Wagner's Influence On Movie Music

Every man or woman in charge of the music of moving picture theater is, consciously or unconsciously, a disciple or follower of Richard Wagner – Stephen Bush, film critic, 1911

Please write music like Wagner, only louder – Sam Goldwyn to a film composer

If my grandfather were alive today, he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood —Wolfgang Wagner

(Note: When I mention a film composer in this post, the film listed next to his name is the one–or more–he wrote that is listed among the 25 best film scores of all time, according to a survey by the American Film Institute. More on that below.)

There is no area in which Wagner’s musical influence is felt more broadly and deeply than in film music. It was very clear to the early Hollywood moguls, and their film composers, that Wagner’s music was the perfect model for the newly created industry. He is widely credited for developing the musical language that was self-consciously adopted from his works for the movies. For example, the man who is often called “the father of movie music,” Max Steiner¹ (King Kong, Gone with the Wind), denied he was the “inventor” and deflected that title to Wagner: “Nonsense. The idea originated with Richard Wagner. Listen to the incidental scoring behind the recitatives in his operas. If Wagner had lived in this century, he would have been the No. 1 film composer.” ²

Max Steiner

The influential 20^th century composer, and teacher of several film composers, Arnold Schoenberg, said that Wagner “bequeathed to us three things: first, rich harmony; second, the short motive with its possibility of adapting the phrase as quickly and often as required to the smallest details of the mood; and third, at the same time, the art of building large-scale structures and the prospect of developing this art still further.”³ 

All three of these bequests were adopted by film composers, though at the base was usually “the short motive,” a.k.a. leitmotifs – what Wagner called “motifs of memory” – whose purpose is “to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of mind, supernatural force or any other ingredient in a dramatic work.”⁴ Wagner used them in a sophisticated way to create or deepen our emotional reactions when these memory-motifs were repeated and developed within a dramatic work. Films often used them very simplistically, but the best film scores integrate them in a more Wagnerian manner; that is, they are developed and modified and transformed as the drama unfolds without viewers’ immediate consciousness of the fact. 

In you want to read more, this article by Gustavo Costantini goes into depth about the use of the leitmotif in film scores. Here is the author’s summary of why they were adopted as the principal means of creating a score:

[Wagner’s] flexible way of using musical themes enabled musicians to resolve a lot of problems when films began to include sound. Firstly, to find a structure for organizing musical material. Secondly, to link characters and situations by means of music. And, finally, to avoid duplication (image / sound / musical onomatopoeia, having sound and music do the same thing). Romantic music entered the film sound field associated with all these technical, psychological and formal aspects, helping narrative film to aim higher. People were aware of the musical code, and the associations with characters and situations allowed directors to delineate and complete plot ideas through sound. And because cinema was not as demanding as opera - at least in those days - the musician’s task was simplified by the use of leitmotifs.

As well, Wagner’s concept of gesamkunstwerk (the total work of art) was explicitly on the minds of some of the composers. For instance, film composer Miklos Rózsa (Ben-Hur) said,

My generation tried to establish the serious motion picture score with a symphonic background. I personally believe in the form of motion picture derived form Wagner’s book Opera and Drama. He discussed the gesamkunstwerk, an all-encompassing art of drama, writing and music.What could be closer to this description than motion picture?⁵ 

Echoing Rózsa, the composer Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Vertigo) said a similar thing:

Cinema is a great opportunity to create a remarkable kind of music in the sense that it is music of the theater, and at the same time, it is music that becomes part of a whole new artistic phenomenon which is known as cinema, which is a combination of all the arts—and music is cinema.⁶

Herrmann believed that, “it is not possible to create a film without music, but you can create a film without good music.”⁷ This is actually not true, as there have been good films with very little or no score. See this for instance. But they are rare.

