ANALYSIS: John Williams and Howard Shore: The Perfect Wagnerites

[Chen G. 3,943]

In the history of music, there had been three works that exploited the concept of the Leitmotive or "Leading Musical Motives." These being Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen, John Williams' Star Wars series and Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings series.

 

Associative themes have been used before, e.g. Lemoye's Electre (1782), Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), Lortzing's Undine (1845) and Wagner's own Lohengrin (1846), but they're generally distinguished from the "mature" leitmotif of the Ring. And while leitmotives had been used since, as in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Strauss' Salome (1905) and film scores by Korngold and indeed by Williams himself (Hook, the Indiana Jones films) its really in these three works that a composer had a chance to work with the same thematic material over multiple entries: four music-dramas and a concert piece (the Siegfried Idyll) in the Wagner case, amounting to some 16 hours of music; nine film scores and multiple concert works in the Williams' case, amounting to some 20 hours of music; and six film score and multiple concert works in the Shore case, amounting to some 21 hours of music.

 

Here I want to look at the techniques these composers took from Wagner. There are many aspects to this influence, such as the use of descriptive music (mostly in terms of "mickey mousing" the action), certain harmonic devices, Wagner's codification of the late-romantic style of orchestration followed by Williams. But this will be an examination from a structural, thematic standpoint. We'll examine:

1. Using Leitmotives, including:
2. The use of themes in musical setpieces.
3. Contrasting two theme-groups.
4. Developing music across multiple theme-groups.
5. Developing and resolving internal conflict within a theme-group.

 

To set this all in context, we will explore Wagner's own musical inspriations - both those stated by him (Beethoven, Weber) and those apparent from historical and musicological examination (Berlioz, Haydn) - and the way these trickled down to Shore and Williams. By his own admission, Williams was not taken with the Wagner performances he heard: his immediate model was one of the great Wagnerians who went into film composition, Erich Korngold who was more influenced by Wagner's procedures in Lohengrin and Tristan. Shore, on the other hand, is an avid opera-goer situation in New York, whose Metropolitan opera is famed for its Wagner productions.

 

A word on theme lists

Quote

I play excerpts from Götterdämmerung, arranged for piano duet, with Loldi. R[ichard] says he is pleased with the work. Unfortunately, in this edition, there are a lot of markings such as ‘wanderlust motive,’ ‘disaster motive,’ etc. R. says, ‘And perhaps people will think all this nonsense is done at my request!’ - Cosima's diary, 1 August 1881.

 

Wagner called his themes "main motives", "melodic moments", "fundemental themes" and "conduits to feelings." The term leitmotif was coined in his lifetime by W.H. Ambros, and applied to his music by Gottlieb Federlein and (without actually using the term, which he later disowned), Hans von Wolzogen. A non-musician, Wolzogen invoked the disapproval of Wagner for his "thematic guide", and had admitted himself that naming the themes is a "bad habit", but his "guide" was the basis for future studies of the leitmotives, most influentially by Derryck Cooke, who first identified Wagner's theme-groups (See below) and, for Shore, by Doug Adams.

 

Although much refined by these scholars and by Frank Lehman (for Williams), this practice still has a number of disadvantages. How far apart must the same music appear to be considered a recurring theme? If its a long tune, do we count each phrase as a separate motive? If we're presented with new variants of the same theme, do we count them separately? "At one extreme," concludes musicologist Robert Donington, "the motives dwindle into mere fragments of figuration; at the other extreme, they pass into passages of development or even tunes."

 

The one extreme is typified by Stefan Mikisch's analysis of the Ring, which lists 261 leitmotives. It makes the score seem very intricate, and like it has a tune for every single tick of the story - down to the bear that Siegfried unleashes on Mime - but it also makes the score seem ever more a patchwork. At the other extreme, Barry Millington only lists 67 leitmotives in the cycle, which reduces the dramatic specificity of the motives.  Even more "definitive" lists, like Adams' sterling work for The Lord of the Rings or Derryck Everert for the Ring, have their shortcomings. "When you start talking about the music of the Ring", laments Jeffrey Swann, "we start talking this arcane language [...that] supplanted a musicological language, with a kind of artificial motive-name language."

 

What's more, the names kind of limit the flexibility of the motives: the themes Adams dubs "Erebor" and "Thorin" are used much more flexibly than those names would imply: its "Thorin" that plays over most the establishing montage of Erebor, and "Erebor" that plays over much of Thorin's heroics during the Warg chase and even at Thorin's death. In Williams, too, the theme connected to Old Ben is used not just as a tag when he appears, but also to suggest Luke's call for adventure and, at the end of the film, the renewel of Ben's values. Similarly, a variation of the theme usually called "Rhine" is used when Wotan describes how he fashioned his spear from Ygdrassil, because they're both symbols of nature. What's more, the association of the themes can change over time: "Erebor" ultimately comes to encompass the Iron Hill Dwarves. Likewise, the theme Williams used initially for the Rebel alliance, migrated in the sequel trilogy to the Falcon, and one of the themes Wagner initially used for Hunding migrated in Siegfried and Gotterdamerung to a more abstract association with "rules."

 

Use of recurring themes

Quote

These Melodic Moments [...] will necessarily have blossomed only from the weightiest motives of the drama, and the weightiest of them, in turn, will correspond in number to those motives which the poet has taken as the concentrated, the strengthened root-motives of a strengthened and concentrated Action, and has planted as the pillars of his dramatic edifice

- Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, 1852

 

From Reminiscence themes to Leitmotives

The composer who most paved the way to the use of recurring themes in Wagner is Carl Maria von Weber, whose works Wagner knew and loved. Taking note from Haydn - he studied with his brother, Michael - Weber sought to incoporate ostensibly symphonic techniques into his works, taking the recurring themes of his operas and presenting them in a sonata form during the overture. After Lohengrin, this technique was much expanded by Wagner into a "web" of themes that comprised the bulk of the composition. This was ostensibly an extension of the practices of Weber - the structure of the entire Wolf-glen scene is determined by the diminished seventh chords of the villians scheming therein - but also symphonic works by Haydn and Beethoven, which Wagner conducted between 1846-49. Says Thomas Grey: "The closest point of identification with Beethoven in Wagner's own mind, however, was  'melody' - again on an abstract level, encompassing principles of motivic organisation and development. [...] The late quartets of Beethoven inspired the formulation of this ideal."

 

Around this time he concieved of and started sketching The Ring - first as one "heroic opera", then as two - and wrote theoretical essays where he draws on the works of Beethoven to describe this use of "Main themes" or "Conduits of Feeling." Originally, he wanted the themes to premiere in the vocal line (like the "Forbidden question" in Lohengrin, except more open-ended due to Wagner turning from end-rhyme to alliterative verse) so that, as they're later recalled by the orchestra, would recall the verse they were originally sung to. His earliest musical sketches for the second of the two operas follow this ideals, having nicknames like "Woodbird" and "Fafner." Wagner's conducting style, which attenuted itself to the character of each symphonic subject, highlighted many of the motives as they made their entrance.

 

The Uses of the Leitmotif

Wagner didn't end up adhering to these prescriptions (nor to his premise of the equal status of music and drama, already discarded in the "protracted pantomimes in Die Walkure, Act I", says Stewart Spencer), but his writings do permit the orchestra to "anticipate" the appearance of the motif in the vocal line, and in the finished Ring this took the form of "embryonic" versions of the motifs, heard before we could infer what they "mean" and/or before we could single them out from the ongoing musical texture: the main love motif of the Ring is first heard very subtly when the third Rhinedaughter leads Alberich on.

 

This happens in Williams - the love music of Anakin and Pamde is first hinted at as early as the wideshot of Anakin and Obi Wan going up the elevator to her apartment. Shore is especially fond of this device: one of the playful Hobbit motives of The Two Towers is hinted at in the fireworks music of Fellowship of the Ring and, in The Hobbit, the scalar figure that welcomes each Dwarf to Bag-End is a hint - hours and hours in advance - of the music going into the 21st hall of Dwarrowdelf.

 

Wagner uses the motives quite literally in Das Rheingold, but beginning in Die Walkure, starts using them more freely, more to create dramatic parallels than just reminiscence: The motive to which Alberich renounced love at the end of scene 1 of Rheingold suddenly repeats at the end of act one of Walkure to contrast Alberich's action with Siegmund's. Williams hints at Shmi's music in Episode III to parallel her with Palpatine's perverse paternal relationship to Anakin, and Shore gives the Ringwraith music to Saruman (among others) to draw a parallel between the two.

 

Other creative uses of the themes is as a greek chorus that tells us something the characters aren't privy to: in Weber's Euryanthe, the music hints at Eglantine's duplicitous goals while she feigns friendship to Euryanthe. In Wagner, the music of Alberich's curse plays while characters with no knowledge of the curse - namely, Siegfried - become ensnared in it. In Williams, the portentous uses the Imperial March and the Emperor's music in the prequel trilogy fit the bill, while in Shore the hints to Gollum in Bilbo's music serve such a purpose.

 

Leitmotives can even be used to comedy: Listen to how Shore's score mischeviously hints at Gandalf when Bilbo asks who sent the Dwarves to his house. In Williams and Wagner this partially takes the form of quoting between works: Wagner pokes fun at his Tristan music in Meistersingers, while Williams references Yoda's music in ET. Shore also misdirects: when Sam is lurking in the bushes outside Bag-End, Shore uses one of the Mordor ostinati to hint at a Ringwraith.

 

We've seen how the leitmotif changes its association over time. But as its musical character changes, it also affects our associations: Hearing Luke Skywalker's music taking to the minor mode, makes us appreciate another side of Luke. More importantly, as we hear a theme attached to another theme, we hear it differently: to hear Mordor music attached to Shire music is to hear Sauron's shadow cast a pall on the Shire. But this conjuction of themes also serves to draw out musical connecitons: the similarity of the Volsung music to Wotan's would be harder to percieve, had Wagner not placed a direct allusion to Wotan partway through the proceedings, and likewise had Williams not planted an explicit reference to the Imperial March into Anakin's music over the end-credits of The Phantom Menace, it'd be harder to appreciate. A striking passage in Shore connects Thorin's death with Kili's in such a way that we hear the connection between Thorin's music, Kili and Tauriel's love music and the "tragic" motif sandwiched between the two.

 

Wagner worked on the premise that the associations are culminative: by the time the Valhalla music recurs at the end of the Ring, it conjures up a mixutre of the different feelings we had from each time we heard it in the cycle. Eventually, the associations become so strong that the sequence of motifs or absence of a motif can become telling in their own right. In The Lord of the Rings, Howard Shore conditions us to hear the theme associated with the Shire and the theme associated with the Fellowship one after the other in that order. Only in the denoument of The Return of the King do we hear them, several times, in the opposite direction.

 

It was important to Wagner, and subsequently to Wiliams and Shore, to keep on building new themes off of the same building blocks as the series progressed. The thematic material of Die Walkure, for example, had by and large not been heard in Das Rheingold, although its cut from the same cloth. In act III of Siegfried, entirely new material - that used in the Siegfried Idyll - enters. Likewise, The Desolation of Smaug is largely made of material not heard or briefly glimpsed in An Unexpected Journey, even dispensing with the main theme (taken from the Dwarven preghiera) of the previous film. There are even more extreme cases in Williams, where in entries like The Lost World and especially The Prisoner of Azkaban, he really dispenses with the thematic material and indeed the basic soundscape of the previous entries.

 

Beyond The Ring

After the second act of Siegfried, Wagner took a hiatus from the Ring to work on Tristan und Isolde, Le Tannhauser, Die Meistersingers von Nurnberg and perliminary work on Parsifal. These works largely abandon the leitmotif technique - most of the themes in Tristan are undifferentiated love themes. This is a style Williams takes up in his Harry Potter scores, where most of the themes are just different "magic" themes. Some of the groups of motives in Shore's score also function like this: namely, the Hobbit themes, which contain very few themes associated specifically with any one Hobbit, or with any locale in - or prop from - the Shire. There's a large group of themes associated with Sauron's influence on Middle Earth, many of which are best described as undifferentiated "tragic" themes.

 

When Wagner returned to the Ring, he started using his themes more flexibly than ever before. Barry Millington notes that here the motifs are more often "expansive melodic ideas. Even when motifs of the former type recur, they are combined with a new freedom, and serve less of a referential function than before." In a few cases, they're even used purely for their musical affect: When Waltraute tells Brunnhilde that Wotan's Spear is broken, we hear the motive originally associated with the magic helmet. Much the same happens in Williams - he admits to using Leia's theme for Ben's death purely for its affect - and even Shore used the music of Aragorn's coronation in the climax of An Unexpected Journey.

 

Themes in musical setpieces

Quote

 this developed quite naturally through a consistent, characteristic web of main themes, which spread not over one scene (as was previously the case in individual operatic forms), but over the entire drama, and in the most intimate relationship to the poetic intention.

 

- Richard Wagner, A Communication to My Friends, 1851

 

Wagner pursued the leitmotif technique to supplant the division into numbers. Streamlining opera from standalone numbers into continuous scenes was a process began in France under Gluck and developed dramatically under Weber with Euryanthe, and which Wagner follows up beginnin with Der Fliegende Hollander. Nevertheless, vestiges of standalone setpieces persist through the early parts of The Ring, and then return with a vengenance in Meistersingers and those parts of the Ring that were written after it.

 

However, by turning one of his leitmotives or their derivations into the "tune" of such a setpiece, Wagner realised he could bind it to the larger structure. So, Fricka has a straightforward aria in Die Walkure, and while we don't hear its tune again, its clearly an outgrowth of the main love theme of the cycle. Williams scores the TIE Fighter attack with an ostinato closely related to the Rebels' music. Shore's music for the Stone Giants, while seemingly a standalone "episode", actually sets-up the music of nature to come later in the film.

 

There's also the question of using the themes in a purely orchestral setting: in his major essays, Wagner (having just abandoned plans for symphonies) declared that the symphonic medium had reached its zenith under Beethoven, and that the music of the future lies in the operatic field. Of course, Wagner's operas do feature expansive preludes and musical interludes, which he often uses to summarise the music of a previous act, a little like how Williams and Shore will do in their end-credits suites. Wagner's assertion about "absolute music" was to be proven wrong by other composers - notably Brahms - and in his later years had considered writing major instrumental works, but left us none except the Siegfried Idyll, based on themes from the third act of Siegfried.

 

Williams and Shore follow suit with several pieces for the concert stage: "Leia's theme" in the Williams' case and "The Dwarf Lords", "Erebor", "A Very Respectable Hobbit" and "Ironfoot" for Shore. Some of these pieces were written for entries in other media: "The Rings of Power" for the eponymous show in the Shore case, and "Adventures of Han", "Galaxy's Edge" and "Kenobi" for the film Solo, the Galaxy's Edge amusement park and for the Kenobi miniseries respectivelly. In fact, Shore's "cycle" begins with absolute music - The Rings of Power titles - and ends with absolute music, in the guise of Bilbo's Song.

 

Beyond that, all three composers - in spite of the image of the singular genius - collaborated with others. In Die Walkure, Wagner quotes Liszt's Faust symphony, and in Tannhauser and Parsifal quotes the "Dresden Amen." For the latter work, he had Angel Humperdinck compose a few extra measures of bells for the transformation scene to accomodate the stage effect. Likewise, some of the diegetic compositions in Williams are by other composers (including his son Joseph) and likewise in the Shore case there are diegetic pieces of end songs by Plan 9 and David Long (who also composed for Rings of Power and for the Hobbiton set), Stephen Gallagher (now taking an entire spinoff score for The War of the Rohirrim) and others. But, as with Wagner, these contributions were skillfully integrated into the whole.

 

Contrasting two theme groups

Quote

"[the musical language] my friends regard as so new and significant, owes its construction above all to the extreme sensitivity which guides me in the direction of mediating and providing an intimate bond between all the different moments of transition that separate the extremes of mood." - Letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, 29 October 1859

 

In a Beethoven symphonic movement, there are two contrasting theme-groups and, following suit, in Weber's operas there's, broadly speaking, the music of the protagonists as against the music of the antagonists, and this process is followed up by Wagner in his mature works. Wagner suggests that his mature works sprang from hearing Beethoven's Ninth at the Paris Conservatory in December 1839, but the rehearsal in question was probably circa February 1840. In December he instead heard Berlioz' Romeo et Juliette, which (itself owing much to Beethoven) is probably the immediate model for this technique in Wagner. Compare the juxtaposition of the sensuous music of Venus with the innocent piping of the shephard in Wagner's Tannhauser, with the juxtaposition of Harold's theme with the chorale in Berlioz' Harold en Italie.

 

This juxtapositon model is at the core of Williams' Star Wars scores: The music of the good guys is contrasted with the music of the bad guys. The theme associated with the Force is always at its most stirring when it pierces through the music of the villains, like when Vader turns on the Emperor. On both sides, there's music that's more ritualistic (Sith and Jedi music) and music that's more belicose (The Republic, Rebels and Resistance on one side; and the Trade Federation, Separatists, Empire and First Order on the other) but the main opposition is a binary. In Williams' Harry Potter scores, the juxtaposition is closer to the Lohengrin model, insofar as there's a main musical world (the magic world) and a secondary musical world (Voldemort's music) trying to usurp it from below.

 

In both cases - and in Shore's scores, these worlds are associated with certain timbres and keys. Again, the model is Weber: The good hunters in Der Freischutz are represented by noble horns and strings, while the villains Kaspar and Samiel are represented by low clarinet and tremolo strings over timpani. The good guys are in C major, and the bad guys are in C minor. In Wagner's Lohengrin, Elsa and Lohengrin are associated with woodwinds and high strings in A major, the King with brass in C major and Ortrud and Telramund with F# minor. The use of keys and timbres needn't overlap perfectly with the familly groups: while Lohengrin is in A major, Elsa tends to be in A♭, creating inner conflict of sorts within the motivic group. In Williams, the Empire is associated with low brass and the "grinding" of high woodwinds against low keyboard sounds, while the good guys get trumpets and horns. Shore, like Wagner, expands on this technique by using instruments outside the normal orchestral arsenal. So the Hobbits are associated with strings, clarinet and tin whistle in D major, the Elves with female choir, harp and sarangi in A major, Mordor with muted trumpets and rhaita in D minor, Rohan with brass and hardinfelle in A Dorian, etc...

 

While Bear McCreary's score to The Rings of Power seems to mimic these procedures, its theme groups are really based on shared melodic intervals rather than on vastly different types of music, and since each theme group consists in the present of a pair of themes, its hard to talk of them rigorously as "groups." Having said that, while Bear's score is totally unrelated to Shore and Co. outside of contributions by Shore and Plan 9, his reprisal of Shore's themes for the show in future seasons could give Shore and Co.s music an extraordinary dimension, uniquely of these three works.

 

Development across multiple theme-groups

Quote

"This [symphonic] unity then provides the entire work with a continuous web of fundamental themes [Grundthemen] which are contrasted, supplemented, reformed, separated, and linked together again, just as in a symphonic movement." - On the Application of Music to the Drama, 1871.

 

While Wagner pinpoints his formative experience with Beethoven to the Paris Conservatory, the more immediate influence of Beethoven and Haydn come from a series of concerts he was preparing starting 1846 while working on Lohengrin: sketches for at least two abortive symphonies from this time bear witness to the influence of these works. The earliest sketches for the Ring suggest a work still along the lines of Lohengrin, contrasting diatonic harmonies for the Norns and diminished harmonies for the mention of Alberich.

 

But as the Ring expanded to four entries, Wagner realised he needed more than two or three musical "types" to build it from. So, rather than have two juxtaposed musical "poles" Wagner creates over six distinct musical worlds, and places them on a sliding scales: as his themes develop, they will tilt from one theme-group to another. A good example is the motif associated with the Ring itself, which begins as a diatonic "nature" motif, and then becomes increasingly chromatic and disonant. Other motivic families are associated with magic (mediant progressions), Law (Scalar motives), love (The "Du bist der Lenz" fragment), woe (falling minor second), joy (falling major second) and so forth.

 

This is the model we find in Shore, who has distinct musical worlds for Sauron (minor second going to-and-fro), the Fellowship (major second going from and-to), Hobbits (diatonic), mankind (modal), Elves (chromatic or otherwise "complex" harmony), Dwarves (intervalic), Orcs (rhythmic), spiders (atonal) and several others. Like Wagner, Shore develops his themes across these groups: as Bilbo grows closer to the Dwarves, his music will become more "Dwarven." As Gondor teeters towards war with Mordor, its music will become "poisoned" by Mordor's harmonies. As Lothlorien fades away, its music will lose its exotic Elven sheen and become closer to the music of mankind.

 

So consummate is the melding together of the musical worlds, that the very act of distinguishing them had come under criticism from the likes of Eero Tarasti: "it ultimately turns out to be an impossible project. For by the time the 146th motif is sounding, one realizes that Cooke’s presentation is unfortunately a rather confused jumble of motifs which have been detached from their contexts, and which could have been selected in other ways as well. No binding logic or system can be found in his discourse on the leitmotifs the practice of theme families." I would argue that the right way to look at the leitmotives is not as a quilt of individual melodies, but from the family group level and down, almost as though they were characters in the scenario: the constituent melodies of each family and their developments and associated keys and timbres are facets of each such character.

