my enemy, the leitmotif

a missive

This essay was written for wehwalt.net, my website about the Ring cycle, but because I realized I haven’t sent out a newsletter this month, I figured I’d send it out here as well.

There is a considerable debate within Wagner studies not only about the specificities of leitmotifs, but often what, in truth, a leitmotif even is. Colloquially, the leitmotif is thought of as a collection of identifying melodies attached to certain characters, feelings, and subjects, within the Ring or in other works by Wagner. This is a seemingly simple concept -- that Siegfried, horn in hand, sounds like this, while the giants, with their lumbering footsteps, sound like that, but, as is the case with anything else in the Ring it is not, nor ever will be simple. In practice, the Ring is a machine by which a handful of spare notes can be transmogrified across a span of time as short as a few seconds and as long as four consecutive days, into something so sprawlingly complex it becomes somehow inescapable and nigh untraceable at the same time. There is indeed a reason why the body of scholarly work about the leitmotif vastly outnumbers that of any other element of Wagner’s life and work.

As a basic concept, however, the idea of the leitmotif is fraught. Where, for example, is the musical line drawn between theme, phrase, and motive? If the leitmotif is to be a “memory aid” or signifier of a certain character, why does it show up so often, and seemingly confusingly, in the mouth of someone completely different, such as in the case, very early on, in scene 2 of Das Rheingold, where Loge’s theme is sung by the giant Fasolt during his negotiations with Wotan?

Despite, or perhaps owing to these peculiarities and fractures, the arc of this “sterotypical” leitmotif in musical discourse is long. Even those who take leave of the shadow of taxonomy fall prey to it. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno, for example, felt that the leitmotif was the antecedent of other vulgarities in bourgeois musical culture, such as the radio jingle. His critique of its role in the Ring is broader and more substantial than just that (it actually has to do with how terrible it is that such small individualities are so totally subsumed by the all-encompassing whole of fate, a claim with which I largely agree) but even a critique as distant as this still relies on the end logic of the leitmotif not only as an individual and indexical musical subject but of the set of leitmotifs as a defined, self-contained, and internally consistent system within the Ring.

By way of its origins in the 19th century, the categorization and taxonomization of leitmotifs is as precious to the historical bourgeois listener as his cabinet of curios, where each line is as crisply labeled as a species of butterfly plucked from the air and pinned behind an unforgiving plate of glass. This is a way of thinking that has retained its appeal across several shifts within modernity that consistently favor systematic hierarchies, including, in our day in age, that infinite list of lists known as the Internet. Then, as now, the same imperative, of severing the individual animal from the whole of life in which it dwells and from which it is inextricable, can be found throughout many guides and companions to the Ring. It is, in my view, however, an impulse that should be tempered, especially at the start of one’s journey with Wagner.

This is not only because it is daunting (even I, someone who has listened to the cycle countless times, do not have even the short list of the motives completely memorized) but because it often is either distracting or has an emotionally stultifying affect. For example, if one goes into the Ring blind, how important is it really to the experience of the work, to know that the opening E-flat major arpeggios, labeled, alternatively as RHINEGOLD, GOLD, GENESIS, NATURE, what have you, are called such? Is it not, in some empirical way, obvious? Similarly, it is somewhat brutish and thick-headed to say that, in the opening of Die Walküre when Siegmund recognizes in Sieglinde the same human compassion that has burned a hole in his heart his entire life, that the harmonization of her leitmotif with Siegmund’s as they further explore the contours of each other’s character functions as a musical signification or foreshadowing that the two are twins. Does it? When one is listening to the cycle front to back, within the continuum of non-reversable time, does it really? Do we not trust the cycle, as is the case with any other operatic production, to explain itself?

Such remarks may sound anti-intellectual upon first reading, but they are actually in line with a self-contained and not uncommon intellectual belief, which is that the Ring is best listened to in the way it was originally intended: in real time, as a series of music dramas. We will get to the drama part in a bit, but in terms of temporal experience, it is worth clarifying that this is a perspective whose foundations lie not in a kind of purist originalism vis a vis a kind of vulgar allegiance to the composer, but in the subdiscipline of sound studies and its understanding about how we as contemporary listeners materially relate to historical music.

