Leitmotif - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A leitmotif sometimes written leit-motif, is a musical term (though occasionally used in theatre or literature), referring to a recurring theme

Theme (music)

In music, a theme is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based.-Characteristics:A theme may be perceivable as a complete musical expression in itself, separate from the work in which it is found . In contrast to an idea or motif, a theme is...

, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical idea of idée fixe. The term itself comes from the German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

Leitmotiv, literally meaning "leading motif

Motif (music)

In music, a motif or motive is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition....

", or, perhaps more accurately, "guiding motif."

In particular such a theme should be 'clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances' whether such modification be in terms of rhythm

Rhythm

Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...

, harmony

Harmony

In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

, orchestration

Orchestration

Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra or of adapting for orchestra music composed for another medium...

or accompaniment. It may also be 'combined with other leitmotifs to suggest a new dramatic condition' or development. The technique is notably associated with the opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

s of Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

, although he was not its originator, and did not employ the word in connection with his work.

Although usually a short melody

Melody

A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

, it can also be a chord

Chord (music)

A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...

progression

Chord progression

A chord progression is a series of musical chords, or chord changes that "aims for a definite goal" of establishing a tonality founded on a key, root or tonic chord. In other words, the succession of root relationships...

or even a simple rhythm

Rhythm

. Leitmotifs can help to bind a work together into a coherent whole, and also enable the composer to relate a story without the use of words, or to add an extra level to an already present story.

By extension, the word has also been used to mean any sort of recurring theme, (whether or not subject to developmental transformation) in music, literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, or (metaphorically) the life of a fictional character or a real person. It is sometimes also used in discussion of other musical genres, such as instrumental pieces, cinema, and video game music, sometimes interchangeably with the more general category of 'theme'. Such usages typically obscure the crucial aspect of a leitmotif, as opposed to the plain musical motif or theme - that it is transformable and recurs in different guises throughout the piece in which it occurs.

Early usage in classical music

The use of characteristic, short, recurring motives in orchestral music can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. In French opera of this period (such as the works of Grétry

André Ernest Modeste Grétry

André Ernest Modeste Grétry was acomposer from the Prince-Bishopric of Liège , who worked from 1767 onwards in France and took French nationality. He is most famous for his opéras comiques....

and Méhul

Étienne Méhul

Etienne Nicolas Méhul was a French composer, "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution." He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic".-Life:...

), "reminiscence motives" can be identified, which may recur at a significant juncture in the plot to establish an association with earlier events. Their use, however, is not extensive or systematic. The power of the technique was exploited early in the nineteenth century by composers of Romantic opera, such as Carl Maria von Weber

Carl Maria von Weber

Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....

, where recurring themes or ideas were sometimes used in association with specific characters (e.g. Sammael in Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz is an opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber with a libretto by Friedrich Kind. It premiered on 18 June 1821 at the Schauspielhaus Berlin...

is coupled with the chord

Chord (music)

of a diminished seventh

Diminished seventh

In classical music from Western culture, a diminished seventh is an interval produced by narrowing a minor seventh by a chromatic semitone. For instance, the interval from A to G is a minor seventh, ten semitones wide, and both the intervals from A to G, and from A to G are diminished sevenths,...

). Indeed, the first use of the word "leitmotif" in print was by the critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

F. W. Jähns in describing Weber's work, although this was not until 1871. Motives were also important in purely instrumental music of the romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

period. The related idea of the musical idée fixe was coined by Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a...

in reference to his Symphonie fantastique
Symphonie Fantastique
Symphonie Fantastique: Épisode de la vie d'un Artiste...en cinq parties , Op. 14, is a program symphony written by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is one of the most important and representative pieces of the early Romantic period, and is still very popular with concert audiences...

(1830). This purely instrumental, programmatic work (subtitled 'Episode in the Life of an Artist') features a recurring melody representing the object of the artist's obsessive affection and depicting her presence in various real and imagined situations.

Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

is the composer most often associated with leitmotifs. His cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...

(the music for which was written between 1853 and 1869), uses dozens of leitmotifs, often related to specific characters, things, or situations. While some of these leitmotifs occur in only one of the operas, many recur throughout the entire cycle.
Wagner had raised the issue of how music could best unite disparate elements of the plot of a music drama in his essay Opera and Drama (1851); the leitmotif technique corresponds to this ideal.
Some controversy surrounded the use of the word in Wagner's own circle: Wagner never authorised the use of the word "leitmotiv", using words such as "Grundthema" (basic idea), or simply "Motiv". His preferred name for the technique was Hauptmotiv (principal motif), which he first used in 1877; the only time he used the word 'Leitmotiv', he referred to 'so-called Leitmotivs'.

The word became controversial among Wagnerians because of its early association with the overly literal interpretations of Wagner's music by Hans von Wolzogen

Hans von Wolzogen

Baron Hans Paul von Wolzogen , was a German man of letters, editor and publisher. He is best known for his connection with Richard Wagner.-Childhood:...

, who in 1876 published a "Leitfaden" (guide or manual) to the "Ring". In it he claimed to have isolated and named all of the recurring motives in the cycle (the motive of "Servitude", the "Spear" or "Treaty" motive, etc.), often leading to absurdities or contradictions with Wagner's actual practice. Some of the motifs he identified began to appear in the published musical scores of the operas, arousing Wagner's annoyance; his wife Cosima Wagner

Cosima Wagner

Cosima Francesca Gaetana Wagner, née de Flavigny, from 1844 known as Cosima Liszt; was the daughter of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt...

quoted him as saying 'People will think all this nonsense is done at my request!'. In fact Wagner himself never publicly named any of his leitmotifs, preferring to emphasise their flexibility of association, role in the musical form, and emotional effect. The practice of naming leitmotifs nevertheless continued, including in the work of prominent Wagnerian critics Ernest Newman

Ernest Newman

Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective...

