo die Möglichkeit der Bezeichnung aufhört, – er muß wissen, daß allerdings
tausendmal mehr Tonstufen in Anwendung kommen, als unser Kompositionsapparat enthält.”
Köhler, Die Melodie der Sprache (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1853), 24.
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 257

Audible speech itself is sound . . . Thus song lies in speech, in its original essence it is
only more musical speech . . . In speech, not only with an outcry of pain . . . are two
tones attached to one syllable, but the tone wave of speech . . . is understood so that
rather than each syllable being joined to a sharply differentiated tone, there are tonal
connections [Tonverbindungen] – crossings in speech tone . . . a syllable often occurs,
without the awareness of the speaker or listener, through a quantity of sound atoms
[Tonatome] each one of which trickles into the next; one can pursue these as little as
the course of a single drop in a waterfall, but one feels it – one notices it, if one wants, in
the declamation of unselfconscious speakers; if one had apparatuses, one could
perhaps measure and calculate it like the thousands of air waves that a single tone
brings about, that in turn make the tone possible.169

In fact, only four years later, an apparatus did emerge to measure and calculate
the voice by producing a graphic trace of the “most delicate details of the motion
of sound waves.”170 On October 28, 1857 in a talk entitled “The Graphic
Fixation of the Voice,” the Parisian scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de
Martinville unveiled his phonautograph technology for the assembled
members of the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale. His device
detailed what he called the “natural stenography” of “acoustic writing,” a
cutting-edge technology that mimicked the double membranous structure of
the inner ear to inscribe raw waveforms into smoke-blackened paper, and
sought thereby to “preserve for future generations some features of the diction
of one of those eminent actors, those grand artists who die without leaving
behind them the faintest trace of their genius.”171 Martinville described the
resulting waveform graphs coolly as an “analysis of the elements of the speaking
voice” – defined as a function of tonality, intensity and timbre – and declared
confidently: “the invention of the writing of sound and of its fixing is, so to
speak, consummated; nothing more remains than to perfect and extend the

169
“Die hörbare Sprache selbst ist Ton . . . Der Gesang liegt also in der Sprache, er ist in seiner
Urwesenheit nur tonvollere Sprache . . . in der Sprache nicht allein bei Ausrufen des
Schmerzes . . . zwei Töne auf eine Sylbe kommen, sondern daß die Tonwelle der Rede . . .
begriffen ist, – so, daß nicht etwa mit jeder neuen Sylbe auch ein vom vorigen scharf
abgeschiedener Ton kommt, sondern daß es auch noch Tonverbindungen, – Uebergänge im
Sprachetone giebt . . . So zieht sich oft eine Sylbe, ohne daß der Sprechende oder Hörende es
weiß, durch eine Menge Tonatome, deren einer aus dem andern in den andern rieselt; man
kann dies so wenig verfolgen wie den Lauf einzelner Tropfen im Wasserfalle, aber man
fühlt es, – wenn man will, bemerkt man es in der Deklamation des Unbefangenen; wenn man
Apparate besäße, könnte man es vielleicht auch messen und berechnen, wie die Tausende von
Luftwellen, die ein einziger Ton bewirkt, die wiederum den Ton ermöglichen.” Köhler, Die
Melodie der Sprache, 3, 62–63.
170
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “Principles of Phonautography” (January 26, 1857) in The
Phonautographic Manuscripts of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, ed. and trans. Patrick
Feaster, www.firstsounds.org/publications/articles/Phonautographic-Manuscripts.pdf, 7.
171
Ibid., 5.
4.3a Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “Fixation Graphique de la Voix” (1857), Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, archives, CEC
8/54–19(1). Transcription: Déclamation écrite par la voix même: s’il faut qu’àce rival . . . terribles mains! [Declamation written by the voice itself: if it must
be that to this rival . . . terrible hands!] L. Scott, 1857.
4.3a The same image with inverted colors to show Martinville’s text and etched lines more clearly.
260 Hearing voices

4.3b Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “Fixation Graphique de la Voix” (1857),

Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, archives, CEC 8/54–19(3).

process, to apply it to the sciences and to the arts.”172 But this proved difficult
because, as Figure 4.3a shows, the zigzags and jagged lines of phonautographic
script were illegible to human eyes, and attempts at providing alphabetic
transcriptions, complete with a legend for deciphering the waveforms
(Figure 4.3b), never gained currency within a practicable compositional sphere.
Phonautography also lacked a playback mechanism at the time, leaving its runic
script mysteriously silent. Despite these shortcomings, its precise transcription
offered a scientific paradigm for capturing the minute fluctuations of an utter-
ance wherein the materialization of any vocal sound meant that what was to be
read or declaimed was no longer qualitatively distinct from that which should be
sung or vocalized, resolving for Wagner the apparent contradiction of writing
poetry to be enunciated as prose.173

172
Martinville, “Fixation graphique de la voix” (October 28, 1857) in Ibid. 30, 37.
173
A monistic paradigm for vocal sound had emerged much earlier from the extentsive
discourse on melodic speech in German aesthetics. Typically, this was advanced on a scientific
basis that drew on the intensity of vibrations and the shapes of waveforms; see, respectively,
Gustav von Seckendorff, Vorlesungen über Deklamation und Mimik. Erster Band, nebst einem
Heft Musik-Beilagen (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1816), 33ff. and Rötscher, Die Kunst der dramatischen
Darstellung, 1: 137ff.
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 261

After clothing his singular interpretation of Wagner’s linguistic theory in

musical notation, Köhler’s resulting compositional method is perhaps the
weakest element in his treatise. To intone text correctly (i.e. as he mistakenly
imagines Wagner must do), he argues, one simply recites a poetic phrase
several times and “eavesdrops” on the “inner echo” after the final repetition,
taking down the residual melodic contour through dictation. This is
precisely composition as the stenography of original performance, exacting
a role reversal of performer and composer, but one which ultimately
annihilates the composer.174 As a compositional tool this was far from an
exclusively German practice, of course.175 But here, Köhler’s notational
means is mechanical enough for him to claim that, if published, his notated
declamation of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land” should be entitled “Lied,
composed by itself.”176 (To underscore the kinship with Martinville, he too
would entitle his transcriptions: “the sung voice written by itself at 50
centimeters” or “declamation written by the voice itself.”177) Though hard
to credit as “self-composed” without a lot of extra-poetic help, Köhler’s Lied
is broken down into its constituent stages of graphic notation that captures
his lyrical declamation, which he subsequently harmonizes and finally
rhythmicizes into a Lied. Figure 4.4 gives the graphic contour, Example
4.6a inserts this into a musical stave, while Example 4.6b shows the resulting
“self-composed” work.
Not surprisingly, such methodology split critical opinion along party lines;
it was ridiculed by Ludwig Bischoff, the anti-Wagnerian editor of the

174
Köhler illustrates his method by setting Wagner’s Stabreim archetype “Die Liebe bringt uns Lust und
Leid, doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen” to music in a “natural” version, but compares it to his
three caricatured settings in the “absolute” style of Meyerbeer, Rossini, and “French.” These rather
amusing parodic compositions are reproduced in Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 192–94.
175
A letter purporting to be from Bellini to Agostine Gallo describes Bellini composing with Romani in
precisely the same way: “I begin by declaiming each character’s lines with all the heat of passion, and I
closely observe the inflection of my voice, the speeding up and slowing down of the declamation in
each situation, the overall accent and the expressive tone that characterizes a man in the grip of
passion.” This first appeared in 1843 within a pamphlet entitled Sull’estetica di Vincenzo Bellini –
Notizie communicate da lui stesso al Gallo, and was variously reprinted. This letter is a proven forgery,
however, and despite several attempts to authenticate its basic claims, John Rosselli recently
dismissed the matter in light of Bellini’s documented practice of composing melodies with neither
text nor poetic context: “The notion of Bellini as a bard driven by verbal afflatus is absurd.” See
John Rosselli, The Life of Bellini (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43.
176
“So würde ich nun kaum wagen, obiges Lied für meine Komposition auszugeben, denn ich
habe nichts daran gethan, als sie erlauscht, und die Sprachmelodie bekleidet; ließe mann solche
Lieder drucken, so sollte der Titel heißen: ‘Lied: komponiert durch sich selbst.’” Köhler, Die
Melodie der Sprache, 65.
177
Martinville, “SEIN 8/54–18” in www.firstsounds.org/publications/articles/
Phonautographic-Manuscripts.pdf, 48, 51.
262 Hearing voices

4.4 Louis Köhler’s graphic notation of Goethe’s poem “Kennst du das Land” from Die
Melodie der Sprache (1853), p. 64. Reproduced by permission of the Eda Kuhn Loeb
Music Library of the Harvard College Library.

Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung,178 but taken altogether more seriously by

Franz Brendel and Liszt, who viewed the young Köhler as something of a
firebrand.179 Wagner privately dismissed him as a “mad crank”
(ein närrischer Kauz) with an inexplicable enthusiasm for “artistic form
without content,”180 though responded more politely to the author himself,
speaking of a book “I had read even before you sent me a copy,” but which
would more profitably have demonstrated that modern verse cannot be set to
modern melodies, while simply intoning speech as “musical prose” results in

178
Bischoff concludes his terse review dismissively: “Wahrlich! Nach diesem Buche liesse sich ein
humoristisches Bild der Musikmacherei im zwanzigsten oder dreissigsten Jahrhundert
entwerfen, bei dessen Anschauung die Thränen, welche der Genius der Kunst jetzt über die
wahnwitzigen Verirrungen seiner Jünger weint, von unbändigem Lachen erstickt werden
müssten.” See Bischoff, “Die Melodie der Sprache,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 14 (1853),
105–09, here, 109.
179
Franz Brendel explains that “Diese Schrift ist, nach Wagner’s Vorgang, der erste Schritt
auf der neuen Bahn.” He argues further that the development of art has now led to a point where “die
Melodie der Sprache ist die Aufgabe der Gegenwart und Zukunft, die bisherige Gesangsmelodie aber
hatte damit äußerst wenig, meist gar nichts zu schaffen.” Brendel, “Die Melodie der Sprache,”
Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft 1 (1856), 10–28, here 11, 21.
Liszt’s appreciative letter to Köhler congratulates him on theorizing what Liszt does unawares
in composition. See Liszt to Köhler, July 5, 1860, see Franz Liszt’s Briefe, ed. La Mara (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893), 1: 358–59.
180
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, March 22–25, 1852, Zurich, SB 4: 324–25.
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 263

Example 4.6a Louis Köhler’s intonation of “Kennst du das Land” inserted into a
musical stave (Die Melodie der Sprache, 1853), pp. 64–5.

Example 4.6b Köhler’s “Kennst du das Land” as a Lied “composed by itself”

(Die Melodie der Sprache, 1853), p. 65.

“unmelodic formlessness.”181 The scientific curiosity latent in Köhler’s claims

also engaged physiologists. Speaking from a materialist perspective, the
Leipzig-based professor of medicine Karl Merkel shared Wagner’s pessimism,
but lumped him together with Köhler as fancifully pursuing a futile end:

181
Wagner to Louis Köhler, July 24, 1853, St. Moritz, SB 5: 370–72.
264 Hearing voices

Example 4.7 Karl Merkel’s alternative to Louis Köhler’s setting of Wagner’s archetypal
Stabreim (Physiologie der Sprache, 1866).
(a) Köhler.

(b) Merkel.

We cannot talk of the melody of speech here, and in all declamatory notation – even were
it to be carried out with all the technical expedients of music, as Wagner and Köhler etc.
have done – we find no actual trace of melody or of actual, intrinsic music.182

While the techniques Köhler espouses are perhaps only relevant as neo-
Wagnerian arcana, then, his essentializing interpretation of audible speech
as pure sound, and his belief in the tonal gradations of every enunciation,
situate his aesthetics midway between song and speech, arguably at the apex
of an iconic–expressive merger.
But the reality of fully aligning melodic shape with either lexical or gram-
matical structure appeared nonsensical to most contemporaries. Merkel is one
of many who challenged Köhler’s melodic setting of Wagner’s exemplary
music–poetic period with his own, verbally tweaked Versmelodie, complete
with alternative intonations (Example 4.7). In his Fliegende Blätter, moreover,
Lobe dismissed the entire enterprise with the deductive argument that if words
and tones are conflated inwardly with one another:
(i) every text must have only one true melody; and consequently
(ii) to such a melody, only one text will fit properly . . .
Or would the words “I love you” have to be set to the same melody regardless of
whether Elsa or Lohengrin, Telramund or Ortrud sings them; is it only the grammat-
ical accent that would determine the tonal and rhythmic contour and figure, not the
character, feeling, and situation of the people, which can be totally different?183

182
“In dieser Hinsicht kann also nicht von Melodie der menschliche Sprache die Rede sein, und es ist
auch wirklich in allen den deklamatorischen Notirungen, und wären sie noch so sehr mit allen
technischen Hülfsmitteln der Musik ausgeführt, wie es Wagner, Köhler u. a. m. gethan, keine
Spur von Melodie oder von wirklicher, specifischer Musik aufzufinden.” Karl Ludwig Merkel,
Physiologie der menschlichen Sprache (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1866), 391.
183
“Wären Wort und Ton so innig miteinander verschmolzen, als die Verehrer der ‘Melodie der
Sprache’ uns einreden wollen, so müßte es (a) für jeden Text eine wahre Melodie geben; und
folglich könnten (b) zu einer solchen Melodie auch keine andern Worte untergelegt werden . . .
Oder müßten die Worte: ‘Ich liebe dich’ dieselbe Melodie erhalten, gleichviel ob sie Elsa, oder
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 265

Lobe is protesting about musical character on the basis of experience, though

what he describes as an absurd (in fact, a falsified Wagnerian) theory was not
unprecedented; it resonates with Conrad Beissel’s (1691–1768) belief that every
German sentence has a unique pitch structure determined by master and slave
words.184 If a grammar – in theory at least – inflected words to predefined
pitches, the suspicion for skeptical nineteenth-century commentators was that
this not only restricts musical characterization, but abdicates compositional
responsibility to a mechanical process of dictation: “we should then be able to
compose a Drama of the Future in a few hours,” Sobolewski quipped.185
A brief examination of the Kompositionsskizze of Lohengrin reveals the
extent to which this is wrong-headed. In addition to the structural alterations
that would distinguish this from the later Orchesterskizze, Wagner’s numerous
recastings of his melodic material – in terms of declamation, intonation,
agogic – illustrate his struggle with notation, as well as the strikingly diverse
alternatives that exist within his second thoughts, reconsiderations, and revi-
sions that characterized his process of melodic composition (sharpened, no
doubt, by his preoccupation with a Germanic rendering of Gluck’s Iphigénie at
that time). Not surprisingly, therefore, Wagner’s documented equivocation
over alternatives suggests that his setting of Lohengrin’s text was far from a
stenographic tracing of speech: in fact, he toiled over the richtige Deklamation.
At the very outset of the opera, Example 4.8a shows the Heerrufer’s call to
the assembled Brabantines. Between Kompositionsskizze, Orchesterskizze and
printed score, there is a progressive transfer of accent and more exalted pitch (e1
rather than c1) to emphasize “Deutschen König” rather than “Deutschen
König,” as well as “Freie von Brabant!” rather than “Freie von Brabant!”
Similarly, Example 4.8b shows Ortrud’s prophecy that, if any part of
Lohengrin’s body were severed, he would become powerless; within the
Kompositionsskizze Wagner shifted the accent from “ohnmächtig” to
“ohnmächtig,” just as he altered Lohengrin’s cry (Example 4.8c) to express an

Lohengrin, Telramund oder Ortrud sängen; nur der grammatikalische Accent bestimmte die
tonliche und rhythmische Biegung und Gestalt, nicht der Charakter, das Gefühl und die
Situation der Personen, die ja total verschieden sein können?” Lobe, “Briefe über Rich. Wagner
an einen jungen Komponisten. Zwölfter Brief,” FBfM 2 (1855), 30.
184
See Lloyd George Blakely, “Johann Conrad Beissel and Music of the Ephrata Cloister,” Journal
of Research in Music Education 15 (1967), 120–38.
185
Sobolewski’s full comment invokes literal mechanical stenography and is worth quoting at length:
“If the system of word-melody maintains its ground, it will not be difficult in this inventive age –
which has already invented an instrument that immediately marks down every note a person
sounds, as well as one that imitates all the instruments of an orchestra – to invent another that will
set down musically whatever a person declaims. We should then be able to compose a Drama of the
Future in a few hours.” See Reaktionäre Briefe aus dem Feuilleton der Ostpreuss, 45.
266 Hearing voices

Example 4.8a Lohengrin, act 1 scene 1, mm. 19–26 (King’s Herald).

Example 4.8b Lohengrin, act 2 scene 1, mm. 327–28 (Ortrud).

emphatic double accent (rather than only one), after Elsa submits to forbidden
desire and asks after his provenance. Finally, one instance of Wagner altering
tonal inflection without changing his text rhythm is Friedrich’s question
(Example 4.8d), which becomes a more urgent inquiry in its open rising
minor sixth, than in its original falling minor third (to the local tonic, a).
With no knowledge of these equivocations, Köhler implicitly discounts a
Wagnerian lexicon of phonetically fixed sentiments by analyzing both how the
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 267

Example 4.8c Lohengrin, act 3, scene 2, mm. 1299–1300 (Lohengrin).

1299 LOHENGRIN

first pen
sketch (KS)
O El - - sa!

pencil
alteration
(KS)
O El - sa!

Example 4.8d Lohengrin, act 2 scene 1, m. 183 (Telramund).

Example 4.9a Köhler’s setting of “Ei” (Die Melodie der Sprache, 1853), p. 25.

same monosyllables can be intoned differently according to character, and

where notation ceases to be able to differentiate vocal delivery in performance:
“Wie” as both question and surprise, in contrast to “Ei!” as exclamation. He
conjures dramatic scenarios that determine how text should be enunciated
differently. Example 4.9a sets “Ei!” as that of an elder sister responding
sympathetically to a younger sibling’s joy over a new puppy. (He may have
had Mozart’s three ladies from Die Zauberflöte in mind, where monosyllables
are differentiated similarly by melodic interval and tonic / dominant context, see
Example 4.9b.) Example 4.9c reproduces Köhler’s setting of “Wie?” as a ques-
tion that expects an answer, while Example 4.9d presents “Wie!” as that of a
General’s anger over a subordinate’s contumacy (which expects no answer).
268 Hearing voices

Example 4.9b Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, act 1, scene 1.

Example 4.9c Köhler’s “Wie?”. Example 4.9d Köhler’s “Wie!”.

(implied answer) (intensified)

Completing his dissociation with lexical fixity, Köhler further argued that accent
in performance distinguishes both settings of “Wie” (the questioner draws out
the sound slowly, while the General’s anger is violent and short). Without
explaining his harmonization, Köhler concludes: “the external similarity
between this ‘Wie’ and ‘Ei’ shortly before it lies only in the notes for our eyes,
while the uninscribable performance together with the harmony marks the
difference strongly enough.”186 Of course, Köhler’s approach remains funda-
mentally different from Wagner’s in that Wagner writes declamation to be
performed, while Köhler literally declaims text aloud, later to be written; both
are transcriptions of a kind, but Wagner’s is prescriptive, Köhler’s descriptive.187
Wagner had expressed similar frustrations over notation to Liszt in 1850,
and given that – with Schröder-Devrient’s utterances in mind – he

186
“Die äußerliche Aehnlichkeit dieses ‘Wie’ mit dem ‘Ei’ von vorhin liegt nur in den
Noten fürs Auge, indem der nicht zu schildernde Vortrag vereint mit der Harmonie den
Unterschied stark genug geben.” Köhler, Die Melodie der Sprache, 26.
187
See Charles Seeger’s classic account of this dichotomy in “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-
Writing,” The Musical Quarterly 44 (1958), 184–95.
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 269

Example 4.10a Lohengrin, act 1, scene 1, mm. 90–97 (King Heinrich der Vogler).
HEINRICH DER VOGLER
90

first pen
sketch (KS)
Was deut - sches Land heisst, stel - le Kamp - fes - schaa - ren,

pencil
corrections (KS)
Was deut - sches Land heisst, stel - le Kamp - fes - schaa - ren,

Orchester-
skizze
was deut - sches Land heisst, stel - le Kamp - fes - schaa - ren, dann

mf p

94

dann schmäht wohl Nie - mand mehr das deut - sche Reich!

schmäht wohl Nie - - mand mehr das deut - sche Reich!

3

ff ff
3

4.5 Wagner’s Kompositionsskizze for Lohengrin (showing revisions in Example 4.10a),

NA A II B 2, 1 recto. Reproduced by permission of the Nationalarchiv der
Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.

equivocated between over- and under-determined notation, his revisions to

spoken emphasis bear most on the present argument. I offer a relatively
large sampling of six examples to illustrate his ongoing struggle with vocal
prescription.
In Example 4.10a, the King’s rallying cry for military power to defend the
German realm rises in pitch (d1 to f1) and agogic accent (dotted quarter to
dotted half note on “deutsche”), as well as gaining emphasis through
syncopated metrical placement. Wagner’s manuscript is given as Figure 4.5.
Similarly, when Lohengrin finally reveals his parentage to the awed
Brabantine crowd (Example 4.10b), Wagner reversed the direction of his
270 Hearing voices

Example 4.10b Lohengrin, act 3, mm. 1276–77 (Lohengrin).

Example 4.10c Lohengrin, act 3, mm. 1637–46 (Ortrud). Wagner’s earlier

harmonizations are indicated by roman numerals in square brackets.

original line between Kompositionsskizze and Orchesterskizze, further

adding an appoggiatura on “Krone”; the resulting proclamation is a more
glorified, forthright exertion that Parzifal “wears his crown.”
At the close of the opera, Ortrud’s fury at the departing knight is likewise
far more emphatic with her sustained high ‘A’s in the Orchesterskizze
(Example 4.10c). This is partly to do with the absence of Ortrud’s original
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 271

Example 4.10d Lohengrin, act 2, scene 2, mm. 491–93 (Elsa).

continuation against Lohengrin (in the Kompositionsskizze) which in the

later version turns her initial phrase into her final and only utterance at the
end of act 3. Wagner’s reinterpretation of this text is nevertheless a decisive
enhancement of Ortrud’s valedictory declamation, illustrating how the
same visceral statement can receive radically different melodic settings.
Modifications of inflection on a lower lever can be equally revealing in
Wagner’s treatment of syntactical minutiae. Over different diminished
triads, Elsa’s reaction to Ortrud’s unexpected appearance in act 2, scene 2
(Example 4.10d) is changed to accommodate a more urgent setting of “what
are you doing here?”
In 1968, Robert Bailey identified a similar discrepancy between Wagner’s
1850 setting of the duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried in Siegfrieds Tod, and
the same from 1869 for Götterdämmerung, commenting that this is a rare
instance in which Wagner made two independent settings of almost exactly the
same text, albeit “separated by a crucial interval of nineteen years.”188 As
Bailey’s comparison demonstrates, to the extent that the words prefigure a
musical setting, they prefigured two quite different settings equally well. The
radical implication here is the possibility that there is no one perfect, not-to-be-
improved-on musical end point in Wagner’s “energy, fire, and determined
expression.” Multiple competing melodic settings for any one text undermine
the authority of a single “locked in” expression, elevating the aforementioned

188
Robert Bailey, “Wagner’s Musical Sketches for Siegfrieds Tod,” in Studies in Music History: Essay
for Oliver Strunk, ed. Harold Powers (Princeton University Press, 1968), 459–94, here 477. We
might also think of Tristan here, where the same lines are set in act 1, scenes 3–4 between Isolde
and Brangäne with slight differences: “Kennst du der Mutter / Künste nicht? / Wähnst du, die
alles / klug erwägt, / ohne Rat in fremdes Land / hätt’ sie mit dir mich entsandt? / . . . Für Weh
und Wunden / gab sie Balsam, / für böse Gifte / Gegengift.”
272 Hearing voices

motifs of freedom, improvisation, and performing the same text in different

ways to a new level of importance for Wagner’s operas of this period. Wagner
came close to admitting as much in 1871 when he said that viewers equate
actors’ activity with the “only reality of the artistic show,” hence:
The artistic share in theatrical performances must simply be ascribed to the perfor-
mers, whereas the author of the piece has no more to do with the actual “art” than
insofar as he has planned his poem by calculating the effect it is to produce when
acted.189

In perceptually rendering actors the only “reality” (Wirklichkeit) of an

artistic event, this, for Wagner, taps the “aim of true art in general,”
suggesting that had Wagner been contented with existing performance
traditions in Saxony, there would have been less need for such closely
composed vocal melody.190
Returning to Lohengrin, his evident difficulty over notating revisions
caused him in some instances to cede plastic melody from the voice to the
orchestra in favor of freer vocal recitation. One of the more extended
melodic revisions in the Orchesterskizze was to Lohengrin’s stanzaic Grail
Narration (Example 4.10e). In fact, Wagner’s only authorized cut for the
Weimar premiere had been the third verse; in his Kompositionsskizze he had
set the first verse to the grail theme from the Prelude, though he modified
portions of this in a second pen sketch; in the Orchesterskizze he changed
these entirely so that Lohengrin recites his text to triadic pitches behind the
upper string melody in the orchestra. There may be several reasons for this:
first, the initial setting required unusual emphasis and melodic length on
relatively insignificant, short words such as “mitten” (m. 1228), “drin”
(m. 1231), and “dort” (m. 1233) which are set to correspondingly lowly
pitches and metrical placement in the revision; second, the instrumental
grail theme itself falls into the category Wagner would later dismiss as
“absolute melody,” and his attempt in 1846–47 to merge this with spoken
inflection results in the kind of anomalous emphasis seen on “Reinste”
(m. 1236), or the unusual rhythm of “ni-cht bekannt” (m. 1230). The
recitational freedom of Wagner’s setting in the Orchesterskizze provided
him with an altogether more speech-like rhythm and tonal inflection; the
contrast between the two melodies is emblematic of Wagner’s frustrations –
voiced in Oper und Drama – at the two “faults” of modern dramatic song,
namely: “ignoring the determinative nature of poetic song–melody, for
which an absolute melody drawn from instrumental music was substituted;

189 190
SSD 9: 159. Cf. PW 5: 160. Ibid.
 Notation: “entirely insufficient” 273

Example 4.10e Earlier versions of Lohengrin’s Grail Narration, Lohengrin, act 3,

mm. 1227–42.
274 Hearing voices

Example 4.10e (cont.)

and second, ignoring the thorough difference in timbre between the human
voice and orchestral instruments.”191 His comments seem tailor-made for
the alterations to Lohengrin’s narration. In this respect, Wagner was being
truly autodidactic, which is to say, self-reflexive in his mid-century
criticism.
Lurking in the background to such revisions is the Wagnerian process of
stratifying dramatic dialogue, of absorbing “melody” into the orchestral
texture as “orchestral speech,” while the voice utters words in the direct
narrative through tonally inflected pitches. Ostensibly, Wagner explains this
theoretical innovation – outlined in the final pages of Oper und Drama – as
a necessity resulting from his dissatisfaction with settings by Weber and

191
SSD 4: 170. Cf. PW 2: 313.
 Pronouncing the homeland 275

Example 4.10f Lohengrin, act 3, mm. 307–10 (Lohengrin).

Meyerbeer. The melodic revisions to Lohengrin suggest equally that insert-

ing melodic material into the orchestra while leaving voices to their inflected
pitches may also result from a compositional strategy to better inflect the
text after an initial frustration with notating the “melody.” The theory of
orchestral speech, in other words, may have been born in part from a failed
vocal-melodic practice. In addition to Example 4.10e, one of the clearest
illustrations of this is a brief revision to Lohengrin’s comment to Elsa “we
are alone” shortly before she asks the forbidden question in act 3. Here
(Example 4.10f), the original vocal melody was doubled in the orchestra, but
is altered so that the new recitational vocal line fits the old (now orchestral)
melody without carrying its pitches.
On different levels, then, German locution was evidently a guiding specter
throughout Wagner’s composition of Lohengrin. But as Hermann Danuser
reminded us in 1975, Wagner’s musical prose does not – pace Köhler – mean
the aperiodic setting of speech, but the setting of prosaically accented verses
(i.e. from poetry) in which only speech accent, and not regular meter or end
rhyme, is valid.192 Wagner’s revisions indicate the considerable flexibility this
entailed in practice, where freedom from external meter – poetic or periodic –
was merely a corollary of elevating speech to the status of poetry. In short, the
potential for sentient expressivity in national speech led him to dismantle
international poetic frames.

Pronouncing the homeland

This shift toward prose in the guise of poetry emphasizes what melodic analysts
tend to forget, namely that the speaking voice was no longer innocent; with
“musical speech” it acquired artistic responsibility. Just as one would not blow

192
Hermann Danuser, Musikalische Prosa (Regensburg: G. Bosse, 1975), 68.
276 Hearing voices

through the reed of an English Horn or into a trumpet but to make musical
sound, after the quasi-verbal utterances of Schröder-Devrient, enunciating text
was itself a musical endeavor of sorts for this particular aesthetic; elocution
became not merely regulative, but – theoretically, at least – constitutive of
texted artworks, if only for German aestheticians within Wagner’s orbit.193
But unlike language, speech behaves as an idiolect; its character as perfor-
mative melody varies with each exponent. The need for “correct” pronunciation
in the singing of any operatic libretto had never been in question, of course. For
the English critic Chorley, one of Schröder-Devrient’s greatest professional
mistakes was her attempt to sing in English “without having mastered the
language.”194 The Austrian singer and pedagogue Ferdinand Sieber outlined
the general problem in his 1854 aphorisms for the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo:
Complete knowledge of one’s mother tongue is an indisputable prerequisite for the
trained singer. If suddenly in the middle of the most beautiful and most delightful song a
speech impediment or provincialism reaches our ear, it would have about the same
disagreeable effect on us as when we see the proudly sailing swan that rises from the
water level and stands on its ugly legs, or we suddenly hear vulgar speech from the
mouth of a truly beautiful person, on whose physical beauty we just feasted our eyes.195

Sieber’s avian metaphor taps into a long discourse on German

declamation that required impeccable pronunciation from actors
and singers alike. In 1774, Johann Georg Sulzer had required that, in
addition to beauty of sound, pronunciation must be “agreeable”;196 the

193
The literature on speech melody among nineteenth-century theorists of drama is vast. Three
seminal contributions are Seckendorff, Vorlesungen über Deklamation und Mimik; Pius
Alexander Wolff, “Bemerkung über die Stimme und ihre Ausbildung zum Vortrag auf der
Bühne,” in Karl Holtei, Beiträge zur Geschichte dramatischer Kunst und Literatur (Berlin:
Haude und Spener, 1827); and Rötscher, Die Kunst der dramatischen Darstellung. Recent
scholarly investigations of this tropic include Ulrich Kühn, Sprech-Ton-Kunst: musikalisches
Sprechen und Formen des Melodrams (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001); and David Trippett,
“Bayreuth in Miniature: Wagner and the Melodramatic Voice,” The Musical Quarterly 95
(2012), 71–138.
194
Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 40.
195
“Die vollkommenste Kenntniß seiner Muttersprache ist ein unerläßliches Erforderniß für den
gebildeten Sänger. Wenn inmitten des schönsten und entzückendsten Gesanges plötzlich ein
Sprachfehler oder Provinzialismus an unser Ohr dringt, so wird das ungefähr denselben
widerwärtigen Eindruck auf uns machen, als wenn wir den Stolz dahin segelnden Schwan mit
einem Male dem Wasserspiegel entsteigen und auf seinen häßlichen Füßen stehen sehen, oder
aus dem Munde eines wahrhaft schönen Menschen, an dessen Wohlgestalt wir uns eben
weiden, plötzlich gemeine Reden erschallen hören.” Ferdinand Sieber, “Aphorismen über
Gesang,” Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo 21 (1854), 166.
196
“Vortrag (Redende Künste): Der Wohlklang hängt nicht blos von der Annehmlichkeit der
Stimme ab, auch die Aussprache muß angenehm sein.” Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen
Künste in einzeln, 4: 765–66.
 Pronouncing the homeland 277

Goethe-protégé Pius Alexander Wolff amplified this in 1827, claiming that

diction assumes a didactic function, i.e. “to educate [both] natives and
foreigners”;197 while Marx, writing in 1854 after decades of philological
research, finds vocal beauty fully synonymous with pronunciation: “an
ideal of purity and sonority . . . [is] indispensable, and the foundation of all
artistic enunciation.”198 As Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, however, the idea
of a national language is a chimera of the nineteenth century, wherein the
attempt was made to raise one “dialect” to the status of a norm, to which
other verbal idioms were then subjugated.199 Such instability of verbal
idiom could only be multiplied by the still greater variability of idiolect,
with its wealth of alternative spoken delivery. Where Sieber’s serenely
gliding swan alludes to an ill-defined notion of received hochdeutsch
pronunciation against which to measure the provincialisms of dialect,
more was at stake for Wagner’s intoned-speech, which straddled
Humboldt’s dualism of language where sensuous sound delicately implied
immaterial thought. In this way, not only enunciation but also inflected
text setting could belie spoken dialect, and it was probably with this in
mind that Carl Stumpf alluded to Wagner’s own provinciality, remarking
in his study of musical origins: “I even believe that with Richard
Wagner . . . echoes of his Saxon speech are clearly discernible in the
phrasing of tones.”200 Stumpf was onto something, it seems, for
Wagner’s contemporary Robert von Hornstein corroborates his suspicion:
“When [Wagner] was really high-spirited, he spoke the earthiest Saxon
dialect. He always had a Saxon accent. Even French . . . he intoned in a
Saxon way.”201 If Wagner was “locking in” a declamatory aesthetic into his
vocal melodies to fill an “empty” performer, at least one commentator
heard this as German dialect, i.e. ugly legs rather than a sailing swan.

197
“Man hat das Recht, von dem Schauspieler alle Eigenschaften einer reinen, richtigen,
makellosen Aussprache zu fordern, und der Vortrag auf der Bühne sollte als eine Schule
desselben für Eingeborene und Fremde gelten können.” Wolff, Bemerkungen über die Stimme
und ihre Ausbildung zum Vortrag auf der Buhne, 295. Cited in Irmgard Weithase, Die
Geschichte der deutschen Vortragskunst im 19. Jahrhundert (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1940), 27ff.
198
A. B. Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture, 268. Emphasis added.
199
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edn.,
rpt. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 54ff.
200
“Ich glaube sogar, daß bei Richard Wagner, der . . . sich Anklänge seines sächsischen Sprechens
in den Tonwendungen deutlich bemerkbar machen.” Carl Stumpf, Die Anfänge der Musik
[1911], rpt. (Hildesheim and New York: G. Olms, 1979), 83.
201
“Wenn er recht ausgelassen wurde, sprach er den derbsten sächsischen Dialekt. Sächsischen
Akzent hatte er immer. Auch sein Französisch . . . sprach er in sächsischem Tonfall.” Robert von
Hornstein, “Memoiren,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 3 (1907), 166. I take this translation from
Spencer, Wagner Remembered, 98.
278 Hearing voices

So the universalized “feeling” communicated by Worttonsprache

(“musical expression . . . conditioned by the speaking-verse”)202 was
potentially vulnerable to the indeterminability of “correct” pronun-
ciation. Yet in Wagner’s theory, at least, the aesthetic concept of Old
High German alliteration exceeded its execution. In Lohengrin, he
sought to replicate in iambic prose the experience of hearing French
and Italian singers in their native tongue, or hearing Schröder-Devrient
in any language. Revisions to his Kompositionsskizze effectively
document the attempt to “dramatize” through declamation, bringing
the opera closer to realist spoken theater in an eminently pragmatic
way. It may well have been the suspected failure of these declamatory
“recitatives” in Weimar that finally persuaded Wagner – on the brink of
penning Oper und Drama – of the need that would have been satisfied by
Stabreim, whose rhyming sonorities, we recall, the ear will intuitively
understand.

* * *
Though Wagner’s project for German melody in the 1840s was intricately
bound to its expression through the German language, it seems he had
already decided by December 1849 that his melodies were missing the vital
ingredient. Less than perfect reports of the Lohengrin premiere merely
confirmed this in what seems to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Consequently, Wagner’s confidence in the ineluctable power of language
(and erstwhile hope for German expression) waned, and under extreme
financial pressure, he tells Liszt rather unconvincingly of his plan to
compose an opera in French for Paris while determining “to remain as
I am in my own character to speak to the French comprehensibly.”203 In the
same letter, Wagner subsequently regarded the language of Lohengrin with
indifference, tentatively agreeing to Liszt’s suggestion from July 1849 that
Lohengrin be translated into English for a world premiere in London.204
Whether or not this sentiment was sincere, Wagner took no such action.
His comments nevertheless mark a point of departure from what Susan

202
SSD 4: 216. Cf. PW 2: 363. 203 Wagner to Liszt, December 5, 1849, Zurich, SB 3: 187–88.
204
See Wagner to Liszt, December 5, 1849, Zurich, SB 3: 188. I infer Liszt’s suggestions about an
English Lohengrin from his earlier correspondence with Wagner. Liszt’s letter of ca. July 6, 1849
survives only as a fragment, and closes with a statement of concern about performing
Lohengrin: “I fear at the performance the superideal color which you have maintained
throughout . . . my sincere friendship may authorize me to tell you. . .” What follows must have
concerned a possible performance in London because Wagner later refers back to Liszt’s
suggestion about this, a suggestion which is not otherwise to be found in Liszt’s letters.
 Pronouncing the homeland 279

Bernstein enigmatically terms the “rigid identification with the typeface of

an ‘I,’” i.e. that which enacts an audio-visual identification “with one’s
language or words as one’s ‘own.’”205 During his first few months in exile,
Wagner’s authorial position, in other words, became temporarily unmoored
from an otherwise staunchly defended bond to the sound of spoken
German. It may be no coincidence that this was also a time he lost faith as
a German revolutionary, so much so that, upon his return to Germany in
1860, he could write to Liszt of “a sense of surprise at the silliness and
unmannerliness [Albernheit und Ungezogenheit] of the language that was
being spoken all around me. Believe me, we have no fatherland!”206
Wagner’s earlier impetus toward spoken expression as Versmelodie appears
now only to have been his first reaction to experiences of witnessing Schröder-
Devrient. She was for him the verification of a specifically Germanicized
Melodik that allowed for a melodic theory to absorb elements of language
intrinsically into its body of sound. In the modes of listening I termed iconic
and expressive, expressive melody was altogether more philosophically accept-
able to Wagner at mid-century – as the realization of a semantically conditioned
poetic idea. But iconic melody, with its emphasis on communicating emotion
intuitively through the sensuous substance of sound, offered precisely the
element he sought to harness in Worttonsprache. Schröder-Devrient appealed
to both modes of listening, and – returning to the adolescent ear with which
we started – by appealing to his “listeners” in Oper und Drama, Wagner went
beyond his initial composition of speech that had preoccupied him throughout
the later 1840s; in intuitively comprehensible sound he sought a guarantor
for dramatic understanding, that is, he sought finally to compose a way of
being heard.

205
Susan Bernstein, “In Formel: Wagner und Liszt,” New German Critique 69 (1996), 91.
206
Wagner to Liszt, September 13, 1860, Paris, SB 12: 260.
 5 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

Wagner’s Sinnlichkeit

I conceive that Ideas in the Understanding are coeval with Sensation;

which is such an Impression or Motion, made in some part of the Body, as
makes it be taken notice of in the Understanding.
John Locke (1690)1

We were all Feuerbachians for a moment.

Friedrich Engels (1886)2

The topic of Wagner’s poetic language often raises a smile. Back in 1911, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica gave official sanction to widespread incredulity:
the archaic alliteration of the Niebelungenlied is not allied with any sense of beauty
in verbal sound or verse–rhythm; and [Wagner’s] ways of expressing emotion in
language consist chiefly in the piling-up of superlatives . . . [demonstrating] the
affectations of the amateur author.3

As early as 1854 Joachim Raff had declared the “great error” in Oper und
Drama to be blind faith in alliterative poetry: “Does Wagner seriously
believe that the chains of his Stabreim, precisely because they are freshly
forged, will deaden less than the old, sometimes somewhat defective end
rhyme?”4 Few challenged this skepticism after Nietzsche had punctured the
Teutonic aura of Wagner’s linguistic designs (“today we laugh at that”):5
Ernest Newman judged Wagner to be “elaborately absurd over his vowels

1
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Edward Mory, 1690), 44.
2
Friedrich Engels “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen
Philosophie” [1886], Eng. trans. German Socialist Philosophy, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher
(New York: Continuum, 1997), 190.
3
Encyclaopedia Britannica, 11th edn. (1911): www.1911encyclopedia.org/
Wilhelm_Richard_Wagner.
4
“Oder glaubt Wagner im Ernste, daß die Kette seines Stabreims deswegen, weil sie wieder frisch
geschmiedet ist, weniger drücken werde, als die alte, hie und da etwas schadhafte des Endreims?”
Joachim Raff, Die Wagnerfrage: kritisch beleuchtet (Brunswick: F. Viewig, 1854), 103.
5
Nietzsche, “Human, all too Human,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann
280 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 668.
 Wagner’s Sinnlichkeit 281

and consonants”;6 Jack Stein cautioned that his mid-century project with
language “borders on the ludicrous”;7 and Pierre Boulez, in his detailed
writings on Wagnerian aesthetics, simply deemed his linguistic preoccupa-
tions unworthy of mention.8 If aligning historical opinion within opera
studies is like herding cats, the consistency with which Wagner’s beleag-
uered philology has been dismissed is sui generis. The implication is that his
Stabreim was a mere indulgence, something to occupy the composer’s
inquisitive mind – bolstering his confidence – in vocal-melodic expression.
Viewed as an authentic component of opera, it has the pale glow of illusion,
which is to say something that vanishes under the scrutiny of cold reality.
Over and above Wagner’s considerable influence on Symbolist poetics,9
even today there seems to be a consensus that the opera poems are at best a
minor irritation, an idiosyncratic appendage that we tolerate, whereas for
Wagner they were supposedly fundamental. This incongruity is worth
exploring; in short, because it masks a shift in the conception of how
sound carries meaning. Wagner’s theory of communication in Oper und
Drama was conceived straight-forwardly at the level of sensation, anterior
to ideation; but this required language itself to become physiologically
tangible. Wagner alludes to this physical immediacy in response to an article
by Theodor Uhlig, perhaps his closest musical confidant at the time,
wherein Wagner protests the practical necessity of his project: “In my
view [Stabreim] is the only point on which I cannot make myself completely
clear to others because this is only possible through the deed.”10 Although
the frisson nouveau produced by Wagner’s “ludicrous” poetry is long past, it
still forms the nexus through which we can best access this discourse on the
phonology of vocal expression and its effects. In Chapter 4 we examined the
relationship between the importance Wagner placed on Schröder-
Devrient’s enunciations and the sensory power he would ascribe to language
as a musical tool. Following this line of argument, we now consider the basis

6
Ernest Newman, Wagner as Man & Artist (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1924), 213.
7
Jack Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1960), 71.
8
Pierre Boulez, Orientations, trans. Martin Cooper (Oxford University Press, 1986), 223–91.
9
A recent English summary of Wagner’s influence on French Symbolism is given by Annegret
Fauser in “Wagnerism,” The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, 229–34. See also Janos Riesz,
“Mallarmés Richard Wagner, rêverie d’un poète français und sein Hommage à Wagner,” in Von
Wagner zum Wagnérism: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik, ed. Annegret Fauser and
Manuela Schwartz (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999), 445–58.
10
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, May 6–7, 1852, Zurich, SB 4: 356. Emphasis added. Uhlig’s serialized
article “Richard Wagners Schriften über Kunst” for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik turned to Oper
und Drama on January 1, 1851, though he was unable to complete his critique of part 3 before his
death on January 3, 1853. See SB 4: 197, note 670.
282 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

for a shift in the conception of melodic and speech sound in Wagner’s

writings around the 1848 revolution, a shift, that is, between aesthetics and
acoustics.
It may be no coincidence that the tipping point between these two
perspectives is what Wagner called Sinnlichkeit. We have met this term
before: it is directly implicated in the very qualities which drew Wagner to
Bellinian melody, to Schröder-Devrient’s “beautiful breath,” and by exten-
sion, to his erotic metaphors for the interrelation of dramatic meaning with
musical expression. During the late 1840s, Sinnlichkeit is both an arbiter and
an actor in the decline (but survival) of idealism and the rise of the natural
sciences. The Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854) lists ten
shades of meaning, of which the third – “faculty of sensory perception”
(fähigkeit der sinnlichen wahrnehmung) – is the most extensively supported
by quotation;11 this includes Johann Georg Hamann’s solid opposition:
“sensuality in our faculty of cognition (the faculty of perceiving experience)
contains two parts: the senses and the power of imagination. The former is
the capability of perceiving an object in the present; the latter is the same in
the absence of the present.”12 When Wagner’s Zurich essays were reprinted
in 1872 he clarified his earlier use of the word Sinnlichkeit likewise as the
antithesis of “ideality” (“Gedanklichkeit”), echoing Hamann’s dualism
closely – “the contrasts of intuitive and abstract perception and their
results” – in formulating his own definition: “the sensory power of percep-
tion” (sinnliches Anschauungsvermögen).13 Beyond the fleshy reality of the
physical body, then, Sinnlichkeit emerges for Wagner as a means of recip-
ient gratification that fuses, for the receiver, an attitude of critical appraisal
for the art object with the sensation of pleasure in the hearing and viewing of
that object. “The sovereign might of physical sensation and emotions of the
heart,” he declared, “breaks down the pride of intellect as soon as these
proclaim their sway as something that all men must obey in common, as
that of sensations and emotions of the species.”14 With this allusion to
phylogeny, Wagner’s urge to communicate to his audience at the level of
biology – “feeling” as a sensory principle – aims for universality drawn from

11
See J. / W. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch¸“Sinnlichkeit” § 3, http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?
sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GS29575.
12
“die sinnlichkeit im erkenntniszvermögen (das vermögen der vorstellungen in der
anschauung) enthält zwei stücke: den sinn und die einbildungskraft, das erstere ist das
vermögen der anschauung in der gegenwart des gegenstandes, das zweite auch ohne die
gegenwart desselben.” Ibid.
13
SSD 3: 4–5. 14 SSD 3: 66. Cf. PW 1: 94. Emphasis added.
 Wagner’s Sinnlichkeit 283

our common anatomy, and finds a stable basis when tied to the capacity for
pleasure in a modern sensorium.
But where did this particular conception of Sinnlichkeit come from? In
addition to Wagner’s literary and cultural preoccupations, this chapter’s
guiding thread is a certain watershed in idealist philosophy from the figure
to whom Wagner dedicated Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft. Back in 1941
Jacques Barzun first posited Wagner as a pivotal figure in the impulse
toward philosophical materialism,15 and it is a curious fact that Lohengrin
was completed only sixty-six days after the Manifesto of the Communist
Party appeared, both of which, it could be argued, document a coalescing of
humanism and materialism, both of which selected and reinterpreted ideas
from Ludwig Feuerbach.
In his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), Feuerbach’s
notion of “sensuality” (Sinnlichkeit) held that man’s conception of nature
was dependent on acts of sensory experience that are equally as primary as
self-consciousness. “What is light . . . without the eye? It is nothing,” he
states, “Only the consciousness of seeing is the reality of seeing or real
seeing.”16 Essentially, the concept of Sinnlichkeit points out the failure of
speculative philosophy to acknowledge the integrity of sensation. In
Hegelian philosophy, within which Feuerbach was educated, the senses
were being subordinated to the intellect, he argued, and sense experience
was being treated as a purely intellectual phenomenon: “[i]ts objects are
only determinations of thought. They dissolve completely into it and keep
for themselves nothing that would have remained outside the thought
process.”17 By intellectualizing the experience of sensation, the idealist
tradition had severed sensation’s roots in the real world and made it possible
to bestow upon sensation an illusory, false, and merely imagined founda-
tion, one that existed only in the mind:
The recognition of the light of reality in the darkness of abstraction is a
contradiction . . . the reality of the idea is sensation. But reality is the truth of the
idea; thus, sensation is the truth of the idea . . . Because, however, one starts

15
“[H]ow can art – particularly music – fit into the Marx-and-Darwin system? The answer is that
Wagner too has a system, and . . . it is basically materialistic and mechanical.” Jacques Barzun,
Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage [1941], rpt. (New York: Doubleday Anchor books,
1958), 12–13. Building on Barzun’s work, Richard Justin presents a specifically Marxian study of
the Ring as the internal corruption of an economic order in “Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Dialectical
Materialism in the Ring,” New Studies in Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, ed.
Herbert Richardson (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 89–126.
16
Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1986), 27.
17
Ibid., 15.
284 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

consciously with the truth of the idea, the truth of sensation is expressed only
afterwards . . . we save ourselves from this contradiction only if we make the real,
that is, the sensuous, into its own subject and give it an absolutely independent,
divine, and primary meaning which is not first derived from the idea.18

A decisive embrace of sensation and corresponding rejection of what Isaiah

Berlin once called “the fatal doctrine of Descartes”19 resonates with
Wagner’s incessant distrust of the “impotent . . . abstract intellect,”20 and
treatment of feeling as a barometer calibrated according to sensuous truth,
where “truth, reality, and sensation are identical.”21 Moreover, it was a
distrust that went back to the nationalist leanings of the pietist Lutheran
Hamann (Herder’s teacher, cited above), whom Berlin paraphrases lucidly:
Such distinctions as we draw between thought and feeling (and their “objects”),
physical sensation and intellectual or moral or aesthetic awareness, are, according to
Hamann . . . an attempt to draw attention now to this, now to that facet of a single
experience; a tendency which, pushed too far, tends to separate and abstract one
facet from another and, pushed further still, to lead to the invention of imaginary
abstract objects, or idealized entities – to transform reality into a collection of
artificial figments. This . . . kills the sources of the true sense of reality.22

Feuerbach embraced Hamann’s doctrine for the Young Germans, but

rejected its basis in Christian mysticism (essentially by replacing the sacra-
ment with the scalpel). Within this context, a suspicious division of heart
and mind even acquired political overtones, not irrelevant to Wagner’s
Dresden: “How many are republicans in their heart and by their disposi-
tion,” Feuerbach asked, “but in their minds, cannot detach themselves from
the monarchy?”23 Wagner publicly rejected the view that humanity must be
subordinated to immaterial strictures or “external, imaginary . . . power[s]”
that he saw vested in the church and the monarchy.24 Mental illusion

18
Ibid., 49–51.
19
Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton University
Press, 2000), 189. While Berlin is paraphrasing J. G. Hamann, see also Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
who speaks for himself: “it is I who read Descartes’ text, I who recognize in it an underlying truth,
so that finally the Cartesian cogito acquires its significance only through my own cogito, and I
should have no thought of it, had I not within myself all that is needed to invent it. It is I who
assigns to my thought the objective of resuming the action of the cogito, and I who constantly
verify my thought’s orientation towards this objective, therefore my thought must forestall itself
in the pursuit of this aim, and must already have found what it seeks, otherwise it would not seek
it.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New
York: Routledge, 2002), 431–32.
20
SSD 3: 145. Cf. PW 1: 179. 21 Feuerbach, Principles, 51.
22
Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 190. 23 Feuerbach, Principles, 29.
24
SSD 3: 44. Cf. PW 1: 71.
 Wagner’s Sinnlichkeit 285

enslaved people to Christianity, he protested, whose modern, subjugating

doctrine “is patiently to sacrifice this miserable world for a better afterlife.”25
A cloistering of the mind, isolated from tangible reality, was solely respon-
sible for the persistent hegemony of what he called “hypocritical absolut-
ism.”26 The synonymy of social and aesthetic questions in Wagner’s Zurich
essays is effectively enabled, at a philosophical level, by his belief that
sensation governs all perception, further tying him to Feuerbach’s trust in
a non-abstract, sensory relation to objects of contemplation, irrespective of
whether they were political, aesthetic, or social–historical. It would seem the
composer found this aspect of Feuerbach’s writing attractive not only
because it represented a kind of avant-garde of the German left, but also
because his immersion in the sensory experience of opera preceded his
political awakening during the 1840s.
It is not surprising, then, that Wagner’s mid-century artistic leanings
appear to emanate from Feuerbach’s statement that the essence of the
modern era was “materialism, empiricism, realism, humanism.”27 Wagner
admired Feuerbach for his “human” perspective, in contrast to the intel-
lectual apparatus of men of letters. This effectively made him a role model
for Young German living: “Nowhere have I found the natural healthy
process so clearly and so consciously expressed as by Feuerbach.”28
Beyond Wagner’s familiar borrowings from him in the narrative sphere –
a pantheistic characterization of the Ring gods as projections of human
need,29 the contradictions of belief and love in Lohengrin, a forthright
renunciation of Christian dogma – Feuerbach seems also to have provided
part of the scholarly impetus for the sensory content of vowels in
Wagner’s conception of Versmelodie, and for a belief in vocal–verbal
sounds that are intuitively comprehensible at a sentient level
(gefühlsverständlich).30
When Siegfried tells Mime of his hopes for a better companion in act 1 of
Siegfried, he explains how he put this specific question to the forest inhab-
itants by means of a horncall: “In the depths of the forest I let my horn ring
out clangorously: is there a faithful friend to accompany me? That I asked

25
SSD 3: 27. Cf. PW 1: 50. 26 SSD 3: 16. Cf. PW 1: 39. 27 Feuerbach, Principles, 22.
28
Wagner to Karl Ritter, November 19, 1849, Zurich, in SLRW, 180–81.
29
Materialism’s flexibility, as a set of changeable attitudes to physical matter, is attested by Max
Horkheimer’s remark a century later that bodily affectivity is a necessary condition of human
knowledge. Hence, pace Feuerbach: “[A] god is incapable of knowing anything because it has no
needs.” Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans.
G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993), 242.
30
See Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 27ff.
286 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

with sound!”31 The channel of communication was not verbal but

acoustically intuitive, raising the possibility in Wagner’s thinking of sub-
lexical sonorities that carry an inherent meaning.32 A similar instance in
Tristan und Isolde sees the shepherd’s “old, sad tune” (alte, ernste Weise) not
only signalling the news of the death of Tristan’s parents, but asking him
articulately of himself: “for what fate was I born at that time?” And
answering: “to yearn, and to die!”33 Whether the sensation of pure instru-
mental sound is merely a prompt to psychological interiority here or carries a
more coherent sub-lexical message remains an open question.34 Ironically,
Wagner’s orientation becomes most clear in his articulation of the
concept of verbal thought as a derivative of somatic stimuli. His account
implicates the study of etymologies alongside Feuerbach’s material
Sinnlichkeit in an attempt to serve a coup de grâce to the concept of disem-
bodied ideas:
Everything for which we find an expression is also something real, and we recognize
its reality if we decipher the expression which we instinctively employ for the thing.
The expression: thought, is very easily explicable, if only we go back to its sensuous
speech-root. A “thought” [Gedanke] is the “imagined” picture in our mind [das im
‘Gedenken’ uns ‘dünkende’ Bild], of a real “thing” that is non-present. Because of the
thought’s origin, this non-present “thing” is a real, physically apprehended object,
which has made a definite impression on us in another place or at another time: this
impression has seized upon our sensation [Empfindung], and, to communicate the
latter to others, we have been forced to invent an expression which shall convey the
object’s generic impression in terms of the sentience of humanity at large. We thus
could only apprehend the object internally according to the impression which it
made upon our senses . . . a “thought” is the image impressed upon our sensory

31
“im tiefen Walde mein Horn / liess ich hallend da ertönen: ob sich froh mir gesellte / ein guter
Freund, / das frug ich mit dem Getön!” Siegfried, act 1, scene 1.
32
Edward T. Cone raised the intriguing possiblity in this scene that characters comprehend the
vocabulary of leitmotifs a priori, see Cone, Hearing and Knowing Music, ed. Robert P. Morgan
(Princeton University Press, 2009), 82.
33
“zu welchem Los erkoren, / ich damals wohl geboren? . . . Die alte Weise / sagt mir’s wieder: mich
sehnen – und sterben!” Tristan und Isolde, act 3, scene 1.
34
Thomas Grey has pointed out instances where Brangäne and Isolde mishear musical signs,
noting how such signs, occurring within the frame of the drama (as opposed to orchestral
leitmotifs), “are even more prone to subjective distortion or misreading” than visual signs.
Despite the evident unreliability of such musical signs, this leaves the problem of how they can
ask and answer articulate questions for individuals within Wagner’s narrative. I would suggest
the general role of subjective listening is to be regarded separately from the few specific occasions
on which the sounds are explicitly intended as messages, and yet can only be based on qualities of
sensation. See Thomas Grey, “In the realm of the senses: sight, sound and the music of desire in
Tristan und Isolde,” in Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, ed. Arthur Groos (Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 69–94, here 77.
 Wagner’s Sinnlichkeit 287

faculty by an object . . . brought back to re-arouse the sensation itself into a

recreation of the sense impression.35

Historically, for Wagner, communication was exclusively channelled

through physical sense impressions; this antique network is traceable
through etymologies, a situation which requires us to accept that the
words of modern language are just mnemonics for this sensory heritage.
Precisely the same process of emotional transfer between sentient beings
regulates Wagner’s Melodik in Oper und Drama, and effectively enables the
plausibility – for him – of a motif-driven, musico–dramatic fabric based on
a correspondence of emotional–poetic sensations: “the emotion manifested
in this melody is a thing which now belongs as much to us, to whom it has
been imparted, as to him who has imparted it.”36
In a striking case of historical equivalence, Marx and Engels’ 1845 essay
on The Material Basis of Morality also reflected this inversion of idealist
priorities by asserting that “the phantoms formed in the human brain are
also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empiri-
cally verifiable and bound to material premises.”37 Perhaps Wagner’s most
abiding “revolutionary” activity during these years was not the repulsion of
monarchist troops from the barricades as part of a push to eradicate class
antagonism, but a shift of perspective only partly documented in the Zurich
writings: Wagner was intuiting how his own “phantoms” of mind could
possibly be sublimates of a material process in music, and moreover how
they could become materially expressive for his audiences across all class
boundaries.
At the center of this hypothesis was language (the most articulate
medium of poetic communication), and we must go back to the expansion
of historical studies in Saxony and Prussia in order to see how the
methodologies of historical linguistics helped to prepare the ground for
a materialist conception of verbal and musical sound. In particular, the
keystone of German Philologie was a belief in national identity as distinct
from individual state identities. Notable skeptical voices, typified by the
eminent historian Leopold von Ranke, doubted the validity of any such
claims:

35
SSD 4: 182. Cf. PW 2: 325–27. Michel Foucault offers a very similar account in his examination of
the “designation” and “derivation” of language in The Order of Things [1966] (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 104–15.
36
SSD 4: 183. Cf. PW 2: 327–28.
37
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Material Basis of Morality,” from Die Deutsche Ideologie
[1845], cited in Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford University Press, 1994), 42.
288 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

Who will be able to grasp in a word or a concept what is German? Who will call it by
name, the genius of our centuries, of the past and of the future? It would only be
another phantom to lure us on one more false road.38

Despite such cynicism, notions of language and literature – as it were, the

documents documenting the history of verbal communication – did
increasingly form the basis of a sense of collective self-identity for a
Germanic Bildungsbürgertum in the early nineteenth century. While there
is no shortage of books devoted to this topic, it will be worth uncovering
Wagner’s specific interest in this discourse as it overlaps with the continuing
appeal of Sinnlichkeit among the ageing members of Young Germany.

Speaking nationally

And you German alone, returning from abroad,

Wouldst greet your mother in French?
O spew it out before your door
Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine
Speak German, O you German! Johann Gottfried von Herder39

Where does the German begin? Where does he end? May a German
smoke? The majority say no. May a German wear gloves? Yes, but
only of buffalo hide . . . But a German may drink beer, indeed as a true
son of Germanias he should drink beer.
Heinrich Heine40

A deep-seated connection between language and cultural identity –

fermenting in earnest within the German states since the last quarter of
the eighteenth century – functions as a starting point for this inquiry.
German linguistic patriotism dates back at least to the early seventeenth
century with Martin Opitz (1597–1639), and subsequently with Otto

38
“Wer will jemals in den Begriff oder in Worte fassen was deutsch sey? Wer will ihn bei Namen
nennen, den Genius unserer Jahrhunderte, der vergangenen und der künftigen? Es würde nur ein
anderes Phantom werden, das und nach andern falschen Wegen verführte.” Leopold von Ranke,
“Über die Trennung und die Einheit von Deutschland,” Historisch-politische Zeitschrift
(Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1832), 1: 388.
39
J. G. von Herder, An die Deutschen, in HSW 27: 128–30. I take this translation from E. Kedourie,
Nationalism, 3rd edn. (London: Hutchinson 1966), 59.
40
Heinrich Heine, “Über Ludwig Börne” (1840), in Werke, 2 vols., ed. M. Greiner (Berlin and
Cologne: Kiepenhever & Witsch, 1962), 2: 752–53.
 Speaking nationally 289

Mencke, J. M. Moscherosch, F. F. von Logau, and Andreas Gryphius, among

others, who resisted the domination of French and Latin with a Lutheran
prerogative. Figures of the eighteenth-century counter-Enlightenment are
perhaps more familiar, such as Hamann and Lessing, Leibniz and
Thomasius, who continued to plough the ground of Germanistik that had
been furrowed a century earlier. In their twenties, Herder spent more than
double the time in Riga that Wagner had (1764–69 and 1837–39 respec-
tively), and in this Russian-owned, German-colonized, Latvian town where
the local rural population spoke Slavic or Baltic languages, Herder’s expe-
riences as a Lutheran preacher arguably prompted him to reflect on the
value of the frail local Lettish culture (while Wagner’s comparable profes-
sional concern was the locution of German and Italian on stage). Herder
despised the unnatural welding together of disparate cultures because of
what was destroyed41 and – from his first essay on the philosophy of history,
Another Philosophy of History (1774) – consistently denounced ancient
Roman conquerors as sinister, lustful, and bloody for this reason, later
likening the “holy” inheritors of their empire to a monstrous amalgam of
arbitrary cultures.42 Accordingly, in his immensely influential writings
about language, nation, and history, numerous statements link national
spirit and mother tongue.43
What Herder saw as the inhumanity of colonial rule (Rome remained his
paradigm)44 was to some extent visited by Napoleon on the German states
themselves with their diverse dialects, laws, sovereignties, and identities,
though ruling princes were kept in place, and local culture was not forcibly
neutralized. Nevertheless, amid a consolidation of French military and
political strength in continental Europe, Fichte’s patriotic Addresses to the
German Nation, given at the Science Academy building in French-occupied
Berlin, echoed almost exactly the same message about Nationalsprache, but
amplified Herder’s intellectual observations, bringing them into a more
urgently nationalist frame:

41
“whom nature separated by language, customs, character, let no man artificially join together by
chemistry,” Herder, HSW 18: 206.
42
Herder: “a lion’s head with a dragon’s tail, an eagle’s wing, a bear’s paw [glued together] in one
unpatriotic structure of a State.” Ibid., 13: 385.
43
Herder’s comment from Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784) is typical:
“Has a people anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole
thought-domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul. To deprive
a people of its speech is to deprive it of its one eternal good . . . With language is created the heart
of a people.” Johann Gottfried von Herder, Materials for the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind [1784], see: www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1784herder-mankind.html.
44
“the Roman eagle . . . pecked out [the] eyes [of foreign people], devoured their innards, and
covered [their] wretched corpses with its feeble wings.” Herder, HSW 14: 201.
290 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of
invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they under-
stand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood
more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an
inseparable whole.45

At once defiant and uplifting, the belief that language is “the embodied and
articulated Spirit of the Race”46 as Coleridge put it, found expression in
many forms: the metaphor in Schiller’s fragment on German Greatness
(1797) hinted at a national physiognomy where “language is the mirror of
a nation, if we look into this mirror, a great, splendid image of ourselves
emanates from it”;47 and half a century later, the philologist Jacob Grimm
drew a direct link between language and literary works in the preface to his
Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854), regarding this as the nation’s cohesive,
sustaining element in the absence of political unity, especially after 1848:
“What else have we in common but our language and literature.”48 With
different motives but a similar rationale, Wagner stated the case for a
communal linguistic heritage most aggressively in Das Judenthum in der
Musik (1850): “A language, with its expression and its evolution, is not the
work of scattered units, but of a historical community: only he who has
unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community also takes any
share in its creations.”49 Nationhood and linguistic identity were quite
simply two sides of the same ideological coin.
While the search for German identity was a “burning political issue” for
Vormärz litterati, it remained ideology – never a reality – for neither
language nor geography was constitutive of actual boundaries within
which “Germany” could be defined in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century.50 Wagner’s interest in what Eric Hobsbawm calls

45
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull
(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979), 223–24.
46
S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection [1825], ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (New York: Swards,
Stanford & Co.: 1839), fn. 183.
47
“Die Sprache ist der Spiegel einer Nation, wenn wir in diesen Spiegel schauen, so kommt uns ein
grosses treffliches Bild von uns selbst daraus entgangen,” in “Deutsche Grösse” (Fragment), Kleinere
from Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen Golz (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1992), 556ff.
48
“Was haben wir denn gemeinsames als unsere sprache und literatur.” Jacob Grimm, Kleinere
Schriften, 8 vols. (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1864–71), 8: 304.
49
SSD 5: 70–71. Cf. PW 3: 84.
50
Leaving aside the unifying opposition to Napoleon, this situation continued at least until 1815, as
James Sheehan explains: “Within the German lands, there was a rich variety of dialects and cultural
distinctions. Between Germans and other language groups, it is very hard to draw sharp lines. Border
regions are often wide belts of mixed settlement; and even when divisions can be established, islands
of linguistic minorities exist on either side of them. There was, in short, no terrain, no place, no
 Speaking nationally 291

philological nationalism (“the insistence on the linguistic purity of the

national vocabulary”)51 thus partakes in the artificially constructed or
“virtually invented” status of a Nationalsprache, which amounted to little
more than the attempt “to devise a standard idiom out of a multiplicity of
actually spoken idioms, which are thereafter downgraded to dialects.”52 The
logical problem in this process, however, is that within such constructed
valuing of one’s own language and culture is the virtual necessity to
disparage that of others. By defining linguistic identity in terms of what is
personally at stake, the collective assumptions within the statement “my
language” become political and hierarchical.
Does this undermine the validity of German objections to being infiltrated
by “foreign” language? It is tempting to dismiss such protectivism as the credo
of a tiny literate elite rather than the illiterate majority. While it would be risky
to assign the groundswell of anti-French rhetoric between 1808 and 1814 and
the uprising of 1813 to philologically or intellectually motivated patriotism,53
such texts as Fichte’s Addresses nevertheless reflect a certain mode of thinking.
They gave voice to the loathing of foreign elements in Germany, though
intrinsically this has little to do with the value of the German language.
If Germany’s musical–operatic antagonist was Italy, her political–military
adversary was France. In both cases, Germany, splintered into culturally
diverse feudal states, formed the weaker. Yet the position of language in this
somewhat reductive master–slave formula was not quite so simple, because
French is, of course, mere “neo-Latin” and has lost its authentic roots. This
explains why, for Wagner, the French “speaking accent has become the
absolute antithesis of an intonation of root syllables.”54 Nevertheless, as

region which we can call ‘Germany’.” Sheehan, “‘What is German History?’ Reflections on the Role
of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 53 (1981), 5.
51
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 56.
52
Ibid., 54.
53
J. Christopher Herold, for example, has claimed it had almost nothing whatsoever to do with
Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, for relatively few people attended lectures and still
fewer actually read philosophical texts. Rather, as Herold argues, it was sheer loathing of the
oppressors by the oppressed. Germans took up arms against Napoleon in 1813 not because they
had read Fichte, but “because they hated the French, because the French had given them ample
cause for hating them, and because it seemed safe to do so after Napoleon’s Russian disaster.” J.
Christopher Herold, The Age of Napoleon (New York: American Heritage Pub. Co., 1963), 279.
Writing contrariwise during the Second World War, Alan John Percivale Taylor structured
Franco–Prussian relations in 1806–15 along an axis of power and resentment: “the defeat of
Austria was not crushing and the resentment at it [was] therefore limited; the defeat of Prussia
was complete and Prussian resentment [was] therefore beyond all bounds.” Alan John
Percivale Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History
since 1815 [1945] (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 32–33.
54
SSD 4: 109. Cf. PW 2: 245.
292 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

Eduard Sobolewski illustrates as late as the early 1850s, French cultural

transfer was far from unpopular in the German states, and – in a discourse
of Nationalsprache – seemingly sapped the indigenous culture:
the French School of modern times . . . has had injurious effects in Germany.
Germans have, from the bad translations they are in the habit of hearing every day,
learned to undervalue the text. In garden concerts, and in the streets, we hear
mostly French airs . . . The present tendency of public feeling in Germany is one
that, for every German, is contrary to nature, and forced upon him by Paris. On this
account it does not flourish, like a southern plant in a northern soil, but is
cultivated from a dearth of indigenous produce. Paris sets the fashion. This should
not be the case.55

Being well-versed in French taste was something of a pan-cultural phenom-

enon (even Baron Freiherr vom Stein, the Prussian Prime Minister under
Frederick Wilhelm III and first hero of the anti-French German
Nationalists, continued to write to his wife and converse in French).56
Ironically, it was only after the Congress of Vienna and the triumphalism
surrounding the dissolution of Bonaparte’s France as a military opponent
that this began to assume widespread negative political connotations within
(pre-unified) Germany. The defensive rhetoric of German liberalism
increasingly attacked the use of French as an unacceptable encroachment
on vernacular identity. Since the argument was philological rather than
economic or demographic, it was put forward primarily by men of letters.
One such is Theodor Mundt:
German science expressed in Latin, German social life that converses in Italian and
French, the poetic heart of the German people that now irreverently lets sounds of
the homeland well up, now again becoming silent as [though] forgetting, these were
the embarrassing conditions of a national culture that are only possible as long as a
nation remains incapable of having a peculiar sum-total of an original worldview.57

To an extent, the entrenched pluralism of a French-speaking Germany is

emblematic of a deeper cultural discontinuity and disunity (Sobolweski was
of Polish descent and ultimately left his Königsberg theater for Milwaukee

55
Eduard Sobolewski, “Reactionary Letters. No. II,” TMW 33 (1855): 45.
56
See Taylor, The Course of German History, 35.
57
“Die deutsche Wissenschaft, die sich lateinisch ausdrückte, das deutsche Gesellschaftsleben, das
italienisch und französische redete, das poetische deutsche Volksherz, das die heimathlichen
Laute bald keck hervorquellen ließ, bald auch wieder wie stumm werdend verlernte, dies waren
verlegene Zustände einer Nationalbildung, die nur so lange möglich sind, als eine Nation noch
nicht eine eigenthümliche Summe origineller Weltanschauung in ihrem Vermögen hat.”
Theodor Mundt, Die Kunst der deutschen Prosa: Aesthetisch, literargeschichtlich, gesellschaftlich
(Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1837), 4.
 Speaking nationally 293

in 1859,58 and Wagner was a Saxon in Züritüütsch-speaking Zurich). Yet

this did not prevent the majority of academic and artistic liberals from
defining their “Germanness” negatively, in opposition to foreign power. The
philologist and historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus, for instance, com-
plained bitterly in his 1834 History of German Literature that, following a
surge of post-Napoleon national euphoria, the German youth were slipping
back treacherously into French ways:

And who has not witnessed with astonishment and great disbelief the political
movements of recent years; how the same young people who eighteen years ago
[1815] wanted to wear only German national costume [a reference to “Turnvater”
F. L. Jahn], wanted to sing its songs [a reference to E. M. Arndt], wanted to return to
its simple virtues, and who no longer wanted to speak French – how these young
people today prefer to incline towards the very same nation, whose whole nature
forms a hostile element to ours that is never agreeable and reconciliatory.59

Wagner too was drawn stylistically to the Opéra and its culture, even
setting a French translation of l’adorable Heine – “Les deux grenadiers” –
complete with thematic borrowing from the Marseillaise shortly after he
arrived in Paris in 1839.60 Yet his well-documented failure to secure a
Parisian success with Rienzi during 1839–42 dissuaded him from continu-
ing to cultivate French elements. Without a firm grasp of Italian, and
professing a sustained dislike of French,61 Wagner would introduce a

58
Robert T. Laudon, “Eduard Sobolewski, Frontier Kapellmeister: from Königsberg to St Louis,”
Musical Quarterly 73 (1989), 94–118.
59
“Und wer wird es in den politischen Bewegungen der letzten Jahre nicht mit Staunen und
grossen Unwillen beobachtet haben, wie dieselbe Jugend, die vor achtzehn Jahren [1815–16] nur
der alten Deutschen Tracht tragen, ihre Lieder singen, ihre einfache Tugend zurückführen, und
nicht mehr französisch sprechen wollte, wie dieselbe Jugend heute nach derselben Nation mit
Vorliebe hinneigt, deren ganze Natur gegen die unsere ein feindseliges und niemals verträgliches
und versöhnliches Element bildet!” Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Zur Geschichte der deutschen
Literatur (Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1834), 3.
60
Wagner was commissioned to set a French translation of Heine – “Les deux grenadiers” –
shortly after he arrived in Paris in 1839. Like Schumann’s (German) setting of the same text,
Wagner quotes a simple rendition of the Marseillaise in the closing section of the
accompaniment (un peu plus vite). But his urge to appeal to French culture went a step too far,
it seems, for he reports in Mein Leben that a “very popular concert singer and teacher”
Monsieur Geraldy declared the song could only be sung “in the streets of Paris to the
accompaniment of cannons and gunshots.” Accordingly, Schott later published Wagner’s
Francophile setting in the original German (as Grenadiere) without changing any aspects of the
melody, much to Wagner’s dismay. See ML 174, 185.
61
“the reason why for a long time I could not warm to the idea of writing an opera for Paris was a
certain dislike of the French language which is peculiar to me. You [Liszt] will not understand
this, being at home in all Europe, while I came into the world in a specifically Teutonic manner.”
Wagner to Liszt, December 5, 1849, Zurich, in SB 3: 187. Fully thirty years later, Cosima reports:
294 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

renovating agenda for vocal melody that involved co-opting the current
trends in Philologie, as we shall see.
Writing to Samuel Lehrs, Wagner hints at a solution to the difficulty of
Nationalsprache that implicates a linguistic resolution of the problem of
“German” operatic melody:
I note with alarm to what depths our national sense of honor has sunk with respect
to dramatic music, too: the long period during which our theaters were exclusively
open to French and Italian music continues to have repercussions even today, when
the French and Italians have been utterly discredited . . . since I know where the root
of the problem lies, I am not down-hearted but shall strive all the more vigorously to
bring about a radical cure in due course. It will be a slow process! This is something I
must now leave behind me forever: we opera composers cannot be European, – so
the question is – either German or French!62

This, of course, was something of a Hobson’s choice for Wagner as he

assumed his post as royal Kapellmeister at the court of Dresden that year;
his sensitivity here towards nationalities would seem to indicate, moreover,
that the “radical cure” he proposes is linguistic. But Mundt later offers one
reason why Wagner’s subsequent attempt to mobilize antique German may
have been received squeamishly by educated opera audiences: the language
was not ready to equate with its nation’s identity. “German spirit and
German language always stand in strange counteraction to each other,” he
professed, “and have for a long time not yet achieved a satisfactory mutual
relation.”63 Despite intellectual rhetoric to the contrary from such lumina-
ries as Humboldt and Fichte, Mundt’s warning would prove prescient for
Wagner’s project.

Philologie: “a radical cure”64

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. In 1822, Wilhelm von Humboldt lec-
tured in Berlin “On the National Character of Languages,” and argued that

“the French language is causing R. increasing difficulties – not only speaking it, but also listening
to it.” CT (October 22, 1880).
62
Wagner to Samuel Lehrs, April 7, 1843, Dresden, in SLRW, 107–08. Emphasis added.
63
“Deutsche Geist und deutsche Sprache standen immer in einer seltsamen Gegenwirkung, und
haben noch nicht seit lange ein befriedigendes Wechselverhältniß zu einander erreicht,” Mundt,
Die Kunst der deutschen Prosa, 4.
64
Wagner to Samuel Lehrs, April 7, 1843, Dresden, in SLRW, 108.
 Philologie: “a radical cure” 295

character “is to be found primarily and in its most complete and pure form
in the living use of speech.” Since this disappears with transient speakers
and listeners, the only option, Humboldt claimed, was to rely on a language
character “preserved in its works of literature,” that is, a discourse net-
work.65 His sentiment was widely echoed.66 Correspondingly, the psycho-
logical impulse to preserve – character, nation, security, language – found
expression in both scholarly and military forums. Jacob Grimm famously
viewed language not as innate but learned, raising the alarming possibility
that birth did not guarantee national character, that nationality (defined by
language) could thus be forcibly usurped:
Let’s submit that if the newborn child of a French or Russian mother on the
battlefield were taken up and reared in Germany, he will not begin to speak
French or Russian, but German like all the other children with whom he grows up.67

Grimm’s admission that there is a difference between ius sanguinis and

language meant that if a single mother tongue was essential to determining a
modern German cultural identity, this would need to be protected, even
openly defended.
The most appropriate medium on hand for this task was of course the
printed word. Accordingly, etymological dictionaries, source compilations,
and dictionaries of root words appeared in abundance after 1816, when
Franz Bopp’s epoch-making contribution to comparative grammar – On the

65
Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the National Character of Languages” [1822], in Essays on
Language, 57.
66
A major contribution to German historical consciousness during the early nineteenth century is
the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, an ongoing project to collect German historical sources
initiated by Freiherr vom Stein’s (1757–1831) Society for the Study of Older German History. On
the individual level, Eberhard Gottlieb Graff (1780–1841), a professor of philology at Königsberg
University, relates an anecdote about losing irreplaceable manuscripts in the preface to his
Diskuta (1826–29). The experience, he explains, illustrated the danger of losing unique literature,
and the corresponding need to preserve everything multiply in print. “Mit der Herausgabe
während meiner Reise zu eilen, bestimmte mich ein Unfall, der mich im vorigen Sommer traf.
Auf dem Wege von Nancy nach Strassburg gingen meine Papiere beim nächtlichen Umpacken
der Diligence verloren. Obgleich ich sie durch das Einschreiten des Hrn. Präfekten Grafen v.
Choiseul nach drei Tagen wieder erhielt, so brachte mich doch die Gefahr ihres Verlustes, der für
mich unersetzlich wäre, auf den Entschluss, jeden freien Augenblick zur Bearbeitung und
Ordnung meiner Sammlungen anzuwenden und das Wichtigste derselben so rasch als möglich
durch den Druck zu sichern.” E. G. Graff, Diskuta: Denkmäler deutscher Sprache und Literatur
aus alten Handschriften, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: J. S. Cotta, 1826), 1: vii.
67
“Wir wollen . . . einmal setzen, daß auf einem schlachtfeld das neugeborne kind einer
französischen oder russischen mutter aufgenommen und mitten in Deutschenland erzogen
würde; es wird nicht französisch, nicht russisch, sondern gleich allen andern kindern, unter
welchen es erwächst, deutsch zu sprechen anheben.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1985), 17–18.
296 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

Conjugation System of Sanskrit Compared to those of Greek, Latin, Persian,

and German – effectively inaugurated the study of language as a science.68
Modern editions and modern language editions of Middle High German
literary works became increasingly available, often going through multiple
editions.69 But the other side of Grimm’s statement about kidnapped
orphans is a political-turned-military campaign – to name but one contem-
porary with Wagner’s Lohengrin – that was waged over the Schleswig–
Holstein Question between 1846 and 1851, where the Danish King
Friedrich VII sought to forcibly annex Danish speakers from Schleswig in
northern Germany.70 This desired congruence between territory and cul-
tural–linguistic boundaries resulted in a policy of territorial assimilation.71
Where monolingualism and cultural homogeneity are taken to be synon-
ymous, the urge to preserve national character in academia and Aceldama
was a battle on two very different fronts.
While Wagner only ever took up military arms against his fellow
Germans, his melodic theory does arguably adopt German as a “weapon

68
Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen,
lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Andreäische
Buchhandlung, 1816), rpt. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1975). Bopp’s later publications are
indicative of the drive within comparative linguistics to reconstruct earlier periods by cross-
referencing known syntactical and phonological structures. See particularly: Vergleichende
Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen,
Gotischen und Deutschen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1833–52); Vocalismus, oder sprachvergleichende
Kritiken über J. Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik und Graff’s Althochdeutschen Sprachschatz, mit
Begründung einer neuen Theorie des Ablauts (Berlin: Nicolai, 1836); Über die Sprache der alten
Preußen in ihren verwandschaftlichen Beziehungen (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1855).
69
This was the case for Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819; 2nd edn., rpt. Wilhelm Scherer
(Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmlern, 1870), rpt. (Hildesheim, New York: Olms, 1989), Deutsche
Rechtsaltertumer (1828; 1854), Deutsche Mythologie (1835; 1844; 1854; 1875), Geschichte der
deutschen Sprache (1848; 1853; 1868); and the Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen
(1812–15) and Deutsche Sagen (1816–18; 1865–66).
70
Briefly, the Danish King Christian VIII sought to absorb the duchy of Schleswig into Denmark
under a liberal constitution that regarded the river Eider as its natural boundary, and
demanded protection of the Danish language from German encroachment. His son, Friedrich
VII, enacted the war his father promised, against which the outraged Frankfurt Parlament was
unable to muster adequate military opposition. A popular insurrection by German
confederate sympathizers “spread over the whole province . . . Volunteers from all parts of
Germany rushed to the northern frontier,” as the contemporary writer and historian Edwin
Emerson Jr. recounted, but “the untrained volunteer army of Schleswig–Holsteiners suffered
defeat at Bov. A corps of students from the University of Kiel was all but annihilated.”
Edwin Emerson, A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year, 3 vols. (New York:
P. F. Collier and Son, 1901), 2: 1061.
71
See Sue Wright, Community and Communication: The Role of Language in Nation State Building
(Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000), 33ff. See also Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism Since 1780, 47ff.; and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Malden: Blackwell,
2006), 42ff..
 Wagner’s Melodik 297

of exclusion”72 against the idioms of what he dismissed as “European”

opera. We can begin to substantiate this claim through an analogue to the
Schleswig–Holstein question in Lohengrin. Consider King Heinrich’s reci-
tational monologues, the first of which warns the assembled Brabantines73
of threats to Germany from abroad, and bids them take up arms against
foreigners: “now is the time to preserve the realm’s honor,”74 adding a
rallying cry in act 3: “For Germany the German sword! Protect the king-
dom’s strength therewith!”75 This was remarkably close to the attitude of
the then Prussia foreign minister, Baron Heinrich von Arnim, who viewed
strong military support for the provisional, pro-German government in
Schleswig–Holstein as an acid test of the new Frankfurt assembly in 1849.76
Before exploring the nature of Wagner’s debt to Grimm as the standard-
bearer for early nineteenth-century Philologie, it may be helpful to outline his
compositional theory in relation to language, as given in Oper und Drama.
Several summaries of this text are available,77 but in what follows I isolate
those elements pertaining specifically to vocal–linguistic melodic expression.

Wagner’s Melodik

In 1851, Wagner defined melody as “the redemption of the poet’s endlessly

conditioned thought into a deep-felt consciousness of emotion’s highest
freedom.”78 This formulation brings together the protean strands of his
age: Hegel’s doctrine of “progress in the consciousness of Freedom,”79
redemption of art by revolutionary progress, synthesis of the arts
(Naturphilosophie), and the healing of emotion between thought and

72
This is Sue Wright’s description of language in the specific context of linguistic nationalism.
Ibid., 8.
73
To be sure, the dutchy of Brabant in the Netherlands was not German, and was never considered
for incorporation into eastern Germany.
74
“Nun ist es Zeit des Reiches Ehr’ zu wahren” (Lohengrin, act 1, scene 1).
75
“Für deutsches Land das deutsche Schwert! So sei des Reiches Kraft bewährt!” (Lohengrin, act 3,
scene 3).
76
Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1840–1945 (Princeton University Press,
1982), 65.
77
Thomas Grey’s extensive critique of the Zurich essays in relation to the composition of the Ring
is the most comprehensive account in English. See Wagner’s Musical Prose. Other notable texts
include Arne Stollberg, Ohr und Auge – Klang und Form (Munich: Franz Steiner: 2006), 111–
242; Hermann Danuser & Herfried Münkler (eds.), Zukunftsbilder: Richard Wagners Revolution
und ihre Folgen in Kunst und Politik (Schliengen: Argus, 2002); and Stefan Kunze, Der
Kunstbegriff Richard Wagners (Regensburg: Bosse, 1983).
78
SSD 4: 142. Cf. PW 2: 281.
79
Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Wiley Book Co., 1900), 19.
298 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

sensation, Geist and Sinnlichkeit. The principle through which he pro-

posed to enact this idealist definition of melody was essentially a progres-
sion from poetic impulse to the emotive response of a listener, albeit
linguistically conditioned. First, the poet strips away modern linguistic
“disfigurements”80 from his emotional utterance – which contains an
underlying historical residue – leaving only the “purely human core.”81
He then identifies the sympathetic relationships between speech roots:
etymologically derived, fossilized units of utterance (codified in the vast
lists of Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik), and whose indivisibility prom-
ised – for Sanskritists – the origin of all meaning. Like concepts have like
roots, and by coordinating these roots in alliterative verse, Wagner the
poet effectively creates Versmelodie; by accenting the roots while leaving
the surrounding “unemphatic, unimportant words”82 unaccented, the
singer’s breath rhythmicizes the root syllables into organic phrase group-
ings without recourse to the “monotonous rhythm”83 of iambic meter,
thereby communicating their intuitive “sense” for Wagner: “this breath
is – Music.”84 Over and above the poetic task, the specific linkage to music
begins with his interest in the vowels within speech roots.
Ancient Teutonic or imported speech roots function as Wagner’s indivisible
poetic atoms, his historical units of emotional meaning in any verbal-melodic
construction. Interpreting the claims by comparative linguists about Sanskrit, he
also requires that they bear an inexplicable primal force – “original truth” – that
remains philosophically indistinct as that which is either “invented or found”:
If the poet pries into the nature of the word which is forced upon him by his feeling,
as the only word to fit an object or an emotion woken by that object, he discovers
this constraining force in the root of this word, which has been invented or found
[erfunden oder gefunden] through the necessity of man’s earliest emotional stress . . .
he perceives at last the origin of that [emotion-swaying] force in the purely sensuous
body of this root, whose primal substance is the sounding vowel . . . the embodied
inner feeling . . . which manifests itself . . . through the sounding vowel of the root.85

In a clear allusion to Herder’s notion of “the original wild mother [tongue] of

the human race . . . those howling and wailing tones,”86 the slippage between

80
SSD 4: 118. Cf. PW 2: 255. Wagner defined these both culturally and syntactically, implying first
why they existed, then outlining what they were, namely: “historico–social and state-religious
relations and conditionings,” and the “mechanical apparatus of qualifying words.” SSD 4: 119.
Cf. PW 2: 256.
81
SSD 4: 118. Cf. PW 2: 255. 82 SSD 4: 120. Cf. PW 2: 257. 83 SSD 4: 106. Cf. PW 2: 241.
84
SSD 4: 127. Cf. PW 2: 265. 85 SSD 4: 128–29. Cf. PW 2: 266.
86
Herder, On the Origin of Language, trans. John Moran and Alexander Gode (University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 91.
 Wagner’s Melodik 299

enunciated vowel and musical tone is the crucial bridge along which Wagner
blends the ostensibly separate sonorities of music and poetry into a unified
mode of melodic expression. But as inherently musical units, spoken vowels
cannot – in this schema – communicate the relationships latent in Stabreim:
Since all the vowels are primarily akin to one another, [our “understanding” of a
vowel] is based on disclosing this primeval kinship by giving full value to the vowel’s
emotional content, by means of a musical tone. The vowel itself is nothing but a
condensed tone.87

Elsewhere Wagner applied precisely the same need for musical tone to
Schröder-Devrient’s spoken utterances, claiming: “[her] whole achievement
must have issued from the element of music.”88 This justification for
musical tone ultimately refers back to Wagner’s pragmatic concern for the
need to persuade the listener’s ear. He puns that only when the sounding
vowel (“tönender Laut”) becomes a meaningful tone (“lautender Ton”) is it
“in a position to satisfy [erfüllen] the infinite capacity of the ‘ear.’”89
As the load-bearers of musico–syntactical “sense,” root vowels outrank
consonants in Wagner’s hierarchy of expressivity. His interest in the latter is
therefore entirely relative to their capacity to modify the former. He outlines
two main functions in this respect: determination of length and color, and
tonal gradation. First, consonants “raise the sounding vowel of the root to a
definite characterization [Charakteristik], by firmly hedging-in its infinitely
fluid element, and through the lines of this delimitation [they] bring to the
vowel’s color, in a sense, the design [Zeichnung] which makes it into an
exactly distinguishable shape.”90 Second, consonants also bind “the vowel
within: i.e. [they] determine the specific nature of the vowel’s manifestation
through the roughness or smoothness of its inward contact therewith.”91 The
specific application of this to singing is of course as much a pedagogical as a
philological question, and Wagner interprets the evidence according to his
experience, acknowledging that strengthened terminals (“nd, rt, st, ft”)
attached to roots make the latter sound “brief and brisk,” and are best adapted
to assonance such as “Hand und Mund,” rather than rhyme per se.92
Given that Versmelodie is conceived with the listener in mind, Wagner’s
continual pleas for willing auditors are only to be expected. That these pleas
require a change in the way people hear – a purification from socio-political

87
SSD 4: 137. Cf. PW 2: 275. 88 SSD 9: 140. Cf. PW 5: 141.
89
SSD 4: 135–6. Cf. PW 2: 273. In modern parlance at least, Wagner’s linguistic pirouette is not an
equal exchange, for “lautender” carries a stronger sense of “meaning” than the English “sound.”
90
SSD 4: 129. Cf. PW 2: 267. 91 SSD 4: 133–34. Cf. PW 2: 271.
92
SSD 4: 134n. Cf. PW 2: 271n.
300 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

“dogmas” – invites skepticism over Wagner’s self-justifying logic. A number

of comparative philologists advocated a similar kind of linguistic paleon-
tology that could undo what Sanskritist and Indologist Max Müller called
the “disease of language.” This referred to a process where words pass from
an original to a metaphorical meaning; it risked, for Müller, the danger of
lexical “mythology,” in which myth transforms denotative words into
beings and stories.93 Though the claim of reaching back to linguistic origins
resonates with Wagner’s documented anxiety about composing original
melodies (i.e. those with “highest artistic individuality”),94 the two have
entirely different meanings in this context: “original truth” appeals to
historically Teutonic authority, while an original or “artistically individual”
melody (as opposed to the Rousseauean concept of première mélodie, which
also refers to the melodiousness of the very earliest languages) is a signifier,
for Wagner, of compositional ability. The critical link is that Wagner was
openly appealing to a communal pride in German language, while less
overtly claiming his seat as its musical standard-bearer.
The resulting communicative model is dialectical; it traces a path from
what is essentially an inner musical vowel to the outer world of syntactical
expression and back to the musical tone, unifying the two in a higher syn-
thesis of Worttonsprache. It was a Hegelian template Wagner understood
more broadly: “The language of music [Tonsprache] is the beginning and end
of the language of words [Wortsprache], just as emotion is the beginning and
end of the intellect, myth the beginning and end of history.”95 Of course, the
purpose of Oper und Drama was not didactic, but exegetical, and Wagner’s
recourse to personal necessity – “it was dire compulsion alone that wrung [my
treatises] from me”96 – has become the accepted explanation for his principal
mid-century theoretical texts. In 1924, Newman described his effort at
theory as a “needed purgation of the intellect,”97 and even borrowed Oscar
Wilde’s (non-Wagnerian) barb to dismiss the philology in Oper und Drama
as the composer’s pursuit of “the obvious, hunting it down . . . with
the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective.”98 This continues part of the

93
Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language: Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great
Britain in April, May, and June 1861 (London: Elibron Classics, 2005), 11ff.
94
See Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, June 9, 1862, Biebrich, SB 14: 176–77.
95
SSD 4: 91. Cf. PW 2: 224.
96
“Meine Schrifstellerischen Arbeiten waren Zeugnisse für diese meine Unfreiheit als
künstlerischer Mensch: nur im höchsten Zwange verfasste ich sie.” Wagner to August Röckel,
September 12, 1852, Zurich, in Briefe an Röckel, ed. La Mara (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel,
1894), 10.
97
Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist, 191. 98 Ibid., 213.
 Wagner’s Melodik 301

late-nineteenth-century reaction against Wagner’s “scholarly prejudice . . .

held up as something Teutonic,” that Nietzsche first mocked as “so-called
‘national’ sense.”99 From a historically archeological perspective, however, the
scholarly tradition of privileging the “musico–poetic period” and the leitmotif
while dismissing the pedantic philology in Oper und Drama fails to ask
certain vital questions about the myopic investigator and his innocently
“obvious” vowels and consonants: where did this conception of a sophisti-
cated linguistic melodic line originate? Why was Stabreim suddenly relevant
to the problems of German melodic theory in 1850–51?100 (Wagner had, after
all, employed it in his very earliest verses for Leubald in 1826–28.101) The fact
that Wagner virtually abandoned alliterative verse after the Ring (employing
rhymed verse in Meistersinger, and rhymed, unrhymed, and alliterative verse
in Tristan), indicates the concept’s historical contingency rather than any
transcendental character. (John Milton’s return to rhyme in Samson
Agonistes, after denouncing it in Paradise Lost, is oddly comparable.)
It was not long before the historical pedigree of speech roots and onomas-
tics (the study of proper names, their history and origin) started to ring
hollow. Martin Heidegger was also disposed to trace these roots in his
labyrinthine quest for lexical specificity, yet became suspicious of etymolog-
ical essentialism, that is, the blind tendency to ascribe authority to etymology
in this way. Though he was not referring to Wagner in his probing of the
essence of Dinge during the mid-1920s, he did warn against such method-
ology as “accidents of an etymological game . . . [played by] merely using the
dictionary.” This could never achieve understanding of the nature of things as
such, he argued, though he later qualifies his dismissal in terms implicitly
more favorable to the reception of Wagner’s project: “etymology has the
standing mandate first to give thought to the essential content involved in
what dictionary words, as words, denote by implication.”102

99
Nietzsche, “Nietzsche contra Wagner,” The Portable Nietzsche, 668.
100
Stabreim emerged as relevant to nineteenth-century German culture following Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm’s publication of an edition of the Hildebrandslied in 1812. Though originally
written in Old High German, this short poem only survives in an Old Saxon manuscript. The
alliterative principle was not rediscovered so much as revived, for the Icelandic and Anglo-
Saxon traditions of epic poetry already had numerous well-known works such as Beowulf
(Anglo-Saxon), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English). It was Old High
German, in fact, that had the fewest examples of Stabreim in its historical literature.
101
“Woher um mich dies wonnigliche Wehen.” Quoted in Peter Branscombe, “The Dramatic
Texts,” Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, translation edited by
John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 270.
102
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 172–73.
302 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

While Wagner believed speech roots harbored an unchanging physical

reality, Heidegger did not. Over and above any opportunistic appropriation
or historical Procrusteanism on Wagner’s part, the original purpose of
inquiries into the history of the German language – that is, the stated purpose
of those Germanists motivated to undertake the painstaking research –
remained focused on what Chaim Gans has termed the “adherence thesis”
to cultural nationalism, namely that individuals have an interest in adhering
to their cultures.103 But, as we have seen, beyond preservation and adherence,
the study of ancient languages sought to circumscribe and embolden a
cultural identity in the present precisely in order to stimulate and orient
progress in the future from the original source in the past. There can be little
doubt, therefore, that it was essentially an invented tradition that stretches the
evidence to give a new idea the legitimizing veneer of age and antiquity.
Speaking for both brothers, Wilhelm Grimm summarized the philo-
logical project as regenerative:
these studies embrace our country, they always have their own attraction for indig-
enous people, which nothing foreign can replace . . . the knowledge of our past, of
its poetry, its law, its customs, aims at explaining our history, enlivening, refreshing,
and adorning it. It wants to water the tree of German life from its fountain.104

But back in 1812, even Jacob Grimm implicitly agreed that resurrecting
archaic language for current usage was impossible (recalling the famous, if
spurious, “Gesichtserker” [literally: “face gable”] instead of the Latinate
“Nase”),105 and frowned on attempts by Joseph Görres and Ludwig Tieck
to modernize old chapbooks or medieval love poetry.106 Years later,
Grimm’s History of the German Language (1848) described ancient lan-
guages as physically perfect in contrast to modern ones, and regarded the
opposition between the linguistic present and past as a universal, timeless
truth.107 History, for Grimm, was “a band which joins antiquity to the

103
Chaim Gans, The Limits of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39.
104
“diese studien umfassen das vaterland, sie haben den eigenen reiz, den das heimische für jeden
immer besitzt, den nichts fremdes ersetzen kann . . . das erkenntnis unseres alterthums, seiner
poesie, seines rechts, seiner sitte will die geschichte erklären, beleben, erfrischen und
schmücken, will den baum des deutschen lebens tränken aus eigenem quell,” in Grimm,
Kleinere Schriften, 8: 465.
105
See William J. Jones, Images of Language: Six Essays on German Attitudes to European
Languages from 1500 to 1800 (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.,
1999), 50.
106
See Gunhild Ginschel, Der junge Jacob Grimm (Berlin: Akademie, 1967), 107ff.
107
“Aus der geschichte der sprachen geht zuvorderst bedeutsame bestätigung hervor jenes
mythischen gegensatzes: in allen findet absteigen von leiblicher vollkommenheit statt aufsteigen
zu gelang als jene nicht zu weit vorgeschritten war: sie vermählten das milde gold ihrer poesie
 Reintroducing Jacob Grimm 303

present, necessity to freedom.”108 Though he never clarified the nature of its

telos, he conceived its path as irreversible, in terms of a living organism’s
growth.109 While remaining one of the most ardent philologists, he thus
valued modern literature precisely for its contemporariness:
Modern poetry has the advantage that it stimulates and interests us more, like
everything which is close to our life and customs, that its force and warmth is much
more obvious and impressive. For this reason it is far more difficult to tear oneself
away from one of Goethe’s novels than from reading Homer.110

Wagner memorably lamented the “natural, mongrel shape”111 of modern

drama, where Tieck, Goethe, and Schiller were all fenced uncomfortably
between the “extremes” of Shakespeare and Racine. If, as Stein and others
assert, Wagner’s corrective project for resurrecting archaic language in the
Ring drama was “ludicrous,” the conditions that first created the plausibility
of this aspiration against Germany’s literary giants, allowing it to crystallize
in a spectacular instance of Wagnerian arrogance (his tendency to judge
older artists in terms of idiosyncratic modern values), bear further scrutiny.

Reintroducing Jacob Grimm

That I was never very thorough with my language studies probably explains
why it was so easy for me to drop them later. It was not until a much later
period that I gained an authentic interest in the study of languages, when I
grasped their physiological and philosophical aspects, as revealed to modern
Germanists by the pioneering work of Jacob Grimm.
Richard Wagner112

Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s German Sagas (1816–18) and German

Mythology (1835) provided the sources for almost all of Wagner’s plots

noch mit eisernen gewalt ihrer prosa,” in Jacob Grimm, “Zeitalter und Sprachen,” Geschichte der
deutschen Sprache, 4.
108
“ein band, welches alterthum und gegenwart, nothwendigkeit und freiheit mit einander
verschmilzt.” See Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, 8: 547.
109
See Grimm to Friedrich Karl von Savigny, May 20, 1811 and October 29, 1814, Briefe der Brüder
Grimm an Savigny, ed. W. Schoof and I. Schnack (Berlin: Schmidt, 1953), 105, 172.
110
“dass die neue Poesie den Vortheil vor der alten hat, dass sie viel stärker reizt und an sich
fesselt, wie alles was unserm Leben und unserer Sitte nah ist, dass ihre Kraft und Wärme viel
offenbarer und eindringender ist, daher wir uns vom Lesen eines göthischen Romans viel
weniger losreissen können, als vom Homer.” Jacob Grimm to Arnim, October 29, 1812. See
Reinhold Steig, Achim von Arnim und Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta,
1904), 237.
111
SSD 4: 15. Cf. PW 2: 134. 112 ML 14.
304 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

from Tannhäuser onward. But Wagner’s engagement with their brand of

philology went deeper than mythic figures and events. “I won my only
breath of freedom by plunging into the ancient world,” he wrote to
Nietzsche in 1872 (then chair of Classical Philology at Basel), “however
much I was crippled by having lost virtually all memory of its speech.”113
Speech, more than language, was the crucial link between the putative
expressivity of ancient literature and the present. In the absence of an
audio-cultural “memory,” the imagination of historical-sounding languages
proved a wellspring for Wagner. Indeed, this was central to his melodic
composition in Das Rheingold, as he willingly explained:
From my studies of J. Grimm I once borrowed an Old German word Heilawac and,
in order to make it more adaptable to my own purposes, reformed it as Weiawaga (a
form which we may still recognize today in Weihwasser [holy water]); from this I
passed to the cognate linguistic roots wogen [to surge] and wiegen [to rock], finally
to wellen [to billow] and wallen [to seethe], and in this way I constructed a root-
driven, syllabic melody for my watermaidens to sing.114

Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s analysis of the progression through different vowels,

semivowels, fricatives, and spirants in the opening scene from Rheingold
leads him to conclude: “it is thus the birth of language that we witness.”115
This is certainly plausible as Wagner’s expressive remainder, but it was
precisely an attitude of freedom and flexibility towards old linguistic sonor-
ities – speech roots as clay in the composer’s hands – that enabled Wagner
to build the Rheinmaidens’ song from finely graded lexical–phonological
relations.
Wagner evidently read Grimm’s work closely, but treated his analysis of
historical utterance loosely. Grimm’s most significant contribution to the
study of historical phonology and phonemic contrast was perhaps the
Deutsche Grammatik (1st edn. 1819; 2nd edn. 1822; 3rd edn. 1840). Its
radically revised and expanded second edition contained a 600-page discourse
on phonology that performed an unprecedented archeology of historical
speech sounds, charting those indivisible vocal units whose capture promised
to provide privileged access to the powerfully communicative sonorities of
historical speech. Grimm’s chief concern from this second edition onwards
was comparing speech sounds across geographic and temporal boundaries.
The industry in producing such a work must have been immense; in its main
body, he charted the vast phonological landscapes of Gothic, Old High

113
SSD 9: 296. Cf. PW5: 293. 114 SSD 9: 300. Cf. PW 5: 297.
115
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation (Princeton University
Press, 1993), 60.
 Reintroducing Jacob Grimm 305

German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Norse; he compared this with
later Middle High German, and Middle English; which he followed with his
descriptions of the sounds of modern German, Dutch, English, Swedish, and
Danish. The basis of the study was thus a comparison of sound, and sound
shifts imbued with – or organized according to – national character.
At least one German contemporary sarcastically recognized Grimm’s
achievement with a musical simile. Heine compared the Deutsche
Grammatik to a Gothic cathedral where the Germanic nations join forces in
a gigantic choir. Erecting the edifice must have been the result of a Faustian
pact, he balks, for there could have been no other way for one individual to
gather all the materials for such an immense structure.116
Here, as Michel Foucault observed, language was being treated as a
totality of phonetic elements for the first time: “A whole mystique is being
born . . . that . . . of the pure poetic flash that disappears without a trace,
leaving nothing behind it but a vibration suspended in the air for one brief
moment.”117 Grimm, ever mindful of the historicity of such sonic moments,
introduced two concepts into Indo-European linguistics that would partic-
ularly impact Wagner’s so-called “Wigalaweia music”: vowel gradation
(Ablaut; apophony), and the consonant sound shift (Lautverschiebung).
Ablaut refers to vowel alternation normally based on grammatical catego-
ries; Lautverschiebung refers to sound change among consonants: the for-
mer is synchronic, structured by conjugation (singen, sang, gesungen; see
also Burg, Berg from bʰergʰ meaning “high”); the latter occurs incrementally
over time, as Grimm explains:
Ablaut: “the regulated substitution of one root vowel for another; a noble and
fundamental asset of the German language.”118
Lautverschiebung: “the shift of rows of consonants in German, initially with
respect to primordial cognates, then also a propos Standard High German with
respect to Low German dialect and Nordic.”119

From these concepts, Wagner understood that the smallest lexical units are
malleable yet intrinsically related by their putatively “original” meaning in

116
Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, 10 vols., ed. O. Walzel (Leipzig: Insel, 1910–15), 7: 358.
117
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1994), 286.
118
“geregelter übergang des vocals der wurzel in einen andern; ein edles und ihr wesentliches
vermögen der deutschen sprache.” J./W. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch [1854], see http://
woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GA00837
119
“verschiebung von consonantenreihen in den deutschen sprachen, zunächst gegenüber den
urverwandten, dann auch in bezug auf das hochdeutsche gegenüber dem niederdeutschen und
nordischen.” Ibid., http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=
GL02547
306 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

Sanskrit. While he got the wrong end of the stick with Ablaut (which he
thought of as terminal consonants that modify a vowel),120 he justifies the
unity of dance, music, and poetry in 1849 through a Lautverschiebung
between D and T – Tanz-, Ton-, und [T]ichtkunst – which Grimm traces
between Greek, Gothic, and Old High German. Wagner hails this as “a
beautifully descriptive sensual picture [sinnliches Bild] of the nature of this
trinity of sisters, namely a perfect Stabreim, such as is native to the spirit of
our language.”121 Grimm had justified the shift of consonants according to
their etymology, which served in 1850 to underwrite Wagner’s fantasy of the
artwork of the future:
Yet more astounding than the accord of the liquids and the spirants is the variation of
the lip, tongue, and throat sounds, not only from the Gothic, but also the Old High
German arrangement . . . Gothic is related to Latin exactly as is Old High German to
Gothic. The entire twofold sound shift, which has momentous consequences for the
history of language and the rigor of etymology, can be so expressed in a table:122

Greek P. B. F. T. D. TH. K. G. CH.

Goth. F. P. B. TH. T. D -. K. G.
OHG B. (V) F. P. (V) D. Z. T G. CH. K.

The same dental sound shift between T and D is also evident in Wagner’s
adoption of the Old High German spelling of “Wodan” in Lohengrin, and
“Wotan” in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. (During the English restora-
tion, John Dryden also invokes the deity with a d: “To wodan thanks we
render” for Purcell’s King Arthur.) All in all, Grimm lists thirteen basic
variants for “the highest and supreme deity” in his expansive exploration of
its etymology,123 remarking elsewhere that “our consonant sound shift
bears witness to the deepest, innermost agility of the language.”124
120
Wagner contrasts this with an initial consonant, or Anlaut; see SSD 4: 129–30. Cf. PW 2: 267.
121
SSD 3: 102. Cf. PW 1: 132.
122
“Noch merkwürdiger als die einstimmung der liqu. und spir. ist die abweichung der lippen-
zungen- und kehllaute nicht allein von der gothischen, sondern auch der alth. einrichtung . . .
Das goth. verhält sich zum lat. gerade wie das alth. zum goth. Die ganze für die geschichte der
sprache und strenge der etymologie folgenreiche zweifache lautverschiebung stellt sich
tabellarisch so dar”: Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., 498.
123
“Die höchste und oberste gottheit.” Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (Göttingen:
Dieterichsche Buchhandlung, 1844), 1: 120. Variants to the name include Gothic Vôdans; Old
High German Wuotan; Longobarden Wôdan / Guôdan; Old Saxon Wuodan / Wôdan;
Westfalen Guôdan / Gudan; Anglo-Saxon Vôden; Friesian Wêda; Nordic Oďinn; Saxon Othinus;
Faeröisch Ouvin. See Wuoten in Ibid., 1: 120–50.
124
“Von der tiefsten innersten regsamkeit der sprache zeugt aber unsere lautverschiebung.”
Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., 4: vi.
 Linguistic relativity 307

The importance of this concept for Wagner lends a degree of credence to its
adoption by later commentators as a tool for interpreting Wagner’s works.
Claude Lévi-Strauss famously spoke of Wagner as “the undeniable originator
of the structural analysis of myth.”125 He justified his view, in part, by the
linguistic principle of sound shifts, likening the common root shared by the
myths of Tristan and Isolde, and Siegfried and Brünnhilde, to Grimm’s
Lautverschiebung: “Just as in languages, a sound shift often produces two
apparently different words from one and the same original, so two apparently
differing relationships had evolved from this single mythic relationship as a
result of a similar shift or transmutation.”126 While the structural reading of
Wagner’s mythic material in terms of linguistic principles may appear overly
schematic, its elevation of philological method to a determining factor in
Wagner’s thinking rings true, at least at the level of metaphor.
Shortly before Wagner died, Cosima recorded his comment relating
German works organically and systematically to each other in the manner
that Grimm’s sound shifts related seemingly disparate words between
languages: “Herr Rub. plays us some fugues from the 48 Preludes and
Fugues: ‘They are like the roots of words,’ R. says, and later, ‘In relation to
other music it is like Sanskrit to other languages.’”127 The comment, if taken
to be reliable, sums up much of Wagner’s linkage to Grimm: preoccupation
with the origins of expression, etymological essentialism, precedence of
speech roots, and a less than rigorous methodology supporting the con-
struction of cultural authority.

Linguistic relativity

Numerous authors expanded upon Grimm’s Lautverschiebung as a scien-

tific principle for tracing etymology, seemingly demonstrating greater
coherence between the dialects behind Neuhochdeutsch.128 But Germany’s
political and linguistic disunity stubbornly contradicted Humboldt’s 1822
hypothesis about a national worldview:129 that we experience the world

125
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked [1964], trans. John and Doreen Weightman
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 15.
126
Cited in Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, 237. 127 CT (June 26, 1880).
128
The most prominent case, sanctioned by Grimm, was Rudolf von Raumer, Die Aspiration und
die Lautverschiebung: Eine Sprachgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1837).
129
Following the Congress of Vienna, the constitution of the German Confederation retained the
geographical boundaries of the old Reich, which were not linguistically determined, but
included non-German-speaking Bohemia and Polish lands in West Prussia and the Duchy of
Posen, not to mention Switzerland. See Taylor, The Course of German History, 47. As John
308 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

through our mother tongue (once known as the Whorf–Sapir hypothe-

sis).130 The Herderian correlate between language and thought on which
Humboldt’s assertion was based is very specific; it articulated a kinship
between the grammatical structure of a language and its bearer’s thought
processes, effectively telescoping theoretical syntax into cognitive function,
and thereby circumscribing the common element that binds a nation’s
constituents together.131 Whether speech is caught in the grid of thought
or vice versa, each is woven into the very fabric the other is unrolling: “The
spiritual singularity of a people and the structure of their language are so
inwardly conflated in each other that, if [only] one were given, the other
would have had to be completely derived from it.”132 If the organization
of our language determines our way of thinking, thereby directly effecting

Edwards points out, however, not all languages require possession of an original group language
for their national identity (Irish – Celtic; Austrian – German). See “Language and Nation”,
Encyclopaedia of Nationalism, ed. Athena S. Leoussi (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2001), 171.
130
“In every language there lies a characteristic worldview.” [“So liegt in jeder Sprache eine
eigenthümliche Weltansicht.”] Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, 17 vols., ed.
Albert Leitzmann (Berlin: B. Behr, 1903–36), 7: 60. For an examination of the distinction
between cultural Weltansicht and ideological Weltanschauung in Humboldt’s writings, see
Elsina Stubbs, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language, its Sources and Influence
(Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 261–63. See also John B. Carroll
(ed.), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf [1957]
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), esp. 246–70.
131
Isaiah Berlin points out that Herder derived the notion that words and ideas are one from his
teacher, J. G. Hamann. “Men do not think, as it were, in thoughts and ideas and then look for
words in which to ‘clothe’ them, as one looks for a glove to fit a fully formed hand. Hamann
taught that to think was to use symbols, and that to deny this was not so much false as
unintelligible, because without symbolism one was led fallaciously to divide the aspects of a
single experience into separate entities – the fatal doctrine of Descartes.” Berlin, Three Critics of
the Enlightenment, 189.
132
“Die Geisteseigenthümlichkeit und die Sprachgestaltung eines Volkes stehen in solcher
Innigkeit der Verschmelzung in einander, daß, wenn die eine gegeben wäre, die andere müßte
vollständig aus ihr abgeleitet werden können. “Über die Kawi-Sprache, quoted in Mundt, Die
Kunst der deutschen Prosa, 9. In contrast to Wagner’s metaphorical usage, Humboldt argued
that correspondences between the grammatical structure of language and its national culture
can be determined still more precisely: “If there is an exact correspondence between logic and
grammatical relationships,” he asserted, “man’s thinking gains in incisiveness, and the intellect
is attracted even more strongly to formal and consequently pure thought, if, as a result of the
language, it grows accustomed to making precise distinctions between grammatical forms.” And
in a different essay (“On the National Character of Languages” [1822]), he repeated his claims
for a direct reciprocity between language character and national identity (defined by mentality),
citing the latter as self-evidently proof of the former in what amounts to circular logic: “what
primarily renders the differences in the character of languages visible is the intellectual
mentality and therefore the mode of thinking and feeling.” See particularly Humoldt’s essay “On
the Origin of Grammatical Forms and their Influence” (1822), in Wilhelm von Humboldt: Essays
on Language, ed. T. Harden and D. Farrelly, trans. John Wieczorek and Ian Roe (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 23–51, here 32, 66.
 Linguistic relativity 309

the development and shaping of our ideas, its mode of expression – “mate-
rial” speech – communicates that unique relationship beyond the realm of
thought. It is speech that becomes ex-pressive (in Derrida’s sense of impart-
ing “to a certain outside a sense which is first found in a certain inside”).133
For this reason, Humboldt regarded speech as “material” in contrast to
thought which was ideal. Speech is “the consequence of an actual need [and]
directly concerned with the denotation of things” whereas thought is con-
cerned with the abstractionism of form.134 The key point in this excursus is
to underscore the legitimacy of spoken expression as a constitutive element
of present, outwardly perceptible identity. This was not “speech in its tran-
scendental flesh,” as Derrida put it, the phenomenological voice that would
continue “to speak and be present to itself – to hear itself – in the absence of
the world.”135 It was precisely with the sonorous texture of a physical voice,
with the body of speech in the world, that perceptions of the different
sounding physiology could function as a social marker, circumscribing its
sound as qualitatively different from the speakers of other “nations.”
This signifying quality had of course been linked to singing styles cen-
turies before Wagner. The seventeenth-century theorist Vincenzo
Giustiniani, for example, famously discussed “new arias pleasing to the
ear” in the Roman Madrigals of Marenzio and Giovannelli, adding:

Besides these changes in the manner of singing, it may be observed that each nation,
each province, almost each city has a way of singing entirely different from the
others. And from this comes the old saying: the French sing, the Spaniards howl, the
Germans shout, the Italians cry.136

And in the early twentieth century, the French ethnomusicologist André

Schaeffner explicitly elevated such music to the identifying criterion for
social groups, claiming that “the music of a group of humans is the voice of
that group, and it is the group itself.”137 Reading a continuous (sonic)
relationship between language and music clarifies the relevance of this belief
for Wagner. Back in 1878, Cosima recorded his remark to this effect: “It is as
133
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1973), 32.
134
Humboldt, “On the origin of grammatical forms and their influence on the development of
ideas” [1822], in Essays on Language, 43.
135
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 16.
136
“Si vede per esperienza che ogni nazione, ogni provincia, anzi ogni citta’, ha un modo di cantare
differentissimo ciascuno dall’altro, e di qui viene quel dettato volgare Galli cantant, Hispani
ululant, Germani boant, Itali plorant,” in Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la musica [1628,
first published 1878], trans. Carol MacClintock (Rome: American Institute of Musicology,
1962), 72.
137
“La musique d’un groupe humain, c’est la voix de ce groupe, et c’est ce groupe même,” in
André Schaeffner, Origine des instruments de musique (Paris: Payot, 1936), 322.
310 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

impossible to write music without melody, as to speak without [verbal]

thoughts: melody is musical thought.”138 As we have seen, Humboldt
believed this direct correlate applied equally to language and national identity,
thereby completing an extended triad between melody, language / worldview,
and nationality. Nineteenth-century discourses of language permit that
speech, melody, and national identity, in other words, were not qualitatively
distinct layers within a construction of culture, not discrete film casings
adhering to an ill-defined national “body,” duplicating it on the outside. On
the contrary, they were the continuous moments of a single body. Their
uninterrupted relationship on the plane of pure sound acquired a scholarly
pedigree beyond mere metaphor, though metaphor played a part in its
rhetoric. If the perception of sound defines the characteristic, communicative
agency of nationality, it makes sense to tackle this through the physiology of
sound perception itself. For, following Wagner’s logic, it was precisely
“sounding physiology” – musically, linguistically – that de facto constituted
and differentiated nationality.
This suited his newly Francophobic outlook in Dresden. But whereas the
gradations between melody, language / worldview, and nationality pertain
to language in the present of the 1840s, Wagner was concerned with
languages in the past. A bevy of philologists also held the same correlate
(of language / worldview) to be valid in medieval speech, though here the
historical imagination is invoked to justify the claim, where analysis of
modern German had drawn on metaphor and assessment of alphabetic
and national character. Grimm, for one, believed affirmatively that “the
essence and history of our people is mirrored in the characteristics and
destiny of our language,”139 adding in 1851 that “the oldest history of the
human race lies hidden, like that of its language, and only linguistic research
will cast some light upon it.”140 For pioneering philologists, then, linguistic
paleontology promised to reveal the sedimented cultural past, becoming
nothing less than “the science of their dreams,” as Maurice Olender put it.141
Grimm used this historical correlate to explain a syntactical shift that
articulates two broad phases in the growth of Teutonic literature; it was a

138
CT (March 13, 1878).
139
[D]as wesen und die geschichte unseres volks [spiegeln sich] in den eigenschaften und
schicksalen unserer sprache [ab].” Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., 4: v.
140
“des menschengeschlechts älteste geschichte lagert verborgen gleich der seiner sprache, und nur
die sprachforschung wird lichtstrahlen darauf zurückwerfen.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der
Sprache, 58–59.
141
Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth
Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8.
 Linguistic relativity 311

shift vital for Wagner’s concept of Worttonsprache, the shift after Middle
High German from poetry to prose:
One can compare the inner strength of the old language with the keen sense of sight,
hearing, smell of savages, even our shepherds and hunters who simply live among
nature. By contrast, the rational concepts of more recent language grew increasingly
clearer and more distinct. [Naïve] poetry is replaced by [intellectual] prose (not the
vulgar but the spiritual kind), the medium appropriate to our own age.142

Unlike Coleridge or Wordsworth, Grimm believed that poetry belonged to

the historical rather than the transcendental realm. Accordingly, he borrowed
Schiller’s distinction to separate a naïve popular poetry created collectively
and anonymously by das Volk, from a sentimental body of literature written
by more recent, individual poets. Grimm’s understanding of this split saw
early poetry as epic and mythical, while later poetry addresses the experiences
and feelings of the author’s own actual world, tending towards prose. For him,
this succession corresponds exactly to the development of language from its
concrete beginnings to abstraction and intellectualism.
Wagner’s fear of a degeneration from original linguistic perfection tacitly
assumes variable levels of a sound’s communicative power. He distinguished
modern speech from “older, poetic speech” in that the former “needs a far
more copious use of words and clauses than did the other,” because it is out of
touch with the meaning of the speech roots and hence “estranged from our
feeling.”143 Here, Wagner is probably drawing on the Classicist Karl Otfried
Müller’s influential comments about ancient Doric – “the object seems to
have been to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible”144 – but
Wagner’s viewpoint is selective, for Grimm’s preoccupation with the course
of a language’s development led him to believe in the incessant growth and
development of that language. In an age steeped in organic theory, a living
language could not be stunted or reined in; it was best understood as
progressing from uncomplicated material perfection to complete rational
maturity. Of course, the flipside of organic growth is deformity and, hence,

142
“Man kann die innere Stärke der alten Sprache mit dem scharfen Gesicht, Gehör, Geruch der
Wilden, ja unserer Hirten und Jäger, die einfach in der Natur leben, vergleichen. Dafür werden
die Verstandesbegriffe der neueren Sprache zunehmend klarer und deutlicher. Die Poesie
vergeht, und die Prosa (nicht die gemeine, sondern die geistige) wird uns angemessener.”
Quoted in Mundt, Die Kunst der deutschen Prosa, 20.
143
SSD 4: 117. Cf. PW 2: 254.
144
Karl Otfried Müller, The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, trans. Henry Tufnell and
George C. Lewis (Oxford: S. Collingwood, 1830), 393. For an assessment of Müller’s influence
on Wagner, see Daniel Foster, Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks (Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 2ff.
312 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

degeneration. Thus, a developmental process was not incongruous with

Grimm’s belief that German words before the time of Luther retained greater
plastic designation, i.e. a more tangible connection with the raw action or
object a word designated. It celebrates a closer proximity to the primitive
treasury of vocables that so fired up Wagner’s interest in a Versmelodie and
would realize their primal communicative agency.
The preface to Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854) is far from nostal-
gic in this respect:
Whoever has studied our language and with an observant soul become aware of the
advantages it has over that of today finds himself initially imperceptibly attracted to all
monuments of earlier times and repelled by those of the present. The higher he can
ascend, the more beautiful and the more perfect the language in its physical form
[leibliche Gestalt] seems to him, the nearer he steps to its present form, the more it
pains him to find that power and eloquence of form in decline and decay. The harvest
to be reaped also grows and rises with such purity and perfection of the language’s
external constitution, because that which is transparent yields more than that which
has already become dulled and confused. Even when I read through books from the
sixteenth, indeed even the seventeenth century, the language – all its primitiveness and
rawness which belongs to its age notwithstanding – seems to me in many of its features
to remain enviable and more powerful [vermögender] than our language today.145

It is tempting to consider Grimm’s comments here and those as far back as

the introduction to the second edition of his Grammatik (1822) as partic-
ularly informative for Wagner, namely that modern German language –
Luther’s Neuhochdeutsch – had deviated from the “noble, almost wonderful
purity” of its medieval incarnation to the detriment of its power of expres-
sion.146 (People like William Barnes and Gerard Manley Hopkins were soon

145
“Wer nun unsere sprache erforscht und mit beobachtender seele bald der vorzüge gewahr wird,
die sie gegenüber der heutigen auszeichnen, sieht anfangs sich unvermerkt zu allen denkmälern
der vorzeit hingezogen und von denen der gegenwart abgewandt. Je weiter aufwärts er klimmen
kann, desto schöner und vollkommner dünkt ihn die leibliche gestalt der sprache, je näher ihrer
jetzigen fassung er tritt, desto weher thut ihm jene macht und gewandtheit der form in abnahme
und verfall zu finden. Mit solcher lauterkeit und vollendung der äuszeren beschaffenheit der
sprache wächst und steigt auch die zu gewinnende ausbeute, weil das durchsichtigere mehr
ergibt als das schon getrübte und verworrene. Sogar wenn ich bücher des sechzehnten ja
siebzehnten jahrhunderts durchlas, kam mir die sprache, aller damaligen verwilderung und
roheit unerachtet, in manchen ihrer züge noch beneidenswerth und vermögender vor als unsere
heutige.” Translation adapted from Christopher Young and Thomas Gloning, A History of the
German Language through Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 265–66.
146
“Luthers sprache, deren grammatik gleichwohl eigentlich dargestellt zu werden verdiente, gehört
nicht in diesen kreis, sie muß ihrer edlen, fast wunderbaren reinheit, auch ihres gewaltigen einfluß
halber, für kern und grundlage der neuhochdeutschen sprachniedersetzung gehalten werden,
wovon bis auf den heutigen tag nur sehr unbedeutend, meistens zum schaden der kraft und des
ausdrucks abgewichen worden ist. “Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., xi.
 Sound qua immanent meaning 313

speaking of English in exactly these terms: Barnes wished to extirpate all

Latinate forms, and said that instead of degrees of comparison we should
speak of pitches of suchness.)147 Wagner’s deep engagement with Melodik
was, in part, to take advantage of, and remedy this situation for drama as
much as music. My claim, inasmuch as this complex interaction of theories
permits one, is that Wagner’s commitment to philology led him to conceive
of a cultural language – the very structures of German thought (after
Humboldt) – etymologically, as “melodic echoes” of an imagined past.

Sound qua immanent meaning

Hence, the appeal for Wagner of this historic language – in addition to its
national status – was pragmatic: the professed communicative agency
inherent in its physical constitution. Grimm had asserted a directly propor-
tional relationship between a language’s age and its communicative
potency, even stating that he would gladly have given up Gottfried von
Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach and all the poetry of the thirteenth
century for the lost parts of a Wulfina, a translation of the New Testament
into Gothic, and the earliest surviving evidence of any Germanic language
(for Germanic languages, Gothic plays a role similar to that of Sanskrit in
the Indo-European family).148
Wagner took this historicism to heart. As late as 1873, he read sections
from Grimm’s History of the German Language (1848) to Cosima:

[R. says] the only language which can be recognized as really beautiful is the one
which is still attached to its roots, and it is a false optimism which induced Grimm to
say that the mixing of the Latin and Germanic languages had produced perfection;
such mixtures, R. says, are an evil, and the purer a language remains as it develops,
the more significant it is. “Of course,” he concludes, “Grimm [in 1848] had given up
all hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him).”149

A silent continuation of this in 1873 would seem to be: “because he didn’t

live to see the day.” Without seeking to ventriloquize Wagner’s thoughts at
two steps removed, his dismay at an adulterated national language is

147
See William Barnes, A Philological Grammar (London: John Russell Smith, 1854).
148
“Welchen abstand aber auch von ihnen stelle die edle, freie natur der mittelhochdeutschen
dichtungen dar . . . es gab stunden, wo für abhanden gekommene theile des ULFILAS ich die
gesamte poesie der besten zeit des dreizehnten jahrhunderts mit freuden ausgeliefert haben
würde.” See Christopher Young and Thomas Gloning (eds.), A History of the German Language
through Texts, 265.
149
CT (June 7, 1873).
314 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

perhaps more understandable two years after the defeat of France and the
long-awaited unification of Bismarck’s Germany, when political institutions
finally mirrored the “cultural” cohesion that a truly Germanic language had
seemed to promise decades earlier, i.e. when the infrastructure of
Staatsnation finally caught up with an existing sense of Kulturnation.150
Ironically, the very concept of Nationalsprache allowed for aspirations
towards political unity; once this was achieved institutionally and militarily,
it confirmed the linguistic project (for Wagner at least) in a self-endorsing
sequence.
Over and above the familiar mythological texts, Grimm turns out to be
the unwitting source for Wagner’s prejudices against modern speech, end
rhyme, and iambic meter, as well as his interest in vowel sounds, speech
roots, and sound shifts (as noted earlier). Wagner did not parrot Grimm
without reflection, though; the evidence suggests that he absorbed and
partially digested certain ideas, reformulating them to his own ends,
where they functioned as a scholarly authorization of his approach to
Melodik.
Grimm offered a balanced view of the historical importance of alliter-
ation and rhyme, but claims that these ultimately degraded root syllables
through time:

Rhyme hindered only bad poets, [while it] served true poets to reveal their power of
speech and of thought. There are times, however, when the art of rhyme dies out
because the sensual tenderness of the root-impoverished language hardens itself and
newly formed composites by nature have stiffer movement; so meter became
obsolete earlier according to the laws of quantity and alliteration.151

Similarly, Wagner speaks of the same modern alienation from the original
sense of speech roots, which “have become altered or newly accommodated
to our social relations and views, and in any case estranged from our
feeling.”152 The aim of Wagner’s expressive poetic melody is predicated
on a revival of (if not a nostalgic return to) this original state, which he
sought through the dialectical model outlined earlier, namely a path from

150
Friedrich Meinecke’s distinction between a common political history built on overtly formal
characteristics, and a shared cultural heritage including language and literature, respectively. See
Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, ed. H. Herzfeld (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969).
151
“Der reim hat nur schlechte dichter gezwängt, wahren gedient, ihre gewalt der sprache und des
gedankens zu enthüllen. Es gibt aber zeiten, wo die kunst des reimes ausstirbt, weil sich die
sinnliche zartheit der wurzelärmeren sprache verhärtet und neugebildete zusammensetzungen
eine von natur steifere bewegung haben; so sind früher die metra nach dem gesetz der
quantität . . . und der alliteration untergegangen.” Grimm Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., viii.
152
SSD 4: 117. Cf. PW2: 254.
 Sound qua immanent meaning 315

what is essentially an inner musical vowel to the outer world of syntactical

expression and back to the musical tone.
On the other hand, Grimm advocated rhyme and alliteration as pre-
servers of language against its natural mutability, and the only means by
which historical sounds become knowable for modern listeners:
Just as the laws of classical meter have revealed a wealth of rules of grammar, so the
observance of alliteration and rhyme is extraordinarily important to German.
Without rhyme there would be almost no history of our language to carry out.
Poetry should not only please the listeners and singers of the Lied, it should also
restrain the power of language, secure its purity and bring knowledge of it to future
generations. Free prose allows the content to die away from memory, it makes the
true ensounding [belautung] of words doubtful to the organs [ear and mouth].153

Wagner, while embracing (Buch)stabreim, dismissed end rhyme as some-

thing that postdates a schism of original artistic unity, and merely “fluttered
at the loose end of the ribbons of melody.”154 Grimm’s appreciation of
rhyme was also limited to its archaic forms, and thirty years before Wagner,
he had similarly castigated modern rhyme, lamenting that “The coarser,
careless rhyme of our best contemporary poets prophesies the gradual death
of even this form.”155
Finally, a practical instance of Wagner adopting Grimm’s working prac-
tices is his drafting of the Lohengrin libretto and the first prose scenario for
the Ring (1848) without capitalization of substantives or common nouns.
This even extended to Wagner’s correspondence – somewhat inconsis-
tently – between January 2, 1849 and November 27, 1852. Grimm printed
the second edition of the Deutsche Grammatik without capitals and in
Roman type (rather than Fraktur), advocating consistent use of lower case
as the only “correct” orthography for German. In the preface to the
Deutsches Wörterbuch he further criticized “the silly custom” of

153
“So wie diesen die gesetze classischer metrik eine fülle grammatischer regeln offenbart haben, ist
in den deutschen denkmählern die beachtung der alliterationen und reime von
außerordentlichem gewicht. Ohne den reim wäre fast keine geschichte unserer sprache
auszuführen. Das band der poesie soll nicht allein die hörer und sänger des lieds erfreuen, es soll
auch die kraft der sprache zügeln, ihre reinheit sichern und kunde davon auf kommende
geschlechter bringen. Ungebundene prosa läßt dem gedächtnis den inhalt verhallen, den
organen die wahre belautung der worte zweifelhaft werden.” Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd
edn., vii. Emphasis added.
154
SSD 4: 97. Cf. PW2: 230. In the context of Wagner’s early melodrama Gretchen (WWV 15;
1831), which matches the end rhyme to periodic phrase terminations, his later attack on
precisely this practice can also be read as a self-reflexive criticism.
155
“Der gröbere nachläßige reim unserer besten neueren dichter weissagt selbst dieser form einen
allmähligen tod.” Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., viii.
316 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

distinguishing substantives with capitals which he linked with the use of

Gothic type (Fraktur).156 Liszt crowed supportively about how, in
Lohengrin’s oasis of lower case, “this simple plan strikes the eye,”157 but
reviewers of the first fascicules of the Deutsches Wörterbuch were less kind,
at least until Grimm’s explanatory preface was published in 1854.158

Vowels: from speech physiology to material sound

What do these connections to Grimm amount to? Wagner, we recall,

regarded vowels in speech roots as the most primitive units of language;
Grimm found them unpredictable, volatile and hence far harder to study
than consonant gradations, which were stable and traceable, by contrast.159
Wagner again appears to have taken his cue from Grimm’s cautious appre-
ciation of vowels: “One may view the vowels as the necessary coloring or
animation of all words, as the breath without which they would not even
exist. The real individuality of the word rests on the vowel sound; it affords
the finest relationships.”160 Grimm’s observation is more a fact of speech
than language, and the parallelism here to Wagner’s ascription of the
“most beautiful breath” to Schröder-Devrient is surely no coincidence.
Significantly for Wagner’s belief in language’s basis in sensation, a number
of writers felt this “necessary coloring of words” was not abstract, but

156
“[Vulgarschrift] ist es, die den albernen gebrauch groszer buchstaben für alle substantiva
veranlaszt hat.” Grimm, “Vorrede” [§19], Deutsches Wörterbuch, http://woerterbuchnetz.de/
cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&mainmode=Vorworte&file=vor01_html#abs20
157
“Diese schlichte Detail fällt schon beim bloßen Durchblättern des Textbuches auf.” Liszt,
“Lohengrin, Große romantische Oper von R. Wagner, und ihre erste Aufführung in Weimar bei
Gelegenheit der Herder- und Goethe-Feiern 1850,” in SS 4: 83.
158
See John L. Flood, “‘es verstand sich fast von selbst, dasz die ungestalte und häszliche schrift . . .
bleiben mußte.’ Jacob Grimm’s Advocacy of Roman Type,” in “Das unsichtbare Band der
Sprache.” Studies in German Language and Linguisitc History in Memory of Leslie Seiffert, ed.
John Flood, Paul Salmon, Olive Sayce, and Christopher Wells (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz,
1993), 279–312, here 280–81.
159
“If a thoroughly grounded statement is ascertained and accepted for [consonants], then perhaps
some insights might also be gained into the history of the vowels . . . in Germanic dialects with
the same consonantal gradation we encounter such varying and manifold vowels.” [“Läßt sich
für diese eine gegründete bestimmung ermitteln und annehmen, so werden dadurch vielleicht
auch einige blicke in die geschichte der vocale vergönnt . . . wir [begegnen] in deutschen
dialecten derselben consonantenstufe so schwankenden und manigfaltigen vocalen.”] Grimm,
Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edn., 497, 505.
160
“Man kann die vocale als die nothwendige färbung oder belebung aller wörter betrachten, als
den athem, ohne welchen diese gar nicht bestehen würden. Die eigentliche individualisierung
des worts beruht auf dem vocallaut; er gewährt die feinsten beziehungen.” Ibid., 495.
 Vowels: from speech physiology to material sound 317

physiologically conditioned: “Every sound has its natural value and future
use founded upon the organ producing it,” Grimm rationalized in 1851.161
A professor of medicine at Leipzig, Karl Merkel, extended this supposition
in 1866 to postulate a complete mapping of all possible vocal sounds – from
characteristic noise to tone and vowel sound – based on the physical
movements of the larynx: “in this way we want to become acquainted
with the mechanism of human vocal and verbal sounds . . . On this phys-
iological path we obtain the natural alphabet that must be valid for all
languages, and which must contain all speech sounds used by the peoples of
the earth for intellectual communication.”162 (Unlike Wagner, though,
Merkel doesn’t connect the corporeal medium of vocal production with
its ostensive message.)
Yet Grimm had cautioned contrariwise that the vast phonological land-
scape of the Grammatik was descriptive rather than didactic, and cannot
lead to physiological laws that govern enunciation:

If one only attributes a purely physiological function to speech sounds [lauten] and
establishes an unproven and unprovable system of pronunciation, this becomes too
tenuous for me at least, and I am not able to stand by it.163

Such views did little to dampen interest in the physical properties of speech,
however, and Merkel publicly disparaged Grimm, even arguing that his
theory of sound was in fact a theory of letters.164 As early as 1830, moreover,
a Cambridge professor of mechanics, Robert Willis, had claimed that vowel
colors were “not inseparably connected to human organs.” This view was
based on the prior assumption that physiological properties of the larynx
and vocal cords in tandem with the modification of the oral cavity deter-
mined vowel sound, and that these could be replicated. Accordingly Willis
constructed a reed organ that, by varying the position of the reed in relation

161
“Jeder laut hat seinen natürlichen, im organ das ihn hervorbringt gegründeten und zur
anwendung kommenden gehalt.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 42.
162
“Wir wollen auf diese Weise die Mechanik der menschlichen Stimm- und Sprachlaute kennen
lernen . . . Wir erhalten auf diesem physiologischen Wege das natürliche Alphabet, das für alle
Sprachen seine Gültigkeit haben muss, und in welchem alle Sprachlaute, welche von den
Völkern der Erde zur geistigen Mittheilung gebraucht werden, enthalten sein müssen.” Merkel,
Physiologie der menschlichen Sprache (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1866), 2.
163
“Nur wenn man den lauten reinphysiologische functionen unterschiebt und darauf ein
unerwiesnes und unbeweisbares system der aussprache gründet . . . wird mir wenigstens die luft
allzu dünn, und ich vermag nicht darin zu leben.” Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 3rd edn.
(Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandlung, 1840), xv.
164
Merkel, Physiologie der menschlichen Sprache, iv–v.
318 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

to the pipe, could produce tone qualities approximately equivalent to the

vowel sequence: U–O–A–E–I.165
It is revealing that comparative anatomy arose at precisely the same time
as comparative grammar within central European universities. In tandem
with Grimm’s chronology of historical sounds, physical speech seemed to
offer another means of accessing what he called the “mysterious and
miraculous”166 nature of language, namely by treating speech as material
substance in the present. In 1836, the Tübingen philologist Moritz Rapp
published Towards a Physiology of Language, in which his stated aim was to
design a natural history of speech as “the only secure basis” for all gram-
matical disciplines. Speech, for him, was now “physiology above all,” and its
“amphibious organ” (capable of singing and speaking) was governed by
only two sets of laws: physiological and historical–etymological.167
Wagner effectively came of age during the historical emergence of phys-
iological speech–sound as a mainstay of language studies. He knew of
Rapp’s work: the first edition of the Physiology was contained in his
Bayreuth library (though this of course cannot confirm he read it thor-
oughly). While Wagner’s belief in the “original truth” within root vowels
was predicated on historical research, such sounds required a physical
manifestation to exist. The dependence was not mutual, and Rapp’s interest
in vocal speech–sounds (Laute) of the here and now is only tangentially
related to a theory of historically original sound; instead, he adduces an
ahistorical predicate – Urlaut – from which all modern vowels are derived.
He elaborates this hypothetical concept (Urlaut) as the “primary vowel
sound,” suggesting that, like primary colors, there must be a physiologically
primal sound, which by definition would precede speech consciousness in a
cognitive rather than temporal realm.168 Urlaut is, in essence, Rapp’s
rhetorical term for the unvoiced, physical impulse to communicate vocally.
By nature, it lacks a defining quality, and is most apparent in modern
German, he suggests, through the sound of “tired” speech, indicating that

165
See Robert Willis, “On the Vowel Sounds and on Reed Organ-Pipes,” Transactions of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society 3 (1830), 231–68, here 233.
166
“Traun geheimnisvoll und wunderbar ist der sprache ursprung, doch rings umgegeben von
andern wundern und geheimnissen.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 58.
167
“Auf solche Leistungen sich stützend, unternahm es der Verfasser, eine Naturgeschichte der
Sprache zu entwerfen, welche die einzige sichere Basis für alle grammatische Disciplin abgeben
kann, und als Physiologie überhaupt die eine Hälfte der Gesetze nach seiner Überzeugung
umfast, welche das doppellebige Organ der menschlichen Sprache bedingen.” Moritz Rapp,
Versuch einer Physiologie der Sprache nebst historischer Entwicklung der abendlaendischen
Idiome nach physiologischen Grundsätzen (Stuttgart & Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1836), vi.
168
Ibid., 20.
 Vowels: from speech physiology to material sound 319

it is ever latent and concealed rather than revived anachronistically: “it is

that sound [Laut] around which the others, the developed vowels, sink back
during flagging powers of production.”169 By inadvertently stripping away
the rational, conceptual accretions of articulate modern language (whether
through speaking “fatigue,” or archaic verse composition), this predicate
mirrors Wagner’s aspirations towards an expression of raw feeling, an
ahistorical “purely human core”170 of utterance which forms the other
side of his attraction to vowel sounds in Oper und Drama.
For Rapp, the vowel system is a living organism with an inner urge to
change its auditory expression; hence its volubility in dialect. Purest a – as
the sound closest to a theoretically prior Urlaut – is the sound most equi-
distant between o and e, he argues, again invoking color to clarify: reddest
red is precisely equidistant between yellow and blue.171 Together these three
vowels make up a fundamental triad because they commune directly with,
and first transform, the Urlaut.172 For Grimm too, a was the central
organizing point: “Of the vowels a holds the clear middle point; i the
heights; u the depths. a is pure and fixed, i and u are liquid and capable of
being restricted by a consonant.”173 Rapp expanded this beyond Grimm’s
straight shift between vowels, and postulates an infinite number of physio-
logical stages – and hence, applied meanings – in contemporary speech
between the poles – i and u – of the vowel system, creating a continuum that
“until it arrives at the poles of i or u can be thought of as an unending and
continuous row of middle steps.”174 Here is the liquid motion Rapp assigns
three rows:

a–ü–e–i
ő–ö–ü
a – å – o – u175

169
“Der Urlaut wird sich gleichsam rückwärts so entdecken, er wird derjenige Laut seyn, um den
die andern, die enwickelten Vocale, bei erlahmender Productionskraft zurücksinken.” Ibid., 21.
170
SSD 4: 118. Cf. PW 2: 255.
171
“Welches übrigens das allerreinste a sey, das sich am fernsten von e und o erhalte, darüber gibt
er eben so wenig ein untrügliches Kennzeichen, als die Farbenlehre ein absolut reinstes Roth
vorweisen kann, das dem Gelb und Blau gleich ferne steht.” Rapp, Versuch einer Physiologie der
Sprache, 22.
172
Ibid., 23.
173
“Von den vokalen hält a die reine mitte, i höhe, u tiefe; a ist rein und starr, i und u sind flüssig
und der konsonantierung fähig.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 43.
174
“die beiden polaren Richtungen des Vocalsystems lassen sich von der Indifferenz a aus, als ein
Continuum betrachen, das, bis es zur Spitze des i und u angelangt ist, eine unendliche Reihe
von Mittelstufen durchlaufend gedacht werden kann.” Rapp, Versuch einer Physiologie der
Sprache, 23.
175
Ibid., 31–32.
320 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

With the exception of its outermost points these steps are fixed arbitra-
rily, for the cycle “does not consist in absolute phenomena.” Vowels can
either become lighter or darker, and as if to quantify a mysterious, inscrut-
able property inherent in this claim for a “living scale,” Rapp further claims
that “no human organ [ear] is able to follow the small deviations,”176
describing the resulting “medial sounds” (Zwischenlaute) that characterize
the system’s undetectably minute gradations as having an “indecisive char-
acter, obscure, dark and mysterious like all ‘between’ states or half-
natures.”177
Thinking again of the opening vocal melody of Rheingold, the point for
Wagner in seeking to utilize these “dark” Zwischenlaute was that each sound
had a putatively fixed physiological designation, which implied an essen-
tialized signification between sound, essence, and origin. It implied, in other
words, a condition of absolute naming where sound and essence were
identical. Novalis, for one, had famously termed the alphabet a
TonSchriftkunst, reinscribing a cultural yearning to regain lost expression
from the punishment of oblivion. The means of achieving this, his vocabu-
lary implies, concern music above all:
Our language – it was initially far more musical and only gradually become prosaic –
is voided of tone [enttönt]. It has now become more like noise – sound [Laut], if one
wants to humble this beautiful word. It must become song again.178

In this reading, true expression of thought depended on a musically latent

sound understood as belonging to language: “as soon as one has but the
right name, one has the inner idea.”179 This synchronic, physiological

176
I have partly paraphrased, partly quoted from the following: “kein menschliches Organ wird
aber die kleinen Abweichungen verfolgen können, nach welchen jeder einzelne Buchstabe je
nach dem Wechsel der Landstriche um ein Minimum nach oben und unten variiren kann, und
es ist genug, wenn wir uns die Ueberzeugung gewonnen haben, der Vocalcyclus besteht nicht in
absolut gestellten Erscheinungen, sondern er ist eine lebendige Scala, die sich nur problematisch
nach angenommenen Punkten theilen und fixiren läßt.” Ibid., 24.
177
“Ihrem Charakter nach haben sie etwas Unentschiedenes, Clärobscüres, Düsteres und
Mysterioses an sich, wie alle Zwischenzustände oder Halbnaturen.” Ibid., 24. Arguing that such
gradations are beyond a perceptible realm and therefore above all questions is a deft rhetorical
move, for it requires that readers take on faith Rapp’s assertion, which itself is not grounded on
quantifiable scientific evidence.
178
“Unsre Sprache – sie war zu Anfang viel musicalischer und hat sich nur nach gerade so
prosaisirt – so enttönt. Es ist jetzt mehr Schallen geworden – Laut, wenn man dieses schöne
Wort so erniedrigen will. Sie muß wieder Gesang werden.” Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke
Friedrich von Hardenbergs, 5 vols., ed. Richard Samuel, 3rd edn. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer,
1960–1988), 3: 283ff., No. 245.
179
“Sobald man nur die rechten Namen hat, so hat man die Idee inne.” Novalis, Schriften. Die
Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, 2: 560, No. 164.
 Musical vowels 321

connection has no recourse to etymologically primitive roots. It was for this

reason that Paul de Man – in reference to Hölderlin – drew attention to the
inherent illusion of nature apparently creating itself in the act of naming,
which he termed: “to originate anew.”180 If the sound structures of language
carry physiologically innate meanings – which was the basis of Wagner’s
interest in Stabreim – how extensive were the attempts by philologists to
chart his putatively “natural” vocal–physiological territory?

