Christian Thorau: Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Studien zu Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners

Abstract

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?