At the time when Wagner was writing the Ring, which is to say the middle of the 19th century, people’s relationship to music and listening began to shift dramatically. Wagner himself knew this, in fact, it was a major driving force of his work, not only in his musical inventions (including the leitmotif) but in the development of Bayreuth, which, having been constructed in a way utterly divorced from operatic precedent (which was more static than in other buildings for the performing arts) and developed around an intensely specific musical and technological program, marked the beginning of modern acoustical planning.

Music, once the domain of the aristocratic elite, had expanded with the development of capitalist society into the drawing rooms and public concert halls of the emergent bourgeoisie. As a result, the relationship between listeners and performers also shifted away from private concerts and towards a diverse set of venues one could access with a fee.¹ This economic shift was a unsteady juncture for those who worked within all disciplines of musical production. For performers, modern salaried orchestras had only just reached institutional stability. For composers, the patronage system had ceded way to the entrepreneurial mode of making a living, though Wagner, through his fraught relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, knew the strains of both sides.

Mass printing of sheet music created both a boon in the proliferation of scores and arrangements of concert music for study and leisure (which themselves contributed to compositional stardom) but also ushered in the behemoth known today as standardized pop music. On the back of these developments came a big expansion of amateur musicianship, which was the primary way by which music could be reproduced in the home. The main vehicle for this reproduction, especially with regards to large ensemble pieces was via the piano reduction, in particular piano four-hands arrangements. Thus, piano playing became a commonly desirable skill, which itself is why the first attempts to mechanize sound came in the form of the player piano. Still, such early inklings of another, humanless way of listening could not prepare anyone for the techonolgical advancements that were to follow. These were the last few years before the Western ear stopped hearing time in one direction.

The recording created an ontological crisis in which, after millennia to the contrary, music ceased to be an event rooted in a specific space and transpiring across a specific time. That music could be consumed talentlessly and effortlessly, that certain phrases could be repeated ad nauseum, but, more spiritually, that the sound of a living breath could be heard after the person breathing had ceased to do so, all of these were life-altering changes that are hard to conceive of today. At the same time, both music and especially performances (and by extension performers, to whom recording was and remains very unforgiving) were subjected to new levels of scrutiny. It is not surprising, then, that taxonomical analyses of the Ring cycle exploded after the development of sound reproduction.

This context of the Ring as a work produced at the penumbra of modern acoustical technology is important not only historically but in how we listen to it. This is not to say that the way we approach music in the age of instantaneous gratification is inherently inferior to some kind of imagined state of premodern innocence, but that, in regards to the structures of the Ring itself, it does effect how we perceive it as an experiental and temporal whole. It has become trite to claim that the leitmotif, much like in the way some obscure patent preordains a now-ubiquitous device, anticipated things like advertising jingles and the looping repetition later made possible by recorded sound. But it is not trite to reiterate that it did, in fact, precede those things, that its function was in some ways as transitional as the times themselves. It is actually quite important that we take into account that the Ring was not meant, in the terms of an experience, to be picked around in like a fruit basket, that this disjointed time in which so much analysis finds its natural environment, is not the same time with which Wagner himself shaped his cycle.

Those who listened to the Ring on the eve of its composition had no way of going backwards. If you missed a musical cue, then you simply missed it. Only over the course of each of the four operas are the motivic references gradually reinforced. The seeking out of forshadowing among little clues, much in the way one does in a novel, which is a static piece of art, was not experientally possible and, at a time where memorization as a skill is at an all-time low, still largely isn’t -- that is, without the score.

It’s not controversial to say that the score of the Ring is, to a greater extent than with any other piece of music, singularly and forcefully severed from the experience of the music itself, often in the service of this one idea. It exists, as is required of many obsessions, as a uniquely fetishized object. The score is a searching grasp towards legibility within a work that does not always seek to be legible. But most of all, the score truncates, reduces the span of musical time to the blink of an eye. And, unlike other pieces of historical music, the cycle’s temporal imperative, the dayslong pace of a story that spans an entire world, requires something specific from the listener - a mix of endurance and pristine attention - and it is this specificity which, whether we like to admit it or not, still demands some respect. The Ring infamously has a way of enforcing its time on others. Perhaps this is why so many like to break it into such tiny pieces.