Most films do have music, and it clearly can help provide a more intense, emotional experience when done well, just as the orchestral music does in opera, particularly from Wagner’s era on. Take the music out of the Herrmann-scored Psycho, for instance, and the scare factor would plummet. Take the music out of the “silent” film The Artist, and it would have never got close to garnering an Oscar, much less distribution.⁸

Howard Shore

One current film composer who has followed the Wagnerian model is Howard Shore in the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit trilogies. My wife Leslie loves literature; I don’t. She had contributed the posts for this blog on Joyce and Tolkien, as I couldn’t do them justice. Since Tolkien is one her favorite authors, I asked her to comment on what the music brought to the film version of the Hobbit, which she found lacking in many other ways. Leslie writes:

To my mind, movies rarely come close to capturing the emotional impact of the books they’re based on. This is largely because reading a book takes far longer than watching a film; one has many hours—often days or even weeks—to live inside the heads of the characters, to learn to empathize with them, to anticipate and share in their desires, fears, anxieties. For this reason, I tend to prefer literature over movies—I revel in the time it takes, and the satisfying payoff at the end.

Music, however, can act as a shortcut to these same emotions. For reasons I couldn’t possibly explain, music has the ability to evoke the deepest feelings in a matter of seconds—especially if the listener has been properly set up in advance. (Just hearing the few chords that accompany Rodolfo's cry “Mimi, Mimi” at the end of La Bohème, for instance, can instantly cause tears to well up in my eyes.)

So using music effectively in a film can give the work a far greater emotional impact than it would otherwise possess. One of the greatest examples of movie music is Howard Shore’s scores for the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. Truly, his soundtracks come closer to Tolkien’s poetic language than any other aspect of the films.

Here’s a perfect example. I had some serious problems with Part One of The Hobbit, in particular the seemingly never-ending chases and battles. But one scene saved the movie for me: when Bilbo contemplates killing Gollum, but then pity stays his hand. At the beginning of the scene the music is ethereal and suspenseful and just sort of floats there, as we watch Bilbo’s frustration at not being able to get past Gollum to escape from the underground passageway. Then the music starts to change: We hear snatches of heroic, pastoral lines, as Bilbo imagines the world outside of Gollum’s dark caves. Determined, he holds his sword up to Gollum’s neck. The strings and tension intensify as Bilbo grits his teeth and brings the sword back, ready to strike. But then he looks Gollum in the eyes, and sees, what? A shared humanity (hobbitity?). The music becomes more complex, questioning (and very Wagnerian, I might add). And then the payoff. We hear strains of folk music—the music of the Shire. Our music. Bilbo lowers his sword, and we truly feel his empathy for this piteous creature. No, he cannot strike him down. I cried like a baby the first time I saw it in the theater. Watch below.

Robin once said to me that she loves music because she doesn’t want to do all the work it takes to read a whole, long novel. But listening to music—or watching a movie with a terrific soundtrack—it’s like mainlining literature.⁹  

The soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit films sounds Wagnerian, and not just because Shore uses leitmotifs in a manner similar to Wagner. The music itself is strikingly reminiscent of Wagner’s music. As the music critic Alex Ross says in this analysis of the two Rings (both musical and literary): 

Shore manages the admirable feat of summoning up a Wagnerian atmosphere without copying the original. He knows the science of harmonic dread. First, he lets loose an army of minor triads, or three-note chords in the minor mode. They immediately cast a shadow over the major-key music of the happy hobbits... The minor triad would not in itself be enough to suggest something as richly sinister as the Ring of Power. Here Wagner comes in handy. He famously abandoned the neat structures of classical harmony for brooding, meandering strings of chords. In the “Ring,” special importance attaches to the pairing of two minor triads separated by four half-steps—say, E minor and C minor. Conventional musical grammar says that these chords should keep their distance, but they make an eerie couple, having one note (G) in common. Wagner uses them to represent, among other things, the Tarnhelm, the ring’s companion device, which allows its user to assume any form. Tolkien’s ring, likewise, makes its bearer disappear, and Shore leans on those same spooky chords to suggest the shape-shifting process.¹⁰

In the movie A Dangerous Method, Shore’s score uses Wagner with less subtlety, using the “descent into Nibelheim” as the rhythmic background of what I assume is an implied descent into darkness. (I haven’t seen the movie.) The film also make use of Wagner’s Siegfied’s Idyll.



