Leading Motifs of the Concept

Understanding the use of leitmotifs in both the composer’s and listeners’ practice means, in part, to examine the uses (and the limits) of the word itself. The career of the word is astonishing. After referring to something specific for Wagner’s operas it entered the general lexicon of European languages where it stands for an important theme that is invoked again and again, whether it be in literature or in the other arts, in philosophy or politics. Tracking such diluted meaning down to the Wagnerian origin of the word “leitmotif” also clarifies the story behind the convenient guidebooks and apps that promote the concept to an eager audience (a story that they themselves usually do not tell). Ironically, exploring a name that promises guidance and orientation leads us into a maze-like history.

Contrary to popular belief, Wagner neither invented the word nor promoted it. The historic identification of Wagner with the term “leitmotif” was so strong that it took more than a century to clarify this misconception. It seems that August Wilhelm Ambros, an Austrian music historian, used the term for the first time as early as 1860.Footnote ⁵ Ambros did not intend for the term to be used especially for Wagner; he highlighted how both Liszt and Wagner (at the time known for Tannhäuser and Lohengrin) retain characteristic motifs or melodies throughout individual works, and that these appeal to the memory of listeners, functioning for them like a “red thread” that leads them through the work. Significantly he coins the word in opposition to traditional forms that the listeners might otherwise miss: Liszt and Wagner would “scorn traditional formal structures (Andante, Scherzo etc. in the symphony and aria, duets etc. in the opera) or apply them in ways hard to discern. Both try to preserve greater unity by continuous use of leitmotifs.”Footnote ⁶ Ambros emphasized that the idea of repeating themes for dramatic use was by no means new. Many composers before Wagner did so. Ambros points to Giacomo Meyerbeer (the recurring Lutheran chorale melody in Les Huguenots) and Carl Maria von Weber (in Oberon and Der Freischütz) and, of course, to Mozart, who in his Don Giovanni used the opening chords of the Overture as a symbol for the Commendatore and his violent death. The impetus for Ambros to coin his new term seems predicated on his observation that Wagner used the preexisting tool more often and more consistently than before; but Ambros does not describe this as a new quality and does not anticipate how Wagner would elaborate on the technique in his following operas, especially in the Ring. Nevertheless, this hint towards a “greater unity” preserved by more consistent recurring motifs shows Ambros’ awareness that leitmotifs perform a formal function that in some way makes up for the loss of structural orientation which resulted from Wagner’s removal of traditional operatic numbers.

In this sense, the word was used by many critics in the years leading up to the Bayreuth premiere. Yet, it did not become part of common parlance until Wolzogen practically connected the “leading thread” and the “leading motifs” in his analysis of 1876. But why was Wolzogen’s text so successful? Why was the word only spread, discussed, and popularized after 1876, given that it had been around for more than a decade, during which Tristan and Die Meistersinger (as well as Das Rheingold and Die Walküre) were published and premiered? It is clear that a major factor in the promotion of the leitmotif concept was the four-evening tetralogy’s world premiere in its entirety, with its associated publicity as both a long-awaited event of international importance and a national achievement. The premiere made visible and audible the full extent of Wagner’s ability to explore and even exhaust the potential of leitmotifs and to make the method his own before a broad audience, not just the experts or Wagnerian adepts. Another factor was the timing: Wolzogen’s extensive analysis had been published just a few weeks before the August 1876 opening night of the Ring, sparking the impression to critics and to Wagnerians alike that the booklet was a kind of officially sanctioned guide, written on the composer’s behalf. It is no overestimation to say that the Ring (like Parsifal after it) never had a chance for a pure “first hearing”; before it was born, it had already been analyzed for the public.

The case of Wolzogen and his Leitfaden shows, however, that the impression and reception of the Ring was also thoroughly mediated. The rise of the leitmotif concept is a perfect example of how musical discourse defines how we hear and judge music. Today we have a clear picture of how Wagner himself acted as a virtuous agent of self-promotion throughout his life.Footnote ⁷ In the case of Wagner’s most important compositional trademark, though, his adepts did all the work, and Wagner was not always happy with the level and content of the result.

Wagner used the word only once, in his essay Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama (On the Application of Music to Drama) in 1879. Reacting to Wolzogen’s guide, Wagner states that the musical and structural function of the motifs is as important as the hermeneutic approach suggested by his disciple: that the semantics constitute only one (or a one-sided) way to consider the tool. But by that point, a mere three years after the Bayreuth opening, the discourse surrounding leitmotifs had already taken on a momentum of its own. In the coming decades, Wolzogen’s labels were disseminated through a flood of guidebooks and via motif tables in librettos and piano scores. The analytical commentary the Wagner disciple had prepared for the premiere was integrated more and more with the work of the composer. That was done to the point where a reader of a libretto with leitmotif labels could get the impression that the composer himself had published the analysis along with the music (see Figure 5.1).

Wagner was not amused to find the names printed right into the music in a four-hand piano score of the Ring he received in 1881. Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary: “Unfortunately in this edition there are many hints like Wanderlust-Motiv, Unheils-Motiv etc. R. says: ‘In the end the people believe that such nonsense happens by my suggestion!’”Footnote ⁸ Wagner knew what potential of misunderstanding came with the motif labeling. He never commissioned guidebooks providing such semantic definition of the leitmotifs, nor did he encourage their use. The composer had tolerated Wolzogen’s efforts but never really welcomed them. And he had seen how the anti-Wagnerian camp exploited the existence of such commentary in their reviews and turned it against him.Footnote ⁹ The new musico-dramatic art of the Ring was critiqued as both overly intellectual yet musically shallow. The need for verbal instructions in order to understand and follow it was a damning aesthetic verdict, given the dominant idea at the time that music should be understood either intuitively through emotionally sensitive listening, or – per Hanslick’s position – through its “purely” musical qualities. The notion that good art should speak for itself and not require lengthy explanations remains an influential popular belief even now.

It is difficult to determine the extent to which this campaign represented a deliberate misreading of Wolzogen’s method, or something the method had fostered. The way Wolzogen presented the leitmotifs exacerbated their inherent ambivalence. On the one hand, he affirmed their initial orientational and recollective function by labeling every motif to signify its preliminary dramatic function. With such labeling he wove the leading thread through all four dramas and thus made the gargantuan work comprehensible for lay listeners. On the other hand, the grand-scale manifestation of the thread was fragmented by dozens of verbal distinctions that the score suggested. Thus, the labeling endeavor precipitated a kind of semiotic tension between the verbal and musical dimensions of the work. On the one hand, the content correlated with a musical phrase by the help of a label turns the motif into a graspable musical metaphor. On the other, the specific name may also narrow and reduce both the sounding features that are exemplified and the sometimes kaleidoscopic array of subtle changes in meaning a motif can potentially represent. So, fixing a name creates a sense of security and predictability for the listener, but at the same time deprives that listener of the potential richness of the motif’s flexibility as an open and floating sign, which can adapt to the corresponding dramatic context by its expressive, sensuous features. Wagner might have had this objection in mind when he called the naming of motifs in the score “nonsense.”Footnote ¹⁰

The title of the booklet had an impact as well. Using the term “leading thread” not only tied it to Ambros’s first use of the leitmotif concept. “Leitfaden” was (and is) a common technical term that stands for a didactic “manual” or “guidebook,” while also alluding to the mythical thread of Ariadne that leads out of the minotaur’s maze.Footnote ¹¹ At its most polemic, the metaphor of the leading thread could thus be misread as a desperately needed orientational tool in order to survive a complete performance of Wagner’s Ring. What Ambros had observed already in 1860, therefore, turned into a widespread prejudice about Wagner’s music. Because his works did not follow traditional operatic forms of aria-like units or graspable melodies they were considered “formless.”Footnote ¹² Already in 1846 after the Tannhäuser premiere, the young and not yet anti-Wagnerian Eduard Hanslick had already refined the common expectation into the ironic phrase: “The big audience … does not like music from which, after the first performance, one cannot take off for home, humming, some eight-bar march melodies, in order to teach them to the fortepiano right away.”Footnote ¹³ Both the extremely complex and long Tristan, considered unperformable for almost a decade, and Meistersinger played their part in confirming the belief that Wagner’s works were hard to understand, demanded too much, or even seemed wholly incomprehensible. How could this apply any less to his new, gigantic tetralogy?

The triumphant success Wagner’s works eventually had in the fin de siècle was by no means a given in 1876 when the Ring was premiered. Against this background, Wolzogen’s promotion of a motivic approach in the run-up to the Bayreuth Festival can be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to mediate Wagner’s new and possibly confusing or even overwhelming art. Yet, while it added fuel to the polemics against Wagner, the Leitfaden (and its descendants, whatever their medium) provided a catalog of named motifs, which for an eager, pro-Wagnerian audience fulfilled exactly the function of something “to take home, humming.” Admittedly, the leitmotifs were not aria-like, operatic melodies. But they became something comparable and equally powerful. The short tunes (and even themes, e.g., the Siegfried motif) were as recognizable and catchy for nonmusicians (verbally and musically, some with earworm qualities) as they were eminently symbolic musical “things” that could spark and embellish discussions among Wagnerian followers.

Motifs, in Wagner’s Theory

How did Wagner talk about leitmotifs? Although he did not come up with the term, the composer had, of course, a firm vision about how such motifs ought to function in a music drama. Part of the maze surrounding the concept is that he developed the idea in his earlier theoretical writings in Zurich, especially Opera and Drama (1850–1), which preceded compositional work on the score of the Ring.

When Wagner spoke of “motifs” he used “primary” or “fundamental motifs” (Hauptmotiv/Grundmotiv) to signify the core motifs of the plot, in the sense of things that drive or motivate the characters.Footnote ¹⁴ To avoid confusion Wagner rarely uses “motifs” when he talks about the music in and of itself. Instead, he would employ phrases such as “foreboding and reminiscent melodic moments,”Footnote ¹⁵ or “fundamental themes,”Footnote ¹⁶ but also occasionally “malleable emotional moments,” and, more closely related to the notion of leitmotifs proper, “signposts for the emotions” (Gefühlswegweiser).Footnote ¹⁷ These phrases indicate that the music corresponds with the drama in quite a direct manner. The musical motifs stand in for the motifs of the dramatic plot, as part of a symbolic relationship: they sensualize the “poetic intent” (whether signifying characters, events, or emotions). The “malleable emotional moments” are audible signs that correlate to the elements of the plot “which the poet … designed as the pillars of his dramatic building.”Footnote ¹⁸ Using this definition, promoters of the leitmotif as a concept might have found their license to align individual leitmotifs with names to produce something akin to a dramatic vocabulary.

Wagner’s explanations also indicate that the new role of musical motifs stemmed from a few salient ideas about what, in his view, the artwork of the future should accomplish. Firstly, it should be drama rather than opera (which I explain in the next paragraph); secondly, the cooperation of the arts should enable the composition of flexible temporal structures that unfold in an organic way, and so allow allusions to both the past and the future; finally, as a core Romantic idea, that the rational (or, in the modern sense, conceptual) parts of the drama (i.e. language and poetic intent) ought to be rendered instead through the emotions: Wagner called it the “emotionalizing of the intellect” (Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes).Footnote ¹⁹ Wagner thus retained music as the romantic medium of choice. He furthermore derived a wholly new poetic Gestalt for his work and, consequently, the need for and reliance on musical motifs in lieu of traditional musical forms to render a sense of structure.

Wagner’s theory was a campaign against the opera of his time and towards a new form he would refer to as “drama.” The “and” in the famous title Opera and Drama was rather more a “versus,” a plea for “Drama instead of Opera.” Wagner developed an outright aversion to the conventions of aria, duet, and ensemble as well as their typical song-like syntax. In his view, it was precisely through those closed forms following predefined musical rules that music had come to dominate the operatic genre, and at the expense of the drama (not to mention his damning views on vocal virtuosity and contemporary theatrical effects). Just as he believed that all the arts must come together to form the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) in order to achieve and serve the drama, so must the music for such works operate at the level of small-scale and even micro-motifs, to guarantee structural coherence while simultaneously allowing for a flexible, organically developing, and dramatic flow of time.

In the third part of Opera and Drama, Wagner unfurls nothing less than a theory for rendering the temporal structure of a drama. In opera, the music swings between extremes. On the one hand it undermines dramatic time during the arias and set pieces, stopping the action entirely for the extended presence of an expressive musical form. On the other hand, music’s influence retreats to mere sung speech (Sprechgesang) in its function as part of the recitativo passages where time and action move forward quickly, and where words refer equally to the past and the future. In Wagner’s opinion, this imbalance meant a disadvantageous use of all the constituent arts, but especially music, as it could not live up to the dramatic potential that he believed Beethoven realized in his motivically organized symphonic scores. If motivic and thematic units (and not self-contained musical pieces [Tonstücke]) were established as the basic currency of operatic composition, so his reasoning goes, then music could also mediate between different layers in time. Musical motifs could prefigure the main dramatic strands, and these could then be presented onstage, sung with words, and expressed through gestures by the protagonist as a dramatic presence that, in turn, could be referred to later repeatedly by the orchestra, remembering and representing past emotions or events. So, in Wagner’s conception, “melodic moments” would do much more than symbolize an aspect of the drama. They would constantly create overlapping triads of foreboding, realization, and memory, in a continuous process of transition and development. The most explicit concept of leitmotif denotes exactly this “leading through time” which in so doing creates and motivates the drama.

What fascinated Wagner about the potential of his new method was that, with the ability to anticipate and reflect, music would not only match what language could do in literature and theater but would even render those temporal relationship. And it would render it less through apprehension by the intellect but more through the intuition of emotions. As the musical motifs make aspects of the drama sensuously perceptible and operate in an expressive, nonverbal, and gestural mode, they became a central tool in enabling emotional understanding. The potential of such a tool was exploited further by the cinema of the twentieth century. It is not surprising that enabling emotional understanding via musical motifs became a sought-after technique when the motion picture was invented and film composers appropriated for the screen what they learned from Wagner’s dramas.Footnote ²⁰

So, at this point it might be legitimate to ask what all this meant for the practical composition of the Ring and whether Wagner the composer lived up to what Wagner the theorist envisioned.

Motifs, in Wagner’s Practice

Given Wagner’s idea of an emotional understanding of the drama through the musical motifs (recall Wagner’s angry reaction to the labeled themes he found in that four-hand piano score), we can deduce that, in his view, we should not have to memorize a hundred short musical phrases before attending a performance. The nonverbal mode in which the sounds from the orchestra pit operate teaches us the motifs simply by repetition and variation, and we should apprehend their meaning effectively along the way, as the drama unfolds before our eyes and ears. To illustrate this point, I will discuss a few examples that show how the method works in Wagner’s practice.

This idea of intuitively learning the musical shapes is introduced at the very start of Rheingold, which proceeds from the simple to the complex in an almost didactic but at the same time deeply symbolic way. We hear a metaphor of musical beginning and creation when the natural overtones of the octave and the fifth ascend from the deep E♭, subsequently creating, quasi naturally, the E♭ major triad and scale (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 1 and 2). Later, when the Rhinemaidens and Alberich interact, the full scope of Romantic harmony is brought to bear to express feelings and passions. The same is true for the melodic level, in which the motifs usually materialize (we will see below that harmonic and even timbral aspects become motivic in the Ring). Wagner demonstrates what it means that the leitmotifs correlate with the “pillars of [the poet’s] dramatic building.”Footnote ²¹

One such “pillar” that translates into two central musical motifs is the idea of “the renunciation of love.” It also provides an example of Wagner’s work process, from the drafting of the poem to the eventual musical setting.Footnote ²² In the November 1851 prose sketch for Rheingold, the idea is first set to the phrase “the gold glistens. ‘How is it to be won?’ ‘One who renounces love.’ – Alberich steals the gold.”Footnote ²³ This, in turn, is developed into one of the founding dramatic motifs for the Ring’s plot. It is first sung by the Rhinemaiden Woglinde when she gives away the secret of the Rhinegold: “Only he who renounces love’s power, only he who banishes love’s delight, only he attains the magic to forge a ring from the gold.”Footnote ²⁴ (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 10). Woglinde’s words are set in a theme-like melody that is staged like an oracle, embedded into the mystical dark timbre of lower brass harmonies including the Wagner tuba, a new tenor tuba that the composer requested and that was named after him. It is in this moment of coming together of the scene, the words, the singing, and the orchestral sounds that Wagner derives specificity for the motif’s initial semantic reference. This is true not only for the “renunciation” theme but also for the musical symbol that refers to the Ring, the central theatrical prop of the whole drama. Wellgunde had introduced the Ring motif just prior to the renunciation theme, where it occurs again at the end, exactly to the cue of Woglinde’s words “to forge a ring from the gold” (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 9a). From now on, these two melodies are charged with meaning that grows in connotation with every recurrence. The first notes of the renunciation motif return a few minutes later when Alberich translates into action what the Rhinemaiden revealed: He curses love and “with terrible force he tears the gold from the rock” (as Wagner’s stage directions read).

What we see and hear in the first exposition of the renunciation and the Ring motifs, and in Alberich’s curse, are textbook examples for what Wagner had in mind in Opera and Drama when envisioning a new form of drama. In such sequences of theatrical exposition, the motifs and themes become part of a “realization” (Verwirklichung) on stage and thus become integrated with the scenic action, bodily gesture, and affect. They acquire an expressive meaning and a reference to persons, things, and emotions that can be recalled and reexpressed when the motifs return later in the orchestral melody, or they may function as agents of symbolic transfer when the motifs are sung by other protagonists in different contexts with new words.

Wagner demonstrates this potential right after Alberich’s curse when the transition to the second scene begins. While on stage the scene changes from the Rhine riverbed to the heights of Valhalla, the orchestra presents the theme of renunciation in a grand symphonic fashion and in the full phrasing we heard from Woglinde. The Ring motif (see Figure 5.1, motifs no. 9a and 9b) that had been the last part of the theme is then repeated four times but with every recurrence altered slightly so that in its fifth repetition it has morphed into an entirely new motif, also a central one, another pillar of the drama, yet presented in the orchestra for the first time: the motif of Valhalla (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 11).

Such musical morphing looks (or sounds) like a magic trick. What Wagner uses here is called the technique of motivic transformation. Roughly speaking, it means retaining the intervallic structure of the motif (here the thirds moving down and up) but changing the scales and chords in which it is embedded together with varying rhythm and tempo. This can completely transform the character of a motif. Here it is the metamorphosis from the eerie, nervous ambiguity of the Ring thirds into the majestic, solid, bright, and hymnal chords of Valhalla. All this happens in the orchestra without any use of words, and no scenic action besides the transformation of the stage. In Wagner’s total work of art, though, the technology of the stage and the activity it presents should not be underestimated, as Gundula Kreuzer has recently shown.Footnote ²⁵ Wagner, the stage director, requests a gradual clearing of the foggy Rhine scenery so that we see the castle of Valhalla at the end of the change. A lot of interpretive energy has been put into explaining why the Ring and Valhalla are, musically, such close relatives. For example, it might foretell that Valhalla will be paid by the gold and the power of the stolen Ring, or, more plainly, that the Ring and Valhalla are symbols (and instruments) of power.

Yet, whatever we read into it (and Wagner invites us to do so), we should not forget that what we hear (or want to hear) in a passage like the metamorphosis of these two motifs depends on what we see on stage. Wagner had no idea of how stage directors could and eventually would put their own personal stamp on a production and thus deviate from the composer’s printed stage directions. In the 1994 Bayreuth Ring-production (directed by Alfred Kirchner), for example, the most radical solution to this transition was presented by drawing a curtain between the scenes. Such a decision counteracted Wagner’s intention of an open scene change and relegates (or degrades) the accompanying musical passage to an orchestral intermezzo. The dialogue between the score and what is presented on stage in historical or current opera productions is a difficult one and is still in its infancy, not least because it also involves performance and media analysis.Footnote ²⁶ If we describe the morphing themes in this passage, we should base that description on the observation that we are watching a visual and spatial transformation while hearing a musical one. At heart, this is a gradual process that connects stage and orchestra into the single whole that Wagner considered to be drama.

From this point on in the Ring, the composer often presents a motif first as an orchestral voice and not in the vocal line. This is his central art of creating dramatic time that points forward, hearkens backwards, and expresses what we see and hear in the moment. Wagner was aware that with the Ring he created a web of musical motifs that constitutes a system of structurally related (or contrasting) expressive figures which, over the course of the work, form a musico-dramatic universe. In retrospect, Wagner described this organizational system as follows: “With Rheingold I forged a new path immediately, where first I found the malleable [plastic] motifs for nature [like the ones for the Rhine, the Ring and Valhalla], which in increasingly individual development became carriers of the emotionally laden tendencies of the vast action and the characters found therein.”Footnote ²⁷ Wagner intended for such a system to manage the musical processes to a degree of structural coherence comparable to that of a symphony.

To round off this crash course on Wagner’s practice, it is worth looking at the poles of the motivic universe in terms of length and frequency. One of the shortest and most often used motifs throughout the four operas consists of only two notes: a suspended note descending stepwise; in terms of meter, a stressed-unstressed figure. “Rheingold! Rheingold!” (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 7b), the Rhinemaidens exclaim at the moment when the sun touches the gold and makes it shimmer. The motif opens the bright C major trio of the maidens. Yet the same musical idea had been introduced earlier in a dark way, as a semitone and as an expression of sorrow and frustration when Alberich screeches, “Woe’s me! Ah Woe’s me!” (Wehe! Ach wehe!, see Figure 5.1, motif no. 4) after having been fooled by all three maidens. The two-note motif retains this dark and sorrowful meaning in most recurrences and for that reason has been called the motif of grief or woe. Wolzogen named it “the motif of drudgery” as Wagner connects it in the third scene with Alberich demonstrating how he reigns over the Nibelungs by means of the Ring, melodically sharpened again by the semitone and a diminished seventh chord on the first note. The words he sings with the motif say everything about his leadership style: “Tremble in terror, downtrodden host! Quick obey the Ring’s great lord!”

Following the woe motif through the Ring is a task that was once suggested by Wagner himself.Footnote ²⁸ The above-mentioned essay “On the Application of Music to Drama” is also the only occasion in his writings where he offers some explanation of leitmotifs himself. He writes, “Much might be learned from a closer examination of the repeated appearances of the simple Rhinemaidens’ motif … so long as it is traced through all the fluctuations of passion throughout the four-part drama, up to Hagen’s Watch in the first act of Götterdämmerung.”Footnote ²⁹ In fact, as Millington emphasizes, “the entire score of Götterdämmerung is suffused with this two-note falling-semitone motif; it appears in all kinds of combinations and always casts a baleful shadow, so sinister and unambiguous as its sound.”Footnote ³⁰

Probably, keeping the idea of emotional understanding in mind, it is not as important whether we are aware of all these occurrences or whether we understand them intuitively together with the scene. What we can “take home” is a kind of musical allegory similar to the motivic link between the Ring and Valhalla.Footnote ³¹ The two opposing sides of the Ring’s shortest leitmotif – the bright, childish C major “Rheingold”-call and the woeful semitone suspension – open an interpretative space that the Wagnerian listener may be eager to fill. Such interpretations correlate the logic of the drama to that of the motifs and might read like this: The Rhinegold as part of a pure and innocent nature is transformed, after the mighty Ring has been forged from it, into an instrument of suppression that causes pain, harm, and injustice. (George Bernard Shaw read the whole of Rheingold as a parable of capitalism.) The shift from nature to political and economic power results from Alberich’s curse on love and, later, from the curse he places on the Ring when Wotan violently seizes it from him. As the gold and the Ring are from the same material, so are the musical expressions for the maiden’s “Rheingold” call and Alberich’s “Wehe” as they are both made from the falling tone step. Yet the maidens falling whole tone from the major scale (a dominant ninth) is joyful and shiny while the woe is a painful semitone, a sigh figure that has been one of the most intense expressions of emotion in music since Monteverdi. This is what fascinates the connoisseurs about these little musical-symbolic things called leitmotifs. The dramatic conflict of an entire mythical plot can be condensed into the transformation of two notes.

The other pole of the Ring’s motivic universe might be represented by a theme that is one of the longest and least used, occurring only twice. It actually comes quite close to being a grand operatic melody when first sung by Sieglinde at the end of act three, scene one of Walküre when she addresses Brünnhilde: “Oh, mightiest of miracles, most glorious of women!” (O hehrstes Wunder! Herrliche Maid!), also known as the “redemption through love” motif. Her line is the most elevated, enthusiastic and desperate expression at her disposal to the news Brünnhilde just revealed to her: Not only is she pregnant, but she is given the broken shards of her brother and husband Siegmund’s sword destined for her son, the new hero Siegfried. Wagner applies an Italianate orchestration to the melody by doubling at unison the singer in octaves in the strings and creates an overwhelming affective moment that makes the climax of the scene and marks the exit of Sieglinde from the drama. Motivically, the moment is as loaded as it is dramatically pointed; we also hear the Siegfried theme for the first time, two of the longest motifs of the Ring in a row, interrupted by the sword motif.

But unlike the Siegfried theme, which Wagner then uses extensively, he lets the melody of Sieglinde disappear only to have it resurface at the very end of the tetralogy, in the last five minutes of Götterdammerung. When composing the end of the tetralogy in 1872, Wagner, as Cosima’s diaries tell us, expressed happiness about having allocated “Sieglinde’s theme of praising Brünnhilde” to the finale, and being able to use it “as the quasi choral singing to the heroes.”Footnote ³² He alludes to his idea that the orchestra equipped with meaningful motifs can take a similar role as the Chorus does in Greek tragedy, where it comments and reflects on the drama and its story. Yet here we also get hold of Wagner as a musico-dramatic rhetorician who strategically positions his arguments, who subverts his own method in favor of positioning the best and most meaningful keystone to his huge musico-dramatic edifice. It is remarkable that this beautiful and effective melody is the least like a leitmotif in the sense Wagner had established. The difficulty critics have had naming it reflects its special status.

Figure 5.2 Final scene of Götterdämmerung from Patrice Chéreau’s Bayreuth production, taken from Pierre Boulez, et al., Der “Ring” Bayreuth 1976−1980 (Kristall Verlag: Berlin and Hamburg, 1980), book jacket,

by courtesy of Bayreuther Festspiele

How does one determine the meaning of a motif that appears once at an ecstatic climax in Walküre and then again as the concluding thought of the drama? The notion of repetition is central to the concept of the leitmotif: the fact that it accumulates references, changes, and extensions of meaning with every recurrence. Listening for leitmotifs is a continuous process of learning throughout the drama. Note that Wagner himself did not label it in the typical manner but rather calls it “Sieglinde’s theme of praising Brünnhilde.” Again, it was Wolzogen who set the name that stuck: “motif of love redemption.” He named it by looking at it from the very end. It thus entered English discourse as the “redemption motif” and, truly, the end is about redemption on all levels: Love is redeemed (from the curse) and that redemption is achieved through love (Brünnhilde’s self-sacrifice); moreover, nature is redeemed from the Ring’s curse as the Rhinemaidens take back the Ring and the circle closes. However, to decide upon a single, fixed name might be too hastily to delimit the interpretative space opened up by the musico-dramatic ending Wagner composed. It might deny the potential in Wagner’s decision to voice an almost-new motif at the end of seventeen hours of musical drama. Wagner leaves us with a riddle. In his centennial Ring of 1976–80, Patrice Chéreau staged this final gesture by having extras on stage with their backs to the audience watch the burning doom of Valhalla. They gaze in the same direction as we, the audience, do. But when the motif sounds from the orchestra pit for the last time, the crowd on the stage turns around and faces the audience, looking into their eyes as if handing something over to us: the question of responsibility, of “why?”, of the future. There are no words sung with the motif, the orchestra holds its voice like a wordless Chorus. We do not need an ultimate explication of the allegory. It is the music that has the last word in the Ring.