 

While Williams doesn't compose in this mould, there is a degree of musical development across the two poles of the music in his work, mostly through the music of Anakin: his music as a boy is clearly on the side of the good guys, and takes on a heroic guise in the space battle against the Droid ship. During the end-credits, it turns before our eyes into the Imperial March, and then in Return of the Jedi, shorn of its ominous harmony, is redeemed.

 

Resolving conflict within a theme-group

Quote

"If we write symphonies, Franz, then let us stop contrasting one theme with another, a method Beeth[oven] has exhausted. We should just spin a melodic line until it can be spun no father." - letter to Liszt, 17 December 1882.

 

In a Haydn symphonic movement, the conflict between tonic and dominant was often set-up within one theme-group, and resolved at the end of the recapitulation. Beethoven expanded this practice by writing extended codas to "wrap" themes up in: see how the theme of the first movement of the Waldstein sonata keeps on modulating keys, before the very end of the movement where its reinforced in C major. Weber followed these procedures in his operas: The chromatic string divisi associated with Emma's ghost is only resolved diatonically at the very end of Euryanthe, when Emma's ghost is laid to rest. Wagner followed this practice, most notably in Tristan where the opening phrase leaves us in the air, waiting for a harmonic resolution that doesn't come. Throughout, Wagner teases such resolutions only to heighten the disonance, before finally resolving to B major at the last mintue or so of the opera.

 

There's some of this in Williams: within the scope of the original Star Wars, Williams refuses to cadence the theme associated with Obi Wan until the concluding celebrations, where it finally achieves a full cadence to symbolise the triumph of Ben's values. Shore uses this principle more assidiously: the emphasised minor seconds of the music of Sauron and his minions sets up tension, which is heightened in its more aggressive guises by appending it to an augmented second. Shore teases a resolution in The Two Towers while Gandalf says that the Ring remains hidden, and then finally when Barad Dur collapses we hear Sauron's music transformed to the relative major. Throughout the extended denoument we never hear this music again (notwithstanding two quick allusions to the halfstep over a major chord associated with the smoke rings), to reinforce its resolution.

Conclusions

Wagner is of course one of the most influential composers in history, but he was ultimately more influential on the other arts - literature, poetry, drama and painting - than on other musicians. The musical influence of his leitmotiv technique is superceded by his innovative harmonic language for Tristan, as well as some of the harmonic and orchestrational devices of Lohengrin. Structurally, however, most of the works influenced by the Ring failed to live-up to its depth, usually for being single-evening works: they could not hope to attain the experience of time - either in the sheer scale of the work or its rich sense of backstory and time-lapse or even in the time of composition. Only in cinema, and only in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings cycles, have composers John Williams and Howard Shore managed to attain the same kind of presentation, and create what are monuments to Wagnerian musical architecture.

Bibliography

Spoiler

Adams, Doug, The Music of The Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore's Scores, Alfred Music 2010.

 

Altonzo, Jamie, ¿Por qué la música de Harry Potter suena tan MÁGICA?, YouTube, 11 December 2018.

 

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

 

Cooke, Derryk, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's Ring, Oxford University Press: 1992.

Eereo Tarasi, Semiotics of Classical Music: How Mozart, Brahms and Wagner talk to us, De Gruyter Mouton 2012. 

 

Everett, Derrick, A list of Motives in the Ring, Monsalvat, 2023.

 

Lehman, Frank, Complete Catalogue of the Themes of Star Wars, Updated August 19, 2022.

 

Maria von Weber, Carl, Der Freischütz, conducted Leopold Ludwig, 1968.

 

Maria von Weber, Carl, Euryanthe, Leon Botstein, 2014.

 

Maria von Weber, Carl, Oberon (translated to German), conducted Ivor Bolton, 2022.

 

Millington, Barry (editor), The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music, Thames and Hudson: 2001.

 

Movérus, Anton, Monoverantus, Youtube.

 

Scruton, Roger, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, Harry N. Abrams, 2017.

 

Mikisch, Stefan, Richard Wagner – Der Ring des Nibelungen - alle 261 Leitmotive.

 

Swann, Jeffrey, Das Rheingold: The Leitmotives of the Ring, YouTube, 2011.

 

Swann, Jeffrey, Wagner: A Voyage of Self-Discovery through Beethoven, YouTube, 9 August 2022.

 

von Beethoven, Ludwig, Waldstein Sontana, played by Daniel Barenboim 2010.

 

Wagner, Richard, Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama, In: Bayreuthe Blätter, November 1879.