*

That the idea of the leitmotif as an indexable, self-contained system within the cycle does not even originate with Wagner himself, and, as such, that their strict categorizations do not come straight from the horse’s mouth should itself serve as an indication to the Ring novice that they need not tread too far into this particular territory in order to listen to or even to master the Ring as a work of art. (In fact, when the first guide to the Ring primarily oriented around the naming and mapping of leitmotifs was published the year of the cycle’s completion in 1876 by Hans von Wolzogen, Wagner found the whole ordeal reductive and was famously unhappy about it.) Wagner himself was more vague about the role of motives in the cycle than most of the people who have ever written about them. He writes:

A musical motive (Motiv) can produce a definite impression on the Feeling, inciting it to a function akin to Thought, only when the emotion uttered in that motive has been definitely conditioned by a definite object, and proclaimed by a definite individual before our very eyes. The omission ofthese conditionments sets a musical motive before the Feeling in a most indefinite light; and an indefinite thing may return in the same garment as often as one pleases, yet it will remain a mere recurrence of the Indefinite, and we shall neither be in a position to justify it by any felt necessity of its appearance, nor, therefore, to associate it with anything else.

But a musical motive into which the thought-filled Wordverse of a dramatic performer has poured itself-so to say, before our eyes-is a thing conditioned by Necessity: with its return a definite emotion is discernibly conveyed to us, and conveyed to us through the physical agency of the Orchestra, albeit now unspoken by the performer; for the latter now feels driven to give voice to a fresh emotion, derived in turn from that earlier one. Wherefore the concurrent sounding of such a motive unites for us the conditioning, the non-present emotion with the emotion conditioned thereby and coming at this instant into voice; and inasmuch as we thus make our Feeling a living witness to the organic growth of one definite emotion from another, we give to it the faculty of thinking: nay, we here give it a faculty of higher rank than Thinking, to wit, the instinctive knowledge of a thought made real in Emotion.²

These are not mystical or crank ideas, ones that should be ignored in pursuit of a higher analytical purpose, nor are they, as is often the case with Wagner, biographical misfortunes by which the quantifiable can claim superiority over the irrational. In fact, what Wagner is describing here is a key and revolutionary function of narrative modernity, akin to that which developed in the realist French novel in the early to mid 19th century, particularly in the work of Gustave Flaubert. This is the idea and execution of a pre- or subconscious affect. In more technical terms, it is the disappearance of the diagetic event (events that are directly experienced by both characters in the piece and by the audience) into the mere fact of narration. It is also worth noting that Flaubert’s work also marks a moment of stylistic transition by which the sentence becomes the key unit of literature, something that is also reflected musically in a shift towards motivic or phrasal thinking both before and after Wagner.

The similarity between these concurrent artistic developments across mediums is a point made in detail by Fredric Jameson in a minor lecture he gave on the Ring as narrative. To paraphrase, prior to this period, the novel was usually built around rigid formal structures whose narrators often had to justify their own existence, such as in the form of the epistolary novel structured as correspondence or testimony. As the novel became the form par excellence of an increasingly interiorized bourgeois life, and as it became more gradually defined by both internally driven rather than externalized conflicts, and by the intense detail of realism rather than the broad brushstrokes of traditional storytelling, these boundaries dissolved and the acute delineation of feeling and action were no longer deemed necessary. This was not unlike how the strict formal structures of opera were gradually eroding around the same period.

The notion that a character could feel or experience something subconsciously is taken for granted now, but it’s actually a very difficult problem to solve dramaturgically, in which, by formal necessity, perspectives and feelings need to be either spoke, sung or pantomimed directly to the audience. That music could serve this role, that it could communicate not only the dramatic subtext of a given situation but also the unspoken nature and the emotion of the character in a matter approaching the simultaneity of how we ourselves feel within the context of our lives and surroundings including at scales beyond just the individual, this, rather than as a system of characterization, is what Wagner intended as the function and goal of the leitmotif.

