Endless Melody
Endless Melody
A Theoretical Excursion
An innovation essential to Richard Wagner’s music was what he called “endless melody.” This chapter scrutinizes his theory of the concept. While endless melody was instrumental in inspiring the stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction, its implications for modernism in general have to do with the aspiration to make everything count, to do away with padding and empty formality. Yet a conflation of intensity with grandiosity is part of its nineteenth-century legacy, and the grandiose brings with it the resuscitation of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Those theories were inspired by volcanic activity, a geophysical force called up again in early theorists of cinema, in which we find the perpetuum mobile of endless melody aligned with film’s capacity to unfurl a lava flow of images.
Keywords: Richard Wagner, endless melody, the sublime, film theory
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .