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Leitmotif
(from Ger. Leitmotiv: ‘leading motif’).
In its primary sense, a theme, or other coherent musical idea, clearly defined
so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances, whose
purpose is to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of
mind, supernatural force or any other ingredient in a dramatic work. A
leitmotif may be musically unaltered on its return, or altered in rhythm,
intervallic structure, harmony, orchestration or accompaniment, and may
also be combined with other leitmotifs in order to suggest a new dramatic
situation. A leitmotif is to be distinguished from a reminiscence motif
(Erinnerungsmotiv), which, in earlier operas and in Wagner’s works up to
and including Lohengrin, tends to punctuate the musical design rather than
provide the principal, ‘leading’ thematic premisses for that design. The term
was adopted by early commentators on Wagner’s music dramas to highlight
what they believed to be the most important feature contributing to
comprehensibility and expressive intensity in those works. It is often used
more loosely to refer to recurrent thematic elements in other musical forms
and even in examples of non-musical genres, such as the novels of Thomas
Mann, who acknowledged Wagner’s influence.
The earliest known use of the term ‘leitmotif’ (see Grey, 1988) is by the
music historian A.W. Ambros, who wrote, in or before 1865, that both
Wagner in his operas and Liszt in his symphonic poems ‘seek to establish a
higher unity across the whole by means of consistent leitmotifs’
(durchgehende Leitmotive). From Ambros the term gravitated, via F.W.
Jähns’s study of Weber (1871), to Hans von Wolzogen’s thematic guide to
the Ring, published in 1876 – the year of the cycle’s first complete
performance. Wagner used it in print in his essay Über die Anwendung der
Musik auf das Drama (1879), in the course of a complaint that ‘one of my
younger friends [presumably Wolzogen] … has devoted some attention to
the characteristics of “leitmotifs”, as he calls them, but has treated them
more from the point of view of their dramatic import and effect than as
elements of the musical structure’.
The use of the term ‘motif’ in writing about music goes back at least as
far as the Encyclopédie (1765), and before 1879 Wagner had employed a
variety of expressions when discussing thematic elements in his works:
‘melodisches Moment’, ‘thematisches Motiv’, ‘Ahnungsmotiv’, ‘Grundthema’, ‘Hauptmotiv’. As Wagner’s comments in 1879 indicate, he sensed
that Wolzogen, whose ‘guide’ was little more than a pamphlet, was in
danger of oversimplifying and trivializing his achievements in his desire to
make the music dramas more accessible; Wolzogen’s remarks reinforce the
fact that ‘leitmotif’, and its subsequent usage, tells us as much (if not more)
about the reception of his works as about his working methods or creative
intentions.
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Wagner, with his wide experience as a conductor, was undoubtedly
aware of the extensive use of reminiscence motifs in earlier opera from
Méhul and Cherubini to Marschner and Spohr, and his close friend,
Theodor Uhlig, in writings on Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, had drawn
attention to the role of recurrent thematic elements in Wagner’s own work
as early as 1850. Indeed, although Wagner was particularly concerned in
Oper und Drama (written in 1851, before he had begun any extensive
compositional work on the Ring cycle) to underline the importance of
formal units (periods) constructed to ensure that all aspects of the music
responded as vividly as possible to the promptings of the text, in practice he
still recognized the necessity for a small number of easily identifiable and
malleable motifs, along the lines of Beethoven’s most pithy and memorable
thematic cells. These would, however, originate in a melody quite different
from the foursquare and often florid vocal phrases of traditional opera, and
embody such a power and directness of expression that the emotion
concerned would be recalled when the motif itself returned, even if action or
text no longer alluded directly to its original associations.
A major problem for motif-labellers has been that this original
association is almost always multivalent – the music depicting the grandeur
of Valhalla also portrays the nobility of Wotan, for example – and might
well be ambiguous. It is now generally accepted that Wolzogen mislabelled
the principal love motif of the Ring as ‘Flight’, taking over this designation
from an earlier commentary by Gottlieb Federlein (1872). And the motif
which, after Wolzogen, is invariably designated ‘Redemption through Love’
was seen by Wagner himself – at least in a letter of 1875 – as representing
the ‘glorification of Brünnhilde’. Such factors indicate why most
commentators on Wagner express reservations about motif-labelling while
finding it difficult to discard the activity altogether. After all, despite his
own reservations about Wolzogen’s efforts, Wagner’s presentation and
manipulation of his thematic material lay at the heart of his musicodramatic technique, as he made clear in Über die Anwendung der Musik auf
das Drama.
Discussing the ‘simple nature-motif’ (ex.1)
and the ‘equally simple motif’ heard ‘at the first appearance of the gods’
castle Valhalla in the morning sunlight’ in Das Rheingold (ex.2:
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Wagner transposed the motif from D to C for ease of comparison),
Wagner observed that ‘having developed both these motifs in close
correspondence with the mounting passions of the action, I was now able
[in Die Walküre, Act 2] to link them – with the aid of a strangely distant
harmonization – to paint a far clearer picture of Wotan’s sombre and
desperate suffering than his own words ever could’ (ex.3).
Exx.1 and 2 combined in Die Walküre, Act 2, to illustrate the suffering of
Wotan Ex.3
Later in the essay, seeking to emphasize the structural rather than the
semantic role of his motivic techniques, Wagner described how the
‘remarkably simple’ motif of the Rhinemaidens’ innocent jubilation (ex.4)
recurs in varied guises throughout the drama until, in Hagen’s ‘Watch’
(Götterdämmerung, Act 1), ‘it is heard in a form which, to my mind at least,
would be unthinkable in a symphonic movement’ (ex.5).
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Wagner’s point is that the malevolent, distorted versions of the gold
motif that pervade the music at this point would sound like ‘empty
sensationalism’ in a symphony, but the dramatic context justifies the nature
of the musical transformation and the structural emphasis which requires its
protracted employment in this ‘distorted’ form.
Wagner himself understandably sought to underline such larger-scale
structural concerns. But the concentration of Wolzogen and others on the
identification of local motivic associations is no less understandable, since
their principal purpose was not to provide the most far-reaching analysis
but to defend the composer against charges of illogicality and
incomprehensibility. Just as commentaries on symphonies and sonatas can
be valuable on all levels, from simple, non-technical programme notes to
elaborate analyses (provided the simple and the elaborate are not confused),
so there is room, and need, for such variety in commentaries on opera.
There is no evidence that the activities of Wolzogen and his followers
seriously inhibited attempts at more sophisticated analytical studies of
Wagner’s harmonic and formal procedures, though these were slower to
emerge. And while the more sophisticated anti-Wagnerians were able to use
such naive motif-spotting as Wolzogen’s to support arguments about the
essential crudity of Wagner’s compositional principles (Hanslick, for
example, wrote in praise of Verdi’s Falstaff that ‘nowhere is the memory
spoonfed by leitmotifs’), many Wagner scholars have built on the
foundations laid by Wolzogen, and Wagner himself, to refine and elaborate
the study of musical meaning in the music dramas, and the role that
leitmotifs play in establishing that meaning. It is motivic evolution and
development, in the context of large-scale tonal structuring and formal
organization, that has become the focus of attention in the attempt to
understand the ways in which Wagner’s musical language, and his attitude
to drama, changed over the years between Das Rheingold and Parsifal.
From the very beginning of scene 1 of Das Rheingold, motifs ‘lead’ in
the sense that they do not merely pervade the musical fabric but establish its
expressive atmosphere and formal processes. They do not invariably
originate in the vocal line as Oper und Drama had prescribed, and Wagner
soon begins to move beyond their exact or varied repetition at textually
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appropriate moments into the kind of transformation that creates deeper
dramatic resonances and larger-scale musical continuities, suggesting that
musical thinking itself is beginning to promote dramatic associations. At the
end of scene 1 of Das Rheingold, the motif associated with the ring, and
with the world’s wealth (Wagner’s own interpretation of the idea, according
to his sketches), is transformed orchestrally into the Valhalla motif at the
start of scene 2, a process leading the listener to connect Alberich’s precious
acquisition with Wotan’s no less highly valued possession, and the power
they both embody. As the cycle proceeds, a clear contrast emerges between,
on the one hand, the immediate connection of word – or visual image – and
tone that first fixes important motivic elements and, on the other hand, the
consequent power of music to reinforce a connection that text and action
may leave implicit: for example, the use of Alberich’s curse when Fafner
kills Fasolt (Das Rheingold, scene 4), and the references to the Siegfried
motif when Brünnhilde and Wotan proclaim the need for a fearless hero
(Die Walküre, Act 3).
