Swann’s Way: Richard Laing is impressed though very nearly defeated by a mammoth study of leitmotifs in the ‘Ring’

Review of Jeffrey Swann, The Music of the ‘Ring’: A Comprehensive Study of the Leitmotives and How They are Used in ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (The Wagner Society of Washington DC, 2025).

July 2026, Volume 20, Number 2, 94–6.

Proust famously found that the taste of a madeleine unlocked a maze of memories. A plethora of connections is found, too, in the Ring, with simple musical ideas developed again and again to open almost unimaginably large musical and dramatic vistas for an attentive audience. Jeffrey Swann has spent decades analysing Wagner’s music, literally cutting up dozens of vocal scores in the process and reassembling them into a massive motivic mosaic for this weighty book.