Of course, the use of Wagner’s music has been common since the beginning of cinema. In the silent era, about 5% (excluding the “Wedding March,” which was ubiquitous in any scene of a wedding at that time) of the cue sheets recommended various Wagner pieces.¹¹ When sound entered, many films used Wagner’s music as part of the score. The book Wagner and Cinema gives a list of about 170 direct uses of Wagner’s music in English-language cinema, and this blogger notes—with some screen examples—that the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) lists over 500 such titles. 

If you then add in film scores written in a Wagnerian manner, as well as allusions to his music within scores, this would make many hundreds of titles; the most famous scores of all time are particularly likely to have Wagner's influence. This is the American Film Institute’s (AFI) list of the best 25 film scores of all time as picked by a jury of 500 “film artists, composers, musicians, critics and historians.”  Within that list only a small percentage were not directly, and greatly, influenced by Wagner’s musical language and form.12

Max Steiner is given credit for the first great film score, King Kong, written in 1933. Blogger Michael Pratt writes here about Steiner's music, with emphasis on King Kong. He writes: “Utilizing Wagner’s leitmotiv system of assigning a theme for all of the main characters and events and using them developmentally in a symphonic fashion allowed Steiner to craft a film score which was both musically dramatic and story enhancing (to the same effect as Wagner’s usage in his Ring Cycle of operas).”¹³  Beyond that, Steiner also matched the sound to the dramatic developments, which became known as “mickey-mousing” because of Disney’s extensive use of the technique in cartoons.  See this short clip of King Kong below for a clear example. 

 

The term “mickey-mousing” is used derisively, but in this interview when he was 78, Steiner defends it, while distinguishing the film music art from opera:

In opera there is no click track and you can’t coordinate it [i.e. the sound with the action] unless you play a march for soldiers, like in Faust, and the chorus walks in tempo. But on screen the music has to fit, otherwise how are you going to play it? If you are in the middle of a love scene, you cut away to a barroom someplace where they have a hurdy gurdy or jukebox or fight, what are you going to do? Keep on with the love theme?... So you have to play the appropriate music to develop the action. If that is “Mickey Mousing” it’s all right with me.¹⁴ 

Steiner used these techniques of leitmotif and “mickey-mousing” in all his scores—all 216 of them—and won three Oscars, though he didn’t win for his Gone with The Wind score, number 2 on the AFI list. The score that won that year, for The Wizard of Oz, doesn’t show up on the list. (There were no Academy Awards in 1933, when King Kong opened.) 

Herrmann and Hitchcock

Another celebrated film composer of that era, though he began his career a little later, was Bernard Herrmann. Unlike Steiner, he didn’t primarily use leitmotifs, but created his own unique musical structure for his scores, revolving around small musical phrases—which is similar to leitmotifs but used more to create an emotion, not necessarily an association.¹⁵ However, interestingly, in one of his most famous pieces, the “Scene d’Amour” from Vertigo (watch below), he did intentionally create an association with Tristan and Isolde, which works as a leitmotif to anyone who knows the Wagner music drama.

Music critic Alex Ross analyses the Vertigo film score here, and writes of this scene: “Herrmann’s use of Wagner, however, is a matter of deliberation and subtlety. The main melodic contour is his own; the harmony is still his idiosyncratic construction. He is jogging the memory of those who know Tristan and the subconscious of those who don’t. His veiled citations indicate in their own way the unstoppable recurrence of the past.” (For other examples of composers who subtlety used Wagner either to intentionally create the connection, or perhaps without such intention, see Jason Neal’s post here.)

Steiner and Herrmann’s style—and indeed the style of the vast majority of the soundtracks on the AFI list—was the “lush, impassioned romanticism of mid-Europe in the late nineteenth century.”¹⁶ In other words, it wasn’t just Wagner’s leitmotifs that were adopted, but also his mode, Romantic music. While Romantic music had already given way to newer forms of orchestral music in concert halls—among them were music labeled Post-Romantic, Neo-classical, Impressionist, Modernist, and Expressionism—film music didn’t adopt those forms and instead continued Wagner’s own tradition: “Romantic music was not only a choice of style, it was the dominant model.”¹⁷

Of the 25 films on the AFI list, 17 were by Jewish* composers.  Every single score on it that was written before 1960 was the product of a Jewish immigrant or a son of a Jewish immigrant. This is far from an accident.  Most were trained during the period of Wagner’s predominance as a composer.  Many were students of the men Wagner had greatly influenced such as Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg.  

Max Steiner, Erich Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood), Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard), Miklos Rózsa, and Dimitri Tiomkin (High Noon) had all fled Europe during the Nazi era. This article summarizes the situation:

In a collision of circumstances, brilliant classical composers were fleeing Europe for their lives at the same time that Hollywood was maturing. Eager for employment and without any prejudice against this new popular art form, these immigrant composers found safe haven in sunny California, did some of their best work, created what came to be known as the Hollywood sound, and transformed cinema. 

This excellent article on these composers emphasizes that they were among the most talented and well-trained composers of their generation: “They were neither students nor pioneers, but rather established, active European composers, among the best of their generation. And they created what many consider to be the finest scores ever written for the film industry.”

The other prominent film composers of the day–Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman¹⁸ (How the West was Won) and David Raksin (Laura)–were all the sons of Jewish immigrants and, interestingly, all three studied with the most famous and influential of all the musical emigres from Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg.

The most famous film composer of the modern day, John Williams (Star Wars, Jaws, E.T.), has continued in the same Wagnerian path—particularly for the Star Wars series—though he is not Jewish himself. However, he says, “Anyone growing up in music as I have done has so has many teachers who are Jewish; it’s so much a part of what we know and what we do.” (Howard Shore, on the other hand, is Jewish.)¹⁹

Some later composers, who grew up after Wagner’s influence had waned significantly, were still asked to write in a Wagnerian style because the older producer wanted the style. Such was the case for Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird) who wrote the score for Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Bernstein relates in this interview, “De Mille had his own concepts of film scoring. He believed in narrative. All the characters had to have themes. There had to be philosophical themes, a theme for good, a theme for evil and so on. I composed all those fragments and he approved, so I went ahead. It’s very Wagnerian, all those leitmotifs.” 

While it might seem ironic now that it was Jewish composers, and the Jewish moguls who hired them, who brought Wagner’s musical legacy to the masses, I don’t believe they would have found it so.

First, the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Europe was already extremely high even before the rise of Hitler—comparable to racism in America in the same era—and the fact that any particular human being was anti-Semitic was just not a deal-breaker for Jews. They had to develop very thick skins to be able to make their way in an often hostile society (as was the case for women, gays, people of color, etc. in the same period.) Even in the United States, which was noted for not having the depth or extensive history of anti-Semitism that Europe did, prejudice was high.  For example, in a 1938 Gallup poll, 50% of Americans said they had a “low-opinion” of Jews.²⁰ 

Secondly the idée fixe that exists today that Wagner was a proto-fasicist and greatly influenced Hitler just did not exist then.²¹ Jews of that era would have found that concept foreign if not absurd, since Wagner had long since been dead, and his anti-Semitism wasn’t considered to be of Hilter’s ilk at all (and, of course, it wasn’t). The Wagner as Jewish boogeyman is of a very modern construction, and did not arise until well after World War II and only became a leitmotif, so to speak, from the 1970s on in American and Europe.²²  I have read several interviews with the composers where they were asked about Wagner, and not one of them raised the issue of his anti-Semitism.

An example of the disconnect between now and then is an account by the conductor John Mauceri about his angst over a concert he had planned with both Wagner and Korngold’s music, to be preformed—he realized to his horror—on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in Germany. He contacted the Korngold family to clear it with them, and, far from having a problem with it, they were thrilled that Korngold was paired with such a genius.²³

As another example, this informative L.A. Times article about Wagner’s influence on movie-music addressed this issue from the point of view that it was a particular irony. The author approached Franz Waxman’s son for a quote.  Unfortunately, he trotted out Wagner’s “association with Hitler” as a given, which rather muddies the water, but John Waxman answered, sort of sidestepping the assumption, “[t]hey recognized Hitler for what he was and despised him for what he did to their families, but they also recognized Wagner’s genius and embraced his music. After all, they grew up on Wagner.”

The same Jewish composers and movie moguls who were victims of the Nazis had no problem embracing Wagner’s music, yet many Israelis not even alive in the era now want to maintain a ban on his works?  It is ironic and hypocritical that Israel bans his music in the concert hall – which reaches but a tiny segment of Israeli society – while it is regularly heard by millions, both directly and through musical allusions to his works, in hundreds of films that are not banned.

The bottom line is that I am very thankful for the Jewish composers and moguls who brought Wagner’s music to the masses.  Now, it would be nice if Israelis could actually hear the music in context to see why it so inspired them to emulate it. 

---

End Notes

* Who is a Jew is, of course, historically a fraught topic. Obviously there is no question for anyone who is religiously Jewish.  But what of those folks who aren't religious? As I said in another post, I like Woody Allen's construction:  “I’m not a real Jew - I am Jew-ish.” The men I am writing about in these post were, for the most part not religious, just culturally Jewish, i.e. Jew-ish.  

1 While I generally link to Wikipedia or similar biographies when I first mention a composer, another great source are these memories of several of the composers mentioned in this post by David Raksin, a fellow film composer. 

2 Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies, 122

3 See here 

4 See here 

5 As quoted in Mark Evans, “Soundtrack: The Music of the Music,” 207 in Soundtrack Available, edited by Wojcik and Knight; Wagner actually discussed the concept of gesamkunstwerk in “Art and Revolution”  and  “The Artwork of the Future,”  not Opera and Drama.

6 As quoted in William Rosar, “Bernard Herrmann: the Beethoven of Film Music?” in The Journal of Film Music, Vol 1, No. 2/3, 143; this is a really interesting piece not just on Herrmann but on the issue of film music as an art in itself. You can download it; just google the title for the PDF.

7 As quoted in Ibid., 121

8 The composer of The Artist’s soundtrack, Ludovic Bource, won the Academy Award for his score. It was, however, not without the—to my mind hilarious—controversy that Kim Novak felt “raped” because the director of the film Michel Hazanavicius chose to use Herrmann’s famous music  “Scene d’Amour” from Vertigo as a homage. (Plus, I am sure his decision was based on the fact that it worked really well in the scene.) It was credited. Seriously, Kim, really? If you missed it at the time, here is one article on the issue. Think of poor Wagner, whose music has been ripped out of context in ways that have actually harmed his reputation – I am referring specifically to Apocalypse Now, but I am sure there are others. Herrmann, no doubt, would have been pleased in comparison.

9 I just want to say that people claim Wagner is “so long,” but Leslie made my point. Literature is long; Wagner is the short way to profound emotions.

10 By the way, I don’t know what any of that musical stuff I just quoted means, as I have no formal musical knowledge whatsoever. But for those who understand that stuff, I thought it might be interesting. What is true for me is that it is impossible to miss the influence of Wagner on that score when watching the movie.

11 Jeongwon Joe and Sander Gilman ed., Wagner and Cinema, 452;  I actually think this book is deadly dull.  But it is the only full book on the subject, though only a collection of essays. Please someone, write another one!  In the meantime, all the other articles I linked to were very interesting—some academic in nature, some not.

12 This survey was done shortly after the Lord of the Rings came out and it did not make the list, though it was on the list of 250 that the 25 were culled from. I suspect if the list is redone in the future, it will. If you would like to explore the leitmotifs of the Lord of the Rings (just the first film) see here.

13 See here 

14 Myrl Schriebman, “An Interview with Max Steiner,” Journal of Film and Video, Spring 2004, 43. You can download this interview if you sign up with JSTOR—it’s free—here. There are people who think that it was with Wagner that “mickey-mousing” originated, but as Steiner pointed out, it wasn't possible in opera.  

15 See Rosar’s article (note 6) for more on his specific musical structure.

16 Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music, 23 

17 Of course, elements from the later musical forms were incorporated into film scores of the era, but the overall dominant sound of these scores—particularly in romantic or heroic scenes—was in the style of Romantic-era music.

18 The Newmans created the first film music dynasty. See here. 

19 For fans of Star Wars, here is an article showing its connections to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, both in content and music. 

20 See here. Also, more on American anti-Semitism here.

21 Michael Tanner gives a good account of this change in the book Wagner, 239-258. My assertion does not mean that there were not those who were starting to make this case after the Nazi rise and appropriation of his music. It is just that it was limited in scope, accusation and effect until the 1970s.

22 Even in Israel, the debate on the Wagner ban didn’t begin in earnest until the late 1960s. Before then, everything German was banned. As they lifted those restrictions, Wagner became a point of contention.  Naomi Sheffi, the author about the book on the ban, The Ring of Myths, said in an interview (the book goes on in detail about this), “The Nazi victims in Israel were divided amongst those who wanted nothing to do with Germany, the majority of whom did not originate from Germany, and the others, the majority of whom were German Jews, who despite their persecution, accepted German culture and even Wagner.”  Quote is from an interview, see here. 

23 See here. The article is interesting.

Musical effects, Part 1: Intro and leitmotifs

To me, music is the language of emotion, and Wagner was the master of that language. Other composers make me feel deeply, of course, but neither to the extent nor the degree that Wagner does. When I am one with his music—that is, really listening and feeling, and not worrying about anything but the moment—I regularly experience the deepest and most intimate emotions that I am capable of feeling, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of seemingly unbearable pain.

I am certainly not the only one to feel intense emotions when listening to Wagner.

For instance, Baudelaire, in writing a fan letter to Wagner, said his music was "rapt and enthralling, something aspiring to mount higher, something excessive and superlative... the supreme utterance of a soul at its highest paroxysm."  (By the way, open that last link for a head scratcher.  I have no idea what bluegrass music has to do with that letter.  Speaking of links, I don't have some for things I quote here, but I can get you to the source material if anyone ever wants something.)

Galina Gorchavova, a current soprano, says this in Diva, the Next Generation: "I am besotted.... there's something heavenly in that music. When I listen to it I feel as if transformed, uplifted. I fly somewhere with it. And the experience is very difficult for me describe in words." 

Hugo Wolf upon hearing Parsifal said "my whole being reels in the perfect world of this wonderful work, as if some blissful ecstasy, becoming ever more enraptured and blessed."

Thomas Mann describes the effects of Wagner's music as: "delicious, sensual-pernicious, sensual-consuming, heavily intoxicating, hypnotically caressing."

Bryan Magee, in his excellent short book, Aspects of Wagner, has a chapter devoted to why Wagner has such a devoted following (and, equally, why some are repelled by the music). He sums up his thesis this way:

My central contention, then, is that Wagner's music expresses, as does no other art, repressed and highly charged contents of the psyche, and that this is the reason for its uniquely disturbing effect. To make a Freudian pun, it gets past the Censor. Some people are made to feel by it that they are in touch with the depths of their own personalities for the first time. The feeling of a wholeness yet unboundedness—hence, I suppose, its frequent comparison with mystical or religious experience. 

Others think listening to his music is like a drug experience. Susan Sontag in her essay "Wagner's Fluids" writes: “It was observed from the beginning that listening to Wagner had an effect similar to consuming psychotropic drug: opium, said Baudelaire; alcohol [ed note: and hashish] said Nietzsche.”

David Bullard, a former columnist for the Sunday Times of South Africa, put it this way: “the incredible power of [his] music to replicate some of the more pleasant effects of drugs or alcohol, but none of the side effects, is only really appreciated by those who have experienced it...Rather as some might pop a mood-enhancing pill, I am now able to select a piece [of Wagner's music] knowing it will have the desired effect, which is probably why I appear to be on a permanent high to many people.” [From his column, "Out to Lunch,"May 18, 2003.]

And, according to one well-known acidhead, Christian Rätsch, “Listening to the Der Ring des Niebelungen is the closest thing to being on acid when you are not on acid, but Richard Wagner is the greatest on acid.” 

Magee also notes that it is therapeutic to some:

This music does for some people what psychoanalysis claims to do for others; it releases radioactive material from the depths of the personality and confronts them with it and makes them feel it and live it through. It also relates all this inner feeling harmoniously to an outer reality. It can thus help people be at one with both their inner selves and the external world: so in a sense it the most whole-making, the most therapeutic art. 

