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.
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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:
