Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music By Matthew Bribitzer-Stull (review)

“Leitmotif ” is one of the few terms in music’s technical vocabulary to have left the confines of its discipline and entered common parlance. Its ubiquity has come with a trade-off, however, as the original intentions and intendant nuances behind the term attached to Richard Wagner since the 1870s have become at best obscured, at worst unintentionally misused and intentionally abused. Recognizing that such a phenomenon is an inherent property of any popular term, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull does not seek to return the leitmotif to the circumscribed environment of Wagnerian music drama. Rather, in Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music, he explodes it by showing how the leitmotif—and, more accurately, leitmotivic procedures—has adapted to the needs of established and new media over the last one hundred fifty years. In doing so, he hopes to demonstrate that “the idea of leitmotif,” which Bribitzer-Stull believes has been debilitated by wave after wave of critical onslaught over the last century, remains “a valuable component of musical understanding” (p. xix).

Uncovering key features of Wagner’s leitmotivic practice begins in chapter 1. Bribitzer-Stull emphasizes the importance of “accumulative association” (p. 4; emphasis in the original), which allows the viewer not only to recall earlier themes, but also to track how those themes change according to various semantic, emotional, and dramatic cues. Association is, in fact, the defining feature of the leitmotif, which Bribitzer-Stull also supplements with developmental (p. 14ff.) and structural (p. 18ff.) components. Given that these features are not unique to the leitmotif, the author concludes the chapter by examining the problematic ways in which scholars, especially beginning with Hans von Wolzogen in 1877, have applied them to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Following the taxonomy laid out in the first chapter, Bribitzer-Stull divides his book into three parts: “Musical Themes” (chaps. 2–3), “Musical Association” (chaps. 4–6), and “Leitmotifs in Context” (chaps. 7–9). Chapter 2 continues the methodology established earlier, in that it attempts to arrive at a leitmotivically-appropriate definition of “theme” by exclusion. A theme is not, according to Bribitzer-Stull, “a unit of musical form” (p. 41) like a phrase, nor need it have the same linear basis that gives melody its singability (p. 44). And motives often convey important, deep structural information that themes—with their penchant for expressive, “explicit extra-musical dramatic narrative”—cannot (p. 50; emphasis in the original).

Chapter 3 sheds light on thematic identity by advancing a model in which “the listener, hearing multiple repetitions and variations of a theme, forms an abstract prototype of it” (p. 65). Bribitzer-Stull argues for the prototype model, since it works both at the contingent and conceptual levels, and with this foundation he begins to move the leitmotif out of the territory of theme or motive by affirming its developmental nature. Chapter 4, drawing on “understandings of expression, signification, referentiality, topic theory, and subjectivity” (p. 83), tries to pinpoint a leitmotif ’s level of associativity, which Bribitzer-Stull defines as “the forging of a connection between two separate ideas such that one may evoke or recall the other” (p. 100). Leitmotivic associativity is at its strongest when memory, emotion, and meaning align, as Bribitzer-Stull demonstrates in a pregnant example from Götterdämmerung (p. 95ff.) that also conveniently foreshadows the book’s later forays into the world of film. A fascinating discussion of the hermeneutics of associativity follows (pp. 100–108), giving the reader—arguably for the first time—a feeling of having finally come down to earth after more than one hundred pages of theory and literature review (or “fuzziness,” as Bribitzer-Stull is apt to call it.) Indeed, armed with several approaches that address the “leitmotif problem” posed in the first chapter, Bribitzer-Stull addresses “piece-specific-plus-cultural-generic and intertextual associative layering...