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?
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 an 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. (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.) This economic shift was a
unsteady juncture for those who worked within all disciplines of
musical production. 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. Meanwhile, for performers, modern salaried orchestras had
finally reached institutional status.
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 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 radio jingles and the repetition 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:
