Page 229 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Example 13.1 > valkyries leitmotif
As more and more Valkyries ride on stage, they greet one another with a familiar cry (Example 13.2).
Example 13.2 > valkyries’ vocal leitmotif
Ho-jo - to - ho ! Hei-a - ha !
Wagner’s associates (Figure 13.9) came to call his Valkyries motive and oth- ers like it leitmotifs. A leitmotif (signature-tune) is a brief, distinctive unit of music designed to represent a character, object, or idea; leitmotifs are strung out and repeated to suggest how the drama is unfolding. Wagner’s leitmotifs are usually not sung but rather are played by the orchestra. In this way, an element of the subconscious can be introduced into the drama: The orchestra can give a sense of what a character is thinking even when he or she is singing about some- thing else. By developing, extending, varying, contrasting, and resolving these representational leitmotifs, Wagner is able to play out the essence of the drama almost without recourse to his singers. In Die Walküre, Wagner employs more than thirty leitmotifs and, as one careful critic has noted, they sound 405 times!
Wagner knew that he was onto a good thing with “Ride of the Valkyries” and thus created a purely instrumental version (see Listening Cue)—a surefire crowd pleaser and money maker—that could be per- formed in concert or even outdoors. In this form, Wagner’s fame spread. “Ride of the Valkyries” was among the pieces played at an all-Wagner concert in Central Park, New York, in September 1872, the first time Wagner’s music was publicly performed in the United States. Subsequently, it was used as an early film score (Birth of a Nation, 1915), in war movies (Apocalypse Now, 1979; Valkyrie, 2009), and in Nazi war pro- paganda. Initially associated with warrior women, “Ride of the Valkyries” has become something of a militaristic “ringtone.”
LiSTeN TO . . . Example 13.1 online.
LiSTeN TO . . . Example 13.2 online.
Figure 13.9
Cosima Wagner (daughter of Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult), Richard Wagner, and Liszt at Wagner’s villa in Bayreuth in 1880. At the right is a young admirer of Wagner, Hans von Wolzogen, who first coined the term leitmotif.
germany 207 Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
56797_ch13_ptg01.indd 207 29/08/14 3:36 PM
<
Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works