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PROGRAM MUSIC Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music. By Matthew Bribitzer-Stull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xxiv, 331 p. ISBN 9781107098398 (hardcover), $120; ISBN 9781316161678 (e-book), Cambridge Books Online.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.
"Leitmotif" is one of the few terms in music's technical vocabulary to have left the confines of its discipline and entered common parlance. Its ubiquity has come with a trade-off, however, as the original intentions and intendant nuances behind the term attached to Richard Wagner since the 1870s have become at best obscured, at worst unintentionally misused and intentionally abused. Recognizing that such a phenomenon is an inherent property of any popular term, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull does not seek to return the leitmotif to the circumscribed environment of Wagnerian music drama. Rather, in Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music, he explodes it by showing how the leitmotif-and, more accurately, leitmotivic procedures-has adapted to the needs of established and new media over the last one hundred fifty years. In doing so, he hopes to demonstrate that "the idea of leitmotif," which Bribitzer-Stull believes has been debilitated by wave after wave of critical onslaught over the last century, remains "a valuable component of musical understanding" (p. xix).
Uncovering key features of Wagner's leitmotivic practice begins in chapter 1. Bribitzer-Stull emphasizes the importance of "accumulative association" (p. 4; emphasis in the original), which allows the viewer not only to recall earlier themes, but also to track how those themes change according to various semantic, emotional, and dramatic cues. Association is, in fact, the defining feature of the leitmotif, which BribitzerStull also supplements with developmental (p. 14ff.) and structural (p. 18ff.) components. Given that these features are not unique to the leitmotif, the author concludes the chapter by examining the problematic ways in which scholars, especially beginning with Hans von Wolzogen in 1877, have applied them to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Following the taxonomy laid out in the first chapter, Bribitzer-Stull divides his book into three parts: "Musical Themes" (chaps. 2-3), "Musical Association" (chaps. 4-6), and "Leitmotifs in Context" (chaps. 7-9). Chapter 2 continues the methodology established earlier, in that it attempts to arrive at a leitmotivically-appropriate definition of "theme" by exclusion. A theme is not, according to Bribitzer-Stull,...