, Deryck Cooke

Deryck Cooke

Deryck Cooke was a British musician, musicologist and broadcaster.-Life:Cooke was born in Leicester to a poor and working class family; his father died when he was a child, but his mother was able to afford piano lessons. Cooke acquired a brilliant technique and began to compose...

and Robert Donington

Robert Donington

Robert Donington was a British musicologist and instrumentalist influential in the early music movement and in Wagner studies.He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and studied at the University of Oxford...

.

The resulting lists of leitmotifs also attracted the ridicule of anti-Wagnerian critics and composers (such as Eduard Hanslick

Eduard Hanslick

Eduard Hanslick was a Bohemian-Austrian music critic.-Biography:Hanslick was born in Prague, the son of Joseph Adolph Hanslick, a bibliographer and music teacher from a German-speaking family, and one of his piano pupils, the daughter of a Jewish merchant from Vienna...

, Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

, and Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....

). They identified the motif with Wagner's own approach to composing, mocking the impression of a musical "address book" or list of "cloakroom numbers" it created.

After Wagner

Since Wagner, the use of leitmotifs has been taken up by many other composers. Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...

used the device in many of his operas and several of his symphonic poem

Symphonic poem

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in a single continuous section in which the content of a poem, a story or novel, a painting, a landscape or another source is illustrated or evoked. The term was first applied by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt to his 13 works in this vein...

s. Despite his sometimes acerbic comments on Wagner, Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

utilised leitmotifs in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas et Mélisande (opera)
Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy. The French libretto was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande...

(1902). Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

used a complex set of leifmotifs in his choral work Gurre-Lieder

Gurre-Lieder

Gurre-Lieder is a massive cantata for five vocal soloists, narrator, chorus and large orchestra, composed by Arnold Schoenberg, on poems by the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen...

(completed 1911). Ruggero Leoncavallo

Ruggero Leoncavallo

Ruggero Leoncavallo was an Italian opera composer. His two-act work Pagliacci remains one of the most popular works in the repertory, appearing as number 20 on the Operabase list of the most-performed operas worldwide.-Biography:...

used leitmotifs in his opera Pagliacci
Pagliacci
Pagliacci , sometimes incorrectly rendered with a definite article as I Pagliacci, is an opera consisting of a prologue and two acts written and composed by Ruggero Leoncavallo. It recounts the tragedy of a jealous husband in a commedia dell'arte troupe...

(1892), using melodies from the opera's arias in the overture

Overture

Overture in music is the term originally applied to the instrumental introduction to an opera...

, intermezzo

Intermezzo

In music, an intermezzo , in the most general sense, is a composition which fits between other musical or dramatic entities, such as acts of a play or movements of a larger musical work...

and the overall orchestral accompaniment. Alban Berg

Alban Berg

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...

's opera Wozzeck
Wozzeck
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's...

(1914–1922) also utilises leitmotifs.

Literature, drama and film

'Leitmotif' is often used to refer to the significant repetition of any element in a book, play, novel, film, or other artistic works. In literature, a leitmotif is used as a recurring event, image, object or character in a story, poem or play. Leitmotifs (or motifs) become significant to the meaning of the overall work when they develop thematic importance. In film, a motif is most frequently a plot device, image, character trait, or element of the mise en scène

Mise en scène

Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...

.

Leitmotif-like techniques, with word patterns replacing melodies, are said to be used in the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

by James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

(chapter 11). Critics argue that there are recurring themes of music that begin at the beginning of the chapter and continue throughout the rest of the chapter, and also the book.

The "leitmotif" is also present in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...

. The themes of the Virgin Mary and the Greek myth of Stephen's namesake, Daedalus

Daedalus

In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a skillful craftsman and artisan.-Family:...

, are some of the more noticeable leitmotifs throughout the work. The leitmotif in this novel provides unity as the character of Stephen matures.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

uses leitmotifs throughout his body of works. Other writers who have used similar techniques include Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

, Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...

, Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was a US satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His best known work is Catch-22, a novel about US servicemen during World War II...

, Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

, Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...

, and Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer, and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending...

in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is a novel by Julian Barnes published in 1989. It is a collection of short stories in different styles; however, at some points they echo each other and have subtle connection points. Most are fictional but some are historical.-Background:One of the many...

.

Critique of the leitmotif concept

The critic Theodor Adorno, in his book In Search of Wagner (written in the 1930s), expresses the opinion that the entire concept of the leitmotif is flawed. The motif cannot be both the bearer of expression and a musical 'gesture', because that reduces emotional content to a mechanical process. He notes that 'even in Wagner's own day the public made a crude link between the leitmotivs and the persons they characterised' because people's innate mental processes did not necessarily correspond with Wagner's subtle intentions or optimistic expectations. He continues:

The degeneration of the leitmotiv is implicit in this [...] it leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily'

In popular culture

Leitmotifs in Adorno's 'degenerated' sense frequently occur in movie

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

scores, and have done since the early decades of sound film. Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was an Austro-Hungarian film and romantic music composer. While his compositional style was considered well out of vogue at the time he died, his music has more recently undergone a reevaluation and a gradual reawakening of interest...

's 1938 score for Robin Hood

Robin Hood

Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes....

, for example, can be heard to attach particular themes and harmonies to individual characters: Robin, Will, Much, and Gisbourne are all accompanied by distinctive musical material. A more modern example is the Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...

series, in which composer John Williams

John Williams

John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T...

uses a large number of themes specifically associated with people and concepts (for example, a particular motif attaches to the idea of the Force).