So just what is it about Wagner's music?

Normally, operas were written to highlight the singers via their arias and other set-pieces like duets, trios, etc. In between these pieces, in earlier days, a harpsichord accompanied what is called recitative (which is sung, but patterned after every day speech). The set-pieces had the emotion and the beautiful singing; the recitative carried the plot.  By Wagner's day, orchestras had generally replaced the harpsichord, and there was more emphasis on the dramatic content throughout, but the focus on show-stopping "numbers" was still at the heart of opera. Wagner upended this relationship as he felt that the music must be in service to the drama and not that the drama existed for these numbers. To underscore that he was doing something very different, he termed his work "music drama." (Sorry, Richard, but I will refer to them interchangeably as operas or music dramas.)

Of his ten operas that are in the repertoire,  Wagner set all but one in a mythical context. Bryan Magee summarizes what he was attempting to do with his music drama:

It would be about the insides of the characters. It would be concerned with their emotions, not their motives. It would explore and articulate the ultimate reality of experience, what goes on in heart and soul... In this kind of drama the externals of plot and social relationships would be reduced to a minimum... Myth was ideal for this, because it dealt with archetypical situations and because its universal validity, regardless of time and place, meant that the dramatist could almost dispense with the social and political context and present, as it were 'pure', the inner drama. 

To achieve this, instead of music frequently interrupted by time-stopping arias or other set-pieces like duets, trios, and chorus numbers, Wagner generally wrote continuous, ever-changing and developing music with the aim to express the deep emotions of the characters. The voice served as the characters' conscious thoughts; the orchestra provided the deeper emotional underpinnings, the unconscious or the repressed. 

The music has no conventional structure, which made it quite revolutionary in its time. One of the leading critics of the day, Eduard Hanslick, said, “Wagner's most recent reform does not represent an enrichment...it is, on the contrary, a distortion, a perversion... One could say of this tone poetry: there is music in it, but it is not music.” [Quoted from the Wagner Companion, at 199.] To Hector Berlioz, it was “raucous noise, the abolition of melody, arias, duets, simple harmony, singable roles and so forth.”

There was a huge debate during his time, and it remains to this day, about Wagner's musical structure. Now, I don't give a damn about this debate:  If it is bad structure but I love it, then structure be damned. If there truly is a marvelous structure that just hasn't been appreciated by some musicologists, that's fine too. These sorts of academic debates seem very silly to me.

Anyway, Wagner defenders have landed principally on one of the key aspects of his “endless music,” the leitmotif, to explain the structure. This is, in essence, a short phrase of music associated with something. It could be a person, a thing, a concept or a feeling. Audiences from my generation likely know it at its most simple form from Peter and the Wolf, where each animal has a tune on an instrument. But people now know of leitmotifs in the Wagnerian mode principally from movie music, such as the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings soundtracks.

Wagner himself didn't like the term and called them “motifs of memory,” which works well. One of leading expert of Wagner's system, Derek Cooke, called them “melodic moments of feeling,” which also works.  Cooke put together this analysis (originally for the BBC) with musical examples on the principal motifs and their development. It is  both easy to listen to and yet extraordinarily complex if you are interested in Wagner's system. And here is a fun video from the '90s with Hugh Downs as the host that is a simple primer on Wagner's use of leitmotifs.  If you want to explore the motifs of The Ring, this is a good site. While they existed before Wagner, he certainly used them in a unprecedented, and much more thoroughgoing, way than anyone before him.

Generally, I pay no conscious attention to leitmotifs when I listen to his music (or, for that matter, when I watch Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings). I prefer to let the music wash over me and merely feel, and that works just fine. Wagner's intent, in fact, was that the music work on a non-conscious level, and indeed it does. While I now “know” several of his leitmotifs, they were just absorbed via listening in a emotional, not intellectual, way.  In a 1903 essay by Camille Saint-Saens on Wagner's music, “The Composer as Psychologist,” he describes Wagner's system like this:

Music takes up where speech leaves off, it utters the ineffable, makes us discover in ourselves depths we had not suspected, conveys impressions and states of beings that no words can render. With his ingenious system of leitmotivs (ugly word!), Wagner has extended still farther the reach of musical expressiveness by making clear the secret thoughts of his characters beneath and beyond the words they speak. Take a very simple example, chosen from among a thousand: Tristan asks, “Where are we?” Isolde replies, “Near the goal,” but the music is that which previously accompanied the words, “head destined for death,” which she whispered while gazing at Tristan. The listener understand at once what “goal” she has in mind.

