Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Studien zu Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners (review)

There has never been a shortage of jokes on Wagner's leitmotifs: Hanslick thought of them as "tourist guides"; Stravinsky as "cloakroom numbers"; Debussy as "address books"; G. B. Shaw as "calling cards"; and the list goes on. These jokes pivot, each in its own way, on the significance accorded to the leitmotifs. In Hanslick's most vivid metaphor they may help musical "tourists" find their way around the strange and exotic place that is a Wagnerian music drama; in Debussy's and Shaw's image, they can still help the listener locate certain musical moments; finally, in Stravinsky's understanding, leitmotifs are little more than an orderly token for something else that has no intrinsic relation to the object that was checked in temporarily. All of these writers register that, for the longest time, leitmotifs were handled as quantifiable knowledge of Wagner's operas, a feature that held considerable appeal to the Bildungsbürger of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the educated bourgeois for whom knowledge was cultural capital. Wagnerian orthodoxy had it (and in certain quarters this is still the case) that music drama was not only to be studied using the libretto—or the score, wherever possible—but also the leitmotif compendium. Even Adorno, the Bildungsbürger par excellence, was aghast when a group of musicology students could not even notate the Siegfried motif.¹ Did they have no education at all?

The fact that Wagner never fully endorsed the concept of the leitmotif—admittedly, he never rejected it, either—makes its history complicated, as it is impossible to link the concept to any given authority figure. In Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit, Christian Thorau convincingly shows not only why Wagner had no choice but to remain ambivalent on the topic, but also why the concept has had such a tortured history. The author examines the concept in a variety of historical and systematic contexts—drawing on Bildungsgeschichte, semiotics, Wagner's reception history, music analysis, and, last but not least, the history of listening—that all add up to the fullest and most thoughtful consideration to date of the reams of leitmotif literature.

What makes Thorau's case so compelling is that he does not try to argue for a "correct" understanding, against any "misunderstandings" of the past, but rather uses the extensive polemics surrounding the leitmotif to illuminate the concept from all possible angles. As Thorau elegantly argues throughout his book, the crux for leitmotifs is that they are creations of reception history whose impact on the understanding and interpretation of the works they are supposed to elucidate has been so powerful that the epistemological value attached to them has far outstripped their musical function within the works. In short, for the first time it seemed possible to rationalize the overwhelming emotional force of Wagner's music, to put it into words and, what is more, into words that Wagner himself had apparently put in the score: the leitmotif seemed to promise the ultimate decipherment of a stable and fixed meaning of Wagner's music drama.

So compelling was the allure of leitmotivic analysis that the eventual reaction against it could only be equally vehement. Only an all-embracing formalist approach such as Alfred Lorenz's notorious Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (1924–33, 4 vols.), with its ubiquitous Bar- and Bogenformen, seemed weighty enough to rein in those pesky leitmotifs and replace their function as a wellspring of both meaning and form. This new chapter of Wagner analysis ushered in a new, more scientific (some might say esoteric) paradigm that constituted an important step in the musicological professionalization of Wagner analysis—Lorenz's tonal charts bear more than passing resemblance to temperature charts found on hospital beds. Rather than superseding the leitmotivic paradigm, however, Lorenz's new formalist model merely had the effect of cutting the ties to the popular reception of Wagner's operas, which remained firmly wedded to the...