It is thus a category error to view the leitmotif, as people so often do, as a purely musical or textual subject in lieu of as a means of relation and association that is simultaneously musical, dramatic, and textual within the work. It is important to reiterate that the Ring was intended to be a discrete event in chronological time, one listened to perhaps once ever in the lives of the listeners. While it is more than fine, and in its own way, a pleasure, to study intensely the motivic structures of the cycle, to go into the work, especially for the first time, with the bias of categorial thinking creates for the listener a retrospective dramatic irony that is frustratingly both structural to the work and yet also unintended by the composer on behalf of the listener. (This is one of the many great dialectical tensions of the work, the question of: are we really supposed to know all that?)

Often, however, the leitmotif effect can be intellectually limiting. Instead of considering the broader dramatic contexts of individual moments, which is to say, how they relate to the whole through the combined apparatus of music, speech, and drama at scales both small and large, one becomes stuck on common questions like “Why does Brünnhilde use the LOVE motif when she speaks of her horse to Siegfried? Does she love the horse? Is it supposed to be funny?” A novice, listening to the cycle empirically, could tell you that the motif comes in the context of a gift to her lover, whom she is about to send on a journey from which he won’t return.

It is precisely at this level of specificity that the Ring often falls apart. The existence of so many little ironic puzzles, “errors” and musico-thematic conflicts within the motivic system drives and has driven so many generations of both listeners and scholars genuinely mad.³ The Ring can even be said to be anti-indexical in its messy imperfection. So much of the effort of the taxonomists, much like those who went out into the bush alongside Darwin, is reflective of a desire for domination over something that insists on retaining its own mysticism. At the heart of this frustration is the unambiguously modernist urge to eradicate ambiguity. Most of the ambiguities within the cycle, from the flaming embers of its open ending to the several small mysteries scattered throughout, many of which go unanswered, are in fact integral to cycle’s own stability as an enigmatic but dialectical whole. They are the reason the Ring is one of those rare works that is so broad that nearly all analyses of it, should they be reasonably argued and sufficiently self-contained, are valid, and hence, why, 150 years later, we keep having the same arguments at scales both infinitesimal and structural.

*

To better examine the leitmotif in this broader, more generous affective fashion, we can return to one of the great scenes of Wagnerian debate, the moment in Act I of Die Walküre in which Siegmund draws the sword Nothung from the ash tree. This act, one of the great symbolic gestures of love within the cycle and also perhaps the zenith of its eroticism, is accompanied not by Siegmund’s motif or that of Sieglinde, for whom the sword is drawn, nor does it come from the array of bliss and love motifs developed throughout their courtship. Crucially, it is accompanied by the bit of music commonly designated by various guides as the “Renunciation of Love” (more accurately, the “Liebe-Tragik”) motif -- the same motif by which, in Das Rheingold the Nibelung Alberich transforms his rejection by the Rhinemaidens and lust for the gold into a misery that will fundamentally upend the world order. Why, so many have asked, does Wagner do this? Why use the same music for completely opposite emotional purposes? There are infinite potential answers to that question (none of which come from the mouth of the composer) but in our chosen analysis, one must look far beyond Siegmund and far beyond Alberich to understand the moment, not just the motif within the context of the entireity of the Ring.

From its very beginning to its very end, Alberich forms a series of narrative dyads with a number of different characters within the cycle. Most overtly, he functions as a kind of mirror for Wotan, or perhaps the shadow Wotan sees in the corner of his own eye, which is in fact his own shadow. Wagner frequently refers to Wotan as “Licht-Alberich” - Light Alberich - a dialectical construct that is set up in Das Rheingold as Wotan and Alberich emerge by the end as a Janus-faced depiction of the same greed. In comparison, the less obvious narrative relationship between Siegmund and Alberich is rarely mentioned in guides outside of this key motivic moment, in spite of the searing musical bond that links the two characters together.