Musical vowels

In contrast to the dominant eighteenth-century view that language origi-

nated as musical wailing, only later to crystallize within the realm of logos,
Grimm argued contrariwise that language is an a priori condition for music:
For singing and song originated from the intoned, measured recitation of words.
From the song came the other poetic art, and from singing through heightened
abstraction came all other music . . . Music could much rather be called a sublima-
tion of language, than language a precipitate of music.181

A year after Rapp’s Physiologie was published, August Kahlert – a regular

contributor to Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik – similarly derided as
“nice” but “fairly useless” the origin theory that claimed “the language of the
first people was song.”182 His article is striking in prefiguring Wagner’s
musical scrutiny of vowels and consonants, and in borrowing the concept of
a vowel continuum from Rapp, but uncomplicatedly, in terms of a sponta-
neous division:

The sound [Klang] of vowels was more varied [historically], they merged more into
one another. A progressive culture – demanding order and thus laws everywhere –
first separated the vowels and so speech–sound color [Lautfarbe] first emerged in
the world. I would not know how to differentiate the vowels differently. The vowel
in itself is still certainly not a sound [Klang], for even if only spoken we do not think

180
Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Language,” in Romanticism and
Consciousness. Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 66.
181
“Denn aus betonter, gemessener rezitation der worte entsprangen gesang und lied, aus dem lied
die andere dichtkunst, aus dem gesang durch gesteigerte abstraction alle übrige musik . . . Viel
eher dürfte die music ein sublimat der sprache heißen als die sprache ein niederschlag der
music.” Grimm’s lecture to the Prussian Academy of sciences was delivered on January 9, 1851,
See Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 58.
182
“Dies hat die alte Behauptung, die Sprache der ersten Menschen sey Gesang gewesen, oftmals
unterstützen sollen. Allein diese schöne Hypothese ist ziemlich unnütz.” August Kahlert, “Das
musikalische Element in der Sprache,” NZfM 46 (June 9, 1837), 181.
322 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

of particular pitches, and yet the ear is affected by separating our five vowels into
diphthongs.183

But particular pitches were latent. A decade later, Helmholtz would build
a vowel synthesizer, using eight electromagnetically vibrated tuning forks to
designate fixed empirical identities for each vowel by varying the relative
volume of different partials to simulate the different vowel qualities (other
German researchers took different approaches to the same end of scrutiniz-
ing the material reality of vowel identities, notably Rudolph König and Karl
Merkel).184 Before this empiricism, however, Kahlert first hypothesized
simply that infinite shades of Lautfarbe emerge only after a rational division
of “more varied” sound into five vowels. Without those points of reference,
the gradations would have nothing to deviate from. With this in mind, he
offers a useful set of definitions for the multifarious German words for
“sound” based on the principle of pitch deviation.

Schall: everything audible in a wide sense, “noise”

Laut: modification of noise [Schall] through speech, therefore
Laute: sounds that constitute speech,
Klang: noise [Schall] with recognizable pitch
Ton: sound [Klang] of a previously known pitch185

183
“Der Klang der Vocale war mannigfaltiger, dieselben verschwammen mehr in eindander. Die
vorschreitende Cultur, die überall Ordnung und daher Gesetz erfordete, schied erst allmählich
die Vocale, und so entstand in der Welt die Lautfarbe. Anders wüßte ich nähmlich den
Unterschied der Vocale nicht zu bezeichnen. Der Vocal an sich ist ja noch kein Klang, denn
eben nur ausgesprochen, ist von bestimmbarer Höhe nicht die Rede, und doch wird das Ohr
durch unsere fünf Vocale sammt Doppellauten verschieden berührt.” Ibid., 180–81.
184
Hermann von Helmholtz, “Klänge der Vokale,” in Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen [1863],
2nd edn. (Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1865), 163–181; and Science and Culture:
Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68ff. The
most recent contextual study of Helmholtz’s study of vowels is Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and
the Modern Listener (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178–92. See also David Pantalony,
“Seeing a Voice: Rudolph König’s Instruments for Studying Vowel Sounds” The American Journal
of Psychology 117 (2004), 425–42; and Merkel, Physiologie der menschlichen Sprache, 109.
185
“Der Ausdruck Laut . . . bezeichnet die Modificationen des Schalles durch die
Sprachwerkzeuge . . . Alles hörbares im weitesten Sinne nennt man Schall . . . Auch ich nenne
einen Schall von erkennbarer Höhe einen Klang, und einen Klang von erkannter Höhe einen
Ton . . . Wir haben also in der Sprache es nur mit Lauten zu thun, d. i. mit dem Schalle, der sich
zum Klange oder Tone runden kann, diese Vervollkommnung jedoch noch nicht erfahren hat.”
Kahlert, “Das musikalische Element in der Sprache,” 180. National rather than physiological
criteria determine the “wealth of sounds” inherent in Kahlert’s typology, which rehearses a
simplistic correlate between feeling, vowel, and national character that had been familiar for
decades: “Die unmusikalischeste Nation Europa’s, die Engländer haben fast nur Zisch- und
Gurgellaute. Herrscht bei ihnen nicht der Begriff, dagegen bei den Italienern das Gefühl vor?”
(page 183). The gap opening between echt philology and its selective appropriation by writers on
 Musical vowels 323

Wagner was an avid reader of Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift. While the

extent to which he absorbed musical opinions about philology in this way
during the 1830s–40s is open to debate, his correspondence certainly
indicates he tried to keep abreast of all contributions.186 But if Oper und
Drama was far from unprecedented in its music–philological leanings, we
may wonder how the more notable writers sought to map specific attributes
of traditionally disembodied “feeling” onto the material of sound, connect-
ing with what Wagner called our “sensory power of perception.”
Two of the most prominent theorists were Heinrich August Kerndörffer
(1769–1846) and Heinrich Theodor Rötscher (1803–81). In his Handbook
of Declamation (1813), Kerndörffer – one of the most musically inspired
writers on declamation – argued that “tonic keys” (Grundtöne) were inher-
ent in verbal speech and could be used to establish a “correct and particular
musical scale” for the human voice.187 Not coincidentally, these vocal “keys”
were based on the five vowel sounds, and Kerndörffer assigned the five
principal notes in his scale to vowels on the assumption that each “tonic” is
understood as an Urlaut insofar as “it belongs to five particular natural
points in the throat [Kehlpunkte] germane to every human voice.”188 That
is: vowel color was deemed wholly physiological.
While it is not possible to “modulate” between “keys” within a poem, one
can mix the overtones of one key with those of another to create the desired
“harmonic mixture,” he explains.189 As quasi-physiological qualities that
seek to bridge the Cartesian divide, each tonic vowel is assigned a specific
expressive quality by Kerndörffer:

U: a terrible shrinking back (like “uh!” or “huhu!”), otherwise known as a

“sound of spirits” which means that, on stage, it is the sound adopted for
the appearance of ghosts

music is made clear by comparing this statement with Grimm’s view – penned during the same
winter as Wagner’s Oper und Drama: “Denn an reichtum, vernunft und gedrängter fuge läßt
sich keine aller noch lebenden sprachen ihr [the English language] an die seite setzen, auch
unsre deutsche nicht, die zerrissen ist wie wir selbst zerrissen sind, und erst manche gebrechen
von sich abschütteln müßte ehe sie kühn mit in die laufbahn träte.” See Grimm, Über den
Ursprung der Sprache, 54.
186
See Wagner to Schumann, December 3, 1836, Leipzig: “Endlich erhielt ich letzthin wieder eine
Lieferung der mus. Zeitschrift; durch meine Reisen war bis jetzt die Verbindung unterbrochen;
ich habe jetzt die Blätter bis uhngefähr [sic] Ende Juli; wären Sie wohl so gut, und besorgten ’mal
gelegentlich, daß mir endlich die übrigen auch zukommen?” in SB 1: 319.
187
“eine richtige und bestimmte Tonleiter.” Heinrich August Kerndörffer, Handbuch der
Declamation (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1813), 16.
188
“sie auf fünf besondere, jeder menschlichen Stimme eigene Kehlpunkte des Gemüths
angehören.” Ibid., 21.
189
“obertönig mitschwingenden Akkordton.” Ibid., 27.
324 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

O: celebratory, sublime emotion, otherwise known as a “sound of worship,”

which means it is appropriate for odes, prayers, or for the portrayal of
male deities
A: free sigh of relief
I: exaggerated effect, which is suitable for portraying female deities190
As the so-called central vowel or middle tone, E lacks a specific indicative
quality and is not therefore assigned a particular place in the row. Such
ambitious claims for vocal–tonal specificity were disputed by at least one
fellow theorist.191 But in his later Manual for a Thorough Training in Public
Oratory (1833), Kerndörffer actually deepened his claim for the inherent
connection between physiology and emotion in each vowel, and arranges
their different sounds according to what he terms “different capabilities of
the soul.”192 The expression of emotions and feelings is realized through
tones as a “language of the heart,” forming a “generally comprehensible
primal language of nature,”193 while the organizing framework, the “capa-
bilities of the soul,” are given as follows:

U rationality [Vernunft]
O the power of judgment [Urteilskraft]
E reason [Verstand];
A the power of imagination [Einbildungskraft];
I fantasy [Phantasie]194

On the basis of this monistic connection between sound, physiology and

soul, Kerndörffer situates declamation as the great nexus linking the human
system together, whose principle consists “in every general language of
nature, of Tonsprache or the language of feelings, from which the essential
fundamental laws of declamation are to be divined.”195 Thus, more than
three decades before Wagner would posit “objective sensations” that

190
Ibid., 21–24ff.
191
In 1841 Emil Thürnagel questioned Kerndörffer’s belief in a uniform “scale” of vocal vowels on
the basis that they were undifferentiable in musical terms. “Da die Töne welche ihr [der
Sprechstimme] zu Gebote stehen, ungleich näher beisammen liegen, als beim Gesange, so ist die
Aufstellung einer vollkommenen, deklamatorischen Tonleiter etwas Unmögliches.” Emil
Thürnagel, Theorie der Schauspielkunst (Heidelberg: August Oswald’s Univ.-Buchh., 1836), 55.
192
“unterschiedliche Seelenvermögen” Kerndörffer, Anleitung zur gründlichen Bildung der
öffentlichen Beredsamkeit. Ein Compendium für Schulen, Gymnasien und akademische
Vorlesungen (Leipzig: Steinacker, 1833), 141.
193
“allgemein verständliche Ursprache der Natur.” Ibid., 121. 194 Ibid., 141ff.
195
“in jener allgemeinen Sprache der Natur, der Tonsprache oder der Sprache der
Empfindungen enthalten, wonach die wesentlichen Grundreglen der Declamation zu
entnehmen sind.” Ibid., 127.
 Musical vowels 325

designate particularities in speech roots, Kerndörffer had envisaged a

linguistic–melodic means of immanent sounding signification, which
made Wagner’s claims all the more credible by 1851.
A second theorist I am briefly introducing, Heinrich Theodor Rötscher,
also developed a monistic vowel theory in his Art of Dramatic Representation
(1841) and also believed in a liquid vowel scale,196 arguing that vowels were
“urges” (rather than “capabilities”) of the soul, dependent on pronunciation:

In vowels, the voice emerges in its original freedom, it is the direct outpouring
thereof . . . Perfect pronunciation will bring the [significance of each soulful urge]
into being as much as possible. There is no doubt that different emotions will be
aroused through these [urges]. The purer they ring out in their pronunciation, the
more clearly their significance will penetrate the ear . . . The clearer and more purely
their sound is heard, the more they appear to the listener as music of speech, the
clearer the torrent of emotions rushes towards them.197

Like Kerndörffer he lacked any empirical method, but believed in a direct

connection between physical vibrations acting on a receptive anatomy,
expressive impulse, and the perception of emotion.198 Two decades later,
Kahlert would situate this in a musical context, likewise asserting a purpo-
sive correspondence between vowels and a particular emotion, in which the
individual quality of vowels attains a daring specificity: “A world of delight
often lies in an ‘O,’ indescribable astonishment lies in an ‘I,’ a fear that
almost paralyzes language lies in ‘U’.”199
What, though, is the significance of such eccentric theories for
Wagner? While most writers introduced different specific “meanings”
for each vowel, they consistently posited a connection between physiol-
ogy, sensation, sound, and signification (all of which Wagner subsumed
under the term die Gefühle in the broader context of Sinnlichkeit: “the

196
“Der reine Vokal entsteht durch den bis zum Laut anschwellenden Hauch und bildet eine auf-
und absteigende Scala.” Rötscher, Die Kunst der dramatischen Darstellung, 1: 128.
197
“Im Vokale erscheint also die Stimme in ihrer ursprünglichen Freiheit, er ist der unmittelbare
Erguß derselben . . . Die Vokale haben aber, als vom Drange der Seele erzeugte Elemente, ihre
Bedeutsamkeit. Eine vollkommene Aussprache wird dieselben daher so viel als möglich zur
Erscheinung bringen. Daß durch sie unterschiedene Empfindungen angeregt werden, unterliegt
keinem Zweifel. Je reiner sie in der Aussprache ertönen, desto klarer dringt sich die
Bedeutsamkeit derselben an das Ohr . . . Je heller und reiner ihr Klang vernommen wird, desto
gesteigerter erscheint dem Hörer die Musik der Sprache, desto klarer rauscht ihm der Strom der
Empfindungen entgegen.” Ibid., 1: 123–26.
198
Ibid., 1: 137–38.
199
“In einem ‘O’ liegt oft eine Welt von Entzücken, in einem ‘I’ eine unausprechliche
Verwunderung, in einem ‘U’ eine Furcht, die fast die Sprache lähmt.” Kahlert, “Das
musikalische Element in der Sprache,” 180.
326 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

sensory power of perception”). Indeed, Wagner’s numerous statements

about the expressive primacy of the human voice in his Melodik would
appear to draw directly on the kind of aesthetic platform provided by
theorists such as Kerndörffer and Rötscher, where liminal structures
for pure phonetics (rather than linear sequence, tonal opposition, or
predefined characteristic shape) become a new means of organizing the
elements of vocal-melodic expression.
Consonants, being cast in opposition to vowels, played very little part in
this (the antithesis of vowel–consonant was variously interpreted through
gender,200 Cartesian dualism,201 and music).202 For Novalis they simply
turned tone into noise,203 and could best be likened to fingers that alter the
pitch on a metaphorical violin (actually a kind of mono-vocal cord):
Consonants are the fingerings and their succession and alternation belongs to
Aplicatur. Vowels are the resonating strings, or rods of air. The lungs are the moving
bow. The multiple strings on an instrument are merely for comfort – they are
abbreviations. It is actually only one string.204

A singing–speaking monochord implies a parallelism between pitch

and vowel continuum, but Lautfarbe was more commonly compared to
color because, unlike pitch frequencies, there was no octave equivalency
in the wavelengths of the color spectrum.205 Beyond paraphrases of

200
“Offenbar muß den vokalen insgesamt ein weiblicher, den konsonanten insgesamt ein
männlicher grund beigelegt werden.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 42.
201
“Wie Denken und Sein, Seele und Leib, Erkennen und Begehren den Dualismus der
menschlichen Natur ausdrücken, so liefert davon das Wort in seinen Bestandtheilen, Vocale
und Consonanten ein niederes Abbild. Der Vocale allein giebt uns keinen Begriff; was ihn
bindet, begränzt, beseelt ist der Consonant.” Kahlert, “Das musikalische Element in der
Sprache,” NZfM 46 (June 9, 1837), 180.
202
“der Mitlauter aber ist ein Feind der Klanges, ist antimusikalisch.” Ibid., 183.
203
Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, “Das philosophische Werk II,” 283ff.,
No. 245.
204
“Die Consonanten sind die Fingersetzungen und ihre Folge und Abwechselung gehört zur
Aplicatur. Die Vocale sind die tönenden Saiten, oder Luftstäbe. Die Lunge ist der bewegte Bogen.
Die mehreren Sayten auf einem Instrument sind nur zur Bequemlichkeit – es sind
Abbreviaturen. Es ist eigentlich nur Eine Sayte.” Ibid.
205
See Rudolph Hermann Lotze’s view that “the ascending scale, which is just as clearly an ascent as
is the number of waves and yet is quite unlike that increase, repeats in its own specific form the
progress in the series of stimuli. Wherever this series attains, through the doubling of a previous
number of waves, a marked import, there the sensation follows with the marked impression of
the octave of the key-note, and thus again in its own particular way represents sensuously the
likeness and difference of the two series. On the other hand the colours, though their prismatic
order rests on a similar increase in the number of waves, gives no one who is unprejudiced the
impression of a similar progress; and the reason for this possibly lies in the peculiar nature of the
nervous process which intervenes between the stimulus and sensation, and which we cannot
take into consideration because we do not know it.” Lotze, Metaphysic in Three Books: Ontology,
 Musical vowels 327

Enlightenment origin theories that connected vowel to emotion, consonant

to concept, no nineteenth-century music theorist I have encountered comes
closer than those quoted above to mapping the infinite canvas of feeling
onto correspondingly infinite vocalic shades; most writers – not least
Wagner – made the tacit assumption, however, that such a link is operative,
traceable, and primal.206

* * *
For Wagner himself it was the multi-volume, etymological dictionaries,
grammars, and monographs on historical linguistics filling his libraries in
Dresden (see Appendix A) and Wahnfried (see Appendix B),207 that seemed
to offer a key, a kind of historical cipher to release what could be termed the
latent primal feeling within the “physical form” or “‘objective’ sensation” of
root syllables that seemed tantalizingly within reach. “The physiognomic

Cosmology, and Psychology, trans. and ed. Bernard Bosanquet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884),
§257. Jacob Grimm had noted precisely the same phenomenon in 1851, and proceeded to draw
a direct comparison between vowel color and pitch: “Every sound is produced by a movement of
stirring air . . . The necessary range and the measure of these sounds and noises are naturally
conditioned as are the scale in music and the spectrum and shades of the colors. To their law
nothing can be added. For besides the seven basic colors which offer endless mixtures no others
are imaginable, and just as little can the least thing be added to the three vowels, a, i, u. From
these originate e and o together with all the remaining diphthongs and their formulations into
mere length.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 19–20.
206
Outside the rigorous methodologies of natural science and philology, the Wagner-influenced
French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud – and speaking of vowels in his sonnet Voyelles (1871) –
prophesied that “one day I will tell your latent birth,” [“Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances
latentes.”] and further proposed (after Wagner) that “I have invented the color wheel of vowels!”
which he gives as: “A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I have decided upon the form and
the movement of each consonant and, with instinctive rhythms, I have flattered myself to have
invented a poetic word accessible, one day, to all senses.” Rimbaud’s first comment is taken from
Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters / A Bilingual Edition, trans. Wallace Fowlie
(University of Chicago Press, 2005), 140. The poem: “J’inventai la couleur des voyelles! – A noir,
E blanc, I rouge, O bleu, U vert. – Je réglai la forme et le mouvement de chaque consonne, et,
avec des rythmes instinctifs, je me flattai d’inventer un verbe poétique accessible, un jour ou
l’autre, à tous les sens” is from Rimbaud’s cynical “Une Saison en enfer” in Une Saison en enfer &
Le bateau ivre: A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat, trans. Louise Varèse (Norfolk, CT:
J. Laughlin, 1961), 50.
207
While Wagner only rarely left comments and other marginalia to indicate whether he actually
read the books in his library, he indicated to Karl Gaillard the personal importance to him of
reading: “I plan to idle away the whole of the coming year, i.e. devouring the contents of my
library without producing any work, although I regret to say that I do once again feel the urge to
write something . . . but I intend to resist that urge, by force if necessary, first because there are a
number of new things I should like to learn about, and second because I have come to the
conclusion that if a dramatic work is to possess concentrated significance and originality, it must
be the result of a certain step upwards in an artist’s life and of a certain important period in his
development . . . it takes several years to produce such concentrated maturity.” Wagner to
Gaillard, June 5, 1845, Dresden, in SB 2: 435–36.
328 Vowels, voices, and “original truth”

likeness of the root words,” Wagner’s oft-quoted rationale for Stabreim

maintains:
shows [the sense of language] in a kinship which is not only swiftly seizable by
the sensory organ, but is in truth indwelling also in the sense of the root. / The
sense of a root is the ‘objective’ sensation embodied therein . . . A sensation
such as can vindicate its own expression through the Stabreim of root
words which call instinctively for emphasis is comprehensible to us beyond all
doubt.208

This, in short, was a historically sanctioned methodology for encoding

meaning through sensualized language. Wagner’s radical turn to an artwork
as “immediate physical portrayal . . . the liberation of thought into sensuous-
ness”209 can be seen in media theoretical terms as canceling the distinction
between a spectator’s reflections and physically lived experience, i.e. sound
as immanent meaning. The widespread treatment of vowels as expressing a
kind of physiology of the soul among Vormärz theorists actually gestured
towards a fully objectified poetry, that is, a material channel wherein
listeners are physically connected to phonetic structures at the level of
sensation – a media transmission defined “not by what it means, but by
the difference between meaning and non-meaning, information and
noise.”210 Wagner’s intense and short-lived adoption of Stabreim simply
formed a methodical way of converting Grimm’s vast lists of monosyllabic
root syllables into a more potently communicative German opera. It was in
effect a new way of solving the problems of German melodic expression
discussed in Chapters 1–3.
Though the etymological essentialism in Wagner’s theory was borrowed,
his aspiration to realize its logical premise – that meaning (signification) is
phonetically innate – was new. As we have seen, Grimm felt that modern
poetry was altogether more appealing to modern readers, and Wagner’s
archaisms have tended to be viewed as a flight from reality. In the context of
philological research that drew upon theories of physiological communica-
tion, Wagner’s description of melodic communication may sound more
plausible to us than perhaps it did before:
We . . . are able, through our hearing, to hold that now merely imagined emotion
secure in all its purely melodic manifestation [Kundgebung]: it has become the
property of pure music, and, then made perceptible to the senses by the

208
SSD 4: 131. Cf. PW 2: 269. 209 SSD 3: 46. Cf. PW 1: 73.
210
David Wellbery, “Foreword” to Kittler, Discourse Networks (Stanford University Press,
1990), xiv.
 Musical vowels 329

orchestra’s appropriate expression, it appears to us as the realization in the present

of what the actor has just told us as a mere thing of thought. Such a melody, once
imparted to us by the actor as the outpouring of an emotion, and now expressively
delivered by the orchestra at an instant when the person represented merely
nurses that emotion in his memory – such a melody materializes for us this
personage’s thought.211

Wagner’s claims, however outlandish, rest on an edifice of philological

research, becoming essentially a form of applied linguistics. Instead of
opera as the fixing of melodic shape around language, now there was to be
language as a melodizing of lexical fixity, construed as physiologically
innate. If linguistic paleontology was the “science of . . . dreams,”
Wagner too was a dreamer, albeit one who disparaged the toil of dry
research in favor of tangible poetic urges: “a need [Not], such as the poet
feels when he is driven to impart himself . . . to the senses.”212 Driven by
such urges, it seems the promise of a physical, sensory language came full
circle.

211 212
SSD 4: 184. Cf. PW 2: 328. Emphasis added. SSD 4: 127. Cf. PW 2: 264–65.
 6 Wagner’s material expression

PART 1

Oper und Drama is a crash site. Aesthetic theory and a materialist concern for
the senses converge in a single vision for communication whose contortions of
logic can deter all but the most sympathetic readers. Wagner himself needed
time to recover from drafting it. During five weeks of hydrotherapy at
Albisbrunn, he impressed the salutary effects of ice baths upon Theodor
Uhlig, adding: “it was freakish how theory and abstraction still tortured me
during the first eight days: it was this – like a mental illness, a perpetual
crossfire of abstract art-theoretical thoughts – that I wanted to tell you
about . . . It is gradually disappearing now more and more like gray clouds
from the brain . . . my senses are gradually being satisfied ever more by the
present, and by that which they perceive directly.”1 Wagner’s proto-medical
vocabulary bears traces – aftershocks? – of the collision between idealism and
materialism in his book. We tend not to think of Wagner as a materialist. But
his pronouncements that “all art reaches us exclusively through the definite-
ness of a universally sensory outlook [universell sinnlichen Anschauung],”2 and
that music “can actualize [verwirklichen] thought,” certainly open this door.3
An awareness of our biological frame turns out to be central to Wagner’s
outlook for his melodic material in part 3 of Oper und Drama:
So we call the most perfect unity of artistic form that in which a widest conjuncture
of the phenomena of human life – as content – can impart itself to our feeling
[Gefühl] in so completely intelligible an expression that in all its moments this
content shall completely stimulate, and completely satisfy, our feeling [Gefühl].4

Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Wagner’s use of the word das Gefühl
connotes both feeling and sensation, i.e. both a psychological quality and a
somatic stimulus. As such it reflects a broader parallelism between a metaphy-
sics of musical rapture and a view of music where “sound has no existence but
in the excitement of a quality of the auditory nerve,” which led to the uneasy
dance of speculative philosophy and “hard” natural science in Germany during

1
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, September 30, 1851, Albisbrunn, SB 4: 122.
2
330 SSD 4: 11. Cf. PW 2: 129–30. 3 SSD 4: 184. Cf. PW 2: 329. 4 SSD 4: 202–03. Cf. PW 2: 349.
 The “real” swan 331

the mid-nineteenth century.5 In the context of Wagner reception, we can think

of this accommodation in terms of the aesthetic application of “psychophysics,”
a mid-century scientific orientation defined by its founder, Gustav Fechner, as
“an exact science of the relationships between mind and body.”6 Fechner, an
experimental psychologist, argued in 1851 that mind and body are two aspects
of the same reality, hence mental and physical processes are also “basically the
same” but are interpreted from different, if necessarily simultaneous, perspec-
tives: bodily–organic or mental–psychological. “Try as he will, the scientist
cannot directly perceive even the tiniest bit of psychical phenomena in another
person; yet these processes are perceptible as mental processes, namely as
feelings, sensations, ideas, desires, and so forth, as soon as self-perception
occurs within them.”7 But just as the perceived reality of a circle differs
depending on whether you are inside or outside it, it remains just
as impossible to stand on the plane of a circle and view both the convex and
concave lines, as it is to perceive the dual aspect of human existence.8 Against
this mid-century double vision, the final stage in our journey through
Wagnerian Melodik examines the materialist idea that the effects of Wagner’s
music on listeners could be explained physiologically, and that melodic expres-
sion could be objectified in this way, where categories such as feeling and
meaning become reified as empirical objects. My approach to this centers on a
development, a parallelism, and a metaphor. The development concerns the
burgeoning natural sciences, the parallelism is that between physics and
metaphysics, and the metaphor that unlocks this for a study of melody relates
to water and wave forms. As a way into this territory, let us first reconsider
Lohengrin’s swan as an interface between willful fantasy and empirical reality.

The “real” swan

In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church.
George Bernard Shaw (1898)9

5
Johannes Müller, Elements of Physiology, trans. William Baly (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard,
1843), 588.
6
“eine exacte Lehre von den Beziehungen zwischen Leib und Seele.” Gustav Fechner, Elemente der
Psychophysik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1860), 1: v.
7
Gustav Fechner, Zend-Avesta oder über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits. Vom Standpunkt
der Naturbetrachtung, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Leopold Voß, 1851), 2: 320. Cited in Michael Heidelberger,
Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview, trans.
Cynthia Klohr (University of Pittsburg Press, 2004), 97.
8
Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 1: 2–3.
9
George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite (Kessinger: Whitefish, 2004), 4.
332 Wagner’s material expression

Gaps between the Middle High German epic of Lohengrin recorded by the
Grimm brothers and Wagner’s own libretto highlight a graceful collision
between mythic possibilities and historical images. The swan is either
imaginary or fake; either it carries Lohengrin fully 400 miles in the blink
of an eye and later transcends avian form, or it symbolizes an impossibly
voiceless (i.e. soulless)10 anatomy that metamorphoses between human and
animal as per pantomime and fantasy literature. But in the Grimms’
summary of the late thirteenth-century tale, the journey from Monsalvat
to Brabant is putatively real, i.e. a different class of “miracle.” It takes fully
five days and nights, and the swan even dives its head into the sea to catch a
fish, which it shares with its armored passenger as sustenance for their
journey.11 By speeding up the swan’s passage to an instantaneous act of
envisioning, Wagner rendered it both medieval and modern: either “a
mysterious miracle” or a technological medium that breaks the sound
barrier.12 The perspectival conflict between occult mysticism and empirical
reality, Romantic fantasy and comical prop was the reason Adorno felt
Lohengrin had become “objectively uninterpretable” by the 1940s.13 But his
assumption that the “illusory reproduction” of operatic miracles was truly
“possible at that time,” that audiences were “still able to conceive the spirit
world without any empirical reality, while today it would only be tolerable as
a ‘fact,’” is wide of the mark. In a milestone biography, Hegel and his Era
(1857), Rudolf Haym regarded the 1850s as a period “which has learned to
renounce poetic illusions and Romantic confusions . . . [one that] sees itself
surrounded by unresolved contradictions.”14 His distinctly post-Hegelian
perspective in 1848 meant that the “seams with which Idealism contained us
are now tearing.”15 These contradictions can be seen in an aesthetics of
melody no less than in the socio-political sphere, and in what follows we

10
Friedrich Kittler, in a post-hermeneutic approach to literature, co-opts a group of Romantic
authors to designate the voice as “the one signified, or trademark, of the soul.” See Kittler,
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz (Stanford University
Press, 1990), 70.
11
See “Lohengrin in Brabant,” [ca. 1280] trans. Stewart Spencer, in Lohengrin (London: John
Calder, 1993), 41.
12
“Welch ein seltsam Wunder!” Lohengrin, act 1, scene 2.
13
“Denn der Gehalt . . . ist das geschichtliche Bild . . . Das an sich interpretierbare Werk ist
zugleich . . . das objektiv uninterpretierbare.” Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen
Reproduktion (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2005), 66–7.
14
“In einer Zeit, die den poetischen Illusionen und den romantischen Unklarheiten entsagen
gelernt hat, in einer Zeit, die sich von ungelösten Widersprüchen . . . umringt sieht, giebt es von
hier aus nur Einen Schritt.” Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seiner Zeit: Vorlesungen über Entstehung
und Entwicklung, Wesen und Wert der Hegelschen Philosophie (Berlin: Gaertner, 1857), 466.
15
Haym, “Philosophie,” in Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, ed. J. S. Ersch
and J. G. Gruber, 26 vols. (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Gleditsch, 1846–48), 24: 183–84.
 The “real” swan 333

shall examine some of the tearing seams in detail. (George Steiner’s vener-
able argument that the seventeenth century marks the “great divide” in the
history of tragedy, after which the rationalism of the Enlightenment spelled
the genre’s impossibility, is oddly parallel.)16
Adorno’s postulate of an age of fantasy neglects the scrutiny of “empirical
reality” implicit in the professionalization and growing institutionalization of
the natural sciences during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In
1826, the Berlin anatomist Johannes Müller published On the Comparative
Physiology of Vision in Men and Animals, in which he conceived his law of
specific sense energies. Following his investigations into the nervous system
across multiple species, he established that nerves do not passively conduct
external stimuli, for the same stimulus is perceived differently – as sound,
taste, light etc. – by different sense organs. So all external affects on the optic
nerve produce the sensation of light, for instance. Müller formulated this
principle most clearly in his landmark Handbook of Human Physiology
(1833–40), published as he took up the professorship in anatomy and phys-
iology at Berlin University: “sensation is not the conduction to our conscious-
ness of a quality or circumstance outside our body, but the conduction to our
consciousness of a quality or circumstance of our nerves which has been
caused by an external event.”17 This meant that the mind is not aware of
objects as such, but only the electrical stimulation in the brain conveyed by
sensory nerves. It had radical implications for theories of sentient communi-
cation, latent in Oper und Drama, for it effectively proved that we perceive the
world according to the structure of our nervous system.18 Müller’s more
illustrious students (including Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-
Reymond) cited his rigorous empiricism in dissection and comparative
anatomy as the key to advancing modern understanding: “a skeptical shaking
of everything long since believed in; time-honored problems were assailed
with a boldness of research unheard-of till then.”19 Seven months before
Wagner began his prose sketch for Lohengrin, the Berlin Physical Society was
founded by Gustav Karsten, Bois-Reymond, and E. W. von Brücke. At one of

16
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1961).
17
Johannes Müller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 3rd edn. (Coblenz: Hölscher, 1838), 780.
Cited in Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab (Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. An English translation by
William Baly, otherwise used in this chapter, was published as Elements of Physiology in 1842–43.
18
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 588. See also Olaf Breidbach, “Zur Argumentations- und
Vermittlungsstrategie in Müller’s Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen,” Annals of the History
and Philosophy of Biology 10/2005 (Göttingen: University of Göttingen, 2006), 3–30.
19
Emil du Bois-Reymond, “Gedächtnissrede auf Johannes Müller, gehalten in der Akademie der
Wissenschaften am 8. Juli 1858,” in Estelle du Bois-Reymond (ed.), Reden von Emil du Bois-
Reymond, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Veit, 1912), 2: 215.
334 Wagner’s material expression

the first weekly meetings, members foreswore talk of vital forces in their
practice of physiology, instating instead the pre-eminence of mechanical
and chemical laws.20 It was in effect an elimination from their worldview
of transcendence and fantasy. While it is hard to gauge quite how aware
an educated, concert-going public would have been of these matters, the
advent of public science lectures and accessible, serialized letters on chem-
istry21 and physiology22 would have helped to popularize scientific research
before a curious Bildungsbürgertum, for whom daily telegrams, inoculations,
and train travel only served to galvanize the disseminating process. Adorno’s
belief in the “death of fantasy” much later in the Wilhelmine period conven-
iently supports the intriguing notion of an “uninterpretable” opera for a post-
fantastical age (a diagnosis synchronized with Max Weber’s social process of
Entzauberung);23 but the key point is that it is also in danger of ascribing too
much fantasy to nineteenth-century audiences.
Extrapolating from this, the swan – as an “unresolved contradiction” – is
far from anomalous in Wagner’s oeuvre: he would continue to require
credulity, fantasy, and suspended disbelief in excelsis from his audiences for
the Ring and Parsifal. And yet, Wagner’s definition of a “poetic” (as opposed
to a “Judeo-Christian” or “dogmatic”)24 miracle explains that this phenom-
enon “shuts its own . . . magic within itself, and is in no way taken by the
spectator for a miracle but is apprehended as the most intelligible representa-
tion of reality.”25 His “poetic” miracles, in other words, connote a belief in the
putatively real within an axiology of poetic / Christian, real / unnatural.26
Such tensions are not helped by the fact that the anthropomorphic
Gottfried (swan) in act 3 was originally to have sung a melodic line in
A major (akin to Lohengrin’s Grail Narrative), which would have confirmed
his loss of avian form and instated his true dramatic identity (Example 6.1).27

20
See Timothy Lenoir, Instituting Science (Stanford University Press, 1997), 139ff.
21
Justus Liebig, Chemische Briefe (Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1844); Jacob Moleschott, Der Kreislauf
des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebigs Chemische Briefe (Mainz: Zabern, 1852).
22
Carl Vogt, Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta,
1847); Rudolph Wagner, Physiologische Briefe [1851–52], rpt. (Göttingen: Klatt, 1997).
23
Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917–1919, Politik als Beruf 1919 (Tübingen: Siebeck, 1994),
1–24.
24
These are based, Wagner explains, on a “fundamental negation of understanding” and require
blind belief in divine power because it rips apart “the connection of natural phenomena”; SSD 4:
82. Cf. PW 2: 213.
25
SSD 4: 84. Cf. PW 2: 216.
26
Berthold Hoeckner argues accordingly that while Lohengrin’s arrival in act 1 is supposed to be a
“poetic” miracle in this sense, it actually “has come to represent something entirely real: a true
miracle,” in Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute (Princeton University Press, 2002), 137.
27
This was first recorded by A. Naubert in “Ein bisher ungedrucktes Stückchen Lohengrin,” AmZ 6
(February 10, 1893), 72–73.
 The “real” swan 335

Example 6.1 Gottfried’s original utterance, which Wagner cut from act 3 of Lohengrin.
Translation: Farewell, untamed tide that has carried me so far, / Farewell, pure and
shining waves on which my white feathers have glided. / My dear sister awaits me on the
shore; by me she shall be consoled.

By cutting Gottfried’s only “human” utterance, Wagner curiously marginalized

the amphibious creature as a real character, rendering him all the more fantas-
tical. From the vantage point of the natural sciences, the mute swan-child’s
anatomical impossibility – like that of Max’s ghostly mother in Der Freischütz or
Undine’s water spirit in Undine – forces Lohengrin to rely on technologies of
phantasmagoria or else alienates the audience’s suspended disbelief. Few would
argue that this clash of German empirical science and Romanticism needs any
further explanation; one can no more resolve a collision than anatomize mythic
hybrids. It presents a kind of parallax view of musical aesthetics, where perspec-
tive constantly shifts between two points that cannot be synthesized, much like
the convex and concave lines of Fechner’s circle. To take another simile, fantasy
and empirical science become as opposite sides of an operatic Möbius strip:
perspectives that exist in parallel but never meet.
To what extent did Wagner think of science in this way? Right at the outset of
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, he suggests he was neither ignorant of nor opposed
to the natural sciences, setting out his qualified appreciation of their rigor as
something capable of banishing unwelcome illusions: “The path of [empirical]
science lies from error to knowledge, from appearance to reality, from religion to
nature.”28 The sciences seemed to offer a means of accessing the physical nature
of things (so prized by Feuerbach, Wagner’s dedicatee), but should not be
pursued arrogantly, as an end in themselves. “Life” is infinite vis-à-vis a finite
“knowledge of nature,” he continues, and the greater goal of modern under-
standing will be attained through the unmediated, sensory experience of art:
That alone is true and living which is sentient, and hearkens to the terms of
physicality [Sinnlichkeit] . . . The highest victory of science is . . . the

28
SSD 3: 45. Cf. PW 2: 72.
336 Wagner’s material expression

acknowledgement of the teaching of the senses. / The end of science is the justifying
of the unconscious, the giving of self-consciousness to life, the reinstatement of the
senses in their perceptive rights, . . . As science melts away into recognition of the
ultimate and self-determinate reality, of actual life itself, so this avowal gains its
frankest, most direct expression in art, or rather in the work of art.29

Art thus evinces the process of synthesizing science and life. For Wagner,
the one merges into the other: sentient reality becomes intrinsic, not
incidental, to art, and science completes a circuit with Lohengrin.
But Wagner never entered a laboratory in his life. He once dismissed
Humboldt and Helmholtz as “Schopenhauerian ‘donkeys,’ ” and it remains
unclear to what extent he even knew of Müller’s anatomical work. No wonder,
then, that his knowledge of science has proved a prickly topic: it was publicly
debated in a bad-tempered exchange by Guido Adler and Richard Bakta in
1903, the former dismissing Wagner’s views on science as “irrelevant,” the
latter proclaiming them significant, nuanced, and informed.30 Back in 1851,
Wagner himself was forced to address the matter in a heated altercation with a
Swiss politician, Jakob Sulzer, about the chemical benefits and detriments of
hydrotherapy and alcohol, respectively. Wagner followed up the argument in
writing, wherein he suggested chapters that Sulzer might read,31 and defended
himself against the accusation that he makes claims about things of which he
has no professional knowledge by arguing that: (a) he had read literature by
respected hydrotherapists; and (b) the expectation that he should want first to
study chemistry or even medicine is tantamount to saying he would need to
study theology before being able to justify his views about God, or read Hegel’s
Aesthetics before being able to make artistic assertions.32 This defensive retort
confirms Wagner was not so much interested in the detail of scientific research
as its broader enterprise, and in this (familiar) spirit of dilettantism he certainly
socialized with scientists, receiving the Dutch physiologist Jacob Moleschott in
Zurich and Rome several times over a twenty-year period, and he kept abreast

29
SSD 4: 45. Cf. PW 1: 72–73.
30
Guido Adler, “Richard Wagner und die Wissenschaft,” Neue Freie Presse (May 10, 1903), 12–13,
here 13; Richard Bakta, “Richard Wagner und die Wissenschaft,” Bohemia (May 13, 1903), 17.
A helpful summary of this debate and its context is given in Kevin Karnes, Music Criticsm and the
Challenge of History (Oxford University Press, 2008), 135–43.
31
Wagner procured several books by J. H. Rausse (a pseudonym for the hydrotherapist Heinrich
Friedrich Franke) via Theodor Uhlig from the Royal State Library in Dresden, including:
Beschreibung der Wasserheilanstalt Lehsen bei Wittenburg in Meklenburg (Parchim: Ludwigslust,
1847); Über die gewöhnlichsten ärztlichen Mißgriffe beim Gebrauch des Wassers als Heilmittel.
Nebst einer Abhandlung über die Aufsaugung und Ablagerung der Gifte und Medikamente im
lebenden animalischen Körper und einer Kritik der Kurmethode des Vincenz Prießnitz (Zeitz:
Schieferdecker, 1847). See SB 4: 21–24, 99.
32
Wagner to Jacob Sulzer, Zurich, December 15, 1851, SB 4: 223–25. See also ML 476.
 The “real” swan 337

of technological developments, recommending Theodor Uhlig travel to Zurich

on the “barbaric railway” followed by a steamer: “you’ll get here fastest.”33 As
Gundula Kreuzer reminds us, moreover, Wagner was in close contact with
stage technologists, such as Carl Brandt, in procuring the use of modern
locomotive boilers for producing steam to create fog, vapour, mist, and
smoke effects during the Ring premiere in 1876.34 His staunch opposition to
the ethics of experimental medicine, documented in his open letter against
vivisection, indicates that he was also aware to some degree about research
practices.35 His position was occasionally inconsistent, however. While he
would later label all doctors “vivisectors,” he continued to medicate, taking
prescribed bromine as a sedative.36
The range of meanings in Wagner’s use of das Gefühl, noted above, is a
critical bridge in this context. Eduard Hanslick actually had great sympathy
for Wagner’s qualified embrace of scientific frontiers. While the Viennese
critic urgently distinguished feeling (Gefühl) from sensation (Empfindung)
in the opening sentences of On the Musically Beautiful (1854), he went on to
advocate a “scientific knowledge of things” for his topic, adding that “this
investigation will have to approach the method of the natural sciences, at
least to the point of attempting to get alongside the thing itself and seeking
whatever among our thousandfold flickering impressions and feelings may
be enduring and objective.”37 The concepts of instrumental Klangfarbe and
vocal Lautfarbe can be understood physiologically, as well as aesthetically,
in this sense, and the implication is that composing an opera – which “wills
to become a fully manifest deed, to seize people by their every fiber of
sensation, to invade them,” as Wagner maintained38 – becomes primarily a
manipulation of the nervous system, after Müller:
Once it is established that an integral part of the emotional change produced by music
is physical, it follows that this phenomenon, as encountered in our neural activity,
ought also to be investigated on this, its corporeal side . . . If we trace the pathway
which a melody must follow in order to act upon our state of feeling, we find that it

33
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, Enge/Zurich, June 18, 1851, SB 4: 65.
34
CT (January 25, 1882); see Gundula Kreuzer, “Wagner-Dampf: Steam in Der Ring des
Nibelungen and Operatic Production,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011), 179–218.
35
SSD 10: 194–210. Cf PW 6: 193–210. In writing his open letter, Wagner was reacting to a
request from Ernst von Weber, author of Die Folterkammern der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Voigt, 1879).
36
CT (August 6 and 8, 1880).
37
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. G. Payzant (Indiana: Hackett, 1986), 1. Two recent
studies of Hanslick’s treatise in light of the discourse of materialism, formalism, and idealism during
the 1840s are Barbara Titus, “The quest for spiritualized form: (Re)positioning Eduard Hanslick,”
Acta Musicologica 80 (2008), 67–97; and Mark Burford, “Hanslick’s Idealist Materialism,”
19th-Century Music 30 (2006), 166–81.
38
SSD 9: 291. Cf PW 5: 288.
338 Wagner’s material expression

goes from vibrating instrument to auditory nerve . . . the whole process of tonal
sensation is now physiologically comprehensible . . . Physiology tells us that what
we experience as tone is a molecular motion in neural tissue . . . [T]he basis of every
feeling aroused by music must lie first of all in a particular manner of affecting the
nerves by an auditory impression. But how an excitation of the auditory nerve, which
we cannot even trace to its origins, is perceived as a particular sense quality; how the
bodily impression becomes a mental state; finally, how sensation becomes feeling: All
that lies on the other side of the mysterious divide which no investigator has crossed.39

Melody, defined simultaneously according to the differing epistemologies of

aesthetics and physiology, constitutes a particularly rich nexus during the
1850s, and a discourse network that addresses the way these perspectives
confront one another is traceable, particularly in the debate Hanslick
identifies over how physical sensation “becomes” psychological feeling.
At this point, it is worth taking a general, rather than a specifying, view of
the character of the materialism at hand. One assumption that Hanslick
makes, along with several writers cited in this chapter, is that, when an
individual is affected by art, mental change is always acompanied by
physical change. This follows from Fechner’s argument we encountered
earlier, that mind and body are one entity whose dual aspect is as two sides
of a coin, where change visited upon one side (by pliers, for instance) is also
visited upon the other side. Fechner called this “the basic law of psycho-
physics” where “nothing can exist, develop, or move within the mind,
without there being something in the body that exists, develops, or moves,
whose effects and consequences reach into the present and future physical
world. In short: all that is mental is borne by or expessed in something
physical and by this means has physical effects and consequences.”40 The
key question for materialists, and particularly – for our purposes – those
interested in sound, was whether purely somatic stimuli could cause or
evoke particular mental states or feelings, whether this is potentially what
Fechner meant by psychological activity “borne by” physical effect.41

39
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 53–56.
40
“Das allgemeinste Gesetz ist dieses: daß nichts im Geiste bestehen, entstehen, gehen kann, ohne
daß etwas im Körper mit besteht, entsteht, geht, was seine Wirkungen und Folgen in den
Umkreis und die Zukunft der Körperwelt hinein erstreckt. Man kann es kurz so ausdrücken, daß
alles Geistige seinen Träger oder Ausdruck in etwas Körperlichem und hierdurch seine weiteren
Wirkungen und Folgen im körperlichen hat.” Fechner, Ueber die Seelenfrage. Ein Gang durch die
sichtbare Welt, um die unsichtbare zu finden (Leipzig: C. F. Amelang, 1861), 221. Translation
modified from Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 98.
41
James Kennaway has investigated the historical claim that musical sounds have physical effects
that are noxious, serving as a pathogen, and can induce actual illness in its listeners, where heart
attack, arousal-related arhythmia, musico–genetic epilepsy, and musical hallucinations
 The “real” swan 339

Extrapolating to Wagner, could the sensory experience of music drama

bypass the mental deliberation of audience members completely in the
creation of a meaningful artistic experience? Philosophically, the crux of
the matter is whether qualities of sensation can be equated with semiotic
units of communication that are not arbitrary (unlike Saussure’s linguistic
sign).42 Fechner thought not. As Michael Heidelberger points out, Fechner’s
law is asymmetrical; while mental change brings about physical change in
an individual, “the reverse is not necessarily true.”43 Commentators on
Wagner’s music, freed from the rigorous constraints of empirical science,
were less cautious, as we shall see.
Hitherto we have considered how Wagner escaped the imbroglio of
nineteenth-century melodic theory by sublimating normative melody to
language, which – based on his adopted philological ideas – he believed
could encode an intuitive emotional content sensualized into sound,
thereby bypassing an audience’s need for verbal comprehension. The imma-
nent specificity of this emotional content was to be harnessed etymologi-
cally through the “physiognomic resemblance” of speech roots in Stabreim.
As we have seen, prominent philologists even argued that the emotion-
bearing vowels therein operated at a pre-linguistic level in the “soul,”
expressing inherent human qualities. As fanciful as this may sound, the
principles on which such a vocal-melodic strategy was based were derived
from bona fide research. The dream espoused by such research, in short, was
precisely the establishment of a science of feeling.
This is the implied knowledge guiding our final chapter, which inter-
weaves mid-century discourses of philology, medical physiology, and
Wagner’s melodic theory in Oper und Drama. I script a historical dialogue
about German culture between contemporary voices in which Wagner is
merely a participant. The broader horizon informing this historical topic,
though, is a more recent turn towards “materialities of communication” in
academic discourse. At its most basic, this is a critique of infinitely reflexive
theorizing that, on the one hand, warns of “the risk implied in the boundless
abstraction of losing contact with the concrete and sensual dimensions of
our experience” in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s words44 and, on the other,
predicts the demise of philosophical questions – the mind’s never-ending

constitute “a number of ways in which music can have a malign impact on the health of listeners
and performers.” See Kennaway, Bad Vibrations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 5.
42
See Christopher Hill’s study of the semantic properties of sensations and “sensation concepts” in
Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 159ff.
43
Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 98.
44
See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of Communication,
trans. William Whobrey (Stanford University Press, 1994).
340 Wagner’s material expression

deferral of concrete answers – by scheduling the explosion of the sun in

4.5 billion years: “death of the sun is a death of mind, because it is the death
of death as the life of the mind,” Jean-François Lyotard taunts: “there’s no
sublation or deferral if nothing survives.”45 The mid-nineteenth-century
knowledge that sound is material, that the body is, at one level, a receptacle
of sound waves, and the suspicion that the sensation of listening is merely
the final stage in a transmission determined by physical laws becomes a
historical “materiality” of communication, in this sense.