The interruption of work on the Ring in 1857 brought a significant
change of direction. Up to that point, Wagner’s aesthetic had centred on the
belief that the most profound art work was a theatrical event to which
words and music made significant contributions. But it now began to
evolve, under the impact of Schopenhauer, and the sheer force of his own
musical inspiration, to the point where music became the central feature –
however important the initial conception of theatrical event and text
remained in relation to the music he eventually composed. The result, in
simple terms, is that leitmotifs become even less specific in meaning and
even more subject to musical elaboration; in all the later dramas there is a
sense in which the motifs ‘lead’ the music beyond literal and immediate
signification while still, inevitably, remaining linked to, and helping to
determine, the progress of the drama. Scholars have wrestled with the
inherent complexity of this interaction between the ‘symphonic’ and the
‘dramatic’. In particular, Ernst Kurth (1920) proposed a distinction between
leitmotifs, which reflect the dramatic situation directly, and ‘developmental
motifs’ (Entwicklungsmotive), which achieve independence not only of such
representational functions but also of the kind of clearcut shaping that
makes a leitmotif easily identifiable. ‘Developmental motifs’ are figures that
promote the ongoing evolution of the music – a process quite distinct from
the actual development (by sequential transposition or any other variation
procedure) of the leitmotifs themselves.
Kurth recognized that leitmotivic analysis on its own cannot possibly do
justice to the significatory power of Wagner’s music. More recently, Carolyn
Abbate (1989) declared that his music ‘actually projects poetry and stage
action in ways far beyond motivic signs’; she also asserted that ‘Wagner’s
motifs have no referential meaning; they may, and of course do, absorb
meaning at exceptional and solemn moments, by being used with elaborate
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calculation as signs, but unless purposely maintained in this artificial state,
they shed their specific poetic meaning and revert to their natural state as
musical thoughts’. No doubt an analysis of Tristan that doggedly attempted
to confine the meaning of every occurrence of the opening cello phrase to
‘Tristan’s suffering’, or any other of the various tags that have been attached
to it, would be absurdly naive and literal. But variation and diversity of
meaning are not to be confused with meaninglessness; it seems undeniable
that the listener ‘comprehends’ the intense, elaborate developments and
derivations in Tristan subliminally, sensing meaning through the sheer force
and insistence of its evolving musical logic.
One result of the increasing flexibility of motivic signification in the
later Wagner is that the motifs themselves seem to invite reduction to a few
unifying archetypes. Robert Donington, Deryck Cooke, Carl Dahlhaus and
many others have shown how a few ‘primal motifs’ in the Ring – Donington
(1963) has four, featuring Broken Chords, Conjunct Motion, Chromatic
Intervals and Changing Notes – may be regarded as generating a great
number of offshoots. Robin Holloway (1986) argued that in Parsifal, even
more pervasively than in the Ring or Tristan, the leitmotifs grow from ‘a
sonorous image-cluster … the nucleus that gives life to the work’s expressive
substance’. Holloway’s interpretation illustrates the tendency of leitmotivic
analysis to seek out ever more intricate and all-embracing unifying factors.
The role of leitmotif in Wagner’s compositional design also remains a
central topic in discussion of the extent to which his structures are ‘tightly’
or ‘loosely’ knit (see Abbate, 1989, 1991). No less valuable has been the
concern of scholars working in the field of German studies to re-examine
the significance of Wagner’s motivic theory and practice in the light of
evolving concepts of drama (see Brown, 1991).
One example of Wagner’s importance in the history of music is the
difficulty of avoiding the concept of leitmotif in studies of so many of his
contemporaries and successors. Roger Parker has found it useful to discuss
Verdi’s Aida in the light of the observation that ‘particularly in its treatment
of “motive” and “recurring theme”, it is the most nearly Wagnerian of
Verdi’s operas’ (1989). Direct influence or attempted imitation are not
implied in this case, but with slightly later composers the probability of
literal influence is much stronger, whether the composer is relatively close in
style to Wagner, as Richard Strauss was in Salome and Elektra, or strikingly
distant, as with Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande. There are in fact very few
composers of significance on whom Wagner’s stylistic influence was direct
and extensive: Humperdinck is one such.
These composers'’ operas show that, whatever the musical style,
through-composition renders some degree of leitmotivic working a useful
means of achieving continuity and directedness. Yet discussion of the topic
is bedevilled by the problems facing motivic analysis in general: that is, of
recognizing the point at which ‘connection’ and ‘derivation’ cease to be
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more convincing than ‘contrast’ and ‘difference’. John Tyrrell (1982)
commented on K.H. Wörner’s attempt to demonstrate all-embracing
thematic connections in Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová that ‘too wide an
interpretation of permissible manipulations allows almost anything to creep
in’. By contrast, Peter Evans (1979) has shown how the presence of
pervasive motivic working can be plausibly demonstrated in Britten’s
operas, despite a style that owes more to Verdi than to Wagner.
