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

Abstract

PROGRAM MUSIC Understanding Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music. By Matthew Bribitzer-Stull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xxiv, 331 p. ISBN 9781107098398 (hardcover), $120; ISBN 9781316161678 (e-book), Cambridge Books Online.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Leitmotif is one of few terms in music's technical vocabulary to have left confines of its discipline and entered common parlance. Its ubiquity has come with trade-off, however, as original intentions and intendant nuances behind term attached to Richard Wagner since 1870s have become at best obscured, at worst unintentionally misused and intentionally abused. Recognizing that such phenomenon is an inherent property of any popular term, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull does not seek to return leitmotif to circumscribed environment of Wagnerian music drama. Rather, in Understanding Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music, he explodes by showing how leitmotif-and, more accurately, leitmotivic procedures-has adapted to needs of established and new media over last one hundred fifty years. In doing so, he hopes to demonstrate that the idea of which Bribitzer-Stull believes has been debilitated by wave after wave of critical onslaught over 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 importance of accumulative association (p. 4; emphasis in original), which allows viewer not only to recall earlier themes, but also to track how those themes change according to various semantic, emotional, and dramatic cues. is, in fact, defining feature of leitmotif, which BribitzerStull also supplements with developmental (p. 14ff.) and structural (p. 18ff.) components. Given that these features are not unique to leitmotif, author concludes chapter by examining problematic ways in which scholars, especially beginning with Hans von Wolzogen in 1877, have applied them to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.Following taxonomy laid out in 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 methodology established earlier, in that attempts to arrive at leitmotivically-appropriate definition of by exclusion. A theme is not, according to Bribitzer-Stull, a unit of musical form (p. 41) like phrase, nor need have 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 original).Chapter 3 sheds light on thematic identity by advancing model in which the listener, hearing multiple repetitions and variations of theme, forms an abstract prototype of it (p. 65). Bribitzer-Stull argues for prototype model, since works both at contingent and conceptual levels, and with this foundation he begins to move leitmotif out of 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 leitmotif's level of associativity, which Bribitzer-Stull defines as the forging of connection between two separate ideas such that one may evoke or recall other (p. 100). Leitmotivic associativity is at its strongest when memory, emotion, and meaning align, as Bribitzer-Stull demonstrates in pregnant example from Gotterdammerung (p. 95ff.) that also conveniently foreshadows book's later forays into world of film. A fascinating discussion of hermeneutics of associativity follows (pp. …