The human “language machine”46

“Mine is a different kind of organism,” Wagner protested to Eliza Willa, a

novelist near Zurich who reported his private words of frustration in 1864;
“I have sensitive nerves, I must have beauty, radiance and light . . . I can’t
live the miserable life of an organist like your Master Bach!”47 The necessity
of sentient fulfillment in Wagner’s hedonistic complaint points – among
other things – to his presupposition of corporeality, a pathos of the body
and its sufferance. Wagner’s sensitivity to nervous stimulation was personal:
in pleasure, he notoriously sought out reams of richly colored silk from his
milliners for lining the walls of his Penzing villa and for making clothes,
stuffing his slippers and satin garments with cotton to keep warm, while
lining his boots with fur. “Wagner loved everything soft,” one supplier
reported.48 And in pain, he suffered from a lifelong allergy to wool
(which caused blotches on his skin),49 and from various bowel problems
since his late 20s – his constipation meant he was living in real discomfort
for a time in 1851: “I am very annoyed: my haemorrhoids are wreaking
havoc in my body.”50 Such bodily fragility puts Wagner’s assertions about
the sensory perception of art in a more immediate context. It was an
altogether different kind of “meaning” – but equally physical. If musical
philologists sought to probe the objective content of melodicized speech–
sounds, it is a small step to consider the extent to which materialist and

45
Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought go on without a Body?” in Posthumanism, ed.
Neil Badmington (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 129–40, here 130.
46
“Die sprachmachine,” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 57.
47
Cited in Spencer, Wagner Remembered, 157.
48
Ludwig Karpath, Zu den Briefen Richard Wagners an eine Putzmacherin: Unterredungen mit
der Putzmacherin Berta (Berlin, 1906), 22.
49
See Wagner to Minna Wagner, October 12 and 17, 1851, Zurich, SB 4: 132–33, 134–35.
50
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, Zurich, October 19, 1851, SB 4: 137. See also Chris Walton,
Richard Wagner’s Zurich: The Muse of Place (Woodbridge; Camden House, 2007), 95ff.
 The human “language machine” 341

musical writers believed meaning could be physiologically fixed in sound,

that is, corporeal, or: beautiful, radiant and light.
Etymological essentialism enabled Wagner’s assumption that speech roots
embodied an “objective sensation.” But was there an assumed reciprocal
relation in language between vocal physiology and historical thought embod-
ied physiognomically in its roots? Since a root syllable can be traced to its
rawest, most “expressive” form, and this divulges a physiologically specific
sound, the suspicion arose that an ahistoric sound in the present could be
connected to an equally expressive designation, i.e. root syllables may not only
be expressive because of their historical etymology but also by virtue of their
innate physiognomy (as Wagner seemed to imply). Jacob Grimm thought that
the a, i, u vowels are primal, innately human sounds precisely because they
“are conditioned by the organs of our body, either forced out of a full chest and
throat or produced with the help of the palate, the tongue, teeth, and lips.”51 So
physiologically comprehensible are the conditions under which these sounds
are produced, he continued, that they could reasonably be imitated, indeed
plausibly produced by synthetic mechanical devices.52
Eighteenth-century speaking machines (notably that of Wolfgang von
Kempelen from 1780) had already changed the perception of voice from an
organic unity to a technical assemblage.53 This became a reciprocal pattern,
for beyond the attraction of curious automata, the possibility of mechanical
speech now reformulated language’s self-conception for modern philology.
Grimm says that:
[t]he natural basis of sound . . . is nothing but an instrument upon which language is
played . . . The instrument itself is indeed more attractive to the physiologist; its
playing however attracts the philologist . . . The language machine . . . developed from
the idea of imitating human language less in the thought than in the sound of words.
In a physiological sense it seeks to get beyond the mechanism of the basic sounds.54

51
“Diese urlaute sind uns angeboren, da sie durch organe unseres leibs bedingt entweder aus voller
brust und kehle gestoßen und gehaucht, oder mit hilfe des gaumens, der zunge, zähne und lippen
hervorgebracht werden.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 20.
52
“Einige ihrer bedingungen sind auch so greif- oder faßbar, daß es nicht völlig mißlingen konnte,
sie durch künstliche mechanische vorrichtungen bis auf einen gewissen grad nachzuahmen und
scheinbar darzustellen.” Ibid.
53
For a detailed history of technological mimicry of the voice before the phonograph, see Hankins
and Silverman, “Vox Mechana: The History of Speaking Machines,” in Instruments and the
Imagination (Princeton University Press, 1995), 178–220.
54
“Die natürliche lautgrundlage . . . ist nichts als das instrument, auf dem die sprache gespielt
wird . . . Den physiologen wird doch mehr das instrument selbst, den philologen das spiel darauf
anziehen . . . Die sprachmachine . . . ging davon aus die menschensprache weniger im gedanken
als im wortschall nachzuahmen und physiologisch hinter den mechanismus der grundlaute zu
kommen.” Grimm, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 22, 57.
342 Wagner’s material expression

The significance of this viewpoint is that a colorful continuum of vowel

gradations, whose primal etymology assured Wagner of their intuitively
comprehensible sound, had now seemingly developed a physiological basis.
The intellectual current that led Wagner to believe in the “physiognomic”
properties of root syllables was almost certainly driven by comparative
anatomy. Its driving force was Müller, mentioned earlier, who knew
Grimm personally (he once sought advice from the philologist on naming
the mass of micro-organisms welling around in sea water: together they
decided on “ocean swelling” [pelagischer Auftrieb]; the modern term is
plankton).55 Müller’s wide-ranging Handbook of Human Physiology
became the leading textbook in physiology for much of the nineteenth
century,56 and included a section on vocal production in humans and
animals. Its opening sentence announces that:
the sounds of the voice and speech are [the] . . . result of . . . the vibrations of a peculiar
apparatus which may be compared to a musical instrument: the tension of the instru-
ment necessary for the product of sound, and the height and succession of tones, are . . .
determined by the contraction of muscles, the physiology of the voice and speech.57

That is unequivocal materialism. The so-called aesthetics of singing, of

speech, of regional accent and its identifying Klangfarbe is reified and its
quantifiable physiological basis revealed.58
In one of his final physiological investigations, On the Compensation of
Physical Forces in the Human Voicebox (1839), Müller used a severed head, and
his wife’s piano, to study the way that the human larynx produces particular
tones.59 “One is amazed that the means we admire in the modulation of the
singer can be accounted for physically to such an extent,” he remarked after
calculating the range of ways to manipulate pitch and timbre by applying
graded forces to regions of the vocal cords, larynx, epiglottis, laryngeal ven-
tricle, membranous walls, and even thyroid cartilage.60 “The head of a cadaver
is severed in such a way that the whole hangs on a small area of the trachea”

55
See Otis, Müller’s Lab, 38.
56
See Brigitte Lohff, “Johannes Müllers Rezeption der Zellenlehre in seinem Handbuch der
Physiologie des Menschen,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 13 (1978), 247–58, here 247.
57
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 637.
58
At a push, we might even interpret Hans Sachs’ observation that “The bird that sang today / has a
well-formed beak” in this context as a commentary on the physiological conditioning of a
good singer. [“Das merkt’ ich ganz besonders. / Dem Vogel, der heut’ sang, / dem war der
Schnabel hold gewachsen.”] Hans Sachs in act 2 of Die Meistersinger.
59
Müller, Über die Compensation der physischen Kräfte am menschlichen Stimmorgan (Berlin:
A. Hirschwald, 1839), 5–37.
60
“Man erstaunt, dass die Mittel, welche wir in der Modulation der Sänger bewundern, bis so weit
sich physikalisch am Stimmorgan nachweisen lassen.” Ibid., 32.
 The human “language machine” 343

6.1 Johannes Müller’s illustration of the manipulation of a human cadaver to produce

artificial tones. From Müller, Über die Compensation der physischen Kräfte am
menschlichen Stimmorgan (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1839), figure 12.

(Figure 6.1), he continues, and “by moving the lips we can even proceed to
forming a few consonants, M and W are very easy, as are the vowels U and A
through the requisite modifications of the opening of the mouth.”61

61
“Bei Bewegung der Lippen kann man selbst zur Bildung einiger Consonanten schreiten, M und
W gelingen sehr leicht, auch die Vocale U und A durch die nöthigen Veränderungen der
Mundöffnung.” Ibid., 34.
344 Wagner’s material expression

Intriguingly, this morbid ventriloquism transcended its artificiality by

extending the range of male voices considerably compared to living sing-
ers (reaching d]3 in one experiment). Turning to animals, by contrast,
Müller asserts a fully physical prosopopeia: “if air is blown into the
bronchi of a duck, a sound exactly similar to the natural cry of the bird
is produced; the same result is obtained by blowing into the trachea of the
duck or goose, even when the bronchi have been cut away.”62 His experi-
ments on the throats of songbirds likewise offered a physical explanation
for what causes and generates their characteristic singing at a consistent
pitch.63 Literary fiction was also on the brink of a material voice, and a year
before Wagner had dramatized a singing contest in Tannhäuser, Hans
Christian Andersen had pitted two nightingales against each other, a
bejeweled, mechanical automaton and a biologically ensouled creature,
where “everyone agreed that [the mechanical bird’s] song was just as
beautiful as the real nightingale.”64 This tale was allegedly inspired by
soprano Jenny Lind – the “Swedish Nightingale” – and Müller’s research
led Grimm to ask whether similar dissections of the cultivated throats of
human singers might furnish signs of their more developed singing ability,
adding: “to ask a still stronger question, would the anatomist succeed in
exhibiting pertinent external traces in the speech organs of those people
who used decidedly harsh gutturals, or who have, like the Slavs, used
strong sibilant combinations.”65
Müller’s work implied this possibility, and Grimm’s skepticism on the
matter was not shared by physiologist Otto Ule, whose 1852 article “The
Voice as Inner Expression” argued contrariwise that the Klangfarbe of a
human voice was exclusively physiologically determined:
The sound of a voice, as with musical instruments, is determined especially by the
toughness of the larynx cartilage. This is flexible and soft in children and women; it
is hard and often almost ossified in men and many women whose voices sound
manly. Mouth, pharynx and nasal passage, ultimately the resonance cavities of the
human voice, palate, teeth, tongue and lips form – by their multifarious position and

62
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 2: 1040. 63 Ibid., 2: 703.
64
Hans Christian Andersen, “The Nightingale” [1844], The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans.
and ed. Erik Christian Haugaard (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 208.
65
“oder um noch stärkeres zu fragen, ob es dem anatom gelänge, in den sprachorganen solcher
völker, die entschieden harter guttural pflegen oder wie die Slaven schwere
zischlautverbindungen eingeübt haben, äußere spuren davon aufzuweisen.” Grimm, Über den
Ursprung der Sprache, 21.
 The human “language machine” 345

movement – the tones of those particular sounds from which human language is put
together.66

Ule is explicit, and the title of his article essentially rewords Wagner’s
assertion that “true melody is . . . itself the utterance of an inner organism.”67
Thus, material sound or the esteemed physiognomic properties of monosyl-
labic roots in Wagner’s Melodik were understood by some as belonging to the
world of objects, the human corpus. This was an uncomfortable conclusion
for idealists such as Wagner, and even today, post-Lacanian commentators
continue to rebuff the demystifying aspirations of vocal physiology: “an
unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from ‘its’ voice,” Slavoj
Žižek retorts. “The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs
to the body we see . . . it is as if the speaker’s voice hollows him out and in a
sense speaks ‘by itself’ through him.”68 Such comments remind us that the
drive to examine and speculate on the material aperture of vocalic production
expressed nothing but the deepest desire of mid-century scientists like Ule,
namely to establish a pure physics of vocal–emotional content.
The ambiguous category of “feeling” had long been at the center of a debate
over music expression. While for Wagner, “feeling grasps nothing but the actual
[das Wirkliche], what is physically enacted, perceivable by the senses,”69 the
deterministic imperative is perhaps most evident in Herbert Spencer’s argu-
ment that “all feelings – pleasurable or painful, sensations or emotions – . . . are
muscular stimuli.”70 Based on Müller’s dictum that muscles can only respond
to stimuli by contracting, Spencer argues the principle governing all production
of and response to music is nothing but a kind of motor reflex action. (Darwin
initially endorsed this view a year before publishing On the Origin of Species,
though came to doubt it a decade later.71) Since, for Spencer, “all music is
originally vocal,” he applies this biological reductionism to the singing voice

66
“Der Klang der Stimme aber wird, ähnlich wie bei musikalischen Instrumenten, besonders
durch die Härte der Kehlkopfknorpel bestimmt. Bei Kindern und Frauen sind diese Knorpel
biegsam und weich, bei Männer und vielen Frauen, deren Stimme männlich klingt, hart und oft
fast verknöchert. Mund-, Rachen-, und Nasenhöhle endlich die Resonanz-höhlen der
menschlichen Stimme, Gaumen, Zähne, Zunge und Lippen bilden die Töne durch ihre
mannifaltige Stellung und Bewegung zu jenen bestimmten Lauten, aus denen die menschliche
Sprache sich zusammensetzt.” Otto Ule, “Die Stimme als Ausdruck des Innern,” Die Natur 30
(July 24, 1852), 233–36, here 235.
67
SSD 3: 314. Cf. PW 2: 108. 68 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 58.
69
SSD 4: 69. Cf PW 2: 198. 70 Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” 403.
71
Drawin’s tentative support reads: “Your article on Music has also interested me much, for I
had often thought on the subject & had come to nearly the same conclusion with you, though
unable to support the notion in any detail. Furthermore . . . I most entirely agree with you that all
expression has some biological meaning.” Charles Darwin to Herbert Spencer, November 25,
1858, Kent, see Darwin Correspondence Project: www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/
346 Wagner’s material expression

in particular, thereby establishing a basis on which Wagner’s theory of “speech

itself as the indispensable basis of a perfect artistic expression”72 finds a
materialist rationale and endorsement. As with Müller’s cadaver and
Andersen’s nightingale, Spencer describes the voice as a mechanism for expres-
sion voided of mystery:
All vocal sounds are produced by the agency of certain muscles. These muscles, in
common with those of the body at large, are excited to contraction by pleasurable
and painful feelings. And therefore it is that feelings demonstrate themselves in
sounds as well as in movements . . . The muscles that move the chest, larynx, and
vocal cords, contracting like other muscles in proportion to the intensity of the
feelings; every different contraction of these muscles involving, as it does, a different
adjustment of the vocal organs; every different adjustment of the vocal organs
causing a change in the sound emitted; – it follows that variations of voice are the
physiological results of variations of feeling. It follows that each inflection or
modulation is the natural outcome of some passing emotion or sensation; and it
follows that the explanation of all kinds of vocal expression must be sought in this
general relation between mental and muscular excitements.73
In this reading, vocal composition required less a music-theoretical, more an
anatomical–biological knowledge. Indicating his distaste for such trends,
Wagner had rejected the inference in 1849 that “life itself could be made
dependent upon scientific speculation,”74 and in any case, most writers were
far more skeptical than Spencer about a directly causal connection between
sensation and feeling. Hanslick said we “know nothing” about it,75 while Müller
observed that entirely different groups of facial nerve fibers are excited accord-
ing to the kind of feeling aroused, but confessed: “Of the cause of this we are
quite ignorant.”76 The unavoidable deduction in Spencer’s account of music,
however, was a redefinition of expression, one recognized by Friedrich von
Hausegger – a Wagnerite – in his tome on the subject for the Bayreuther Blätter:
“Bodily motion or utterance of speech sounds, in which an emotional state
[Gemüthszustand] becomes recognizable to others, is called expression.”77

calendar/entry-2373.html. But he later qualifies: “The cause of widely different sounds being
uttered under different emotions and sensations is a very obscure subject. . . . [Spencer’s]
explanation appears to me too general and vague to throw much light on the various differences
[of potential vocal expression], with the exception of that of loudness, between ordinary
emotional speech, or singing.” See Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
[1872], ed. Joe Cain and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2009), 86–87.
72
SSD 4: 210. Cf. PW 2: 357. 73 Spencer, “The Origin and Function of Music,” 403–04.
74
SSD 3: 46. Cf. PW 1: 74. 75 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 56.
76
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 2: 934
77
“Eine Köperbewegung oder Lautäusserung, in welcher ein Gemüthszustand Anderer erkennbar
wird, heisst Ausdruck,” in Friedrich von Hausegger, “Die Musik als Ausdruck,” Bayreuther
Blätter 2 (1884), 37.
 The human “language machine” 347

6.2 The emblem for Otto Ule’s journal Die Natur (1852).

Nietzsche agreed, judging four years later that “one never communicates
thoughts, one communicates movements, mimics signs, which we then trace
back to thoughts.”78 In other words, immaterial feeling, like immaterial sound,
no longer existed for music by 1884. Communication was physical. To what
extent, though, can this verdict be seen earlier in the century in the wake of Oper
und Drama?
Ule’s article from 1852, whose premise would be applied to vocal music
by Spencer, appeared in the newly founded journal for natural sciences,
Nature: Journal for the Dissemination of Knowledge about the Natural
Sciences and an Outlook on Nature for Readers of all Levels.79 The identify-
ing emblem for each issue aptly captures the extraordinary impact of the
new way of thinking (Figure 6.2). It showed a volcano eruption throwing up
clouds of ash and stardust, amid leaves, fruit, and branches, all of which – in
addition to depicting a “mysterious” natural phenomenon – neatly allego-
rized the stunning power of the epistemological shift that had occurred in
this field, even if it did not exactly interlock with the metaphor Ule used for
this shift in his standpoint article: “to illuminate the darkness of our present,
that is the first task of the natural sciences.”80

78
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York: Vintage Books, 1968), 428.
79
“Die Natur: Zeitung zur Verbreitung naturwissenschaftlicher Kenntniß und Naturanschauung
für Leser aller Stände.” See Figure 6.2.
80
“Das Dunkel der Gegenwart zu erleuchten, das ist die erste Aufgabe der Naturwissenschaft” in
Otto Ule, “Die Aufgabe der Naturwissenschaft,” Die Natur 1 (January 3, 1852), 2.
348 Wagner’s material expression

In this shift, our bodies had not exactly been reduced to an arbitrary bio-
logical machine.81 Whereas speech sounds were innate, language was not. Back
in 1837, August Kahlert was clear in his definition of poetry (Dichtkunst with a
d) that disembodied thought preceded utterance, where speech was a sensual
embodiment of thought, and thought itself was boundless, requiring words as
mere tools.82 Ule likewise dislocated and isolated the word, though from feeling
rather than thought: “[it] has nothing to do with feelings, and if it is a child of
feeling, then it was born after the death of its father.”83 Wagner’s Versmelodie,
however, was predicated precisely on a healing of these dislocated elements. His
concept of sound that is intuitively comprehensible by our feeling as the basis
for poetry (Dichtkunst with a t) posited words as sensuous units that were
bidden by feeling (das Gefühlsnothwendige). This aspiration elevated sense and
sensation to the exclusion of intellect and ideation, where the poet’s task is to
“impart his subject unconditionally to the feeling [Gefühl] and nothing else,”84
which required the melodicization of anaphoric, alliterative speech, as we saw
in Chapter 5. The question as to whether this was manifest physically touches
on a much broader psychophysical discourse of the age: the “one ancient
riddle” as Hanslick put it. “How the body is connected to the soul.”85

Musical monism qua science of feeling

If the eyes reveal one’s inner soul, melody, correspondingly, is “the most
perfect expression of the inner being of music.”86 Wagner’s loose equation
was old fashioned for 1851 – melody as the tangible point of access to
music’s “soul.” Yet for all his wielding of scalpels, Müller too argued that
the organizing unity of each animal he dissected was dependent on their
81
La Mettrie’s Enlightenment conception of man as “a self-winding . . . immense clock” was not
mentioned in the discourse, but by the mid-nineteenth century technological innovation in
steam and understanding of thermodynamics gave credence to the metaphor. Helmholtz, for
instance, declared in 1854 that “the animal body . . . does not differ from the steam engine as
regards the manner in which it obtains heat and force, but . . . in the manner in which the force
gained is to be made use of.” See Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 37; see also Julien Offray de La
Mettrie, L’homme machine [1748], trans. Richard Watson and Maya Rybalka as Man a Machine
(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), 32, 70.
82
“Die Kunst insofern sie zur Lösung ihrer Aufgabe das Schöne hervorzubringen, sich der Sprache
als ihrem Mittel, und insofern die Sprache wieder die sinnliche Erscheinung unseres Denkens
ist, sich unserer Begriffe und Gefühle als ihrem Stoffe bedient, heißt die Dichtkunst . . . Das Reich
der Dichtkunst ist . . . das unermeßliche des Gedankens, nur ihr Werkzeug ist das Wort.”
August Kahlert, “Das musikalische Element in der Sprache,” NZfM 46 (June 9, 1837), 183.
83
“Das Wort hat mit dem Gefühle nichts zu schaffen, und wenn es ein Kind des Gefühls ist, so ward
es nach dem Tode seines Vaters geboren.” Ule, “Die Stimme als Ausdruck des Innern,” 233.
84
SSD 4: 119. Cf. PW 2: 256. 85 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 56.
86
SSD 3: 309. Cf. PW 2: 104.
 Musical monism qua science of feeling 349

soul.87 This disembodied object presented a challenge to mid-century

physiologists. Did the profound feelings traditionally ascribed to it have
an anatomical basis or not? Ule describes the “mechanism” of muscular
movement that determines speech sounds with materialist relish,88 yet
proceeds to modify, rather than sever, a connection between “soul” and
“sense.” His premise is that voice is the externalized utterance of inward-
ness, but even for the physical scientist, this inwardness (“feeling”) remains
mysterious and explicable only by conceit.89 For metaphysicians, the ques-
tion was too important to permit such evasiveness, however. The Leipzig
polymath Rudolf Hermann Lotze was well placed to tackle the problem,
having gained a medical degree alongside his philosophy dissertation on
Descartes and Leibniz. The fruits of his dual studies were published a year
after Oper und Drama, as Medical Psychology: Physiology of the Soul (1852),
an extensive treatise that sought to unravel the mystery of how to heal
philosophy’s Cartesian divide. Accordingly, he explained how material
stimuli leading to “feelings” can possibly be linked to a disembodied soul:
Admittedly an immaterial substance, lacking any dimensions, cannot fill a stretch of
space; nothing prevents it from occupying a particular place within [this space],
however, from which adjacent particles of matter are set in motion directly by its
force, and right up to which every excitation from external nature must travel
[fortpflanzen] in order to have any effect on it at all.90

This dislocation gave rise to another. Lotze dismisses the idea that the failure
to explain reciprocal actions of soul and body is an “inconvenient exception,”91
arguing – after Müller’s law – that our intuitions of sense are not to be identified
with the real qualities as they are physically propagated: “The sensations of
color tells nothing of the ether’s oscillations, the tone nothing of the air’s
vibrations; both sensations betray nothing about the form of neural stimulation

87
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 32.
88
“Der Laut ist das Erzeugnis einer Muskelbewegung, die einem Mechanismus in Bewegung setzt,
durch den früh und spät unwillkürlich, was uns bewegt, Lust und Unlust, wie sie an der Seele
vorüberzieht, zur lauten Aeußerung wird.” Ule, “Die Stimme als Ausdruck des Innern,” 234.
89
“Die Stimme ist der Laut des Innern, ist ein Ausdruck des Gefühls.” Ibid., 233.
90
“Eine immaterielle Substanz, aller Ausdehnung entbehrend, kann freilich nicht eine gewisse Strecke
des Raums erfüllen, aber Nichts hindert, dass sie einen bestimmten Ort in ihm habe, von welchem
aus ihre Kraft unmittelbar die benachbarten Theilchen der Materie in Bewegung setzt, und bis zu
welchem hin, um überhaupt zu Einwirkung auf sie zu gelangen, alle aus der äussern Natur
stammenden Erregungen sich fortpflanzen müssen.” Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie: Physiologie
der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), 115–16. The question of whether forces can act over a distance
across cells (implicitly modeled on Michael Faraday’s principle of a magnetic field) was vigorously
debated among anatomists during the 1840s–50s. See Otis, Networking, 53ff.
91
Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Outlines of Psychology [1881], trans. George T. Ladd (Boston: Ginn &
Company, 1886), 98.
350 Wagner’s material expression

by which they arise.”92 As he later put it: “they are consequences, not copies of
their stimuli. Thus they are internal phenomena in the soul.”93 By uncoupling
the essence from the effects of sensation, Lotze was able to declare that sense
stimuli are “no doubt only motions” and create the property of a given
sensation in the soul without actually conveying any material substance to it:
All the intuitions of sense, which at first appear to set before us with exactness what
is in itself real, are merely secondary phenomena in which the results of the
reciprocal actions of elements, in themselves wholly supersensible, reach our per-
ception. / Accordingly it is not the conception of immaterial, but that of material
being, which is to be scrupled at; and the gap does not exist, which appears to us at
first to separate body and soul as two perfectly heterogeneous elements, and to
render their reciprocal action impossible.94

This delicately balanced view from 1881 was not limited to the university elite
(Wagner, for his part, used telling turns of phrase such as “all the nerves of my
soul”).95 The concept of soul as a disembodied object was also consistent
across Lotze’s writings: “like sensations, feelings are not mappings of the
processes, whose consequences they are,” he concluded as early as 1852.96
This willful embrace of paradox can be identified with what Andreas Daum
has termed “strategies for enchantment” in the discourse of nineteenth-century
science, for it presents a counternarrative to the view of man’s desacralization
as a linear process against the rise of atheistic materialist thought and the rapid
growth and popularization of science education alongside industrial pro-
gress.97 Yet it also promoted a split worldview. The contemporary historian
Friedrich Lange dubbed this Germany’s “materialist controversy,” adding that:

[t]he old creative impulse will not rest … Germany is the only country in the world
where the apothecary cannot make up a prescription without being conscious of the
relation of his activity to the constitution of the universe . . . Outside the daily habit of

92
“Die Farbenempfindung erzählt nichts von Oscillationen des Aethers, der Ton nichts von
Luftschwingungen, beide Empfindungen verrathen nichts über die Form der Nervenerregungen,
durch sie die entstehen.” Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, 235–36.
93
Lotze, Metaphysic in Three Books, trans. B. Bosanquet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), 255.
94
Lotze, Outlines of Psychology, 103–04.
95
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, July 27, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 364.
96
“Wie die Empfindungen, so sind auch die Gefühle keine Abbildungen der Processe, deren Folgen
sie sind.” Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, 236.
97
Andreas Daum, “Science, Politics, and Religion: Humboldtian Thinking and the
Transformation of Civil Society in Germany, 1830–1870,” Osiris 17 (2002), 116. This strategy
is ongoing in many respects; see also George Levine’s recent attempt to dispel the notion
that “disenchantment” is the only possible outcome of Darwinian thought, in Darwin Loves
You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton University Press,
2006), 7ff.
 Musical monism qua science of feeling 351

labor and experiment, there lies still an infinite realm, to wander through which refreshes
the mind and ennobles the soul.98
Within musical discourse, this cognizance of scientific law in tandem with
traditional metaphysics tended to promote speculation more than empirical
investigation. The only New German writer with documented expertise in the
natural sciences was Richard Pohl – a powerfully articulate essayist – who
anonymously authored eight “Acoustic Letters” in the Neue Zeitschrift during
1852–53, the first of which declared its aim to “explain the necessity of an
ordered connection between natural phenomenon and mental activity
[Geistigthätigkeit] in the context of music, as the most sensory and unmedi-
ated of all the arts, even if it will not be possible accurately to pursue this
connection itself.”99 The most pregnant connection for Wagnerian aesthetics
concerned the voice and emotion (or: speech and melody), which – as we saw
in Chapter 4 – was treated most analytically from within Wagner’s circle by
Louis Köhler. His expressly “dark and distant aim” pivots between the
psychological and physiological in seeking to “find the natural basis of a
way of feeling that lies very deep in people’s minds, but is only recognized, not
explained.”100 In nuce, his discussion aims to pinpoint the effects of feeling on
vocal sound production. But predictably inadequate scientific knowledge led
him, like Pohl, to defer the potential of establishing a science of feeling, that is,
the ability to quantify the production of emotion: “psychologists and phys-
icists should, along with mathematicians and philologists, go hand in hand
with the composer and poet, then progress of a considerable kind could be
made.”101 Despite his admiration for Wagner, Köhler must have known the
composer was inadequate to all of these professions; his call to arms therefore
reaches out unequivocally through his treatise (and, by implication, its model:
Oper und Drama) to qualified voices within the broader scientific discourse.
But such cautious indecision from Pohl and Köhler was mirrored even by
trained scientists such as Ule, who was also attempting to quantify vocal

98
Lange, History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance, 263–64.
99
“Dennoch ist der letzte Zweck dieser Briefe gerade der, die Nothwendigkeit eines gesetzlichen
Zusammenhangs zwischen Naturerscheinung und Geistesthätigkeit in Bezug auf die Musik – als
der sinnlichsten und unmittelbarsten unter den Künsten – darzulegen, wenn gleich es nicht
möglich sein wird, diesen Zusammenhang selbst genau verfolgen zu können.” Richard Pohl,
“Akustische Briefe: Erster Brief,” NZfM 1 (July 2, 1852), 3.
100
“Sollte hierin nicht ein Schritt weiter erkannt werden dürfen zu dem so fernen, dunkeln Ziele,
Geheimes offenbar werden zu sehen, den Naturgrund einer Fühlsweise zu finden, die so tief im
Menschengemüthe liegt, und doch anerkannt, nicht erklärt war?” in Köhler, Die Melodie der
Sprache in ihrer Anwendung besonders auf das Lied und die Oper (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1853), 83.
101
“Die Psychologen und Physiker sollten, wie auch die Mathematiker und Philologen, Hand in
Hand mit dem Dichter in Ton und Wort gehen, dann könnte ein Fortschritt erheblicher Art
werden.” Ibid.
352 Wagner’s material expression

expression as a function of feeling. Without elucidating a physics of cause

and effect, stimulus and sensation, Ule posits just such a mechanism in the
soul, which – problematically – was the very seat of untouchable being. In
speculating, however, his incomplete, partial materialism indicates the
relative powerlessness of this approach in 1852 when confronting the
paradox of soul and its “connection” with inanimate, dissected muscle
tissue:

Deep in the soul a second, murkier order often draws behind a veil of transparent
thoughts, which is conveyed to us only by a dark feeling. These are moods of the
spirit . . . everyone feels them in himself without being able to explain them . . .
Feeling connects thoughts into a unity, it is the surging sea on which thought – like a
sailing ship – emerges and submerges. But the waves of feeling strike the shore and
alter its forms. Mime and gesture spontaneously accompany those stirrings of inner
life, and the voice is the reverberation of the breaking waves.
Mime and speech sound are based not on agreement, but on natural compulsion.
They are movements, contractions of individual parts of our multi-structured
muscle apparatus . . . finally we try intentionally to produce the signals and speech
sounds that we have learned as forms of certain feelings in order to share them with
others. Thus speech sound becomes word, becomes language. But the word is again
inferior to thought, and muscle movements rarely reach such a degree of freedom
and ease that the spoken thought enters from the darkness of feeling into the clear
light of cognition. Then, of course, speech begins to display that entire wealth of
forms of mental [geistiger] motion, and the poet’s imagination, the researcher’s
depth, the energy will affect thousands of people through the word and will do so for
centuries to come. In that case, language is an expression of the entire inner human
being because it no longer sensualizes thoughts alone, but its content.102

102
“Tief in der Seele zieht hinter einem Schleier durchsichtiger Gedanken oft eine zweite trübere
Reihe, von der uns nur ein dunkles Gefühl Kunde gibt. Das sind jene Stimmungen des
Geistes . . . Jeder fühlt sie in sich, ohne sie erklären zu können . . . Das Gefühl verkettet die
Gedanken zur Einheit, ist das wogende Meer, auf dem wie segelnde Schiffe die Gedanken auf
und niedertauchen. Aber die Wogen der Gefühle schlagen an das Ufer und verändern seine
Formen. Mienen und Gesten begleiten unwillkürlich jene Regungen des innersten Lebens, und
die Stimme ist der Nachhall der brandenden Wogen . . . Nicht auf Übereinkunft also, sondern
auf einem natürlichen Zwange, beruhen Mienen und Laute. Sie sind Bewegungen,
Zusammenziehungen einzelner Theile unsres vielgegliederten Muskelapparates . . . wir
versuchen es endlich, absichtlich jene Zeichen und Laute hervorzubringen, die wir als Formen
gewisser Gefühle kennen gelernt haben, um sie Andern mitzutheilen; und so wird der Laut zum
Worte, zur Sprache. Aber das Wort bleibt hinter dem Gedanken zurück, und selten erreichen
die Muskelbewegungen jenen Grad von Freiheit und Leichtigkeit, daß der gesprochene
Gedanke aus dem Dunkel des Gefühls in das klare Licht der Erkenntniß tritt. Dann freilich
entfaltet sich in der Sprache jene ganze Formenfülle geistiger Bewegung, und die Phantasie des
Dichters, die Tiefe des Forschers, die Energie des Willens wirken durch das Wort auf Tausende
von Menschen und auf Jahrhunderte fort. Dann wird die Sprache ein Ausdruck des ganzen
 Musical monism qua science of feeling 353

By reinforcing an inscrutable link between sonic expression and pre-linguistic

feeling, Ule decisively reduces language to an intermediary medium between
“soul” and body, even as he lays bare the physical mechanisms of vocal
expression, and defines the content of communication as sensation.
Possibilities for exploding the Cartesian divide were pursued still further
in an unpublished treatise entitled “Microcosm: Outline of a Physiological
Anthropology” written by Roland Daniels in 1851, a monist medical doctor
from Cologne, whose lively conclusion was entitled “Ridiculousness of the
Dualistic System.”103 Like Lotze, he refuted the burden placed on physical
scientists to establish causal, physical connections between tissue, nerve,
cartilage, and an immaterial “soul,” where the physical voice was its vehicle
of expression. Instead, he lambasted the project, as Wagner formulated
it, when the composer characterized the power to communicate as an
intuitive faculty of sense perception, wherein humanity’s sentient capacity
(Gefühlsvermögen) is the “bearing organ” (literally: uterus) of understand-
ing.104 If the soul is dependent on the body for its expression, Daniels
maintained with tongue in cheek, it requires literal “bodily organs” and
therefore, the greater or lesser perfection of these organs will result in
corresponding degrees of perfection in expression, presumably in both
reception as well as production. The organs essentially become “instru-
ments” in this reading (cf. Novalis and Grimm), and he who works with
better instruments works more perfectly. The more “normal” the process of
nourishing one’s brain, Daniels continues, the more freely the soul is
allowed to reveal itself through this principal organ: “The difference
between mental functions of different people would be based, according
to this explanation, on the greater or lesser perfection of their instrument,
their body,” he concludes.105
Of course, Diderot had long since led the eighteenth-century debate over
monism in France;106 Daniels’ statement in 1851 is nevertheless ironic,
however, because his larger authorial strategy is to defeat this (longer

innern Menschen, weil sie nicht mehr die Form des Gedankens allein, sondern seinen Inhalt
versinnlicht.” Ule, “Die Stimme als Ausdruck des Innern,” 234.
103
“Lächerlichkeit der dualistischen System,” in Roland Daniels, Mikrokosmos: Entwurf einer
Physiologischen Anthropologie [1851], ed. Helmut Elsner (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1988),
127–39.
104
SSD 4: 111. Cf. PW 2: 247.
105
“Der Unterschied in den geistigen Funktionen verschiedener Menschen beruhte nach dieser
Erklärung auf der größeren oder geringeren Vollkommenheit ihrer Instrumente, ihrer Körper.”
Daniels, Mikrokosmos, 129–30.
106
See Mark W. Wartofsky, “Diderot and the Development of Materialist Monism” [1953], in
Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel,
1979), 297–337.
354 Wagner’s material expression

surviving German) idealist dualism in extenso without articulating a coher-

ent substitute; hence, it is a protest rather than a delayed discourse on
monism. “How bored good souls must become in the body of a child,” he
quips, “or even a soul that has only the honky-tonk instrument of an idiot to
play on!”107 While teasing that “bad singers” must still basically have been
“good people,” he isolates the concept of muscle power (Muskelkraft) to
illustrate the flaws in this dualistic perspective, which in turn also denies the
division of conceptual phenomena from their individual manifestation:
We see that a muscle contracts under different stimuli. We call this characteristic
of the muscle its power [Kraft], we speak of muscle power. Now – in order to talk
in the sense of those who personify the soul – I would have to say: this muscle
power is a single essence, which itself uses the muscle for its expressions
[Äußerungen]. Now we know that it all depends on how large or small the muscle
is, which depends on how well or badly it has been nourished etc., which
determines how strong or weak the contractions are, translated into dualistic
style: the same muscle power expresses itself better through the one muscle than
through the other, better through a well-nourished than through a scrawny
muscle, better or worse depending on the quality of the material etc. According
to this, the power of an old man would basically be equal to that of a youth –
a well-intentioned theory that does not, however, pass muster in practice. It’s like
saying that the appearance of light is actually just as intense when burning a tallow
candle as a wax candle, only that the light can express itself better with the latter
material; or the warmth of a hot oven and that of my hand are equally great, but
my hand is a worse instrument than the oven.108

Such ridicule was the final nail in the coffin of an idealist dualism (though
Nietzsche felt the need to strike yet another hammer blow on behalf of

107
“Wie sehr muß sich die gute Seele langweilen in dem Körper eines Kindes oder gar eine Seele,
welche nur das verstimmte Instrument eines Blödsinnigen zu spielen hat!” Daniels,
Mikrokosmos, 130.
108
“Wie sehen, daß ein Muskel sich auf verschiedene Reize zusammenzieht. Wir nennen diese
Eigenschaft des Muskels seine Kraft, wir sprechen von Muskelkraft. Jetzt würde ich, um im
Sinne derjenigen zu reden, welche die Seele personifizieren, sagen müssen: diese Muskelkraft ist
ein eigenes Wesen, welches sich zu seinen Äußerungen des Muskels bedient. Nun wissen wir,
daß, je nachdem der Muskel größer oder kleiner ist, je nachdem er besser oder schlechter
ernährt wird usw., je nachdem sind auch seine Kontraktionen starker oder schwächer. Ins
Dualistische übersetzt: die gleiche Muskelkraft äußert sich besser durch den einen mageren,
besser oder schlechter, je nach der verschiedenen Qualität der Materie usw. Die Kraft eines
Greises wäre demnach im Grunde dieselbe wie die Kraft eines Jünglings, – eine Theorie des
guten Willens, welche aber in der Praxis nicht stichhält. Es heiße dasselbe sagen, als wenn ich
behauptete, die Lichterscheinung beim Verbrennungsprozesse eines Talglichtes u. eines
Wachslichtes sei eigentlich gleich groß, nur könne das Licht sich an der letzteren Materie besser
äußern als an der ersteren; oder die Wärme eines heißen Ofens u. die meiner Hand seien gleich
groß, aber meine Hand sei für sie ein schlechteres Instrument als der Ofen.” Ibid.
 Musical monism qua science of feeling 355

Wagner in 1872).109 For despite Wagner’s dualistic outlook in his gendered

allegory for drama and music, word and voice, intellect and sensation, ratio
and anima, his purpose is, of course, to effect an historical reconciliation of
these in the neo-Grecian concept of music drama. Without engaging the
detail of brain fibers and neural networks, in other words, Wagner’s implicit
understanding of melodic expressivity appears to be that at moments of
peak intensity dualities collapse; he defined art itself, after all, in these terms
precisely as the collapsing of life and science.110 And if there were any doubt,
he publicly ridiculed the Cartesian alternative.111
But his position vis-à-vis monism was arguably reaching. He aims for a
mutual “understanding” (Verständnis) between composer and listener at
the level of sensory feeling – in Lotze’s terms, physically mediated psycho-
logical agreement:
Only when the whole capacity of man’s feeling [Gefühlsvermögen] is completely
excited to interest in an object conveyed to it through a recipient sense does that
object win the force to expand its concentrated essence again, in such a way as to
bring it to our understanding as infinitely enriched and flavored nourishment.112

Even Franz Brendel was suspicious of this. He responded with tentative

support: “while even an intuitive understanding [Gefühlsverständnis]
of Lohengrin is not given immediately to everyone, the difficulties never-
theless grow and multiply as soon as it concerns conscious insight.”113
The trouble was a lack of theoretical explanation. How exactly Wagner’s
brand of monism relates to anatomical processes remains undetermined
in Oper und Drama, which goes some way to explaining his repetitious
predicate of sensuous feeling as both a medium and currency of
communication.

109
He writes: “the popular and entirely false opposition of soul and body does nothing, of course, to
explain the difficult relationship between music and drama, and does everything to confuse it,”
adding with disdain that “the unphilosophical crudeness of that opposition seems to have
become a readily accepted article of faith among our aestheticians.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Birth of Tragedy, 104.
110
SSD 3: 44–46. Cf. PW 1: 72–73.
111
“[T]he dissociation of the artist from his person is as foolish as the divorce of the soul from the
body.” SSD 4: 231. Cf PW 1: 270.
112
SSD 4: 110. Cf. PW 2: 246.
113
“Ist doch schon das Gefühlsverständnis des Lohengrin nicht sofort Jedem gegeben; die
Schwierigkeiten aber wachsen und vermehren sich, sobald es sich um bewußte Einsicht
handelt.” Franz Brendel, “Einige Worte über Lohengrin zum besseren Verständnis desselben,”
NZfM 8 (February 18, 1859), 90.
356 Wagner’s material expression

Physical Mitleid

The sensation [Empfindung] manifested in this melody . . . is a

phenomenon which now belongs as much to us, to whom it has been
imparted, as to him who has imparted it.
Richard Wagner114

While Wagner took a keen interest in the development of the natural

sciences, he resisted their perspective. Works of genius would soon be
explained away, he cautioned in 1878, “once chemistry has finally laid
hold of logic . . . [E]very mystery of being [would be exposed] as mere
imaginary secrets,” while the faddish “act of knowing” would exclude all
“intuitive knowledge.”115 Wagner evidently resented the idea that knowl-
edge emanating from the academic corridor might reify or undermine his
personal convictions. During the first year of the Bayreuther Blätter he
chastised the unnamed representatives of “science” who “haughtily look
down upon us artists, poets, and musicians, as the belated progeny of an
obsolete worldview.”116 The target here was Nietzsche, whose book Human,
All too Human – Wagner sensed – sought to undermine his self-conception
of artistic genius. “It is believed,” Nietzsche writes in the anonymous
passive:
that the more profoundly man thinks, the more exquisitely he feels . . . the more he
appears as a genius . . . the nearer he gets to the true nature of the world and to
comprehension thereof: this, indeed, he really does through science, but he thinks he
does it far more adequately through his religions and arts.117

Wagner’s reaction was almost compassionate: “a long dreaded and not

entirely unpredictable catastrophe [has] now overtaken [Nietzsche],” he
wrote to Karl Overbeck, adding “I have retained sufficient friendship for
him not to read his book.”118
But compassion is an ambiguous concept here, for Nietzsche’s claim
that worldly comprehension is achieved through science trickles into

114
SSD 4: 183. Cf. PW 2: 327–28. 115 SSD 10: 84. Cf PW 6: 75.
116
SSD 10: 79. Cf. PW 6: 70.
117
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, trans. A. Harvey (Chicago: C. H. Kerr &
Co., 1915), 58.
118
Wagner to Franz Overbeck, May 24, 1878, Bayreuth, in SLRW, 884. In the event, Wagner
did read Menschliches, Allzumenschliches; his essay “Publikum und Popularität,” written later in
1878, offers a rebarbative reply to the growing prominence of nineteenth-century
Darwinism and the natural sciences, and protests particularly against the annulment of the
genius concept. SSD 10: 84. Cf. PW 6: 75.
 Physical Mitleid 357

Wagner’s own “obsolete worldview” ironically. Wagner wrote to Mathilde

Wesendonck of his compassion as a projection of fatally sympathetic nerves:
“the question here is not what the other person suffers but what I suffer when
I know him to be suffering . . . how I imagine it is how it is for me . . . So my
fellow-suffering makes the other person’s suffering a reality.”119 In his dram-
atization of antivivisectionism in Parsifal, “compassion” forms the recurring
motto: the hunted swan is real (unlike Lohengrin’s Gottfried) and dies by the
iron and wood of Parsifal’s arrow, becoming a faint introduction – via his
mother’s pain – to the searing wound Amfortas must suffer, and for which
Parsifal, ultimately, will feel physical compassion. Hausegger duly raised the
question of compassion as a function of expression – i.e. how we comprehend
the expression of others – two years after the premiere of Parsifal. “The
expression ‘compassion’ [Mitleid],” he explains:
is also applicable in a purely physiological sense. The similarity of someone in
sympathy goes so far that we even feel affected in the same organs and in a similar
way as the sufferer . . . Not only pain, however, but also other physical conditions are
felt sympathetically and arouse similar phenomena in others. Thus the conditions of
sneezing, yawning, laughing, crying and especially conditions of deep excitement.120

This sympathetic reactivity on the level of biological organs offers a new

shading of knowledge through compassion (durch Mitleid wissend), and
the gulf between Parsifal’s spiritual revelation and Hausegger’s yawning
encapsulates the parallax view of musical expression at this time; this, after
all, is Hausegger’s explanation for the “purely physiological” mechanism
through which we understand musical experience. It is unintentional and
unconscious, he maintains, and works as a kind of instinctual receptivity or
“congenital attentiveness.”121
At the center of this corporeal Weltanschauung, the belief that vocal
emissions born of emotion manifest in a net of muscular tensions will elicit
sympathetic reactions from auditors – essentially in the way Amfortas’ wound
affects Parsifal – is a striking claim, but one that has a clear, deductive basis.

