| The Leitmotifs of Wagner's Ring |
Just click on any of the Scene tags to display the motifs which occur within that Scene . . .
Donington (Wagner's 'Ring' and its Symbols, Faber, 1963) gives 91 motifs, ordered by their groupings and relationships. Mann (in his translation of the texts, for the Friends of Covent Garden, 1964) gives 73, numbered roughly in order of first appearance. About 60 of the motifs are recognised by both authors. In this page, Donington's numbers are prefixed with a d and Mann's numbers are prefixed with a m, and the d-number is used in cases where both authors have numbered the same motif. The descriptions of the motifs are loosely based on those in Donington's Appendix of Music Examples.
Editor's comment: While working on this page, I was struck by the dominance of the Leitmotifs in the musical fabric of the Ring:
- Most of the orchestral fabric is made up of Leitmotifs; there are of course free passages as well, but only to the extent that a Bach fugue also contains free voices.
- All the motifs are related; they derive from a common ancestor d1, they group into families, and have brothers, cousins, parents, and partners.
- Though the motifs are short and inter-related, Wagner keeps them as distinct from each other as possible.
- The motifs do not get woven into each other in a contrapuntal texture, and each motif gets its own consistent, characteristic instrumentation; they are not put through a durchgebrochene Arbeit process.
- Each motif generally remains in the same key, or narrow range of keys; they are not put through a symphonic-style Durchführung process.
- This network-of-motifs clearly differs from the subject and counter-subject of a fugue, or from the various themes of a symphony, by being always inter-related, and by not being time-prescriptive. They also differ from a single-theme structure (e.g. Liszt's h-moll sonata) by being melodically distinct.
- This network-of-motifs is structural without being time-prescriptive; it leaves the details of which motif occurs when to the needs of the drama.
- This network-of-motifs structure scales better up to the 16-hour level than any other known musical structure would have done.
Technical credits: This page needs JavaScript to be enabled in your browser. The music was typeset by Peter Billam using muscript and then converted to .jpg using gs, and to .wav by timidity and normalize-audio, and thence to .mp3 by lame, the whole process being organised by make. There is a tarball of the muscript source files.
See Also: www.trell.org/wagner/motifs.html
Peter Billam, www.pjb.com.au