George Perle (1980) has attempted to argue that Alban Berg, in
Wozzeck, used the leitmotif principle more effectively – that is, less
predictably and mechanically – than Wagner himself had done. In his
discussions of Wozzeck and Lulu Perle also distinguished between leitmotif
and ‘Leitsektion’: ‘a total musical complex’ that serves a referential function.
The notion of referential musical function may be further elaborated if not
only exact or near-exact recurrences but also the equivalences that are
revealed by reduction to the unordered collections known as pitch-class sets
are admitted: Allen Forte’s work on Wozzeck (1985) and Tristan (1988)
represents the most extensive demonstration of that procedure. Such
manipulations might appear to have little to do with the leitmotif principle
as it relates to Wagner, moving away as they do from the particular profile
of the theme on the musical surface. So, too, Schoenberg’s Erwartung, in its
atonal athematicism, might be felt to be more a reaction against Wagner’s
influence than a celebration of it. Yet Carl Dahlhaus contended that the
brief structural segments of Erwartung, ‘not unlike Wagnerian periods, are
not infrequently defined by means of a characteristic musical idea, which
constitutes the predominant motif, albeit not the only one’ (1978; Eng.
trans., 1987). If motivic elaboration of any kind is seen in terms of the
leitmotif principle, then it becomes possible to extend the range of Wagner’s
‘influence’ still further. The most ambitious operatic enterprise of the late
20th century, Stockhausen’s Licht, could scarcely be less Wagnerian in style,
yet the material of the entire seven-opera cycle derives from a ‘superformula’, in which melodies representing the three central characters,
Michael, Eva and Luzifer, are superimposed. The virtually constant
presence, in the background, of these melodies may represent an approach
to motivic composition very different from that of Wagner (see Kohl, 1990).
We might nevertheless sense a genuine bond with those ‘plastic nature
motifs, which, by becoming increasingly individualized, were to serve as the
bearers of the emotional subcurrents within the broad-based plot and the
moods expressed therein’, to which Wagner referred in 1871, in the
Epilogischer Bericht on the Ring, when he attempted to describe what he
believed his first task had been when embarking on the work almost 20
years before.
Reminiscence motif
(Ger. Reminiszenzmotiv, Erinnerungsmotiv).
A theme, or other coherent musical idea, which returns more or less
unaltered, as identification for the audience or to signify recollection of the
past by a dramatic character. It is an important ancestor of the
LEITMOTIF.
The systematic use of motifs for dramatic purposes first developed in
France and Germany in late 18th-century opera, though earlier examples
may be found (for example where one character quotes another’s music
allusively). With the weakening of the closed aria form, greater importance
began to pass to arioso, recitative and scena; and the association of motifs
with characters and events began now to provide not only a useful system of
illustration but, gradually, the means of applying formal control through
quasi-symphonic techniques. An early formulation of the principle of
associating a musical idea with a character occurs in Lacépède’s La poétique
de la musique, ii (1785): a chapter on ‘Des caractères des personnages
considérés relativement à la tragédie lyrique’ proposes for the musician that,
in ‘chaque morceau qu’il composera, il comparera ce sentiment qu’il aura,
pour ainsi dire, créé, avec celui que le morceau devra montrer et faire naître’
(‘in each piece that he composes, he shall match this feeling that he will
have, so to speak, created, with the person whom the piece is to show and
bring to life’).
Mozart’s use of motif was generally confined to such straightforward
devices as the recurrence, in Le nozze di Figaro (1786), of Figaro’s ‘Se vuol
ballare’ to re-emphasize his intentions towards Count Almaviva, but there
are prefigurations of later techniques in Idomeneo (1781), particularly in
figures associated with the emotions of Ilia and the sacrifice of Idamantes.
Other operas of the closing decades of the 18th century make effective use
of reminiscence motifs. A celebrated instance is Blondel’s song in Grétry’s
Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784); the device was also used by Méhul
(Ariodant, 1799) and Catel (Sémiramis, 1802), among many others, to
provide a reminder of a previous dramatic event. The quotation of a
substantial part of a whole number for dramatic effect remained a familiar
device, as with ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in Flotow’s Martha (1847) or ‘La
donna è mobile’ in Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851). Verdi also used reminiscence
more subtly, for example in the moving recall, in Otello (1887), just before
Otello kills Desdemona, of the theme associated with their loving embrace.
Although composers have continued to use simple thematic recall, or
thematic ‘labels’, to identify or characterize individuals, ideas and events on
their recurrence, most have chosen to avail themselves of the additional
dramatic and expressive resources offered, in the light of the Wagnerian
leitmotif, by thematic transformation and development.
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