119
Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, October 1, 1858, Venice, in SLRW, 423.
120
“Der Ausdruck ‘Mitleid’ ist auch in rein physiologischem Sinne zutreffend. Die Aehnlichkeit des
Mitempfindens geht so weit, dass wir uns sogar in den gleichen Organen und in ähnlicher
Weise, wie der Leidende, affizirt fühlen . . . Aber nicht nur Schmerzen, sondern auch andere
körperliche Zustände werden mit-empfunden und erregen ähnliche Erscheinungen in Andern.
So die Zustände des Niesens, Gähnens, Lachens, Weinens und namentlich auch Zustände tiefer
Erregung.” Friedrich von Hausegger, “Die Musik als Ausdruck,” Bayreuther Blätter 1 (1884), 39.
121
“eine angeborene Aufmerksamkeit.” Ibid.
358 Wagner’s material expression

“Irritation or excitement of the auditory nerve is capable of giving rise to

movements in the body, and to sensations in other organs of sense,” Müller
had explained in his Handbook. “[A] sudden noise excites in persons of
excitable nervous system an unpleasant sensation, like that produced by an
electric shock, throughout the body . . . Various kinds of sounds . . . cause in
many people a disagreeable feeling in the teeth, or, indeed, a sensation of cold
trickling through the body. Intense sounds are said to make the saliva collect in
the mouth in some people.”122 This, it would seem, is the rational platform on
which opera would become a contact sport, and on which commentators such
as Heinrich Klein could complain of:
the wild Wagnerian corybantic orgy . . . with orchestral accompaniment slapping
you in the face . . . Hence, the secret fascination that makes it the darling of feeble-
minded royalty . . . who need this galvanic stimulation by massive instrumental
treatment to throw their pleasure-weary frog’s legs into violent convulsion.123

Satire notwithstanding, the topos of galvanism in Wagner reception could be

surprisingly anatomically accurate. “Bliss of the spinal cord” is one description
of experiencing the last act of Tristan, reported by Henri Laujol in 1883.124
Such stimulation was by definition non-conscious, and – allusions to orgasm
aside – Müller’s Handbook explained that these reflex motions of the animal
system (whether natural, such as the contraction of the iris from irritation of
the optic nerve; or artificial, such as Klein’s galvanism) were indeed exclusively
controlled at a non-conscious level by the “cerebro-spinal nerves.”125
There is no evidence Wagner consciously pursued the connection of
feeling and sensation at the level of physiology. Indeed, he writes privately
in 1852 of being “astonished by the tremendously violent effect” a perform-
ance of his Tannhäuser overture had had on some women whose “effective
symptoms” caused intense paroxysms: “so moved were they that they
had to find relief by sobbing and crying.”126 But Wagner’s description
arguably reconfigured a currency of ideas, for such reactions are classified
by Müller as reflected motions of the organic system, i.e. involuntary spasms
or convulsive motions of the muscles supplied by the respiratory and
facial nerves, but in response to mental excitement – i.e. psychological

122
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 2: 1311.
123
Julius Leopold Klein, Geschichte des Dramas, 8 vols. (Leipzig: 1871), 8: 738–39. Cited in
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (New York: Coleman-Ross, 1853), 237.
124
Henri Laujol, “Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,” Jeune France (April 1883); adapted from Jean Pierrot,
The Decadent Imagination: 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (University of Chicago Press,
1981), 50.
125
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 2: 927.
126
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, March 20, 1852, Zurich, SB 4: 319.
 Physical Mitleid 359

sympathy – not purely physical stimulation.127 Suffice to conclude that

even by the 1850s, the effects of Wagner’s sensuous sound – whether
Versmelodie, Stabreim, or Klangfarbe – were believed by some to be
decidedly real: more physics than metaphysics.
Popular supporters of Wagner’s haptic music tacitly took this for granted.
Without actually understanding the nature of any putative link between
psychology and physiology that bears the burden of Wagner’s theory, it
remained possible for them to use this link to repulse complaints about
Wagner’s “lack” of melody. “The emotions of the mind have also their
equivalents in sound,” declared Jonathan Jones, a self-styled “Musical
Student and Neophyte of the Order of St. Wagner.” His defensive article on
Lohengrin appeared in the Musical World shortly after the London premiere at
Covent Garden (May 8, 1875), and telescopes Wagner’s theoretical assump-
tions into a few sentences, which by the mid-1870s seemed surprisingly
unproblematic:
The emotions of the mind have also their equivalents in sound. Every feeling of the
heart has its natural utterance, and every passion of the soul its voice. A feeling or
passion, when partially and moderately excited, imparts to speech an appropriate
color and force of sound . . . The musical poet is he who can realize the grades of
passion, and has the Prospero-like power over the realms of sound to express
them . . . Herein is Wagner’s excellence.128

In a physiologically deterministic context, Hausegger took precisely this

reading of Wagner’s talent and used it to reframe the composer’s achieve-
ment. If muscular tensions and cerebral impulses were constitutive of the
feeling and experience of musical expression, the capacity to understand
these as artistic means, and to convey an emotional state to others through
them, becomes the “creative power of the artist.”129 Ultimately, however,
this merely recapitulates the old mystery of artistic genius, for the assumed
psychophysical laws governing physiological expression, the science of
feeling, as it were, remained safely out of reach for composers.130

127
Müller, Elements of Physiology, 2: 933.
128
Jonathan Jones, “Lohengrin,” TMW 53 (July 3, 1875), 438.
129
“In der Fähigkeit, sich der Mittel der Kunst in der Art zu bedienen, dass sie als Ausdruck verstanden
und durch sie Gemüthszustande auf andere übertragen werden, besteht die Schaffenskraft des
Künstlers.” Hausegger, “Die Musik als Ausdruck,” Bayreuther Blätter 10 (1884), 313.
130
“The artist creates unconsciously, and all the surprising coincidences of his tonal forms with those
governing motions of the apparatuses of expression are not the result of observation, rather a
product of direct urge toward expression that has grown in him.” [“Der Künstler schafft
unbewusst, und alle die überraschenden Übereinstimmungen seines Tongebildes mit den in den
Ausdrucks-Apparaten herrschenden Bewegungen sind nicht Ergebniss der Beobachtung, sondern
Produkt eines unmittelbaren in ihm wach gewordenen Dranges nach Ausdruck.”] Ibid., 316.
360 Wagner’s material expression

It appears that there was never a serious debate over Wagner’s potential
mastery of sound or fraudulence in these material terms: experimentation
could not dissolve the utopia. Doctors such as Daniels were evidently
uninterested in, or unaware of, an artistic rationale for the medical approach
to “soul,” describing the dualism between sense and thought as “pure
artifice.”131 Hence, the veracity one ascribes to Jones’ description of
Wagner’s “excellence” remains largely rhetorical: an enthusiastic, majority
endorsement in lieu of empirical alternatives.

PART 2

A comparative physiognomy: vowels and colors

One can only speak of reaching a conclusion [about Lohengrin] . . . if one

has really taken in the new phenomena, experienced them . . . without that
one speaks like a blind man about color.132
Franz Brendel (1859)

Tone [Ton] lies in everything audible . . . There is a parallelism with color

in its genetic development . . . commonly noted, but which physicists do
not yet appear to have recognized comprehensively.133
August Kahlert (1837)

I myself believe that sound is identical in its nature with light. Sound is
light, perceived under another form; each acts through vibrations to which
man is sensitive and which he transforms, in the nervous centers, into
ideas.134
Honoré de Balzac (1838)

Beyond the expressive human voice, what about Wagner’s ambitions for
an instrumental speech faculty? Having established the discourse on

131
“Der Dualismus von Sinnen u. Gedanken ist ein rein künstlicher, in der Wirklichkeit sind sie
immer vereinigt.” Daniels, Mikrokosmos, 133.
132
“Nur dann erst [kann] von einem Abschluß die Rede sein . . . wenn man die neuen
Erscheinungen wirklich in sich aufgenommen, durchlebt . . . Ohne das spricht man wie der
Blinde von der Farbe.” Brendel, “Einige Worte über Lohengrin zum besseren Verständniß
desselben,” 90.
133
“Der Ton liegt in allem hörbaren . . . Es liegt in seiner genetischen Entwicklung ein Parallelismus
mit der der Farbe, – eine oft und . . . angeregte Bemerkung, die aber die Physiker noch nicht in
ihrem ganzen Umfange gewürdigt zu haben scheinen.” Kahlert, “Das musikalische Element in
der Sprache,” 180.
134
Honoré de Balzac, Gambara (Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 19.
 A comparative physiognomy: vowels and colors 361

material expression, and its implications for Wagner’s Melodik as part of a

broader monistic turn, we may wonder to what extent the knowledge that
expression is, in part, physiological – movements of matter – can be applied
to Wagner’s actual composition. Did the linguistic specificity of vowels
within speech roots extend to Wagner’s orchestral motifs and
Klangfarben? His celebrated claim that “the orchestra indisputably pos-
sesses a faculty of speech . . . [which is] something quite real and palpable”135
would appear to suggest so, but how far did the ambition of this sonic
communication go? If his orchestra was to provide commentary on the
dramatic action, as most Wagner commentators remind us, what level of
literalism can be ascribed to this process? In philological terms, surely the
ideal of instrumental Sprachvermögen is entirely metaphorical. An orches-
tral melody – without any basis in etymological essentialism, without a
physical larynx – cannot really speak, can it?
Amid garrulous debates in the German press over Wagner’s melodies, the
composer was consistently lauded for his use of instrumental Klangfarbe.
His treatment of the orchestra in Lohengrin is praised in this respect by
Hanslick,136 held up for emulation by J. C. Lobe,137 evidenced as composi-
tional process by Henry Finck,138 and enviously analyzed by Joachim
Raff.139 Indeed, it is perhaps Wagner’s only compositional parameter to
escape ridicule during a decade shot through with partisan criticism. Berlioz
even claimed that Klangfarbe expiated Wagner’s difficulties over melody:

135
SSD 4: 173. Cf. PW 2: 316.
136
“[In der] Behandlung des Orchesters . . . leistet Wagner nicht blos Ausgezeichnetes, sondern
auch theilweise Neues . . . Wagner . . . ist somit der Erste, der den Zauber neuer und kühner
Orchester-Effecte in vollster Ausdehnung für dramatische Zwecke benützt hat. Wagners
Instrumentirung ist in ihrer geistreichen Verwendung der Klangfarben, und dem elastischen
Anschmiegen an den Text, interessant für den Musiker, hinreißend für den Laien.” Hanslick,
HSS I/4: 345.
137
“Kein Sachverständiger wird Wagner die Kenntniß der Instrumentationsgesetze bestreiten wollen;
seine Opern enthalten viele interessant und wirkungsvoll kolorirte Stellen,” Lobe, “Briefe über Rich.
Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten, FBfM 1 (1853), 456.
138
“A great part of his [Wagner] genius lay in producing with colors effects which no print or
photograph can possibly reproduce. Wagner thought out his operas in orchestral colors; his very
ideas are often conceived in colors and instrumental combinations which the piano can no
more reproduce than it could have suggested them to the composer.” Henry T. Finck, Wagner
and his Works [1893], 2 vols. (New York: Haskell House, 1968), 2: 28.
139
“Es ist bei der Wiederkehr [of the Swan’s A major music] schön gesteigert, und die Haltung
der Vocale zeugt in demselben von einer Kenntniß und Berechnung des Klangeffects, welcher
aus der Lage und der Mischung der Stimmen zu ziehen ist, die zur Bewunderung hinreißen . . .
sowie er den Pinsel zur Hand nimmt, ist er der größte Meister. Er dürfte schwer sein, ihm
einen Coloristen zur Seite zu stellen. Berlioz gleicht ihm auf seine Art vielleicht in Ansehung des
Instrumentale, hinsichtlich des Gesanges aber nicht von Weitem.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage:
Kritisch Beleuchtet (Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1854), 126.
362 Wagner’s material expression

“true, there is no phrase, properly speaking, but . . . [the Lohengrin prelude]

is a marvel of orchestration, in the gentle shadings no less than in the
brilliant colors.”140 And Liszt argued as early as 1851 that Wagner uses
instrumental color structurally as a form-building device.141 By visualizing
the sound a decade later, Charles Baudelaire aims to make explicit through
sensory perception of the Lohengrin Prelude what was arguably implicit in
Liszt’s analysis: “I experienced the sensation of heightened brightness, of an
intensity of light increasing so quickly that no shades of meaning furnished
by the dictionary could suffice to express this constant increase of burning
whiteness.”142 Whether or not Baudelaire had read Pohl’s “Acoustic letters,”
he was confident enough to invert the onus of proof in his review of
Tannhäuser: “what would be really surprising,” he countered, “is that a
sound could not suggest a color, that colors could not give the idea of a
melody, and that sound and color would be unsuitable for translating
ideas.”143
The gulf between conscious knowledge and inexplicable sensation in
these accounts is telling. In Pohl’s discourse on music and natural science,
Klangfarbe sits at the intersection of a dualism between mind and matter –
one of those “large interference points in nature” that delivers “the unity,
the inseparability of spirit [Geist] and matter.”144 It offers a way of fram-
ing, in other words, the very site at which acoustic vibrations and human
perception converge. His fourth letter from 1852 is seemingly torn
between the two ideas – inspired by Wagner’s sensations of speech
physiognomy, yet informed by acoustic science, i.e. vibrations transmitted
across the ether:
I hear in the tone of voice whether hate or love speaks to me, whether joy or pain
moves the heart. Both can smudge the color – the voice can become toneless, indeed
it can be snuffed out [verlöschen], suffocated in the highest moment of bliss or of
pain. These last instances are nothing but changes of vibration and tension of

140
Hector Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays, trans. Elizabeth Csicsery-Róney
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 205.
141
See Franz Liszt, “Lohengrin, Grand opéra romantique de R. Wagner, et sa première
représentation à Weimar aux Fêtes de Herder et Goethe 1850,” SS 4: 86.
142
Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London:
Penguin, 1972), 331.
143
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal et oeuvres choisies, trans. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Dover,
1992), 227.
144
“Hier ist einer jener großen Interferenzpunkte in der Natur, die uns die Einheit, die
Untrennbarkeit von Geist und Materie predigen.” Pohl, “Vierter Brief: Schallentstehung.
Geräusch und Ton. Grenzen der Hörbarkeit. Höhe, Intensität, Klangfarbe,” NZfM 9 (August 27,
1852), 88.
 A comparative physiognomy: vowels and colors 363

molecules – but who wants to deny that here there are still purely mental elements
that move, that govern?145

This weakening dichotomy is reflected slightly differently in contempo-

rary Wagner criticism. Raff – author of one of the most articulate
critiques of Wagnerian aesthetics from the 1850s – argues that, in his
theories of future works of art, the composer wants it both ways: with the
deepest concern for the color of vocal (Lautfarbe) and instrumental
(Klangfarbe) expression, he tries to countermand subjectivity, even spec-
ifying the “objects” of instrumental music in drama in order to inform (by
way of hermeneutic clues) judgment of his material.146 The motivation of
premonitions, of memories, the preparation of atmosphere, the interpre-
tation of gesture all become orchestral “objects” in Raff’s science of
expression.
A sampling of writers indicates that this was less far fetched for a
musical mind during the middle third of the century than one might
think. In the post-philosophe sphere of French literature, Balzac’s fictional
composer, Gambara, put the case in all its Leibnizian brevity in 1837:
“Music is at once a science and an art. Its roots in physics and mathematics
make it a science; it becomes an art by inspiration which unconsciously
employs the theorems of science.”147 Similarly, Pohl characterized a
disconnect between physics and aesthetics as that which appeared to
bifurcate the substance of music, and which he felt could only be bridged
through physiology: “The physicist concerned with sensory impression
fails to ask where he is going . . . the composer with facts of harmony fails
to ask where he is coming from.”148 Raff likewise disavows the contented
equilibrium that Balzac’s composer appears to espouse. Ironically, his
aesthetic traditionalism prompts him to view Wagner as a progressive
composer in this respect, dismissing as a red herring Gambara’s “mathe-
matical and physical laws” that would seem to underpin the basis of
harmonic motion:

145
“Ich höre am Klang der Stimme, ob Haß oder Liebe zu mir spricht, ob Freude oder Schmerz die
Brust bewegt. Beide können die Farbe sogar ganz verwischen – die Stimme kann tonlos werden,
ja sie kann im höchsten Moment der Luft oder des Schmerzes ersticken, verlöschen. Das sind in
letzter Instanz wohl Nichts als Schwingungs- und Spannungsänderungen der Molecule – aber
wer will läugnen, daß hier noch rein geistige Elemente die bewegenden, die herrschenden sind?”
Ibid., 88.
146
Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 165. 147 Balzac, Gambara, 19.
148
“Dies veranlaßt den Physiker, sich mit dem sinnlichen Eindruck zu begnügen, ohne zu fragen,
wohin er führt, und den Musiker, die Harmonie als Thatsache zu ergreifen, ohne zu fragen,
woher sie kommt.” Pohl, “Akustische Briefe: erster Brief,” NZfM 2 (1852), 13.
364 Wagner’s material expression

I am not of the opinion that the means of musical expression should be jammed
into the region of mathematically grounded harmonic sound phenomena, and
must disavow the pretensions of such theorists, even when they set out with such
grandiose formal justification as [Moritz] Hauptmann, because with the increase
of objects that become attributed to music and of the elastic material that music
subjectively necessitates, more and more is to be freed from nature into the
spirit.149

Raff’s views are notable for binding idealist and materialist traditions
together. The implied connection between what he terms “objects that
become attributed to music” and “elastic material that music subjectively
necessitates” is that of growing compositional means (chords, intervals,
timbre etc. as well as newly developed instruments) and the composer’s
ability to express his subjectivity. Raff’s twenty-first letter reveals that
Klangfarbe and the notion of an orchestral speech capacity are directly
implicated in this coupling. One must find the right point of view from
which to observe the material nature (Materiatur)150 of the orchestra,
he explains, citing the two “essential differences” therein as formal–dynamic
(pitch, duration) and density–derivative (sound color).151 The latter is his
chief concern, for he sees it as germane to Wagner’s linguistic aesthetic.
Identifying the density of sound color as material expression in this
way transgresses two important Wagnerian boundaries: voice and
instrument, form and material. Raff posits a dialectical relation in
Wagner’s orchestra between formal content and real material nature
(reale Materiatur), which is embodied approximately in the strings
and brass, respectively. He argues that the body of orchestral strings is
closest to the formal (non-vocal) content of an artwork, while the brass
is more defined and particular in its (quasi-vocal) articulation. These
conditions are due to the strings’ chameleon capacity for poetic “asso-
nance” through articulation that mimics speech but remains linguistically
indistinct, so that “in a way [the strings] form the transition to real
[vocalized] material” while the brass’ less mimetic “assonance” compares

149
“Ich bin nicht der Meinung, daß das musikalische Ausdrucksvermögen sich in den Bereich der
mathematisch ergründeten harmonischen Klangphänomene einzuzwängen habe, und muß
die diesseitigen Prätensionen der Theoretiker, selbst wenn sie mit so großer formaler
Berechtigung auftreten, wie Hauptmann, desavouiren, weil mit Zunahme der der Musik
zuwachsenden Objecte und der subjectiven Bedürfnisse das elastische Material der Musik mehr
und mehr aus der Natur in den Geist zu befreien ist.” Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, fn. 58.
150
Raff adopts Hegel’s term Materiatur, first employed by Hegel in his “Differenz des Fichteschen
und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie” (1801), and formerly by Carl Leonhard Reinhold.
The term connotes the material nature or inner material composition of an entity.
151
Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 166.
 A comparative physiognomy: vowels and colors 365

to vocalization more directly because it draws real breath and its “colors
are more differentiated.” Such claims were bold. Speaking of the violin’s
versatile voice, Raff speculates that:
its assonance can be graded from loveliest, almost inaudible [consonants] up to
grating consonants, which the bow easily produces. The same is the case in
vocalizing . . . Finally, the violin easily assimilates the colors of other instruments.
A passage painted [angestrichen] sonorously in a high register on the G string, for
example, will come very close to a horn color. Play notes on the D string using the
fingerboard somewhat loosely, and you achieve the color of the flute in a low
register.152

Such mimesis is part of Raff’s broader telos for the symphonic orches-
tra’s body, where orchestral speech capacity is discussed in terms of
becoming subject to both lyric and epic modes of “recitation,” whose
objects are too concrete for poetry and too abstract for visual arts, and
which idealize the material of reasoned speech spatially, and that of
painting temporally.153 The former fits into meter and periodic con-
struction, the latter is “made liquid with regard to time,” which leaves,
for Raff, only the division of shadow and light, which already concerns
the number of instruments and their dynamic capacity, while physio-
logical “complexion actually brings into consideration color in
particular.”154
Accordingly (and parallel to the vowel–soul ratios of Chapter 5),
Raff does not shy away from specifying “shadow and light” in material
sound, and lists the different colors of Wagner’s instruments, under-
scoring the importance of their comprehensibility for his works:
“Evidently, the configuration of instruments for each musical phrase
must be such as to enable its complete sensory representation,”155 he
states unequivocally.

152
“Ihre Assonanz kann vom lieblichsten, fast unhörbaren, bis zum rauhesten Consonanten
abgestuft werden, da der Bogen dies leicht hergiebt. Dasselbe ist mit der Vocalisirung der
Fall . . . Endlich assimilirt sich die Violine auch in der Farbe sehr leicht anderen
Instrumenten. Eine Passage z. B. auf der G-Saite in höherer Lage sonor angestrichen, wird
sich sehr der Hornfarbe nähern. Streicht man Töne auf der D-Saite am Griffbrett etwas
locker an, so erzeilt man die Farbe der tiefen Flötenlage.” Ibid., 167.
153
Ibid., 168.
154
“Bei Vertheilung von Schatten und Licht kommen das dynamische Vermögen und die
Zahl der Instrumente schon in Betracht, bei dem Colorit selbst jedoch die Farbe speciell.”
Ibid., 169.
155
“Die Zusammenstellung von Instrumenten muß evident für jeden musikalischen
Satz so sein, daß seine vollendete sinnliche Darstellung dadurch ermöglicht
wird.” Ibid., 170.
366 Wagner’s material expression

flute = light and colorless air to blue air

oboe = light yellow to grass green
clarinet = pink to violet / blue
bassoon = gray to black
horn = forest green to brown
trumpet = intense red (scarlet) to purple / violet
trombone = from purple / red to brown / violet156

Though Raff admits these are only “approximate analogies,” he is adamant

that “exact knowledge of this palette demands serious study otherwise the
purposeful individual application and mixture of colors is impossible.”157
The closest Wagner himself came to such stipulation was the orthography
for his overture in B-flat major in 1830 (WWV 10; since lost). In his first
(1843) and third (1865–80) autobiographies, the composer is at pains to
illustrate the dilettantism of his early attempts at composition, recalling how
he wanted to distinguish three “mystical elements” in the orchestra by their
color so as to be immediately visually distinguishable: “I wanted to reserve
black ink for the brass instruments alone; the strings were to be scored in
red, and the woodwind green.”158 While this is not “writing” Klangfarbe as
such, the composer-as-painter was never a more literal concept.
Regardless of the extent to which such a public revelation was purposive
self-fashioning on Wagner’s part, it functioned in this way, for Liszt drew on
Wagner’s words in all seriousness to confirm the deliberate coloristic
division of Wagner’s orchestra into strings, wind, and brass. An explicit,
multi-colored precursor to Lohengrin was “no surprise,” he declared.159
Wagner himself harked back to these junior days in act 1 of Die
Meistersinger when David cites color as a distinguishing feature of melody
in the rules of mastersinging to Walther, referring, among other things, to
“the ‘writing-paper’ and ‘black ink’ melodies . . . the ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ and ‘green’
tones,”160 indicating his sustained engagement with the literalized concept.
Common-sense objections were readily forthcoming. In an extended
review of Raff’s book in the Neue Berliner Musik-Zeitung, Carl Kossmaly

156
“Man findet selbige gemäß die Flöte von heller und farbloser bis zu blauer Luft, die Hoboe von
hellem Gelb bis zu Saftgrün, die Clarinette von rosa bis zu violettblau, das Fagott von grau
bis zu schwarz, das Horn von waldgrün bis zu braun, die Trompete von hochroth (scharlach) bis
zu purpurviolett, die Posaune von purpurroth bis zu braunviolett farbhaltig.” Ibid., 169.
157
“die genaue Kenntniß jener Palette auch ein ernstes Studium erfordert, da sonst die
zweckmäßige Einzelverwendung und Mischung der Farben unmöglich ist.” Ibid.
158
ML 51. 159 Liszt, SS 4: 89.
160
“die ‘Schreibpapier’-, ‘Schwarz-Tinten-Weis’; / der ‘rote,’ ‘blau,’ und ‘grüne’ Ton.” From Die
Meistersinger, act 1, scene 2.
 A comparative physiognomy: vowels and colors 367

pointed out the obvious scruple that Klangfarbe cannot be inherent in an

instrument that different people hear and “see” differently:
Given this distinction it is quite plausible that the tone of one and the same
instrument, the clarinet for example, seems to one person to be pink or violet-
blue, while to someone else, particularly in the instrument’s lower register, it seems
perhaps decidedly dark brown or even deep red.161

Accordingly, when applied to programmatic interpretation of instrumen-

tal portions of Wagner’s works, Vienna’s Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung was
quick to lambast the kind of physiological precision Raff intimates as
“glorified nonsense” in Tannhäuser, complaining that “the essence of this
music, as even a naïve reader admits, lies in not being music; it is only fed to
the imagination as a means of generating [visual] figures, in the process of
which one never enjoys the freedom to imagine what one wants.”162
Importantly, neither critic denied that sound colors existed, only that
these were not universal and so could not be pinpointed objectively.
Thus, the flipside of Raff’s call to bring sensations of instrumental color to a
listener’s perception is the fixing of that listener’s response by reconciliation of
the dialectic between form and material;163 it produces a kind of guaranteed
physiological judgment in the listener (as suggested by the monistic
discourse cited earlier), which effectively turns E. T. A. Hoffmann’s concept
of Werktreue from the responsibility of performance into a fact of reception.
Here, the listener becomes at least implicated, and potentially even encoded in
a sensory economy where “galvanic” listening – feelings convulsed as frogs’
legs – is only the most extreme characterization. André Gill’s 1869 caricature
(Figure 6.3) of Wagner drawing blood from a collective, oversize ear by
hammering a physical quarter note directly into the ear drum captures
something of the literalism of this material mode of communication
(as well as mocking Wagner’s capacity for massed sonorities); and it was
Nietzsche who famously recognized that Wagner had thereby reconciled the
physical and intellectual components of sensual experience which had
been separated in Western culture under the influence of Hellenistic
philosophy.

161
“bei dieser Verschiedenheit [ist] gar wohl denkbar . . . dass der Ton ein und desselben
Instruments – z.B. der Clarinette – den Einen als ‘rosa’ oder ‘violett-blau’ anmuthet, während er
dem Andern, namentlich in den tiefern Regionen des Instrument’s vielleicht entschieden
dunkelbraun oder gar tiefroth.” Carl Kossmaly, “Die Wagnerfrage von Joachim Raff,” Neue
Berliner Musik-Zeitung 21 (May 21, 1856), 161.
162
Cited in Lobe, “Letters to a Young Composer about Wagner,” trans. David Trippett in
Thomas Grey (ed.), Richard Wagner and his World (Princeton University Press, 2009), 274.
163
Raff, Die Wagnerfrage, 170.
368 Wagner’s material expression

6.3 André Gill’s caricature of Wagner in the newspaper L’Eclipse

(April 18, 1869), frontispiece.

Recent commentaries in the realm of media theory have put this recon-
ciliation with more acerbity, extrapolating from Nietzsche’s trope of
later nineteenth-century Wagner criticism: “Wagner est une nervose!” or
simply Nervenmusik.164 In 1990, Norbert Bolz proceeds from the assump-
tion that the physiological a priori of thought response is not hermeneutic
but media-technological, writing provocatively: “Wagner’s is the first music
to get on your nerves. All we need do is to hook up the [audience’s]
bared nerve ends with electronic wires to enter into the world of
the new media.”165 (Adorno had made essentially the same point about
Schoenberg’s immediate, electroencephalographic expression in Erwartung,

164
Nietzsche’s comments on Wagner’s art as neurosis are explicitly physiological. See A Nietzsche
Reader, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977), 142. For an examination of the
phenomenon of Nervenmusik in which (over)stimulation is viewed as the basic cause of
sickness, see James Kennaway, “From Sensibility to Pathology: The Origins of the Idea of
Nervous Music around 1800,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65 (2010),
396–426.
165
“Wagners Musik ist die erste, die auf die Nerven geht. Man muß nur noch die bloßgelegten
Nervenfasern durch Elektrokabel technisch implementieren, um in die Welt der neuen Medien
einzutreten.” Norbert Bolz, Theorie der neuen Medien (Munich: Raben, 1990), 44.
 Physiological colors 369

though in less provocative terms.)166 It is not as far fetched as we might first

assume: Hanslick saw nerves (poetically) as agents of “the imperceptible
telegraph service between body and soul,”167 while even by the early 1850s,
Helmholtz drew analogies between “neural telegraphy” and the process of
perception, viewing the nervous system’s sensory organs as media appara-
tus: “the eye was a photometer, the ear a tuning-folk interrupter with
attached resonators,” as Timothy Lenoir puts it.168 But Wagner’s
“Prospero-like power” to summon control over, and transmit the grades
of passion in vocal expression implied neither the fantasy of electrodes nor
Bolz’s Valhalla voltage, which must ultimately remain an underdeveloped
facet of post-structuralist reception history. The contemporary theory of
expression rests – as Raff put it – on shadings of light and shadow, though its
subsequent appropriation as applied physics by writers such as Bolz testifies
to its position at an intersection between materialist inquiry and philosophy
of mind.

Physiological colors

We have called [colors] physiological because they belong to the

sound eye.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe169

Goethe is a physicist become poet.

Richard Wagner170

So what, if anything, was the theoretical foundation for Raff’s colorful

claims? In 1810, the polarity of light and shadow, to which he referred,

166
Adorno claims that rather than mimicking the passion he sought to express, Schoenberg
finds the route of direct access to agitate the auditory nerve as per electroencephalography:
“the truly subversive moment for him lies in the change in the function of musical
expression. No longer are passions feigned, but in the medium of music there are registered
undissembled the incarnate motion of the unconscious – shocks, traumata.” Cited in
Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143.
167
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 51.
168
Timothy Lenoir, “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication,” Osiris 9 (1994),
184–207, here 184. Later in the century, Ernst Kapp would articulate the first philosophy of
technology that attempted to understand human organs in terms of media prosthesis.
See Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur
aus neuen Gesichtspunkten (Brunswick: G. Westermann, 1877).
169
Goethe, Theory of Color, trans. Herb Aach (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971),
78–95, here 78.
170
SSD 12: 281. Cf. PW 8: 380.
370 Wagner’s material expression

had formed the basis of Goethe’s Farbenlehre: “Colors are acts of light . . .
Light and its absence are necessary for the production of color.”171 While
there is not space here for a detailed examination of Goethean theory, let me
summarize its relevance for the present discussion. For Goethe, white light
did not contain the complete color spectrum (pace Newton), but had
progressed beyond the lightest color – yellow – into a colorless state.
Similarly, black was not the absence of color in a Newtonian sense, but a
progression beyond the darkest color – blue – into colorlessness. White and
black are thus merely positive and negative affections of the eye, between
which grays or σκιερόν (cloudiness) – strictly the nature of color – pass in a
continuum of shading: “colors in general are to be considered as half-lights,
as half-shadows, particularly if they are so mixed as to reciprocally destroy
their specific hues, and produce a shadowy tint, a gray.”172
When under Goethe’s influence, the young Schopenhauer published his
own treatise On Vision and Colors, in which, among other things, he
expanded on Goethe’s σκιερόν (cloudiness) as the seat of color differentia-
tion. Unlike Goethe, Schopenhauer sought a physiological explanation for
the “bright and cheerful impression of [shaded] color” in contrast to the
“somber . . . dismal” quality of the color gray. When perceiving the latter, he
argues, the retina is partially “intense” in its activity; the perception of colors
as manifestations of Goethe’s cloudiness, by contrast, are determined by
“qualitatively partial” activity of the retina. The former employs only one
part of the retina “intensively,” the latter depends on a balance whereby
“the activity of the one half that appears has the inactivity of the other as its
essential and necessary condition . . . [creating] a chemical combination and
an intimate permeation of light and darkness . . . [which is] the phenom-
enon of color.”173 However imaginatively fallacious, this recourse to chem-
ical reasoning is indicative of the belief that the perception of color
(a property of sound as much as of light) must be physically explicable.174
The question remained as to whether comparable “qualitatively partial”
activity was thought to be ascribable to the auditory cortex in the perception

171
Goethe, Theory of Color, 71, 75. 172 Ibid., 75.
173
Schopenhauer, On Visions and Colors [1816], trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford and Providence: Berg,
1994), 36–7.
174
Schopenhauer was speculating, of course. Actual scientific observation of the retina was first
reported in 1823 by the Czech anatomist and physiologist Johannes Purkinje (1787–1869). The
retina became an object of detailed scrutiny in 1847 when the English mathematician and
engineer Charles Babbage devised an Ophthalmoscope. It was Helmholtz, however, who
popularized his own Ophthalmoscope in 1850–51, demonstrating that light entering the pupil
is reflected back to its source. See Nicholas J. Wade, A Natural History of Vision (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1998).
 Physiological colors 371

of Klangfarbe, and the extent to which this could then be said to be

intuitively comprehensible.
Just as Wagner placed (sensible) art above (theoretical) science, Goethe’s
premise for his Farbenlehre was its intuitive usefulness for art. He rejected
Newton’s optical spectrum as unintelligible to the artist who already sensed
in color the conditions of warmth and coldness, proximity and distance.175
Appealing to accepted polarities in nature (magnetism, electricity), he
bolstered his anti-abstract position with claims for what could be observed
with the eye, that is, the appearance (analogy) rather than essence (identity)
of color. These polarities essentially allowed him to structure his influential
color wheel in opposition to Newton’s rainbow spectrum.
How does this concern vowel color and Klangfarbe? Analogy (to Goethe)
was precisely what structured Moritz Rapp’s model for vowel gradation in
his Outline of a Physiology of Language (1836), which we encountered in
Chapter 5. Goethe’s color wheel, variously synthesized into a hexagon of
two superimposed triangles, is the template for Rapp’s organization of an
Urlaut that precedes a vowel continuum. When set beside Rapp’s own vowel
triangle, the analogy becomes clear (Figure 6.4). Furthermore, Goethe
agreed that sound and color were “referable to a universal formula,”176
but remained indirectly related: “They are like two rivers which have their
source in one and the same mountain, but subsequently pursue their way
under totally different conditions in two totally different regions.”177 (Might
he have had Faust in mind: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust”?)
Beyond the original kinship of sound and color, Goethe also believed –
like Raff’s Klangfarbe and Kerndörffer’s vowels – that each color produced a
“distinct impression” on the mind, thereby addressing both our ocular sense
and feeling. This particularity could be employed for “sensual, moral and
aesthetic ends,” he suggests, adding that the primordial relations embodied
in color “may be made use of as a language,” to amplify those same relations
in other phenomena.178 Like Raff’s instrumental colors, it was on the cusp of
a theory of material communication that I am ascribing to Wagner.
Rapp’s borrowing from Goethe is explicit. The three main vowels, a, e, o,
emerge from the Urlaut in the same way that “gray makes the primal cause
and mediation for yellow, blue, and red. Gray must first be conceived, it
must proceed to the color element in its trinity. So in the Urlaut we have the

175
Goethe’s corresponding approach is “to present this theory in a way that is useful and
intelligent to the artist.” See “The Pure Phenomenon” [1798], in Theory of Color, 67.
176
Ibid., 166. 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid., 189–90.
372 Wagner’s material expression

a.
Red

Purple Orange

Blue Yellow

Green

b.
Red

Violet Orange
Gray

Blue Green Yellow

c. a
∂
ä å
o'' o
e
i ö u
ü

6.4 A comparison of Goethe’s color triangle with Rapp’s vowel triangle.

(a) Goethe’s “ancient mysterious hexagon” (Theory of Color [1810], 1971, p. 190).
(b) Rapp’s representation of Goethe’s color triangle (Physiologie der Sprache, 1836, p. 19).
(c) Rapp’s physiological triangle for vowels (Physiologie der Sprache, 1836, p. 30).

condition of all vowels, to which, however, belongs a further potency to

actually produce them.”179 Goethe’s σκιερόν – as the undeveloped differ-
ence between his three main colors – thus became the analogue to the
undifferentiated, primal sound or Urlaut, from which all other shades of
vowel – most clearly the primary three – emanate in a continuum between
i and u.180 Like Raff’s sensory fixing of instrumental color, then, Rapp’s

179
“Es ist ganz dasselbe wie in der Farbenlehre das Grau den Urgrund und die Vermittlung
für Gelb, Blau und Roth macht; Grau muß zuerst gedacht werden, er muß aber das
Element der Farbe in seiner Dreiheit hintreten. So haben wir im Urlaut die Bedingung
aller Vocale, es gehört aber eine weitere Potenz dazu, sie wirklich zu produciren.” Rapp,
Versuch einer Physiologie der Sprache (Stuttgart & Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1836), 31.
180
Rapp begins his inquiry into the concept of a vowel by asking rhetorically why such a
comparison should not be made: “Wenn man das Grau die unentwickelte Indifferenz
zwischen den drei Farben Gelb, Roth, Blau nennen kann, weil sie in ihm noch nicht
actuell enthalten, wohl aber potenziell bedingt sind, so fragt sich, gibt es einen diesem
Standpunkt entsprechenden Sprach- order Vocallaut, und wenn es ihn gibt, so dürfen wir
nicht anstehen, diesen Laut mit dem Namen des Urlauts oder Urvocals zu bezeichnen.”
Ibid., 20.
 Physiological colors 373

appropriation of Goethe’s color theory as the basis for vowels lends the -farbe
in Lautfarbe a more literal character; viewed in terms of a spectrum of light
waves, it also lends credence to Wagner’s notion of intuitive comprehensi-
bility through instrumental “vowels” as a physiological concept.
Two decades later, Lotze also sought to establish the physiology of color
by, on the one hand, claiming that colors should be compared to timbral
differentiation (rather than pitch) – particularly in the pronunciation of
vowels on the same pitch – while, on the other hand, substituting “live-
liness” (Lebendigkeit) for Goethe’s polarity of light and dark as the organiz-
ing criterion.181 But Lotze’s vowel physiology went further than Rapp’s
when he suggested a parallelism between the sensation of particular mus-
cular contractions and the feeling of the different vowels: “it would not be
impossible that the feelings of [different] muscle contractions distinguish
themselves in the same way as do vowels on the same pitch.”182 Elsewhere,
however, his attempts to posit causal connections between material form,
“wave motion,” and soul become more evasive.183 Not until 1926 would an
empirical case be made for the total synonymy of vowel identities and
instrumental timbres. Carl Stumpf, the Berlin-based psychologist and com-
parative musicologist, was able to verify empirically Helmholtz’s character-
istic frequency zones for vowels, and concluded:
a more detailed study always leads to the view that [vowel or instrumental sounds] are
just parts of the infinite diversity of possible sound colors caused by the chance form of
the hole of our mouth and the construction of our musical instruments, and that these
chance parts are never sharply distinguished. Rather, they flow over into each other.184

181
Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, 216.
182
For clarity, I quote Lotze’s statement in full: “Zwar werden wir voraussetzen, dass Contraction
überall an sich dieselbe Empfindung veranlasse, so wie die Wärme überall als dieselbe Wärme
empfunden wird; da jedoch kein Muskel dem andern an Gesammtlänge und Dicke, an Zahl,
Länge und Richtung der einzelnen Fasern völlig gleich, so wäre es nicht unmöglich, dass auch
ihre Contractionsgefühle sich etwa in derselben Art, wie Vocale bei gleicher Tonhöhe
unterschieden.” Ibid., 306.
183
“The physical causes of the differing sounds are not known exactly; they would not easily lend
themselves to a clear analysis, for they certainly consist of innumerable characteristics and in
part irregularities of structure and the form of the sounding body . . . it is not difficult to see that
all these modifications of spatial wave motion could become useful passage for the soul.”
[“Die physischen Ursachen der abweichenden Klänge sind weniger genau bekannt; auch
würden sie eine übersichtliche Analyse schwer gestatten, da sie gewiss in unzähligen
Eigenthümlichkeiten und zum Theil Unregelmässigkeiten des Gefüges und der Form
schallender Körper bestehen . . . Es ist nicht schwer zu sehen, dass alle diese Modificationen
räumlicher Wellenbewegung für die Seele zu nutzbaren Reisen werden können.”] Ibid., 214.
184
“immer führt doch eine eingehendere Untersuchung zu der Anschauung, daß beide nur
Ausschnitte aus der unendlichen Mannigfaltigkeit möglicher Klangfarben sind, bedingt durch
374 Wagner’s material expression

With the right equipment and a little “pretense” (Verstellungen), the sound of
a trumpet flows readily into “A,” a horn into “O,” he concludes. It would
seem, empirically, that an orchestra could, were Wagner’s theory pushed over
the edge, actually speak in human vowels (surely German?) – though such
hypothetical realism has remained hypothetical rather than real.

Wagner’s melodic triangle

Pace Stumpf, the difference between instrument and human voice, between
Raff’s and Rapp’s color scheme, is decisive for Wagner: media, for him,
remain untranslatable. In Oper und Drama, he suggests that the ineffective-
ness of melodic theory hitherto rests mainly on the practice of cutting melodic
pitches out of the harmonic accompaniment. This supposedly eradicates pitch
duplication, but it ignores the “great distinction between the sensuous
Klangfarbe of the instruments and that of the human voice,” which we
instinctively distinguish, resulting only in incomplete harmony.185 In view
of the transgression of this “hard” division by medical theorists such as Lotze
and Daniels, it is possible finally to posit a “melodic triangle” for Wagner
(Figure 6.5) that summarizes the spatial and sequential relationships of his
materiality of melodic communication. This is modeled after the preceding
examination of sensory perception of color through both instrumental and
vowel timbres, yet here, the concept of melody is primal, a close analogue to
the Urlaut or red-as-synthesis; it splits into a polarity of sound and vowel
color, analogous to Goethe’s white (–yellow) and black (–blue), or Rapp’s
i and u. The theoretical axiom is based equally on a radial motion outward
from the central concept of musical color or Tonfarbe (just as Wagner’s

Melody

Instrumental human voice

Tonfarbe
Klangfarbe Lautfarbe

Materialist
Optics Physiology
sensation

6.5 A Wagnerian “melodic triangle.”

die zufällige Gestalt unserer Mundhöhle und die Konstruction unserer Musikinstrumente, und
daß diese zufälligen Ausschnitte nicht einmal scharf gescheiden sind, sondern fließend
ineinander übergehen.” Carl Stumpf, “Sprachlaute und Instrumentalklänge,” Zeitschrift für
Physik 38 (1926), 745–58, here 757.
185
SSD 4: 168. Cf. PW 2: 310.
 Wagner’s melodic triangle 375

vowels must merge with musical tone to “redeem” their poetic expression, and
Goethe’s shades of gray form the mobilizing element in his theory), and a
progressive movement from melody, through Tonfarbe and sensation, to the
relevant branches of the life sciences: physiology and optics.
In placing melody at the apex of a schema progressing from aesthetics to
science, I risk raising more questions than I answer. This, however, was
precisely the problem characterizing a discourse among music theorists
around the middle of the century who, in the wake of Helmholtz’s popular
lectures on the physiology of harmonic consonance and dissonance,186
remained skeptical about a comparable theory for melody. Such would
seem to have been the gifted legacy which the volumes of speculative
physiology concerning vocal expression appeared to have promised earlier
in the century, and which Wagner – however distantly, and in his own way –
sought to appropriate: “if we trace the pathway which a melody must follow
in order to act upon our state of feeling,” Hanslick mused, “we find that it
goes from vibrating instrument to auditory nerve, as is made amply clear in
Helmholtz’s epoch-making On the Sensations of Tone.”187 Yet two prom-
inent writers who, like Hanslick, doubted the possibility of an exclusively
physiological melodic theory were August Wilhelm Ambros and Lotze. The
former weighs into this debate in 1856 with caution, stating:
Even if harmony admits in any case of an additional explanation through agreeable
or disagreeable convulsions of the auditory nerves by means of consonances or
dissonances, yet in the case of the third element of music, which is almost the most
essential one, namely, melody, a physiological theory for explaining its charm would
hardly be so easy to establish.188

Back in 1852, Lotze had already expressed pessimism about the likelihood
of a profitable relationship between acoustics and melody in his Medical

186
Helmholtz gave his lecture “On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music,” on January 9,
1857 at Bonn Univeristy, where he was Professor of anatomy and physiology. See Helmholtz,
Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, 46–75. Helmholtz later incorporated the
material from this lecture into his monograph on the physics, physiology, and aesthetics of
music, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, which was first
published in 1863.
187
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 54.
188
“Läßt die Harmonie allenfalls auch noch eine physiologische Erklärung durch angenehme oder
widrige Erschütterung der Gehörnerven durch Consonanzen oder Dissonanzen zu, so dürfte
bei dem dritten Elemente der Musik, das beinahe das wesentlichste ist, der Melodie eine
physiologische Theorie zur Erklärung ihres Zaubers schwerlich so leicht aufzustellen sein.”
Wilhelm August Ambros, Die Grenzen der Musik und Poesie: Eine Studie zur Aesthetik der
Tonkunst (Leipzig: Heinrich Matthes, 1855), 40–41. Eng. trans. J. H. Cornell, The Boundaries of
Music and Poetry (New York: G. Schirmer, 1893), 39–40.
376 Wagner’s material expression

Psychology. While he may not have read Wagner’s texts, his own were
carefully studied by Hanslick, who cited Lotze’s judgment in his ultimate
refutation of any direct referentiality between melodic stimulus and feeling
perceived in a putatively sensory economy of musical expression:
Reflection upon melodies would lead to the admission that we know nothing at all
about the conditions under which a transition of the nerves from one kind of
excitation to another provides a physical basis for powerful aesthetics feelings
which follow the change of tones.189

Yet precisely the opposite view was expressed later in the century by
Hausegger, a staunch Wagnerian, whose emphatic optimism preceding
his “physiological” analysis of Donna Anna’s aria “Or sai che l’onore”
(from Le nozze di Figaro) is an isolated attempt of its kind, but nevertheless
allows him to conclude:
I therefore believe, despite the absence of detailed results of research, I am able to
assert that unshakable laws or prohibitions of melodic succession can be explained
by laws or limitations of sound expression with reference to the human organism.190

Detailed results of research did follow, as Fechner had predicted in 1860.191

Part of the difficulty hindering a “physiological” Melodik in the 1850s was
that the mechanism of sensation remained elusive for empirical research.
Nobody believes any more that physical stimulation results directly in our
experience of the world, Lotze argued, putting forward instead a six-part
chain of signification from external stimulus to internal perception. If
we perceive color from the oscillation of the ether, or melodic sounds
from the vibration of the air, he continued, “we can only find the source
of these sensory perceptions within ourselves,” not within “physical

189
Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, 237. I take this reference from Hanslick, On the Musically
Beautiful, 55.
190
“[S]o viel glaube ich, trotz dem Abhandensein detaillirter Erforschungsresultate, behaupten zu
dürfen, daß unumstößliche Gesetze der Melodieführung oder absolute Unzulässigkeiten in
derselben sich auf Gesetze des Lautausdruckes oder Grenzen desselben im menschlichen
Organismus zurückführen lassen,” in Hausegger, “Die Musik als Ausdruck,” Bayreuther Blätter
10 (1884), 312.
191
See Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 14. In 1910, the American psychologist Walter
Bingham proposed a “motor theory of melody” based on a literal (muscular) reading of tension
and resolution in musical form. He measured listener responses to short melodic sequences
through movements of their right index finger – taken as a register of motor activity – and found
that both sensory and associative forces organize corporeal response as a function of
expectation, intervallic patterning, and prolongation. See Walter van Dyke Bingham, Studies
in Melody (Baltimore: Review Publishing Company, 1910), esp. 43–88, here 82. Subsequent
studies ensued, see also L. L. Thurstone, “The Problem of Melody,” Musical Quarterly 4 (1920),
426–29.
 Wagner’s melodic triangle 377

processes” that may induce the soul to produce those perceptions, but do
not cause them as such.192 For all Wagner’s theorizing over root vowel
sensations in a poetic–melodic synthesis, his reluctance to engage with
concrete concepts, such as pitch and rhythm, is perhaps indicative of this
lack of clarity within medical anatomy.
The theorist J. C. Lobe represents nineteenth-century common sense in
disputing flatly that one could “really see with the ears.”193 Yet the notion
that the transmission between wave motion and sensation was an inexpli-
cable or “miraculous” coupling makes it, ironically, not all that implausible,
for similarly inexplicable phenomena are commonplace within the narra-
tive sphere of opera – Wagner’s Tarnhelm being the paradigmatic means of
transmuting one physical reality into another. The device’s magic, para-
doxically, becomes a way of interpreting inexplicable scientific processes.
Needless to say, Wagner’s predilection for mythic subjects and personal
fictions lends itself to the discourse in this sense. Hence, if the ears could see
color, then the orchestra could pronounce different vowels, and the audi-
tor’s eyes could hear them.
After our earlier swan, another example from Lohengrin may help to
underscore the latent materialism in this perspective. Consider Elsa’s “slow
scream”194 into the foreground for Lohengrin to defend her honor; this
commands the swan knight over a distance of some four hundred miles, the
distance between her duchy in Brabant and his holy mountain at Monsalvat.
For Friedrich Kittler, this is “an impossible exploit unless . . . the medium
were not the message . . . barely audible sounds, freed from the speaker’s
mouth and will, have grown to an absolute sound that travels through space
and time,” that is, via radio waves.195 For Alexander Rehding the feat of
acoustic transmission even conjures the spectacle of the telephone.196

192
“Folgt nun der Oscillation des Aethers eine Farbenempfindung in uns, der Luftschwingung ein
Ton, so haben wir die Quelle dieser qualitativen Sinnesempfindungen nur in uns selbst zu
suchen, dürfen aber in den äussern Reizen nichts sehen, als physische Vorgänge irgend welcher
Art, zwar geeignet, die Seele zur innerlichen Erzeugung jener Anschauungen zu veranlassen,
nicht aber, sie ihr als schon fertige zuzuführen.” Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, 174–75.
193
Lobe is quoting a review from the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, see “Letters to a Young
Composer about Wagner,” 274.
194
Wagner’s stage directions read: “Elsa tritt auf . . . dann schreitet sie sehr langsam und mit großer
Verschämheit der Mitte des Vordergrundes zu,” Lohengrin, act 1, scene 2.
195
Friedrich Kittler, “Weltatem: On Wagner’s Media Technology,” in Wagner in Retrospect, ed.
Leroy R. Shaw, Nancy R. Cirillo, and Marion Miller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 206.
196
Alexander Rehding, “Magic Boxes and Volksempfänger,” in Music, Theater and Politics in
Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich, ed. Nikolaus Bacht (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 266.
378 Wagner’s material expression

This insight is less dependent on post-structuralist methodology than it

might seem: in 1848 – just in time for the finished score of Lohengrin –
Punch advertised a Telakouphanon or “speaking trumpet” that purported to
carry the human voice across great distances, so that a priest may give his
sermon simultaneously in three different churches, or that by laying down a
number of these devices “domestic establishments [such as Lohengrin’s
castle] might be served with the liquid notes of Jenny Lind [singing Elsa]
as easily as they are with soft water, and could be supplied with music as
readily as they can with gas.”197 Beyond the fad for such eccentric theories,
Nietzsche later relished this clash of technology and metaphysics when
describing music’s new Schopenhauerean empowerment: it symbolized “a
priest . . . a sort of mouthpiece of the ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone from the
beyond.”198
The assumption of a medium based on sense stimuli underpins these
speculations, and finds an uncanny analogue in Lotze’s description from
1883 of the telegraphic process by which sound, color, or taste is transmitted
and perceived. As in Medical Psychology, he separated the stimulus and
transmission of sensation from its effect – “there is nothing in the redness of
red, the blueness of blue, or the sound of the heard tone, which suggests a
larger or smaller number of vibrations of a medium”199 – and in doing so,
likened the transformative transmissions of this effect – tantamount to the
unseen physical structure between a performer and an audience – to the
electric telephone:
Effects or actions, which proceed from [things themselves] and are sense stimuli to
us, are no doubt only motions and themselves neither red nor sweet; but what is
there to prevent our supposing that, by acting through our nerves, they make that
same redness or sweetness arise, as our sensation, in our souls, which also attaches as
a quality to the things themselves? Such a process would be no more wonderful than
the telephone, which receives waves of sound, propagates them in a form of a
motion quite different, and in the end conducts them to the ear retransformed into
waves of sound.200

Elsa’s scream, in other words, reaches the listener’s “soul” in precisely the
same way that it reaches Lohengrin at Monsalvat, it is transmitted and
retransformed as sound via motion along nerves or “electric cable,”

197
“The Opera Telakouphanon,” Punch (1848), 275.
198
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 73. Emphasis added.
199
Lotze continues: “yet science has indirectly discovered such vibrations to be the occasion of
these sensations.” Lotze, Metaphysic in Three Books, 448–49.
200
Ibid., 449.
 Suggestive metaphors: water and sound waves 379

underscoring a parallelism between music and physics, or what could

almost be called the melodic technology of music drama.

Suggestive metaphors: water and sound waves

Light, as well as sound, is [a wave motion]; the name is derived from the
analogy of waves on the surface of water . . . When a point in a surface of
still water is agitated – as by throwing in a stone – the motion thus caused
is propagated in the form of waves, which spread in rings over the surface
of the water. The circles of waves continue to increase even after rest has
been restored at the point first affected.
Hermann von Helmholtz (1857)201

The ocean binds and separates the land: so does music bind and separate
the two opposite poles of human art, dance and poetry.
Richard Wagner (1849)202

By symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech

or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of
which it represents.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816)203

When Schopenhauer’s treatise On Vision and Colors failed to create a

sensation, he complained to Goethe that it was “like [throwing] a stone in
a bog – no ripples.”204 Wagner too held out little hope that his essay Das
Kunstwerk der Zukunft would make waves.205 Water metaphors are some of
Wagner’s most consistent figures of speech in the Zurich writings. He
acknowledges them cheerfully and openly (“we can’t give up our simile of
the ocean yet”),206 but his prolix language is vulnerable to an interchange
between literal and metaphorical meanings, such as when he signed off
“Wassermann” in letters to his wife during five weeks of hydrotherapy in
1851, a literalism, but also a poetic complement to his “Wasserfrauen,” or

201
Helmholtz, “On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music” [1857], in David Cahan ed.,
Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 52.
202
SSD 3: 81. Cf. PW 1: 110.
203
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series, 75
(Princeton University Press, 1972), 6: 79.
204
Schopenhauer to Goethe, June 23, 1818, in Schopenhauer, Gesammelte Briefe, ed.
Arthur Hübscher (Bonn: Herbert Grundmann, 1987), 35.
205
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, July 27, 1850, Zurich, SB 3: 362. 206 SSD 3: 83. Cf. PW 2 112.
380 Wagner’s material expression

Rhine maidens as they would later be called.207 Given that “all language is
metaphorical” at some level, the capacity for simultaneously metaphorical
and literalized signification is impossible to reconcile in Wagner’s writ-
ings.208 In a way, this irreconcilability is precisely the value of their artistic
purpose: to retain the instability of signification against the clear mnemonic
recurrence of musical material in Wagner’s dramas. Rather than searching
for a weak compromise between these viewpoints, this closing section will
use the ambiguity of “water” images in Wagner’s rhetoric to clarify his
irreconcilable relationships for us as part of a reflexive methodology that
returns the ambiguity to Wagner himself, thereby strengthening the case for
a literal, materialist reading of Wagner’s sounds as set against the customary
metaphorical fare.
Why is water similarly ambiguous? Its wetness conducts vibration just as
well as air does, yet it also constitutes a vivid poetic metaphor.209 Wagner’s
recurring image of “rising and sinking waves of melody”210 pivots delicately
between allegory and symbol in mid-century writings about sound, giving
rise to a playful ambiguity that – far from teasing apart – draws together the
very qualities the clarifying image purports to separate, namely acoustic
symbol (sound waves) and aesthetic allegory (sea of harmony). This con-
necting process is probably what Roland Barthes had in mind when he
defined the picture or image as “the organization of the various readings
that can be made of it: a picture is never anything but its own plural
description.”211 No intentional signification is invoked in this slippage
between aesthetics and acoustics; it rests on the intriguingly flexible identity
of musical sound at the time: at once material and metaphysical. Wagner, as
we have seen, resisted the perspective offered by natural science, but his
language of metaphors undermines that stance.
Rather than dismissing the divergent watery images as overblown rhet-
oric that sustains the ambiguity of Wagner’s “unmelodic” art, let us ask what
might be constant in them. Waves are always in motion, and cannot be

207
Wagner to Minna, September 28, 1851, Albisbrunn, SB 4: 121ff.
208
Michael McCanles, “The Literal and the Metaphorical: Dialectic or Interchange,” PMLA 91
(1976), 279–90, here 279.
209
Practices of transmitting music through water, technologies for subaqueous sound production,
and hydrophonic listening are now reasonably well established. For an overview, see
Stefan Helmreich, “Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science,” Oxford
Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford University Press,
2012), 151–75.
210
SSD 3: 83. Cf. PW 1: 112.
211
Roland Barthes, “Is Painting a Language?” The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 150.
 Suggestive metaphors: water and sound waves 381

frozen; they simply become calm sea or adopt a constant amplitude of zero
(i.e. no distortion). In 1808, when the Danish physician Hans Christian
Ørsted examined the natural “acoustic figures” of fine powder that appeared
on glass plates after several vigorous strokes of a violin bow caused each
plate to vibrate, a principle of motion resulted:
The most perfect and internally harmonious motion of bodies is also the one which,
through the ear, produces the deepest impression on our internal sense of beauty
[symmetrical images]. With this, I believe that the first physical definition of the
various kinds of sounds has been given.212

From the outset of a material conception of sound, then, regular motion and
symmetrical imagery have been interrelated. A Naturphilosoph, Ørsted
argued that this kind of kinship went some way to demonstrating the
“great fundamental unity [that] pervades the whole of nature.”213
Ambiguity arose, however, as soon as the image itself was not produced
by the vibrating, resonating body, but acquired metaphorical layers of
signification for sound, layers abstracted from any physical connection to
the original source. This divorce of meaning from appearance is based on
the assumption of an originary unity and constitutes something of a secular
fall in the story of sound images in the nineteenth century. It also unleashed
the metaphorical richness of wave motion.
Back in 1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offered one of the clearest distinc-
tions between allegory and symbol in The Statesman’s Manual. Though he
balances this heavily in favor of the symbol (which he connects to the universal
through the particular), his articulation will nevertheless be useful for inter-
rogating Wagner’s unstable aquatic imagery: “An Allegory is but a translation
of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an
abstraction from objects of the senses.”214 Coleridge’s “picture-language”
that abstracts from sensation is an apt description of the most straightforward
reading of Wagner’s imaginative process in his writings; sensation is abstracted
into image which informs idea, rather than vice versa. “On the other hand,”
Coleridge continues, “a Symbol is characterized by a translucence of the
Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal
in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the

212
Hans Christian Ørsted, “Experiments on Acoustic Figures,” Selected Scientific Writings of
H. C. Ørsted, trans. and ed. Karen Jelved, Andrew D. Jackson, and Ole Knudsen (Princeton
University Press, 1998), 274.
213
Johannes Carsten Hauch, H. C. Ørsted’s Leben. Zwei Denkschriften von Hauch und
Forchhammer, trans. H. Sebald (Spandau: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1853), 13.
214
Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 30.
382 Wagner’s material expression

Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible.”215 In

sum, whereas an allegory bears no traceable connection to the notion it
translates into image, a symbol harbors an essential element of that which it
represents. Allegories are phantasmal, while symbols are microcosmic; the one
gestures toward the abstract, the other, to the concrete.
Wagner’s music most explicitly evoking surging water, however, immedi-
ately blurs this distinction. The first scene of Das Rheingold takes place
underwater, and was even apparently to be premiered on conjoined barges
afloat lake Lucerne until safety concerns forced Wagner to abandon the
plan.216 The opening 136 measures of the Prelude are remarkable in being a
paradigm of isosonorous musical representation. The passage is both allego-
rical and symbolic in that it both represents the birth of the world as a
dramatic notion of beginning, and actualizes it through the gradual unfolding
of the natural overtone series: the literal, concrete birth of the acoustic world.
It is thus an “actual and essential part” of that which it represents, and its
“wave motifs” translate – or allegorize – the aquatic sound of primal creation
into abstract images. Here, in other words, “water” connects the symbolic
overtone series to the allegorical, abstracted image of the surging Rhine.
Several modern scholars have responded to this duality (albeit indirectly).
Kittler views this representation of the birth of the world as a “musico–
physiological dream” that effects “a historical transition from intervals to
frequencies, from a logic to a physics of sound,”217 where Thomas Grey
interprets it as “nothing less than a compact mise-en-scène of the mutual
origins of language and melody”218 and Jean-Jacques Nattiez similarly
argues that the music “is born from primordial sound.”219 Kittler reorients
the aural field from music to media, from a theory to a physics of sound,
while Grey and Nattiez sublimate Wagner’s instrumental overtones for a
vocally undifferentiated Urlaut. More than sixty years earlier, Thomas
Mann made heirs of all the above when he stated that Wagner’s music for
the flowing Rhine waters is “the beginning of music itself. And it was not just
the music of myth that he, the poet–composer, would give us but the very
myth of music itself, a mythical philosophy and a musical poem of
Creation.”220 Thematizing the origin of Wagner’s lofty music dramas

215
Ibid. Emphasis added. Goethe had made a similar distinction using the same terms in his theory
of color. See § 916 (symbol) and § 917 (allegory) in Goethe’s Theory of Color, 350–51.
216
See Max Fehr, Richard Wagners Schweizer Zeit, 2 vols. (Aarau: H. R. Sauerlander, 1934–54),
2: 21.
217
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 24. He is, of course, alluding to Wagner’s account of
conceiving the Prelude during a feverish night’s sleep in La Spezia, Italy.
218
Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 266. 219 Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, 54.
220
Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (Univeristy of Chicago Press,
1985), 189.
 Suggestive metaphors: water and sound waves 383

through Rheingold is attractive by virtue of being a tidy – if problematic –

allegory; as physical overtones, the music becomes a metaphor for itself
(i.e. a symbol), a soundtrack to its own existence. But Mann’s chiastic use of
“myth” is double-edged; it connotes both Wagner’s mythic origins of the
musical world, and the “myth” of Wagner as the subject of his own “poem of
creation” in which speech and music are conceived as equally apportioned
shareholders in a singular economy of sound.
In fact, this Wagnerian myth of sonic origins dates back to Ørsted’s
1808 experiment, though – appropriately – its circulation in Germany
(in recycled form) is roughly coeval with the composition of Rheingold itself
(November 1853): it dates from 1852, specifically from Pohl’s “Acoustic
Letters” in the Neue Zeitschrift we encountered earlier, in which he auspi-
ciously dubbed the fantasy of original, physical sound “the Siren of our
century.”221 Though iconic, the “physiological dream” of Rheingold is
not unique in this regard. In Lohengrin, the first five partials of the overtone
series are also symbolically regulative: another sounding beginning –
daybreak in act 2, scene 3 – contains a 54-measure fanfare exploration of
the D major triad, which gradually extends across three and a half octaves
(from A to d3), rising note by note in a 2-measure rhythmic ostinato
(twenty-nine measures of which are underpinned by a sustained drone in
the lower strings, thereby inverting the orchestration of Rheingold’s open-
ing, from m. 45). Liszt admired this realist mapping of sound image
explicitly onto a narrative of daybreak,222 and Wagner even thematizes
geographic distance through contrasting frequencies: watchmen sound the
réveille from a tower, and are answered by a distant tower, all in D major
(54mm.); when the king’s four trumpeters then appear immediately outside
the banqueting hall to sound the summons, the fanfare pitch drops to C
major for fifteen measures – bringing the sound symbolically closer by the
perception of pitch.223 The realist echoes of the sailors in Tristan and Der
fliegende Holländer also point to elementary physics, and could one not also
think of the Lohengrin Prelude’s opening in terms of overtones? Like the
“physiological dream” of Rheingold, the ethereal A major triad could be
construed as the third, fourth, and fifth partials over a missing fundamental,

221
“Das ist die Syrene unseres Jahrhunderts.” Pohl, “Akustische Briefe: Vierter Brief,” NZfM 8
(August 20, 1852), 74.
222
“Die Ruhe der Nacht tritt ein, bis der Tag anbricht. Man hört, wie die Wachen sich von der
Höhe der Türme ihre Signale geben . . . was einen sehr glücklichen Echo-Effekt hervorbringt . . .
während welcher das immer bewegter Crescendo dem Glanze des nahenden Morgens
entspricht.” Liszt, SS 4: 55.
223
See Lohengrin, act 2, scene 3, mm. 870–937.
384 Wagner’s material expression

in which the gradual descent to harmonic security (and fundamental reso-

nance) inverts the ascent of act 3, scene 2, and of Rheingold. That all three
passages thematize a beginning or origin (of day, of the world, of the Holy
Grail on earth) is perhaps no coincidence. The beginning of sound itself –
Pohl’s “Siren” – is heard, symbolically, in terms of pure overtones. By thinking
in terms of wave motion rather than poetics, Pohl asked rhetorically in 1852,
“does [sound] appear any the less magical?”224

Picturing vibrations

The idea of acoustic origins does not distinguish between language, voice,
vowel, melody, instrument, or sound color, still less between physics and
aesthetics; the undefined remainder rests on imag(in)ing pure “vibrations”
or waves of sound (a synaesthetic agent also adopted by such modernists as
Kandinsky and Klee to collapse pictorial and sonic media into each other).
If the acoustic symbolism of the opening of Wagner’s Prelude seems far
fetched, consider Pohl’s fourth “Acoustic Letter” in which this Ur-vibration
is given form as a fantastical vision of Heinrich Dove’s (non-metaphorical)
siren of 1851,225 i.e. a throbbing rod producing sound waves in the dark:

The vibrations of the rod increase more and more. The explosions occur faster and
faster, they always become stronger. There comes a point when my ear can no
longer separate them; they flow together into one in my awareness; I still only hear a
whistling – and suddenly a deep bass tone hits my ear. It is of such deafening
intensity that nothing could be heard, neither of a voice, nor of the sound of any
musical instrument, not even that of the organ. This sound rises in pitch continu-
ally. It runs through all middle steps up to the highest shrillest sound that cuts into
our ear with unbearable intensity.226

224
“Ist sie auch weniger poesiereich – denn sie ist ja nur eine ‘Maschine’ – erscheint sie darum
weniger zaubervoll?” Pohl, “Akustische Briefe: Vierter Brief,” NZfM 8 (August 20, 1852), 74.
225
For a history of the siren, see Ernst Robel, Die Sirenen: Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte
der Akustik. Part II: Die Arbeiten deutscher Physiker über die Sirene im Zeitraume von 1830–
1856 (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1894).
226
“Die Schwingungen des Stabes vermehren sich aber fort und fort. Die Explosionen erfolgen
rascher und rascher, sie werden immer stärker. Es tritt ein Moment ein, wo sie mein Ohr nicht
mehr zu trennen vermag; sie fließen im Bewußtsein in Eins zusammen; ich vernahme nur noch
ein Sausen – und plötzlich schlägt ein tiefer Baßton an mein Ohr. Er ist von so betäubender
Intensität, daß weder von meiner Stimme, noch von dem Tone irgend eines musikalischen
Instruments, selbst nicht von dem der Orgel, das Geringste gehört werden könnte. Diese Ton
erhöht sich fortwährend. Er durchläuft alle Mittelstufen, bis zum höchsten schrillenden Ton,
der in unser Ohr mit unerträglicher Intensität einschneidet.” See Pohl, “Akustische Briefe,” 73.
 Picturing vibrations 385

By situating this primal sound in darkness, Pohl alerts us to the potent effect of
visualizing the (sound) waves; his putative science is not supposed to be
symbolic, still less allegorical, but in darkness it requires the same act of
envisioning that Wagner’s vocabulary does. By denying the reader a clearly
defined image (in daylight), Pohl’s description shares with Wagner’s Prelude
more than the “deafening intensity” of an inhumanly “deep bass tone”
(Rheingold at 16 Hz), it also shares with it the sensory distance (and cognitive
insertion) required by picturing something we cannot actually see.
Another reason for the pitch black context is that, as the rod’s vibrations
continue to speed up, Pohl’s fantastical acoustic spectrum transmutes into
Newton’s color spectrum: “A weak red light becomes visible, it becomes
more lively, the rod glows. First red, then it becomes yellow, then blue. It
runs through all colors until after violet everything sinks back again to
night.”227 As mentioned above, the original, less dramatic version of this
scientific vision was penned by Ørsted,228 and irrespective of whether we
want to consider this or Pohl’s text in any way an exemplar for Rheingold
avant la lettre, the philosophical roots of this belief in a unified cosmos
wherein the “octave” equivalency between senses (contiguous wavelengths
separating the perception of sound and light) is engineered to demonstrate
Ørsted’s belief in natural unity, a single “grand scale of sensations,” can be
traced most directly to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, espousing a “system of
nature [that] is at the same time the system of our mind.”229 In this way,
synaesthetic observations of Wagner’s music attain a basis in putative
reality, at least from the perspective of monistically inspired natural science.
On this basis, the Dresden acoustician August Seebeck – who had first
determined that pitch was based on periodicity – could assume that longi-
tudinal (sound) and transverse (light) waves behave similarly. This led him to
propose an optical analogue to acoustical resonance in 1844, wherein he
explained the mechanism of brightness as the resonance of spectral colors
with vibrating molecules in groups of nerves in the retina.230 Drawing
together the physiological and analogic strands of this discourse, furthermore,

227
“Ein schwaches rothes Licht dämmert auf, es wird immer lebhafter, der Stab glüht. Erst roth,
dann wird er gelb, dann blau. Er durchläuft alle Farben, bis nach dem Violett Alles wieder in
Nacht versinkt.” Ibid.
228
Hans Christian Ørsted, “Experiments on Acoustic Figures,” in Selected Scientific Writings of
H. C. Ørsted, 280.
229
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 30.
230
August Seebeck, “Bemerkungen über Resonanz und über Helligkeit der Farben im Spectrum,”
Annalen der Physik 62 (1844) 62: 571–76. See also the reverse theory where color is treated in
relation to acoustic resonance by Macedonio Melloni, “Beobachtung über die Farbung der
Netzhaut und der Krystall-Linse,” Annalen der Physik 56 (1842), 263–302.
386 Wagner’s material expression

Helmholtz only accepted Thomas Young’s tricolor receptor theory (where the
retinal structure comprised three receptors sensitive principally to wave-
lengths of red, green, and violet ranges) when he realized it formed a con-
ceptual basis for understanding the organ of Corti in the ear; that is, where
primary colors (objectively based in particular nerve endings of rods and
cones) become analogous to simple tones (objectively based on the organ of
Corti), and color mixtures to combination tones.231 To be sure, such analogies
between the physical properties of waveforms and of different organs of
sensory perception remain inspirational rather than empirical; they never-
theless betray a common way of thinking during the mid-century, and lay
bare the influence – even within the natural sciences – of the romantics’
fervent desire to find a grand foundation for unity.
While Helmholtz’s research from the 1860s (and later that of Alexander
Graham Bell)232 offered detailed explanations for the wave formations that
produced different vowels’ sound color, Eduard MacDowell demonstrates
that writers on music continued to draw as late as 1912 on the enticing
specter of a spectrum vibrating between sound and color to explain
Wagner’s compositional skill:
In the Prelude to Lohengrin, Wagner pictures his angels in dazzling white. He uses
the highest vibrating sounds at his command. But for the dwarfs who live in the
gloom of Niebelheim he chooses deep shades of red, the lowest vibrating color of the
solar spectrum.233

231
“In the cochlea of the internal ear, the ends of the nerve fibers, which lie spread out regularly side
by side, are provided with minute elastic appendages (the rods of Corti) arranged like the
keys and hammers of a piano. My hypothesis is that each of these separate nerve fibers is
constructed so as to be sensitive to a definite tone, to which its elastic fiber vibrates in perfect
consonance . . . Its analogy with Young’s theory of colors is obvious.” Hermann von Helmholtz,
“Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens,” in Hermann von Helmholtz, Selected
Writings, ed. Russell Kahn (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 181. For a contextual
examination of Helmholtz’s realization, see Timothy Lenoir, “Helmholtz and the Materialities
of Communication,” 184–207.
232
Alexander Graham Bell, “Vowel Theories,” in The Mechanism of Speech: Lectures Delivered
Before the American Association (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1907), 117–29.
233
Eduard MacDowell, “Origin of Song vs. Origin of Instrumental Music,” in Critical and
Historical Essays: Lectures delivered at Columbia University (Boston, Leipzig, New York:
A. P. Schmidt, 1912), 21. MacDowell’s ideas are almost identical to attempts at scientific explanations
for comparative “octaves” across different senses, such as Alexander Wilford Hall’s in 1878: “as
the auditory nerve recognizes the octaves of sound by their pitch, from the slowly pulsating bass
to the rapidly throbbing soprano, so the optic nerve recognizes its single octave of light in its
vermilion and crimson, through the middle register of green and yellow, up to the highest tints of
blue and violet: and as the gustary nerve recognizes its octaves of taste by variety of flavor, from the
low and shuddering notes of aloes and wormwood, through the mean register of acids, up to the
purest and highest tones of nectarous sweets, – so the olfactory nerve recognizes and analyses its
 Watery emblems: the harmonic sea 387

Back in 1852, however, Pohl declared the gap between sound and light to be
too great to bridge with “one of our inadequate means,”234 and we may
suppose that the inherently ambiguous images of sound and light waves
went a long way to assuaging this scientific lack, as it did for MacDowell
even though explanations concerning waveforms existed long before 1912.
The crucial step taken by writers who treated music as the result of
vibrations, i.e. a sounding medium, is to present an essentialist perspective
in which vibrating air (ether) is considered a material reality rather than a
secondary product of aesthetic theory; here, an abstract idea behind music
recedes against the physiological pleasure of experiencing its emotional
content, which was precisely Wagner’s hope in 1851 for the “immediate
physical portrayal” of art as an “immediate vital act.”235 Put more abstractly,
an a priori retreats in favor of a presence; the vibrations mean nothing but
the perception of their sensation (as Lotze argued in 1852), which Wagner
wanted to be intuitively comprehensible on his terms.

Watery emblems: the harmonic sea

For both physiologist and music theorist, the “material reality” most com-
parable to vibrating air seems to have been water: the quintessential fluidum
vitale. Köhler’s fantasy of acoustic scrutiny is a case in point:

The silent, low-limbed fish in the deep regions of its fluid element feels every stirring
of the water’s surface above . . . We humans don’t perceive anything in the con-
stantly revolving, surging air waves; the delicate body of tones is not yet more than
letters to the young schoolboy, its form appears like an Egyptian hieroglyph to the
first-year elementary student.236

Less than four years later, Helmholtz used the same simile not to lament our
poor understanding of sound, but precisely to explain wave motions to a
non-scientific audience. The ocean was an instructive spectacle that illus-
trated what otherwise could only be “recognized by the mind’s eye of the

numerous octaves of odour by their variety of scent.” A. W. Hall, Evolution of Sound: Part of the
Problem of Human Life and Hereafter (New York: Hall & Co., 1878), 228–29.
234
“Die Kluft zwischen Ton und Licht ist zu groß, um sie mit einem unserer unzureichenden Mittel
zu überbrücken.” Pohl, “Akustische Briefe: Vierter Brief,” NZfM 8 (August 20, 1852), 74.
235
SSD 3: 46. Cf. PW 1: 73.
236
“Der stumme, gliederarme Fisch auf tiefem Grunde seines flüssigen Elements fühlt jede Regung
der obern Wasserfläche . . . Aber wir Menschen nehmen nichts wahr in den stets kreisenden,
wogenden Luftwellen; der zarte Körper des Tones ist uns noch nicht mehr, wie dem
Schulbübchen ein Buchstabe, dessen Form dem A-B-C Schützen eine ägyptische Hieroglyphe
ist.” Köhler, Die Melodie der Sprache, 78, 83.
388 Wagner’s material expression

mathematical thinker,” namely a mass of air traversed in all directions by

waves of sound:
We can watch it from the parapet of any bridge spanning a river, but it is most complete
and sublime when viewed from a cliff beside the sea. It is then rare not to see
innumerable systems of waves, of various lengths, propagated in various directions.
The longest come from the deep sea and dash against the shore. Where the boiling
breakers burst shorter waves arise and run back again toward the sea. Perhaps a bird of
prey darting after a fish gives rise to a system of circular waves which, rocking over the
undulating surface, are propagated with the same regularity as on the mirror of an
inland lake. And thus, from the distant horizon, where white lines of foam on the steel-
blue surface betray the coming trains of wave, down to the sand beneath our feet, where
the impression of their arcs remains, there is unfolded before our eyes a sublime image
of immeasurable power and unceasing variety which, as the eye at once recognizes its
pervading order and law, enchains and exalts without confusing the mind.237

What this has in common with Wagner’s theoretical writings is compelling.

Both illustrate by literary representations of waves and water. Both draw on
the concept of unknowably wide and powerful waters, i.e. a sublime ocean
(though without recourse to “the voice of nature,” i.e. the notion of natural
sounds from thunder claps to Aeolian harps). Most revealingly, both adopt
the ocean to say what it is they want to say about the functioning of musical
sound, though ostensibly for different reasons. (The only evidence of
Wagner’s awareness of swirling sound waves in his “sea of harmony” is
his reference to good music written according to “tone vibrations,”238 and a
glimmer of double meaning in his summary protest to Uhlig: “Ah, how
ludicrous it would be if, with all our enthusiasm for art, what we were
fighting over were simply thin air [leere Luft]!”239)
Recall that this connection is specific to melody for A. F. Kanne –
a leading critic for the Allgmeine musikalische Zeitung during the early
decades of the nineteenth century. He argued that “morally the similarity
[between the ocean and melody] is undeniable.”240 While historically
melody has an audio–poetic association with water, Kanne’s is kinetic. His
view is based on the abstraction of a sine wave archetype for all melodic
motion, which he sees infinitely replicated on the surface of the sea. By
contrast, Wagner’s symbolic use of water vocabulary is neither audio nor

237
Helmholtz, “On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music” [1857], in Science and
Culture, 57.
238
SSD 3: 120. Cf. PW 1: 153.
239
Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, January 12, 1852, Zurich, in SB 4: 249.
240
“Moralisch wäre die Ähnlichkeit unläugbar.” Kanne, “Der Zauber der Tonkunst,” AmZ
63 (1821), 539.
 Watery emblems: the harmonic sea 389

kinetic, but sensory – pivoting between the disembodied idea of an oceanic

expanse and the resonance of submerged vibrations. Throughout his writ-
ings, he reveals that he too thinks consciously in clarifying metaphors, the
logic of which appears to be clinched only after images are formed. Such a
thought process is, in a sense, a microcosm for Wagner’s mantra that feeling
and sensation precede understanding and knowledge. Consider the incon-
gruities: the gap that must be traversed by daring sailor–composers – the sea
of harmony – is comprised of “tinted waves of harmony” – water in its
abundant vitality, in which melody is simultaneously the poet’s “wave-born
mirror image,”241 as well as the droplets falling back to the “mountain lake”
of the orchestra from the poet’s oar aboard the boat of the dramatic singer’s
Versmelodie;242 elsewhere, ringing sounds flow as breast milk (where
melody is its “nursing mother”).243
Wagner’s potent tangle of images allied to the ocean is new neither in
metaphor nor in subject. He tapped into a web of established metaphors
relating to the Beethoven mythology, where the venturesome composer
navigates uncharted, stormy waters according to his inner compass.244
As early as 1799, Wackenroder had begun weaving this web by character-
izing Germany – Land der Musik – as a “resonant ocean,” which Wagner
then localized in relation to a Land / Meer der Harmonie.245 But his use of
the metaphor in 1851, I am suggesting, is differentiated by the realism it had
acquired by this time through proximity to the burgeoning natural sciences.
His critics responded accordingly: Hanslick’s negative description of unend-
liche Melodie in Meistersinger as “the intentional dissolution of every
fixed form into a shapeless, sensually intoxicating resonance” seems oddly

241
SSD 4: 142. Cf. PW 2: 280. 242 SSD 4: 173. Cf. PW 2: 314. 243 SSD 4: 93. Cf. PW 2: 226.
244
The following text has multiple correspondences to Wagner’s classic accounts in Das Kunstwerk
der Zukunft and Oper und Drama, and appeared in 1838: “Beethoven war und bleibt wohl
unbestritten der kühnste Segler auf den Fluthen der Harmonie . . . Jede seiner Fahrten auf des
Tonreiches gränzenlosen Ocean gestaltet sich zu einer Entdeckungsreise, von wannen er stets
Neues, noch Ungekanntes aus weiter Ferne mit zurück in die Heimath bringt. Scheint es auch
zuweilen, als sey der allen Meeresstürm ein hohnlachend trotzende Argonaut irgendwo
verschlagen, an schroff entgegenstarrende Klippen, oder auf wüstes, unbewohntes Eiland; doch
immer findet der Genius seines unbeugsamen Geistes sich wieder zurechte, denn er darf
vertrauen mit Zuversicht dem inner, nie trügenden Compaß, und ihm leuchtet als treuester
Führer der reinste, hellstrahlende Demantglanz des unbeweglich am Himmelszelte flammenden
Polarsterns.” See “Zweytes Concert spiritual,” Allgemeine Musikalischer Anzeiger 10 (1838),
45. Quoted in Heike Stumpf, “… wollet mir jetzt durch die phantastisch verschlungenen
Kreuzgänge folgen!” Metaphorisches Sprechen in der Musikkritik der ersten Hälfte des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Bonner, 1996), 103. For discussion of Uhlig’s essays on
Beethoven, see Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, 70–76.
245
“tönendes Meer,” in Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2 vols.
(Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1991), 1: 206.
390 Wagner’s material expression

apt;246 as does Nietzsche’s criticism of the same as part allegory, part

acoustic symbol: “One walks into the sea, gradually loses one’s secure foot-
ing, and finally surrenders oneself to the elements without reservation: one
must swim.”247 At the end of the century, Max Nordau humorlessly tied the
metaphor to diatribes of degeneration where “weak-brain[ed]” listeners
resurface from the opera house “with a merely sensual feeling of having
enjoyed a hot, nervously exciting tone-bath.”248
In these readings, Wagner’s harmonic sea was nothing but a vast reso-
nance chamber, in which the physiological immediacy of listening to an
artwork defined by its “immediate physical portrayal”249 provoked some
wearied responses: “Wagner seems to mean business . . . We simply groan
under a weight of bare realism and amorphous sound,” Moritz Hauptmann
wrote of Lohengrin. “There is something wrong somewhere,” he scoffed,
“when a man comes away from a drama or an opera feeling as if he had been
beaten.”250 In tandem with this proto-scientific protest, water was also a
motif of nature’s seemingly irresistible might, and feeds into a discourse that
David Blackbourn has linked to the specifically modern project of conquer-
ing nature through science. In such a reading, the material landscape
provides an entry point to access Germany’s cultural past; marshaling
water, reclaiming marshland as fields for agriculture, and replotting the
course of the Rhine to prevent flooding and aid shipping, were instances of
man’s mastery of natural waters that, Blackbourn argues, became particu-
larly relevant to the modernization of German culture.251
Like the sensory basis of Lautfarbe and Klangfarbe, therefore, there is a
constant flavor of realism in Wagner’s ostensibly fantastical, aquatic rhetoric.
In his conceit about the harmonic “sea,” he even applies a realist substitution
test. Without an ocean to connect the various allegorical shores “no light-
winged ship [may] carry anything from either continent” until some “machi-
nery, perhaps a railway, is able to bridge the waste!”252 Consider Wagner’s
joke: the Bavarian Ludwigsbahn had first journeyed on December 7, 1835, so
Beethoven (the “most daring swimmer”) could only have taken the train

246
Hanslick, Music Criticisms 1846–99, trans. Henry Pleasants (Baltimore: Penguin, 1950), 119.
247
Nietzsche, “Nietzsche contra Wagner,” 666.
248
Max Nordau, Degeneration [1892], (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1993), 211.
249
SSD 3: 46. Cf. PW 1: 73.
250
Moritz Hauptmann to Louis Spohr, February 9, 1853, in The Letters of a Leipzig Cantor, ed.
Alfred Schöne and Ferdinand Hiller (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1892), 2: 211.
251
David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern
Germany (New York: Norton, 2006).
252
SSD 3: 82. Cf. PW 1: 111.
 Watery emblems: the harmonic sea 391

between melody and rhythm anachronistically. By intuitively linking the

overwhelming natural power of the ocean to that of musical expression,
Wagner rejects modern technology – the specter of a nineteenth-century
channel tunnel – as the equivalent of superficial art: meaningless short cuts,
effects without causes (Wagner’s poetic boat used oars, not steam).253 From
his “boundless sea of harmony” to the “waves of melody,” the image of water
thereby informs Wagner’s ability to express through sound, and like
Helmholtz, he held fast to a simile between the ocean and the “nature of
tones”:

If melody and rhythm are the shores on which musical art touches with fertilizing
contact the two continents of its primally related arts, so sound itself is her very own,
liquid element, and its immeasurable expanse of waters make out the sea of
harmony. The eye knows but the surface of this sea; its depth the depth of the
heart alone can fathom. Upwards from its nocturnal sea bed it extends to the sunlit
surface; the ever-widening rings of rhythm cross over on it from one shore; from the
shady valleys of the other shore arise the yearning gentle breezes that rouse this calm
surface to gracefully rising and sinking waves of melody.254

Wagner’s propagating ripples (“the ever-widening rings of rhythm”) paral-

lel Helmholtz’s “innumerable systems of [circular] waves” confirming that
harmony and water interact intuitively on more than one level. This rebus-
like vocabulary of aquatic symbols provided a means of expressing the belief
in an invisible, material substance. Implicit therein is the enveloping mate-
riality of water. This never materializes as rain – whether element or
ambience – with its disconnected droplets. In the Wagnerian imagination,
water remains a continuous, enveloping quality capable of propagating
waves. Like the Rhine waters that collapse Coleridge’s distinction between
allegory and symbol, Wagner’s water imagery crystallizes into a more
concrete phenomenon for the scientific (or scientifically curious) mind; its
structural relation to Helmholtz’s sound waves enters along a path where
the “sea of harmony,” in addition to being merely poetic metaphor, can be
read as a claim for the plausible materiality of sound.
Of course, the signified of sound / ocean waves remained undetermined:
if Nietzsche saw the paradox of willful freedom and mathematical order in a
waterfall,255 Helmholtz saw an illustration of material sound from his cliff-
top vantage point. The tendency of water to provoke solipsistic reflections

253
SSD 4: 172. Cf. PW 2: 315. Wagner’s remarks against technology are not old-fashioned so much
as critical of industrialized machinery’s unnatural power and failure to engage “authentically”
with its environment. See SSD 3: 82–83. Cf. PW 1: 111–12.
254
SSD 3: 83. Cf. PW 1: 112. 255 Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, 131.
392 Wagner’s material expression

was evident for Wagner himself when he was ambling alongside Cosima,
Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s sister, who recounts that the party sat still:
looking out over the sea of glistening silver. As we listened to the soft lapping of the
waves, each one of us heard the song of his own thoughts sounding out of this sweet
monotonous melody as if some magic horn were sending forth a piercingly
sweet echo.256

Such correspondences between solipsism and illusion were confronted by

Raff, who was skeptical of the hypnotic effect Wagner’s wave images had on
a reader. “But what do I see, my friend?!” he balked, after quoting a passage
from Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft:
You are staring straight forward, you appear not to hear me! Ah, I see . . . Wagner’s
attractive description arouses your memories from Heligoland. All the magic of
seascape steps before you through a willing imagination supported by lively remem-
brance, wake up, my friend, wake up!257

Ironically, this freedom of interpretive reflection is opposed to the physio-

logical determinism that proto-scientific inquiries sought to establish
through color and vowel, Klang- and Lautfarbe. As noted at the outset,
however, Wagner’s idea of recurring musical motifs tacitly holds their
signification to be learned, not innately perceivable; as A. B. Marx put it
in 1854, it is “an external reminiscence acting mnemonically, but not
psychologically.”258 While vocal and instrumental sound color remained a
universally respected parameter of Wagner’s compositional practice,
he played no role directly in the scientific debate about their perception.
Regardless of the extent to which his works may have provoked contribu-
tions to this discourse, as prompts to the scientific imagination, the fore-
going discussion indicates how thoroughly his writings can be read through
the constellation of contemporary scientific thought.

256
The Nietzsche–Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline
V. Kerr (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 79.
257
“Aber was muß ich sehen, mein Freund?! Sie starren vor Sich hin, Sie scheinen mich nicht zu
hören! Ach, ich errathe. . . die reizende Schilderung Wagner’s ruft Ihnen Erinnerungen aus
Helgoland wach; alle Zauber der Seelandschaft treten vor Ihnen, durch ein williges Gedächtniß
unterstützte lebhafte Phantasie. Erwachen Sie, Freund, erwachen Sie. . .” Raff, Die
Wagnerfrage, 72.
258
Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and its Culture, 97.
 Epilogue: Turning off the lights

It seems only fair that the last word should go to Wagner himself, whose voice
has been somewhat less than authoritative in the preceding pages. In one of the
more intriguing passages from Lohengrin – the opera that has pivoted, for us,
between so many of the dualisms in this journey through Melodik – Ortrud
eyes a solution to her intractable problem, her mysteriously invincible adver-
sary (Lohengrin):
One who possesses magic strength
will, if the smallest of his limbs
is torn from him, at once be seen
stripped of his power, yes, exposed!1

This famous prophecy is, in many respects, an apt metaphor for the problem of
idealized melody that we have been probing because it captures the need to
explode the illusory “magic strength” of a musical object by means of the
simultaneously desirous and dangerous objectification of that object. “Cut a
finger from this god, and he will no longer be a god” is Wagner’s Feuerbachian
message; its silent continuation, by extension, would be that by taking a
pedagogue’s pen or a physiologist’s scalpel to melody, one expels its inscrutable
powers of expression, for better or worse. As we have seen, Wagner and Franz
Brendel interpreted Lohengrin as a model of genius in these terms, and
appropriately, the composer implored Liszt to “cut nothing!”2
But the objectification of melody came in many flavors during the course of
the nineteenth century, and Wagner’s role as the poster boy of Germany’s
Melodielosigkeit makes him a thoroughly ambiguous figure in this respect. On
the one hand, he espoused the phonological voice as the centerpiece of all
melodic expression while, on the other hand, his dry, recitative-like stichomy-
thia made him a laughing stock for Italianist listeners. He placed human
“feeling” at the fountainhead of all sensory communication, yet stubbornly
rejected its basis in scientific inquiry as the “exposure of every mystery of being

1
“Jed’ Wesen, das, durch Zauber stark, / wird ihm des Leibes kleinstes Glied / entrissen nur, muss
sich alsbald / ohnmächtig zeigen, wie es ist!” Lohengrin, act 2, scene 1. Emphasis added.
2
Wagner to Liszt, July 2, 1850, Thun, in Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt (vols. 1 & 2), trans.
Francis Hueffer (Cirencestor: Echo library, 2005), 46. 393
394 Epilogue

as mere imaginary secrets.”3 These representative contradictions betray what I

have termed the parallax perspective of mid-century aesthetics: one that views
the same object simultaneously from two different positions, wherein the
singular object appears not to be the same as itself, and one’s perspective
forever flits between the two viewpoints. As we saw in our study of Wagner’s
philological borrowings, it seems that because the one melodic “object”
Wagner did adhere to rigorously (at least for a time) has been largely dis-
credited, commentators have marginalized its importance for his
Weltanschauung. Speech roots, Stabreim, and vowel sounds thus form a
pressure point in the parallax perspective mentioned above. Their communi-
cative power – or “magic strength” – was thought to be historically real, i.e.
scientific: something Wagner felt he could harness, and yet the implications of
this reality – the continuity between Lautfarbe and Klangfarbe, the materialism
in any etymological “physiognomy” – remained beneath the surface of
Wagner’s composition for listeners, it remained speculative, acquiring only
the semblance of scientific rigor through figures such as Pohl and Köhler. (The
concept of realism is of course always relative in relation to its object, and in this
case, we are reminded of the so-called Thomas theorum, that “if men define
situations as real, then they are real in their consequences.”)
By his autumn years Wagner had had enough of pseudo-scientific spec-
ulation, and shot down ideas of musical synaesthesia in an aphorism penned
more than three decades after the shimmering Lohengrin prelude.
I have met – intelligent – people with no sense at all of music, and for whom tonal
configurations [Tongestaltungen] had no expression, who tried to interpret them by
analogy with color-impressions; but never have I met a musical person to whom
sound conveyed colors, except by a figure of speech.4
Of course, the scientific basis for Goethe’s “physiological colors,” Ule’s
voice, or Lotze’s muscle contractions that isolated the emotion sensation
of a vowel, i.e. a mechanics of the “soul,” were strongly supported at the time
by the monist platform of Germany’s liberal academy, and thus make a
legitimate claim on historical assessments of Wagner’s music. While these
writers do not exactly provide an insight that completely shatters our latter-
day perception of Wagner’s music, they foreground the contemporary fear –
very real for Nietzsche – that his music does work on the nerve fibers,
muscle tissue, and skin cells of his auditors.5 “After all,” he claimed of

3
SSD 10: 84. Cf. PW 6: 75. 4 SSD 12: 280. Cf. PW 8: 375.
5
The residue of this fear finds expression with writers such as Adorno, who argued in value-laden
terms that Wagner’s approach inverted Hegel’s: “the Hegelian definition that art is the sensuous
manifestation of the idea [no longer applies]. Instead, the sensuous is so arranged as to appear to
 Turning off the lights 395

Wagner, “aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Like

Hauptmann earlier, he was not being facetious when he observed: “I no
longer breathe easily when this music begins to affect me,” and his com-
plaint need not be read as intended, simply a critique of psychological
sickness.6 It also betrays the anxiety among listeners that Wagnerian
music does act physiologically, and that we cannot close our ears.
By taking this principle to an extreme, writers such as Spencer and
Hausegger sought to reify the entire experience of emotion and feeling as
the sensations of muscular contractions, i.e. Wagner’s would-be scientific
rationale for sound that is gefühlsverständlich. The fantasy of a composer’s
physiological power dominates this landscape of ideas, and while skeptical
commentators have tended to formulate this negatively (where “style becomes
the sum of all the stimuli registered by the totality of his senses”),7 it can
equally break through the barrier of cultural institutionalism; despite
Wagner’s passionate philology, in other words, his modes – or “materialities” –
of communication reach the illiterate and uneducated just as powerfully as the
privileged literati, as Kittler put it: “an aesthetics of applied physiology . . .
required neither training nor elite culture.”8 So if, in Wagnerian sonorous
melodies, we have not been learning about a new cultural “object,” we have all
the same been confronted with its own hidden presuppositions and become
aware of another – disturbing – side of that object that we knew all along:
cognitive surrender to the sheer materiality of sound.
In her celebrated essay on “Wagner’s Fluids,” Susan Sontag thought of
Tristan act 3 as “a platform against lucidity” where not eroticism but the
surrender of consciousness is the point: “they want the lights turned off.
Isolde’s last words . . . are a description of losing consciousness: ertrinken,
versinken / unbewusst höchste Lust!”9 In some ways, this observation estab-
lishes the narrative end point for Chapter 6. Neural networks, after all, require
no consciousness when stimulated by acids or electrodes – the analogue of an
objectified melodic expression. Correspondingly, in the search among
German physiologists for a mechanical basis for sensory perception of mel-
ody, every movement towards emotional or physiological specificity became a
hemming-in of interpretation in the realm of art, which – for music – entailed
an act of listening that becomes ever more akin to an involuntary physical

be in control of the idea.” T. W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London
and New York: Verso, 2005), 96.
6
Nietzsche, “Nietzsche contra Wagner,” The Portable Nietzsche, 664.
7
Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 91.
8
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800–1900 (Stanford University Press, 1990), 189.
9
Susan Sontag, “Wagner’s Fluids,” London Review of Books (December 10, 1987), 8–9.
396 Epilogue

reflex: the ultimate loss of contemplative freedom. The possibility that such
control (or manipulation) could be transferred to musical sound – conceived
as an experience of immersion in vibrating air masses where “to hear is to be
touched, both physically and emotionally”10 – constitutes a dark fantasy of
Wagner reception and remains a specter over those writers who sought to
uncover a “science of feeling”: a traceable physiological link between stimulus,
sensation, and emotion.
In 1854, Hanslick had cautiously predicted the future possibility of “an
‘exact’ science of music after the model of chemistry or physiology,”11
though he later complained of being subject to irresistible chemical stim-
ulation in just this manner when listening to Richard Strauss’ Don Juan:
“The composer may thus be compared with a routine chemist who well
understands how to mix all the elements of musical–sensual stimulation to
produce a stupefying ‘pleasure gas.’ For my part I prefer, with all due
homage to such chemical skill, not to be its victim.”12 This quip is only a
euphemism for music Hanslick didn’t like; but if he presents one view,
Nietzsche offered another: the decadent motive for seeking out stimuli,
fearless of the results, in what amounted to artistic voyeurism. “The essential
thing is the type of new desire, the wish to imitate and to experience the lives
of others, disguise, dissimulation of the soul. Romantic art is only a make-
shift substitute for a defective ‘reality.’”13 The implication is that artistic
stimulation is artificial because neural excitement with no connection to
(authentic) experience outside the grip of art is tantamount to galvanism –
or, in the context of new media: virtual reality. One of the modern inher-
itances of this claim is Robert Nozick’s “experience machine,” a thought
experiment in which individuals are given the choice whether or not to enter
a machine that could simulate any pleasurable experience they wished –
indistinguishable from reality – through cerebral stimulation. Nozick’s
second argument (of three) against entering the machine rhymes with
Hanslick’s dislike of “pleasure gas,” namely that we want a unique identity:
“someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob.”14
Reflex functions flatten out the ground of individuality, presupposing a
uniform response that is incapable of being misunderstood – the extreme

10
Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 4.
11
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful¸ 35. 12 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms 1846–99, 292.
13
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 440.
14
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 43. The other two
arguments Nozick gives against entering the machine are that “We want to do certain things, and
not just have the experience of doing them . . . [and that] plugging into an experience machine
limits us to man-made reality.” Ibid.
 Turning off the lights 397

edge of intuitively comprehensible melody. The historiography of Wagner

studies has come to associate this control of the physically vulnerable
subject with what, after the Second World War, is often called Wagner’s
proto-fascism (i.e. the Nietzschian trope of an overblown sensuality that
keeps audiences pinned in their seats in order to subject them to “mytho-
logical configurations” of feudal socialism).15 But earlier figures like William
James passionately refuted the theory that we are responsive automata, that
“feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react
upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller
whom it accompanies.”16 Common sense, he asserts, shows that even a live
frog with an intact brain will not respond in predictable ways to stimuli:
“The signal may be given, but ideas, emotions or caprices will be aroused
instead of the fatal motor reply.”17
Wagner, as we have seen, also rejected the deterministic logic of this
strand of materialism, though for different reasons, even if the mid-century
reception of his music and vocabulary was inevitably characterized to some
extent by the intellectual currents of sensuality and physical stimuli ema-
nating from Johannes Müller’s Berlin.18 In this context, Brünnhilde’s plea
that a chemically forgetful Siegfried “forced delight from me, and love”
resonates provocatively.19 But Wagner’s music is not just erotic spasm, of
course; it is precisely because anatomical excitation forms only one contrib-
utory strand to the dense woof of his reception that he continues to elude
reductive historical categories. What is lost, he protested, in a deterministic
worldview based on the physical sciences is “spontaneity itself”; and this
surely traverses the gamut of unpredictable reactions to Laut- and
Klangfarben within his melodies, however contrary this may be to his
urge to be understood precisely, and on his own terms. “Few puzzle any
more,” Sontag reflected, “about what Wagner’s operas mean. Now Wagner
is just enjoyed – as a drug.”20 Such deliverance from his political reception,
though well-intentioned, can only sound ironic against the heritage of
material incursion and artificial stimuli from which it originates.
Which brings us back to Ortrud’s tuneless recitation about severing
Lohengrin’s finger – or the puncturing of idealism with a sharp scalpel.