If you read any primer on Wagner's music, you will note that people like Cooke have named his leitmotifs, principally so they can analyze and comment upon them.  Wagner didn't like the leitmotif labeling and refused to do it—his wife Cosima quotes him as saying it was “nonsense” (on 8/1/81).  Indeed, labeling does cause a problem. It tends to reify the music in a very unhelpful way. If you are actually trying to recognize them, or even more so trying to figure out why the one called, for example, "sword of manhood" is being played at a particular moment, that process removes your attention from feeling the music.  Since Wagner considered that the essence of drama was “knowing through feeling,” anything that detracted from that was a negative to him. 

It is very true that there is a Pavlovian dog quality to listening to Wagner's music repetitively, which is why people keep coming back for their treat. Listening to the “motifs of memory” that now have deep resonance to both the story and to my life is a short-cut to activating those intense emotions. Talk about mood music! If I want to feel euphoric or have a good cry or feel deep compassion, I know just which pieces would give me those rewards.

Just because a composer writes leitmotifs doesn't mean, of course, that they work as intended. But Wagner was extraordinarily good at writing music that created the emotions that he wanted his audience to feel.  As noted in the Saint-Saens example above, when that incident happens, the music—whether you remember it consciously or not—does tell you Isolde wants death. The motif itself is dark and ominous. You know immediately the "goal," not through intellect, but through emotional reaction to the music. Whether you consciously recognize it or not, the feeling will be there. The listener might feel more resonance if it—the earlier use of the motif—has already lodged in memory, whether conscious or not. Certainly, if a piece of music is particularly emotional to you and it is later woven into the score, that feeling does reemerge, and often very strongly. The emotional reaction to Wagner's music tends to increase over time as repeated listening reveal ever greater depths of feelings as you relive the musical memories and make seemingly endless connections, both within the story and, reaching out of the story, to your own life.

To continue the Pavlov analogy, here (at 4:48-5:30ish) is one of my favorite musical treats, which always affects me whenever the motif shows up through the rest of the Ring Cycle. It is the initial leitmotif of the music associated with the love of Sieglende (our dog Ziggy's namesake) and Siegmund, from the first act of Die Walküre. 

I have more to say about how Wagner achieves his musical effect, but right now I have to get back to building my roof. So let me just give a brief preview of the next post:

What is extraordinary to me about Wagner's music is that he really takes you inside a person's head emotionally for an extended length of time. I will write about how he achieves this, with an example from his opera Tristan and Islolde.

And, finally, just a note for those who have never listened to Wagner. It's an extraordinary gift he has, but it does require putting in the time to really listen to his music with attention and, to really get much out of it, listening several times to the same opera. For many people, this isn't what they want from music. They might want beautiful music to relax to or fun music to sing along with or rhythmic music to dance to, and on and on.  Wagner's operas are not a casual listening experience. (I have tried to put the operas on in the background but I find myself yelling to the CD:  "Would you just shut the hell up, Brunhilde!" Or the like...)  However, he did write beautiful orchestral music, and it is quite possible to listen much more casually to his music. For those people who are interested in hearing Wagner but really don't want the opera experience (at least yet), try an excerpt album, like this one.  For actually getting a feel for the full opera to see if it might be to your taste, there is a series by the Dutch conductor Edo de Waart, who essentially creates orchestra “suites” from four of Wagner's operas: The Ring, Parsifal, Meistersinger and, my favorite of the four "suites," Tristan and Isolde. (You must ignore the cover art on the CDs!) These are ways you can put on some Wagner in the background and get a sense of the music without commiting to a four or five hour opera.