 

Wagner, Richard, Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde, 1851.

 

Wagner, Richard, Le Tannhauser (translated to German) conducted Colin Davies, 1978.

 

Wagner, Richard, Lohengrin, conducted Daniel Barenboim, 2010.

 

Wagner, Richard, Oper Und Drama, 1852

 

Wagner, Richard, Parsifal, conducted Kent Nagano, 2004.

 

Wagner, Richard, Der Fliegende Holländer, conducted Christian Thielmann, 2013.

 

Wagner, Richard, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, conducted Richard Farnes, 2016.

 

Wagner, Richard, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted Philippe Jordan, 2017.

 

Wagner, Richard, Die Wibelungen; Weltgeschichte aus der Sage, 1849.

 

Wagner, Richard, Götterdämmerung(Twilight of the Gods) , Act II: Siegfrieds Tod, arranged W. Breig, from Richard Wagner im Schweizer Exil, 2014.

 

Wagner, Richard, Tristan und Isolde, conducted Daniel Barenboim, 1983.

 

Reitter, Andrew J., From Alberich to Gollum: Hollywood’s Transformation of the Leitmotiv (University of Delaware: 2013)

 

Riedlbauer, Jörg, "Erinnerungsmotive" in Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen", in The Musical Quarterly (Oxford University Press: 1990) Vol. 74, No. 1, pp. 18-30.

 

[Jurassic Shark 12,030]

55 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

there had been three works that utilized the concept of the Leitmotive

 

Only three? Are you sure about that?

 

55 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

to their full extent

 

Please define.

[Chen G. 3,943]

1 hour ago, Jurassic Shark said:

Please define.

 

The whole text kinda defines it, but in thinking about leitmotivic works one's mind races to operas like Salome, Pelleas et Melisande, Wozzeck and to some films like Steiner's King Kong or Williams' Hook. But those are all single-evening works, and not necessarily all that lengthy, at that: there's only so many themes and theme-groups you can establish in such a span and only so much development you can put them through.

 

You do have other film series that have used leitmotives: Williams' own Indiana Jones, his Harry Potter scores, John Barry's work on James Bond or Akira Ifukube's work on Godzilla, but they're episodic, and so only so much of the material can be developed over the span of the work as a whole.

 

Ontop of that, many works that we speak of colloquially as leitmotivic don't necessarily comply with the particularities of that definition: be they Wagner's own later works or other operas or film scores, single-standing or serialized. Thay may be so either because the themes don't undergo development and/or because they aren't organized according to specific associations with narrative elements.

 

Really, that leaves us with these three works. Someone (though not I) could even make the bold statement that they take the Wagnerian practice further than The Ring, both due to having a larger scope (more entries AND more music) and incorporating elements of Wagner's later practices that were never incorporated into The Ring.

[Schilkeman 955]

From the same New Yorker article, "If Mr. Hanslick were alive, I think I’d be sitting on the side of Brahms in the debate." Williams certainly borrowed the concept of Leitmotif from Wagner, but that's where the comparison stops for me. His style is much more influenced by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Copeland, and Vaughan-Williams. Even his overtly romantic scores from the 70's are closer to Mahler's highly contrapuntal middle symphonies than the operas of Wagner. Shore is much closer in style to Wagner, and utilizes his Leitmotif techniques in a much more literal, and dare I say, derivative way.

[Chen G. 3,943]

1 hour ago, Schilkeman said:

Williams certainly borrowed the concept of Leitmotif from Wagner, but that's where the comparison stops for me. His style is much more influenced by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Copeland, and Vaughan-William

 

Well, there are two aspects to this: the content of the music - melody, harmony and I'd also say orchestration - and the structure of the musical storytelling. In terms of content, I'd agree Williams is much more in the camp of Tchaikovsky et al. Heck, in terms of content Shore isn't at all Wagnerian, either!

 

But structurally, Williams' works are indebted not just to the leitmotif of the Ring but just as significantly if not more, to the structure of two warring musical factions from Lohengrin and Parsifal. Its hardly surprising: Lohengrin and Parsifal were always more popular, and much more influential, than was The Ring.

 

I’m not even saying Williams was influenced by Lohengrin as such: his Wagnerian influence seems to be second-hand: either through his studies and/or through Wagnerian film composers of the previous generation; whom, again, we think of as being influenced by The Ring where they probably more influenced by Tristan and Parsifal.