15
On this sizeable topic, see, most recently, Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner (London and
New York: Verso, 2010), 9ff.; and Slavoj Žižek, “Why is Wagner Worth Saving?” in Adorno, In
Search of Wagner, viii–xxvii.
16
William James, “Are we Automata?” Mind 4 (1879), 1–22, here 1.
17
Ibid., 4. See also Principles of Psychology [1890] (New York: Cosimo, 2007) 1: 130ff.
18
See Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab, 6ff.
19
“Er zwang mir Lust und Liebe ab” Götterdämmerung, act 2, scene 4.
20
Sontag, “Wagner’s Fluids,” 9.
398 Epilogue

The double vision that pits the idealist viewpoint against the realism of a
materialist perspective wears a Janus face. Germany’s Wilhelmine future
looked increasingly toward scientific materialism, and Wagner’s recalcitrant
emphasis on genius and the unscientific criteria of “feeling” and “intuitive
knowledge”21 makes him perhaps just as much a cultural reactionary as an
artistic revolutionary during the 1850s. Another way of putting this is that,
already in 1848, Ortrud’s modernist observation cedes the final victory
between idealism and materialism to the latter. And here, a final Wagnerian
contradiction is exposed: the sorceress-turned-scientist lacks the proper word
for the means by which Lohengrin will be undone; she intuits it, but cannot
name it. Wagner similarly refused to move beyond historical linguistics for
his “science” of melody that “actualizes thought,” even while his ambiguously
materialist metaphors and suggestive imagery pointed to that which he could
not bring himself to name – the science of sound. It was easier simply to say:
“we tersely sum up music’s nature in the concept – Melody.”22

21 22
SSD 10: 84. Cf. PW 6: 75. SSD 3: 304. Cf. PW 2: 103.
Appendix A: Books on language
in Wagner’s Dresden library

Author Title Publication Topics

Bemmel, De la langue et de la poésie Bruxelles: historical

Eugène van provençales A. Vandale, 1846 linguistics

Gervinus, G. G. Geschichte der poetischen Leipzig: Wilhelm historical

National-Literatur der Engelmann, linguistics and
Deutschen (5 vols.) 1840–44 literature

Gervinus, G. G. Handbuch der Geschichte der Leipzig: Wilhelm historical

poetischen National-Literatur Engelmann, 1842 linguistics and
der Deutschen literature

Graff, E. G. Diskuta. Denkmäler deutscher Stuttgart u. historical

Sprache und Literatur, aus alten Tübingen: J. G. linguistics and
Handschriften zum ersten Male Cotta, 1826–29 literature
theils herausgegeben, theils
nachgewiesen und beschrieben.
(3 vols.)

Grimm, Jacob Deutsche Grammatik Göttingen: grammar,

(vol. 1 only) Heinrich Dieterich, etymology, his-
1840 torical
[3rd edn.] linguistics

Grimm, Jacob Geschichte der Deutschen Leipzig: historical

Sprache (2 vols.) Weidmannsche linguistics
Buchhandlung,
1848

Grimm, Jacob Ueber den altdeutschen Göttingen: historical

Meistergesang Heinrich Dieterich, linguistics
1811

Hagen, Des Meisters Godefrit Hagen, Cöln am Rhein: dictionary,

Godefrit der Zeit Stadtschreibers, M. DüMont- historical
Reimchronik der Stadt Cöln Schauberg, 1834 linguistics
aus dem dreizehnten
Jahrhundert. Mit

399
400 Appendix A

Author Title Publication Topics

Anmerkungen und
Wörterbuch nach der
einzigen alten Handschrift
zum erstenmale vollständig
herausgegeben von E. von
Groote, Stadtrath.

Herder, Johann Ausgewählte Werke in Einem Stuttgart u. philosophy of

Gottfried von Bande Tübingen: J. G. language,
Cotta, 1844 philology

Hornig, C. Glossarium zu den Gedichten Quedlinburg: L. L. dictionary,

August Walthers von der Vogelweide Franke, 1844 historical
nebst einem Reimverzeichniss. linguistics

Lachmann, Zu den Nibelungen und Berlin: G. Reimer, dictionary,

Karl u. zur Klage. Anmerkungen von 1836 historical
Wilhelm Karl Lachmann. Wörterbuch linguistics
Wackernagel von W. Wackernagel

Minnesinger Deutsche Liederdichter des Leipzig: J. A. Barth, historical

zwölften, dreizehnten 1838 linguistics and
und vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, literature
aus alten bekannten
Handschriften und früheren
Drucken gesammelt und
berichtigt, mit den Lesarten
derselben, Geschichte des Lebens
der Dichter und ihrer Werke,
Sangweisen der Lieder,
Reimverzeichnis der Anfänge,
und Abbildungen sämmtlicher
Handschriften von Fr. Heinrich
von der Hagen (2 vols.)

Rühs, Friedrich Die Edda nebst einer Einleitung Berlin: historical

über nordische Poesie und Realschulbuch- linguistics and
Mythologie und einem Anhang handlung, 1812 literature
über die historische
Literatur der Isländer

Saxo Saxonis Grammatici Historia Havniae: historical

Grammaticus Danica. Recensuit et commen- Gyldendal, 1839 linguistics
tariis illustravit Petrus Erasmus
Müller (2 vols.)
 Appendix A 401

Author Title Publication Topics

Vaulu-Spá Das älteste Denkmal Leipzig: historical

germanisch-nordischer Sprache, Weidmann, 1830 linguistics
nebst einigen Gedanken über
Nordens Wissen und Glauben
und nordische Dichtkunst von
Ludwig Ettmüller

Volkslieder Alte, hoch- und niederdeutsche Stuttgart u. historical

mit Abhandlung und Tübingen, J. G. linguistics and
Anmerkungen herausgegeben Cotta, 1844–45 literature
von Ludwig Uhland [2nd edn.]

Ziemann, Mittelhochdeutsches Quedlinburg u. dictionary,

Adolf Wörterbuch zum Leipzig: G. Basse, grammar,
Handgebrauch. Nebst 1838 historical
grammatischer Einleitung linguistics
 Appendix B: Books on language in
Wagner’s Wahnfried library

Author Title Publication Topics

Abel, Die deutschen Personen- Berlin: Herz, 1853 etymology
Heinrich F. Namen

Apel, August Metrik (2 vols.) Leipzig: Weygand, 1834 linguistics

Becker, Karl F. Schulgrammatik der Frankfurt a. M.: grammar

deutschen Sprache Herrmann, 1835

Benecke, Beyträge zur Kenntnis der Göttingen: Dieterich, literature of the Middle
Friedrich G. altdeutschen Sprache 1810–32 Ages

Bode, Georg, H. Geschichte der Hellenischen Leipzig: Heinrich Bode, historical linguistics
Dichtkunst (3 vols.) 1840

Bopp, Franz Vergleichende Grammatik Leipzig: Dümmler, linguistics, comparative

des Sanskrit, Send, 1868–71 (3rd edn.) grammar
Armenischen,
Griechischen,
Lateinischen, Litauischen,
Altslavischen, Gothischen
und Deutschen (3 vols.)

Brandstätter, Die Gallicismen in der Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1874 linguistics, historical

Franz A. deutschen Schriftsprache linguistics and
mit besonderer Rücksicht literature
auf unsere neuere
schönwissenschaftliche
Literatur

Braun, Julius Naturgeschichte der Sage: Munich: Bruckmann, etymology, historical

Rückführung aller religiösen 1864–65 linguistics and
Ideen, Sagen, Systeme auf literature
ihren gemeinsamen
Stammbaum u. ihre letzte
Wurzel (2 vols.)

402
 Appendix B 403

Author Title Publication Topics

Braune, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Halle: Lippert, 1874 linguistics, historical
Wilhelm (ed.) deutschen Sprache und linguistics
Literatur

Colebrooke, Abhandlung über die heiligen Leipzig: Teubner, 1847 theology, Sanskrit
H. T. Schriften der Indier

Diez, Friedrich Grammatik der Bonn: Diez, 1870 grammar

romanischen Sprachen
(3 vols.)

Düringsfeld, Sprichwörter der Leipzig: Fries, 1872–75 linguistics

Ida von. (ed.) germanischen und
romanischen Sprachen
(2 vols.)

Geiger, Ludwig Ursprung und Entwicklung Stuttgart: Cotta, 1868–72 linguistics and historical
der menschlichen Sprache linguistics
und Vernunft (2 vols.)

Gerber, Gustav Die Sprache als Kunst Bromberg: Mittler, 1871 linguistics

Gley, Gérard Langue et litérature des Paris: Michaud, 1814 etymology and historical
anciens Francs linguistics

Gobineau, Traité des écritures Paris: Didot, 1864 historical

Arthur cunéiformes writing systems

Grimm, Jacob Kleinere Schriften (8 vols.) Berlin: Dümmler, 1864–71 historical linguistics,
mythology

Grimm, Jacob Deutsche Grammatik Göttingen: Dieterich, grammar, etymology,

(4 vols.) 1822–37 [2nd edn.] historical linguistics

Grimm, Jacob Deutsche Grammatik Göttingen: Dieterich, 1840 grammar, etymology,

(1st vol. only) [3rd edn.] linguistics

Grimm, J./W. Deutsches Wörterbuch Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1961; etymological dictionary,

ongoing project historical linguistics

Grimm, Jacob Geschichte der deutschen Leipzig: Hirzel, 1868 historical linguistics
Sprache [3rd edn.]

Grimm, Jacob Reden und Abhandlungen Berlin: Dümmler, 1864 linguistics and historical
linguistics
404 Appendix B

Author Title Publication Topics

Grimm, Jacob Abhandlungen zur Berlin: Dümmler, 1866 linguistics, grammar
Litteratur u. Grammatik

Grimm, Jacob Rezensionen und vermischte Berlin: Dümmler, 1869–71 linguistics

Aufsätze (2 vols.)

Grimm, Ueber deutsche Runen Göttingen: Dieterich, 1821 historical linguistics

Wilhelm

Hahn, Karl A. Althochdeutsche Prag: Calve, 1852 historical grammar,

Grammatik mit einigen dictionary
Lesestücken und Glossen

Hahn, Karl A. Mittelhochdeutsche Frankfurt a. M.: Brönner, historical grammar

Grammatik 1842–47

Hahn, Karl A. Mittelhochdeutsche Frankfurt a. M.: Brönner, historical grammar

Grammatik 1871 [2nd edn.]

Heyse, Theoretisch–praktische Hannover: Hahn, grammar

Johann C. Deutsche Grammatik 1839–49
oder Lehrbuch zum
richtigen Sprechen, Lesen
und Schreiben der
deutschen Sprache, nebst
einer kurzen Geschichte
und Verslehre desselben
(2 vols.)

Hoefer, Zeitschrift für die Berlin: Reimer, 1845 linguistics journal

Albert (ed.) Wissenschaft der Sprache
(vol. 1 only)

Holtzmann, Das Niebelungenlied, vol. 1 Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1870 grammar,

Adolf (ed.) “Die specielle Lautlehre” historical linguistics

Littré, Émile Histoire de la langue Paris: Dider, 1863 etymology, linguistics,

française: études sur les historical linguistics
origin, l’étymologie, la
grammaire, les dialectes, la
versification, et les lettres
au moyen âge (2 vols.)

Matthiä, Ausführliche griechische Leipzig: Vogel, 1825–27 historical grammar

August Grammatik (2 vols.) [2nd edn]
 Appendix B 405

Author Title Publication Topics

Obermüller, Deutsche-Keltisches, Berlin: Denicke, 1872 comparative dictionary,
Wilhelm Geschichtliche- historical linguistics
Geographisches
Wörterbuch: zur
Erklaerung der Fluss- Gerb-
Orts- Gau- Völker- und
Personen-Namen Europas,
West-Asiens und Nord-
Afrikas im allgemeinen wie
insbesondere Deutschlands
nebst den daraus sich
ergebenden Folgerungen
für die Urgeschichte der
Menschheit (2 vols.)

Pott, August F. Die Personennamen, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1853 etymology, linguistics

insbesondere die
Familiennamen und ihre
Entstehungsarten, auch
unter Berücksichtigung
der Ortsnamen

Pott, August F. Die Ungleichheit menschlicher Lemgo u. Detmold: theories of race

Rassen: hauptsächlich vom Meyer, 1856
sprachwissenschaftlichen
Standpunkte, unter
besonderer
Berücksichtigung von des
Grafen von Gobineau
gleichnamigem Werke; mit
einem Ueberblicke über die
Sprachverhältnisse der
Völker

Pott, August F. Etymologische Forschungen Lemgo u. Detmold: Meyer, etymology, historical

auf dem Gebiete der 1859–76 [2nd edn.] linguistics
Indo-Germanischen
Sprachen: unter
Berücksichtigung ihrer
Hauptformen, Sanskrit,
Zend–Persisch,
Griechisch–Lateinisch,
Litauisch–Slawisch,
Germanisch und Keltisch
(6 vols.)
406 Appendix B

Author Title Publication Topics

Rapp, Moritz Versuch einer Physiologie der Stuttgart u. Tübingen: etymology, linguistics,
Sprache nebst historischer Cotta, 1836–41 physiology
Entwicklung der
abendländischen Idiome
nach physiologischen
Grundsätzen (4 vols.)

Rapp, Moritz Grundriß der Grammatik Stuttgart: Cotta, historical grammar,

des indisch-europäischen 1852–55 linguistics
Sprachstammes (2 vols.)

Riecke, Carl F. Die Schichtung der Völker Gera: Strebel, 1872 German history,
und Sprachen in historical linguistics
Deutschland: auf Grund
der vergleichenden
Sprachforschung
nachgewiesen an Orts-,
Familien-, Their-Namen,
Titeln und Idiotismen

Ritschl, Canticum und Diverbium Bonn: Georgi, 1871 linguistics, Classical

Friedrich bei Plautus literature

Schlegel, Ueber die Sprache und Heidelberg: Mohr u. linguistics, Indian

Friedrich Weisheit der Indier: ein Zimmer, 1808 literature and
Beitrag zur Begründung philosophy
der Alterthumskunde

Schmitthenner, Ursprachlehre: Entwurf zu Frankfurt a. M.: historical

Friedrich einem System der Herrmann, 1826 linguistics, historical
Grammatik mit besonderer and comparative
Rücksicht auf die Sprachen grammar
des indisch-teutschen
Stammes: das Sanskrit, das
Persische, die pelasgischen,
slavischen und teutschen
Sprachen

Schulze, Ernst Gothisches Glossar Magdeburg: Baensch, 1848 historical dictionary,

linguistics

Stark, Franz Die Kosenamen der Vienna: Tendler & Co., history of German names
Germanen: eine Studie; 1868
mit drei Excursen: 1. Über
Zunamen; 2. Über den
Ursprung die
zusammengesetzten
Namen; 3. Über besondere
 Appendix B 407

Author Title Publication Topics

friesische Namensformen
u. Verkürzungen

Stephanius, Saxonis grammatici histor- Sorae: Moltken, 1645 historical linguistics,

Stephanus J. iae danicae libri XVI historical grammar

Stephanius, Stephani Johannis Stephanii Sorae: Crusius, n. d. historical linguistics

Stephanus J. notae ueberiores in
historiam danicam
Saxonis grammatici:
una cum prolegomenis
ad easdem notas

Wack, Kurze Anzeigung: wie nem- Regenpurg: Hagen, 1713 historical linguistics,
Johann C. lich die uralte Teutsche grammar
Sprache meistentheils
Ihren Ursprung aus dem
Celtisch-oder
Chaldaeischen habe / und
das Beyrische vom
Syrischen herkomme

Westphal, Philosophisch–historische Jena: Mauke, 1869 etymology, historical

Rudolph Grammatik der deutschen linguistics, grammar
Sprache

Xylander, Das Sprachgeschlecht der Frankfurt a. M.: historical linguistics

Josef von Titanen: Darstellung der Sauerländer, 1837
ursprünglichen
Verwandtschaft der
tatarischen Sprachen
unter sich und mit der
Sprache der Hellenen, und
Andeutung der
zunächst daraus
hervorgehenden Folgen
für die Geschichte der
Sprachen und Völker

Zeuss, I. C. Grammatica Celtica: e Berlin: Wiedman-nos, historical Celtic

moumentis vetustis tam 1871 [2nd edn.] grammar, linguistics
hibernicae linguae quam
Britannicarum dialecta-
rum Cambricae Cornicae
Aremorcae comparitis
Gallicae priscae reliquiis
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Adler, Guido. “Richard Wagner und die Wissenschaft,” Neue Freie Presse (May 10,
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Index

Abbate, Carolyn, 203 as melodist, 17, 34, 78, 111, 119–20, 149
Adler, Guido, 336 as Skizzenkomponist, 147–48
Adorno, Theodor W., 25, 32, 39, 62, 332–34, 368 deafness, 217
aesthetics, 62, 120 Fidelio, 202, 205, 207, 211
absolute / relative beauty, 41 Beissel, Conrad, 265
and character. See Charakteristische, das Bekker, Paul, 25, 44, 213
and Greek sculpture, 40, 50 Bellini, Vincenzo, 132, 202, 203, 208, 212, 241
whiteness of, 42 and melodic composition, 261
and harmony, 51 and text-setting, 68
and pattern recognition, 24 and Wagner, 25, 139, 145–46, 158, 182–85
and the beautiful, 46–47, 50, 52 as melodic paradigm, 22, 57, 146
and the sublime, 46 for Wagner, 25, 158, 159–60, 178, 181, 185,
and the ugly, 51, 57, 64 188, 197
Ambros, August Wilhelm, 375 physical effect of opera, 189
Andersen, Hans Christian, 1, 344 Bergson, Henri, 16
apophasis, 123 Berlin, Isaiah, 284, 308
Applegate, Celia, 7 Berlin Physical Society, 333–34
Aristotle, 24, 52, 408 Berlioz, Hector, 132, 178, 189, 212
Poetics, 24 and chromatic melody, 178
Arouet, François-Marie [Voltaire], 90 as model for Wagner, 131
associationism, 80–84, 117 Benvenuto Cellini, 26
and memory, 82 caricature of, 22
automatic writing, 89–90 on melody, 70, 361
on Rossini, 22
Babbage, Charles, 370 on Tristan, 189
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 146, 178, 203–4, Berry, Mark, 138
307, 340 Beyle, Marie-Henri [Stendhal], 23, 39,
Bacon, Francis, 38, 45, 408 190, 194
Bailey, Robert, 271 Bingham, Walter van Dyke, 19
Bakta, Richard, 336 motor theory of melody, 376
Balzac, Honoré de, 360 Bischoff, Ludwig, 26, 56–57
Baragwanath, Nicholas, 144 Blackbourn, David, 390
Barnes, William, 312 Bois-Reymond, Emil du, 89, 333
Barthes, Roland, 221, 380 Bolz, Norbert, 368–69
Basevi, Abramo, 23 Bopp, Franz, 7, 295–96
Baudelaire, Charles, 362 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 134
Baudrillard, Jean, 127 Boulez, Pierre, 281
Bayer, Josef, 46–51 Brahms, Johannes, 203, 208
and Hegel, 46–47 Breig, Werner, 247
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 179, 241 Brendel, Franz, 262
and genius, 69, 148 and musical characterization, 46, 49, 50
and Schröder-Devrient, 211, 217, 226 and music’s law of development, 8, 58
and Wagner, 212, 246, 389, 390 and the New German School, 18
439
440 Index

Brendel, Franz (cont.) Eco, Umberto, 51, 52, 58

and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 4, 88, 176 Edwards, Arthur C., 60, 65
on Italian music, dominance of, 68 endless melody, 1, 29, 53, 119, 199, 389
on Lohengrin and genius, 92–93, and F. Nietzsche, 158
101, 360 and T. W. Adorno, 25
on Wagner, 26, 355 science fiction interpretation of, 10–11
Brentano, Bettina von, 84 Engels, Friedrich, 280, 287
Burmeister, Johannes, 13 Erlman, Veit, 199
Burnham, Scott, 71 Eschenbach, Wolfram von, 313
Evans, Mary Ann [George Eliot], 34
Canova, Antonio, 194 expression, 128
character. See Charakteristische, das and form, 44
Charakteristische, das, 34–36, 45–51 and melody, 70, 83, 100, 108–9, 111, 113,
as non-Italianate, 46 117, 120
chiroplast, 82–83 laws of, 127
Chorley, Henry, 33, 167, 217–18, 226, 276 mechanism within, 120–25
Clarke, Arthur C., 10 antithesis to originality, 133
cognition definition of, 62
and electricity, 81, 84–89, 333 particularity of, 39–41
automatic invention, 96–98
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 82, 290, 379, 391 Fauser, Annegret, 281
on allegory/symbol, 381–82 Fechner, Gustav, 331, 338–39, 376
componium, 96–98, 118, 119, 120, 128 Fétis, François-Joseph, 4, 96, 104, 165
Cone, Edward T., 286 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 193, 283–85, 335
Cooke, Deryck, 144, 154 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 128, 201,
copyright law, 135–38, 162. See also plagiarism 289–90
publishers’ control over, 139 Figurenlehre, 62, 110
Wagner on theft, 138 Filippi, Filippo, 53
Cornelius, Peter, 247 and melodic types, 19–20
Cramer, Alfred, 200 Finck, Henry, 361
Czerny, Carl, 104 Fischer, Franz, 143
Flaubert, Gustave, 84, 90
Dahlhaus, Carl, 72, 188 folksong, 20, 23–24, 26, 114
and Kapellmeistermusik, 143 Fontane, Theodor, 89–90
Daniels, Roland, 353–55 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 20
Danuser, Hermann, 275 Foucault, Michel, 187–88, 193, 287, 305
Darwin, Charles, 64 Frankenstein’s monster, 85, 123
on Herbert Spencer’s theory of music, 345 Franklin, Benjamin, 84
Daube, Johann Friedrich, 71, 122 Franz, Robert, 200
Daum, Andreas, 350 French melody, 22
Dawison, Bogumil, 215–16
de Staël, Germaine. See Staël, Germaine de Gaillard, Karl, 149–50, 159, 179, 327
Deathridge, John, 159, 162, 208, 212 and intellectural property, 139–40
Delacroix, Eugene, 190 Galvani, Luigi, 85
Derrida, Jacques, 309 and galvanism, 123, 125, 358
Devrient, Eduard, 216, 239–40 Gans, Chaim, 302
Diderot, Denis, 353 Gefühlsaesthetik, 14, 58, 66
Dolar, Mladan, 219 gefühslverständlich. See sound and intuitive
Dorn, Heinrich, 131–32 comprehension
Dove, Heinrich, 384 Genast, Eduard, 239
Draeseke, Felix, 36, 37, 44, 413 genius, 69–70, 72, 76, 81, 100, 103, 117, 125,
Dreyfus, Laurence, 188, 230 127, 147
Dursch, Johann Georg Martin, 52 Gerard, Alexander, 81–82
 Index 441

Géricault, Theodor, 55–56 Hamann, Johann Georg, 80, 123, 282

German melody, 7–8, 39, 180, 223, Hanslick, Eduard, 39, 46, 92, 348, 369
254, 278–79 and German opera, 24
self-criticism over, 21–22 and praise for Wagner, 27–28, 361
German unification, 313–14 music and natural science, 337–38, 346, 375,
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 293 376, 396
Geyer, Flodoard, 13, 37, 77, 122 Wagner criticism, 27–28, 33, 53, 131, 132,
definition of melody, 75 143, 144, 389
Gill, André, 367 Hardenberg, Georg Friedrich Philipp von
Giustiniani, Vincenzo, 309 [Novalis], 320
Glasenapp, Carl Friedrich, 6, 183 Hartmann, Eduard von, 47
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 39 Häßliche, das. See aesthetics and the ugly
Iphigénie en Aulide (arr. Wagner), 230–34 Hauptmann, Moritz, 1, 364, 390
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 40, 69–70, 84, Hausegger, Friedrich von, 346
239, 303, 369 complaint about melodic theory, 4
and Italy, 189, 190 on melody and physiology, 376
and musical expression, 48 Haydn, Joseph, 122–23
color theory, 369–73 Hayez, Francesco, 190–91
Goethe-Wörterbuch, 45 Haym, Rudolf, 332
Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 38, 46, 76, 283,
erklären, 111 332–33, 364
Graff, Eberhard Gottlieb, 295 and form, 42–43
Gregory, John, 70 and freedom, 14, 43–44, 297
Grey, Thomas, 30, 34, 48, 53, 71, 136, and melodic theory, 4
142, 144, 182, 252, 286, 297, and Wagner, 336
367, 382 on melody, 13–14
Grimm brothers Italian, 42–43, 205
Deutsche Sagen, 303 Heidegger, Martin, 301–2
“Lohengrin in Brabant,” 332 Heine, Heinrich, 288, 293, 305
Deutsches Wörterbuch, 45, 254, Helmholtz, Hermann von, 333, 348, 370, 373,
282, 312 375, 379, 385–86, 391
Grimm, Emil, 72 media prosthesis, 369
Grimm, Jacob, 7, 310, 322–23, 327 vowel synthesizer, 322
and historicism, 313, 318, 328 water imagery, 387–88
and nationalism, 290, 295, 310 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 288, 289, 298
and Wagner, 254, 255, 297, 303–7, and folksong, 23
313–16 Hermann Lotze, Rudolf. See Lotze, Rudolf
Deutsche Grammatik, 255, 298, 304–7, Hermann
315, 317 Herold, J. Christopher, 291
Ablaut, 305–6 Herzfeld, Michael, 18
Lautverschiebung, 305–7 Hindemith, Paul, 4, 60, 72
Deutsche Mythologie, 303 historical linguistics. See Philologie
Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache, 156, Hobsbawm, Eric, 277, 290–91
302–3, 313 Hoeckner, Berthold, 334
lower case, use of, 315–16 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 41, 90, 367
origins of music, 321 Hofmeister, Friedrich, 139
pessimism over German unification, 7 Hohenlohe, Marie Fürstin zu, 224
physicality of language, 341–42 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 321
physiology of language, 344 Holtmeier, Ludwig, 144, 146, 174–75
vowels, 317, 319 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 312
Grimm, Wilhelm, 302 Hugo, Victor, 51–52, 57. See also aesthetics and
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 209, 339–40 the ugly
Gurney, Edmund, 64 Humboldt, Alexander von, 85, 89
442 Index

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 222–23, 252, 294, 304, Köhler, Louis, 256–57, 261–64, 266–68
308, 310 and water imagery, 387
and speech, 307–9 Kondo, Koji, 10, 80
Husserl, Edmund, 201 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 46, 49
Korstvedt, Benjamin, 29
idealism, 91, 214, 282 Kreuzer, Gundula, 30, 185, 336–37
and imitation, 146–47 Kropfinger, Klaus, 208
materialist critique of, 283, 332–33 Kurth, Ernst, 174–75
writers on melody, 14–15
imitation, attitudes towards, 146–50, 180 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 348
invention Lablache, Luigi, 160–62, 163, 167
and cognitive mechanism, 117–19 vocal range, 167
and self-consciousness, 76–77, 97–98 Lange, Friedrich, 350–51
Iser, Wolfgang, 201 language, 7, 198, 220–21, 222–23, 255. See also
Italian melody, 22–24 Philologie (historical linguistics)
and German cultural constructions, 182–97 and dialect, 276–77
and simplicity, 22 and etymological essentialism, 301, 328, 341
and text-setting, 68 and German nationalism, 288–94, 302,
German sympathies for, 20, 145–46 307–8, 310
Nationalsprache, 7, 290–91, 292,
Jackson, Myles, 83 294, 314
Jadassohn, Salomon, 127 and music, 47, 103, 158, 310, 321–27
Jakobson, Roman, 133 as melodic agent, 66–68, 158, 180
James, William, 82, 397 as sensuality, 186
Jean Paul. See Richter, Jean Paul Tonschriftkunst, 320
Jena Romantics, 13, 66 and performance, 219–20, 224–25
speech, 225, 275–77
Kaan, Heinrich, 187 and physiology, 316–21, 341–48
Kahlert, August, 113, 321–23, 348, 360 aural learning, 200
Kanne, Friedrich August, 72, 73–74, 104–7, phonetics, 200
109–10, 128, 388 materialist conception of, 340–48
definition of melody, 75 onomastics, 301
Kant, Immanuel, 39, 82, 121, 147, 149 universal, concept of a, 37–38, 58
and electricity, 84 Whorf–Sapir hypothesis, 308
and genius, 69, 71, 98, 147, 180 Laocoön statue, 40
on imitation and originality, 147 Laube, Heinrich, 206, 215
on music, 16 Lenoir, Timothy, 369
talent / genius, 102 Liebig, Justus, 334
Kapellmeistermusik. See Dahlhaus, Carl and Lind, Jenny, 378
Kapellmeistermusik Lippmann, Edward, 153
Kennaway, James, 368 Lippmann, Friedrich, 184
Kerndörffer, Heinrich August, 41 listening subject, 120, 198–201, 215
and vowel qualities, 323–25 “galvanic” listening, 367
critique of vowel scale, 324 Liszt, Franz, 70, 189
Kierkegaard, Søren, 186 and Lohengrin, 94, 316, 383
Kittler, Friedrich, 63, 65, 200, 332, 382 instrumental color, 362
and Elsa’s scream (Lohengrin), 377 premiere, 228–30, 234–39, 278
on Aristotle, 24 and melody, 48, 134, 176, 178, 262
Klangfarbe, 337, 361–67, 392 relationship with Wagner, 30, 200, 211–12,
as nexus point, 9, 362–64 279, 366
instrumental vs vocal, 374 melodic borrowing, 134
Kleist, Heinrich von, 77 Works
Koch, Heinrich Christoph, 20, 71, 83, 255 Am Grabe Richard Wagners, 134
 Index 443

Après une Lecture du Dante expression and physiology, 64–65

Fantasia quasi Sonata, 176 emblematic devices for, 83, 85, 91, 96. See
Die Glocken des Strassburger Telekouphanon, componium,
Münsters, 134 psychograph, chiroplast
“O, du mein holder Abendstern” materialities of communication, 339–40
(Tannhäuser transcription), print culture, 29
Symphonic Poems, 49 monism (and the soul), 348–50, 351–55
Lobe, Johann Christian, 38, 46, 127, 144 Mattheson, Johann, 4, 77–78
and aesthetics, 46, 64, 98, 147, 205, 377 Mazzucato, Alberto, 22–24
and melodic theory, 20, 63–64, 82, 84, McLuhan, Marshall, 91
117–26, 127, 264–65 mechanical improvisation, 96. See componium
and work ethic, 102, 148 Melodielehre. See melody and pedagogy
complaints about melody, 17, 21–22 melody
definition of melody, 75 and aesthetics
on Wagner’s melodies, 33–34, 142–43, 150, genius, 70–78
153–54, 157, 361 nature, 12
on Wagner’s writings, 28, 143 originality, 131–34
Locke, John, 280 and plagiarism. See plagiarism
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 91, 326–27, realism, 64–66
349–50, 387 ugliness, 51–57. See also aesthetics and the
and sense transmission, 378 ugly
on melody and physiology, 375–77 and borrowing, 132, 134, 136, 141–43, 149,
sound color, 373 154, 165, 293
Ludwig, Otto, 214–15. See also poetic realism and character, 35. See Charakteristische, das
Lyotard, Jean-François, 339–40 and freedom, 32, 43–44, 57
and “grammar of expression”, 62
MacDowell, Edward, 386–87 and language, 150–60, 220–22, 275–79, 310,
Mahony, Francis, 130 339. See also Philologie (historical
Man, Paul de, 25, 321 linguistics), language
Mann, Thomas, 32, 116, 148, 188 speech, 276
on Das Rheingold, 382–83 and listening, 109–10
Marpurg, Friedrich, 21 iconic/expressive modes, 220–22, 279
Martinville, Édouard-Léon Scott de, 257–60 and materialism, 356
Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 106, 229, 244, 277, 392 as channel of communication, 2
and Franz Brendel, 49 life sciences, 374–75
and genius, 83, 100, 102 physiological theory of, 375–77
definition of melody, 75 and nationalism
Die Kunst des Gesanges, 58–61, 229 as national signifier, 7
on Italian sensuality (Sinnlichkeit), 185–87, German/Italian opposition, 19, 30, 49,
196–97 57–58, 67–68, 204–5, 240
on teaching melody, 71–72, 100, 110–16 and nature, 43
and organicism, 112, 114 and pedagogy, 71–80, 91, 144
critical reception, 114–16, 127, 162 as synthetic, 118
Marx, Karl, 100, 287 assimilation of models, 117–25,
materialism, 91, 149, 330–40 160–74
and Ludwig Feuerbach, 283–85 and rhythm, 23, 35, 43, 56, 103–4
and metaphysics, clash with, 335 Lohengrin, 48
and thought, 87–89, 125 and shape
as telegraphy, 88–89 as plastic form, 39, 46, 200, 204
and voice, 342–44 as topographical register of emotion,
and Wagner, 330–31, 397 62, 112
art (stimulus) and physical reflex, 345–46, geometric semiosis, 39, 61–62, 63–64
356–59, 395–96 wave motion, 105–7, 379–92
444 Index

melody (cont.) and “strategies for enchantment”, 351

and voice. See also Wilhelmine Schröder- and Wagner, 335–37, 356, 363–64, 374–75
Devrient Die Natur, 347
monistic paradigm for, 260 Naturphilosophie, 3, 13, 381, 385
as music’s total form, 1, 157 Nauenburg, Gustav, 66, 67, 88
as philosophical monstrance, 12–16 neudeutsche Schule. See New German School
as problem, 3–5 New German School, 18, 78, 176, 351
as unwritable, 205. See also notation Newman, Ernest, 280, 300
as vocal phenomenon, 6, 30, 108 and Wagner in Paris, 163
dearth of treatises on, 4–5, 16, 71–72 Nicolai, Otto, 132
definitions of, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 70, 304, 391–92, 394–95
resistance to, 18–20 and modern listening, 9, 201
generative approach to, 110–12 and monism, 346–47, 354
German anxieties about, 12, 17–18, 24 and the telephone, 378
prominence of, 12 and virtual reality, 396
relation to harmony, 3, 4, 21, 32, 46, 50–51, and Wagner, 32, 51, 133–34, 356
68, 71–72 Die Meistersinger, 390
symbolic / real orders of perception, 62–66 melody, 1, 158
melograph. See componium Nervenmusik, 367–68
Merkel, Karl, 263–64, 317, 322 philology, 51, 280, 301
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 284 Tristan und Isolde, 188
Meyer, Stephen, 206, 219, 244 Nordau, Max, 390
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 14, 22, 142, 163 Norma, 160–62, 164, 181, 223
Mill, John Stuart, 80, 83–84 “Ah del Tebro”, 164
Millington, Barry, 145 and periodicity, 165
Milton, John, 301 and Wagner, 6, 156
Moleschott, Jacob, 88, 334, 336 Wagner’s imitation of, 160–75
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 295 notation, 244–46, 256–75
Mörike, Eduard, 76, 77 Nottebohm, Gustav, 148
Morrow, Mary Sue, 30 Novalis. See Georg Friedrich Philipp von
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 98, 208, 241, Hardenberg
253, 267 Nozick, Robert, 396
and Kopfkomponist, 98–99, 147, 149
Mozartbild, 98–99, 127 Olender, Maurice, 310
Works Ørsted, Hans Christian, 381, 383, 385
Don Giovanni, 123–24, 186 Otis, Laura, 89
Wagner’s arrangement of, 231
Le nozze di Figaro, 376 Percunos (god), 156
Müller, Johannes, 193, 336 phantasmagoria, 32, 335
and anatomical response, 346, 357–59 Philologie (historical linguistics), 68, 295, 310,
and soul, 348–49 322–23
and vocal physiology, 342–44 and music, 220–21, 254
law of specific sense energies, 333, 349 and nationalism, 287–88, 294–97,
Müller, Karl Otfried, 311 302–3
Müller, Max, 300, 310 and Urlaut (primordial vowel sound),
Mundt, Theodor, 7, 39, 292, 294 318–20, 374
music–poetic period, 252, 301 consonants, 326
natural alphabet, 317
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 94, 304, 382 speech roots, 201, 223, 253, 297–98, 301, 304,
natural sciences, 5, 81, 82–83, 282, 330–31, 314, 339, 341
333–34 vowels, 318, 319, 326
analogy, use of, 385–87 and music, 321–26
and conquering nature, 390 phrenology, music and, 88
 Index 445

plagiarism, 133, 141, 178–79, See also and vowel qualities, 325
copyright law Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 21, 300
legal milieu, 134–41 “unitè de mèlodie”, 21
Plato, 74, 201
poetic realism, 214–15 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 39
and Wagner, 239 Schaeffner, André, 309
Pohl, Richard, 228, 351, 384, 387 Schechner, Nannette, 219, 226
acoustic letters, 351, 362–63, 383–84 Schelling, Friedrich, 3, 385, See also
and Das Rheingold, 384–85 Naturphilosophie
Poriss, Hilary, 162 on melody, 15
Potter, Pamela, 7 Schiller, Friedrich, 41, 290, 303
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 138–39 Schilling, Gustav, 63, 96–97, 112
psychograph, 85–90 Schlegel, Friedrich, 48–49
and the occult, 86, 87 on melody, 14
psychophysics, 9, 331, 359, See also Fechner, Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 38, 432
Gustav Schleswig–Holstein Question, 296
first law of, 338–39 Schoenberg, Arnold, 10, 368
inauguration of, 9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 370–71, 379
Purcell, Henry, 250 on melody, 15, 99
Pygmalion, 50 Schröder, Sophie, 219
Schröder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 205–8,
qualia, 8 219–27, 281
and Dresden, 234
Raff, Joachim, 60, 113 and Fidelio, 202, 205, 217
and sound color, 363–66, 371 and passionate speech, 205, 211, 214, 215,
critique of, 366–67 216, 219, 220, 228, 244, 252, 276
and Wagner, 47, 254–55, 361 and Wagner, 187, 202–3, 207–8, 208–12,
Lohengrin, 48 213–14, 226, 228, 268, 279, 316
Stabreim, 280 German reception, 205–6, 222, 223, 250–52
water imagery, 392 intent to communicate, 220
definition of melody, 75 paired with Tichatschek, 209
Rapp, Moritz, 318–20 pronunciation, 276
“medial sounds”, 319 weak vocal technique, 217–19, 223
règle de l’octave, la, 72 losing her voice, 216–17
Rehding, Alexander, 377 Schubert, Franz, 78, 217
Reicha, Anton, 4 Schulz, Johann A. P., 58
definition of melody, 75 Schumann, Robert, 3, 17, 57, 148
on melody, 17, 102–4 Schütze, Stephan, 66
Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 23 science of feeling, 9, 339, 345, 348–60, 396, See
Reynolds, Christopher, 141 also psychophysics
Rhine, the, 382, 390, 391 Seebeck, August, 385
Richards, Annette, 98 sexual imagination, 186–91, 193–96
Richter, Jean Paul, 98, 129 Sgambati, Giovanni, 130–31, 147
Menschen sind Maschinen der Shakespeare, William, 139, 246, 303
Engel, 101 Shaw, George Bernard, 331
Riemann, Hugo, 16, 63 Sheehan, James, 87, 290–91
Rimbaud, Arthur, 327 Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Rochlitz, Friedrich, 98–99 A Defence of Poetry, 118
Rosen, Charles, 55, 179–81 Sinnlichkeit, 49, 282–85, 335–36, See also sexual
Rosenkranz, Karl, 52–56 imagination
Rossini, Gioachino, 22, 205 and German view of Italy, 184–97
Wagner’s criticism of, 8, 26, 184 A. B. Marx, 185, 186–87
Rötscher, Heinrich Theodor, 67 and Herder, 185
446 Index

Sinnlichkeit, (cont.) Vogt, Carl, 88

and Wagner, 187, 191–97 Physiological Letters, 334
Italianism, 6, 185–86 Volk, das, 106, 311
vocal melody, 188–89, 281–82, 286–87 Voltaire. See Arouet, François-Marie
Smart, Mary Ann, 194 Voss, Egon, 140, 145
Sobolewski, Eduard, 51, 253–54, 265, 292
complaint about melody, 17 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 14,
on French influence, 291–92 61, 389
on genius, 99–100 Wagner, Adolphus Theodor, 87
Sontag, Henriette, 219, 226 Wagner, Cosima (second wife), 134, 191, 203,
Sontag, Susan, 395, 397 240, 307, 309, 313, 392
sound Wagner, Minna (first wife), 145
and pleasure, 20, 35, 50, 282, 283, 387 Wagner, Richard 26, See also Zurich essays
Hanslick’s “pleasure gas”, 396 absolute melody, 204, 253, 272
intuitively comprehensible, 110, 221, 222, and antivivisectionism, 337, 356–57
285–86, 397 and autobiography, 212–13
physical reaction to, 357–59, 390 and Bayreuther Blätter, 183
subaqueous production, 380 and Bellini, 145–46, 159–75, 182–85,
visualizing vibations, 384–87 202–3, 212
Spencer, Herbert, 65, 345–46 and borrowed poetry, 146, 154, 157–59, 160
Stabreim, 301, See also Wagner and critical misunderstanding, 8,
and Stabreim 29, 200
Staël, Germaine de, 39 and criticial misunderstanding, 29
Corinne ou d’Italie, 189–90, 192 and declamation, 210, 224, 239–40
stage technology, 337 criticism of, 239
Steiner, George, 333 and Dresden, 180, 182, 235, 284–85, 294, 310
Stendhal, 23. See Beyle, Marie-Henri and hack work, 136
Strassburg, Gottfried von, 313 and Hegel, 300, 336
Stumpf, Carl, 277 and insertion arias, 160, See also “Norma il
vowel color, 373–74 predisse, o Druidi”
Sulzer, Jakob, 336 and language, 51, 224, 233–34, 254, 297–300,
310, 314–16, 318, See also
Tappert, Wilhelm, 141–42, 154 Philologie, language
Taylor, Alan John Percivale, 291 Jacob Grimm, 314–16
Telakouphanon (speaking trumpet), 378 linguistic nationalism, 294
Teutonius [pseudonym], 60, 62, 72 linguistic turn, 256
definition of melody, 75 sensuality of, 180, 184–85, 186, 201, 222,
on melodic expression, 108–9 223, 252–53, 286–87, 327–29
Tichatschek, Josef, 209, 210, 212, 228 Stabreim, 198, 199, 202, 254, 261, 281, 301,
paired with Schröder-Devrient, 209 321, 327–28, 339
Tieck, Ludwig, 302, 303 criticism of, 280–81
Tomlinson, Gary, 215 vowels, 325–26
and Liszt, 212. See Liszt, Franz
Uhlig, Theodor, 153, 187, 330, 388, 389 and materialism, 330–31, 356–57, 397
and language, 224, 281 consciousness, 395–96
Ule, Otto, 344–45, 349, 351–53 deterministic worldview, 397
unendliche Melodie. See endless melody haptic music, 359
Unger, Johann Friedrich, 99 sensorium, 340–41
bypassing conscious reflection, 8,
Vazsonyi, Nicholas, 150 339, 355
Villot, Fédéric, 29 theory of sentient communication, 333
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 47 Tarnhelm, 377
Vivaldi, Antonio, 146 technology, 391
 Index 447

and melody, 379 “Norma il predisse, o Druidi” (WWV 52),

on Beethovenian melody, 119 145, 158, 161, 164, 166, 171, 173,
chromaticism, 175–78 178, 179, 183
conceding melodic failure, 158 Das Liebesverbot, 144, 154, 174
criticism of compositional ability, 2, Der fliegende Holländer, 133, 143, 149, 383
17–18, 24–26, 26–27, 31–37, 53 Der Ring des Nibelungen
as pretender, 1–2 Das Rheingold, 53–55, 247, 304, 320
concealing “ineptitude”, 28 and water, 382–84
defence of compositional ability, 150, 183 prelude, 384–85
definition, 75 Die Walküre, 221, 224
“melodic technology”, 379 Siegfried, 53, 285–86
text–melody relationship, 185–86 Götterdämmerung, 196, 271, 397
settings of others’ poetry, 161 Die Feen, 143
theory of, 253, 297–300, 310, 328–29 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 69, 342
Versmelodie, 16, 285, 298, 299, 312, 348 interpretation of dreams, 90–91
and monism, 355 language, 301
and nationalism, 179, 279 melodic criticism, 389
and France, 293 melody and color, 366
criticism of German composers, 18, 25, 162 themes of text-setting, 159, 203
German singers, anxieties over, 229–30 Leubald (WWV 1), 301
Italy, 191–97 Lohengrin, 28, 156, 221, 227, 228, 256, 355,
break with Italiante style, 38, 182–83 359, 390
and originality, 131, 143, 149–50, 162 and language, 253, 315–16
and plagiarism, 130–33 and nationalism, 296–97
anxiety about, 133 and notation, 265–71
and the natural sciences, 335–38, 388 and Schröder-Devrient, 228–52
melodic triangle, 374–75 as allegory, 92–96, 285
miracles, 334 as melodic failure, 158, 184
skepticism, 356 Elsa’s scream, 377–79
water cures, 336 materialist perspective on, 331–33,
and vocal notation, 210, 230–34, 235, 334–35
241–50, 264–75 melodic criticism, 31, 33–35, 48, 51, 153,
inadequacy of, 200 156–57
collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften und overtone series, 383
Dichtungen, 1871–73), 183 possible English world premiere, 278
Gesamtkunstwerk, 208, 355 prelude, 383–84, 386
and sculpture, 50 sound color, 361–62
faculty of orchestral speech, 360–61, 374 Wagner conducting, 246–47
on compositional process, 149 Overture in B-flat (WWV 10), 366
on listening, 198–202 Parsifal, 65, 134, 334, 357
on reading, 327 Percunos, 154–57, 158
on screams, 221 Rienzi, 26, 133, 159, 162, 163, 210, 241, 293
philosophy of debt, 138–39 Rule Britannia overture (WWV 42), 154
proleptical reception, 28–29 Siegfrieds Tod, 200, 210, 247, 271
water imagery, 379–82, 387–92 Tannhäuser, 154, 175–76
realism, 390–91 early reception, 28, 48, 144, 362
solipsism, 391 and lyric form, 152–53
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, 202–3, melodic criticism, 25, 30, 33, 44,
213–14, 226, 316 132, 142
relationship with, 206–13 “O, du mein holder Abendstern”, 175
Works 184 physical reaction to, 358
“Der Tannenbaum” (WWV 50), 247 and Schröder-Devrient, 210
“Les deux grenadiers” (WWV 60), 293 and sensuality, 194
448 Index

Wagner, Richard (cont.) Wolff, Pius Alexander, 277

Tristan und Isolde, 2, 204, 271, 383 Wolzogen, Alfred von, 202, 227
desire motif, 188 Wolzogen, Hans von, 6, 183
language, 301
losing consciousness, 395 Young, Eduard, 80
melodic chromaticism, 175
physical reactions to, 358 Žižek, Slavoj, 345
sensuality, 188 Zopff, Hermann, 237
Iphigénie en Aulide (arrangement), 286 Zurich essays, 26, 37, 143, 256, 282, 285
Wagner, Rudolph, 334 sea of harmony, 32, 388–91
Weber, Carl Maria von, 35, 38, 131, 205, 335 Das Judenthum in der Musik, 290
Weber, Gottfried, 71 Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 306, 335–36, 379
Weber, Max, 334 Oper und Drama, 194–95, 227, 229, 230, 235,
Weitzmann, Carl Friedrich, 176 238, 355
Weltanschauungsmusik, 16 and language, 250–52, 281, 300–1,
Wesendonck, Mathilde, 133, 149 319, 323
Wieck, Friedrich, 218 and materialism, 192, 196, 222, 330–31
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 214 dissemination of, 28
Willis, Robert, 317–18 on listening, 198–99
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 40, 50, on melody, 27, 252–53, 374
52, 146 vocal-melodic theory, 297–300
Winkel, Diederich Nicolaus, 96 orchestral speech, 272–75
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 29 three Graces, the, 194