Wagner on the Wide Screen: Arnold Whittall evaluates an investigation into the leitmotif in music drama and film

Review of Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

November 2015, Volume 9, Number 3, 94–6.

It’s a time-honoured scholarly principle that a technical term, like a generic label, gains weight and significance if it can be shown to have led a long, rich and well-varied life. Matthew Bribitzer-Stull’s point is that however you think of the leitmotif, you cannot sensibly define it as something ephemeral, or confine its manifestations to a few familiar stage works by Richard Wagner. Bribitzer-Stull’s preference, and the principal theme driving his narrative, is that if it makes sense to move from a base of multiplicity, detailing all those ‘various forms of musical meaning’ that Wagner’s motifs represent, it makes even more sense to think of ‘one factor that binds them all together’ in what he terms ‘the phenomenon of musical association’ – something that can reach out beyond relatively brief thematic statements into structures demonstrating ‘associative tonality’.