The world of the Ring is Wotan’s world, and it is the constructs by which it is bound together that create the conditions for everything that later comes to pass. It is, to speak dialectically, a world that possesses within its structures the very material by which it can be unmade. Alberich’s renunciation of love, and by extent, his fundamental violation of nature, would not be possible were it not for the preexisting condtions that both enable his immiseration (which, as is often pointed out by critics, is a system of racialized hierarchy) and, by way of the precedent set by Wotan in his forging of the spear of contracts from the World Ash Tree, the ability to alter what is not, in reality, a natural world in a state of innocence.⁴

Later, in Die Walküre, the narrative dyad pivots, one could say, away from Wotan and towards Siegmund, who is the new recipient of the same god-ordained (though this time with more specificity) misery and, by extension, the same unstable world order. Siegmund and Alberich, though from very different perspectives, are both Promethean figures in the Ring. The creation of the ring via the renunciation of love and the removal of the sword from the tree as an act of love’s ultimate dedication - both sacred objects, both tied, albeit inversely, to the same emotion - are fundamentally acts of freedom, are breaks with the world as it is and, by extension, with those who lord over it. These acts and the choices therein are both immanently responsible for the terminal decline of the godly order, an order which each character, in their own way, rejects in its totality, Alberich by way of his curse, and Siegmund by his abdication of heaven in favor of dying a free man on earth. The loss of the ring and the killing of Siegmund have, essentially, the same effect on Wotan: they drive him mad.

There is something also to be said about the broader implcations of Siegmund’s words, sung as they are to the “Liebe-Tragik” motif:

Heiligster Minne
höchste Not,
sehnender Liebe
schrende Not
/
brennt mir hell in der Brust,
drängst zu Tat in Tod

(Supreme ecstasy’s / direst extremity / yearning love’s / aching need; (with the transitional addendum into the Nothung passage): is ablaze in my breast urging me to act and to die!)⁵

These are, of course, oppositional to Alberich’s in intention (”So let the waters listen! / Love it is that I curse!”)⁶, but the textual comparisons somewhat end there. The linkage of love in between the two texts is meaningful but somewhat bare, as is the musical connection which remains both simple and confounding. Thus, it is only within the broad totality of the Ring as drama, music, and text simultaneously, the structural continuity between two oppositional but similar figures, each defined by their own relationship to agency; and, finally, through the flexible affect afforded by the leitmotif itself - certain in one utterance, absolutely subconscious in another - that the bond between these two moments, moments upon which the very fate of the world hangs in the balance, can be truly understood.

In short, if we are to take seriously the imperative of the total work of art, then it is totality rather than specificity, and specificity in service to totality, that we must bear in mind at any given musical moment. So much can transpire at the instantaneous moment at which we remember someone or something, feel something or intuit a feeling in others. But if we were to perceive life only at that scale, we would not be able to integrate these moments into something graspable, into an identity that can be sustained, into a corporeality that matters. Perhaps this is in part why the Ring moves across the aural and visual field of the listener at the pace of both days and seconds simultaneously: because it transpires not on the scale of music, but of life itself. That music is expanded into the life-scale is its great achievement. As such, it is often enough to listen to the little birds singing in the clearing the song of a woman on the rock. But, just as often, it is better to see the forest through the trees.

1. This spatial dichotomy, it should be noted, always existed with regards to opera, whose technical requirements were both more stringent and, as a result, its architecture, subjected always to the public eye, was more notoriously hierarchical.

2. from Richard Wagner, “Opera and Drama: Part II,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol.2, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Braude Brothers, 1966), 329-30.

3. Within contemporary Millennial culture, a strong equivalency to this problem can be found in the recursive, extensive, yet incomplete symbology found in the children’s series A Series of Unfortunate Events in which cryptic items such as a sugar bowl as well as locations and characters from earlier in the series (a time when it was more serialized in nature) return in the later volumes either bereft of answers or provided new ones. Despite being intended for young readers, Daniel Handler, fka Lemony Snicket, often distorts repetitive motivic structures by way of postmodern literary features such as anachronism, pastiche, and intertextuality.

4. This relationship, the funamental dialectical bond in the cycle, will be further elaborated on in a forthcoming essay about Das Rheingold.

5. DW lines 568-574. It is also important to point out here that Siegmund and Sieglinde are the most infuriatingly tied up in the knot that unites irony, music, text, subtext, and drama, because the question of what each of the twins knows - about each other or even about themselves - is always in flux, and, unlike other events in the Ring is difficult to ascertain even retrospectively. As a result, the two speak in a language that is especially cryptic for which music serves as an only somewhat clarifying force.

6. DR lines 527-528: “den hör is de Flut / so verfluch ich die Liebe!” The Sabor translation here is vastly superior: (Bear witness, the world: / Cursed be love and all loving!)