3
The leit-motive, of course, is not Wagner's invention. Other operatic composers had tentatively handled the device before him; and in his own day Schumann had seen the possibilities of such a method being applied to the song. In his Frühlingsfahrt, for example, the joyous major melody that accompanies the bright youths on their first setting out in life changes to the clouded minor as the poet tells of the ruin that came upon one of them; and everyone knows the sadly expressive effect of the winding up of the Woman's Life and Love cycle with a reminiscence of the melody of the opening song. The device of reminiscence in poetic or dramatic music is indeed so obviously a natural one that we can only wonder that the pre-Wagnerian composers did not make more use of it. But Wagner did more than employ it as a sort of index or label; he turned it into the seminal principle of musical form for perhaps three-fourths of the music of our time. He made it not merely a dramatic but a symphonic-dramatic instrument. He had experimented with the device from his youth, but until now without perceiving its symphonic possibilities. We have seen him carrying forward a significant theme from one scene to another in Das Liebesverbot. In Rienzi there is very little real use of the leit-motive. He will adopt a characteristic orchestral figure for a person or a situation at the commencement of a scene or "number," and play with it all through that particular set piece; but it is very rarely that he will remind us of a previous situation by importing the theme that symbolises it into a later situation. He does this, for example, with the "Oath" motive, which first accompanies Rienzi's story of his own vow to avenge his murdered brother (vocal score, pp. 77, 78), and is afterwards employed to accompany Colonna's threat of vengeance if Rienzi dooms him and his fellow conspirators to death (p. 266), Rienzi's rejection of Adriano's plea for mercy (p. 337), and finally Adriano's own resolve to be avenged upon Rienzi (p. 416). In the Flying Dutchman the tissue is largely unified by typical themes, which, however, are as a rule merely repeated without substantial modification, though now and then a motive is melodically transformed to suggest a psychological variation, as when the "Redemption" theme from Senta's ballad—
No. 23.
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afterwards becomes the motive of "Love unto death"—
No. 24.
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In Tannhäuser there is a good deal of recurrent material—the Bacchanale and the Pilgrims' Chorus, for instance—but the leit-motive can hardly be said to be used at all in the later sense. Lohengrin is strewn with leit-motives that are marvels of characterisation; but here too they recur in their original form time after time. For the most part they merely label the character: they do not change as he changes, nor do they spread themselves over the score with the persistence of the motives of the later works.