Josef Hoffmann, set design sketch for Das Rheingold, Bayreuth 1876. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Bayreuth, 13 August 1876. The auditorium of the new theatre is dark, the orchestra is hidden beneath the stage, and from the bottom of the pit rises an E flat so low that at first it is not heard but guessed at. It is the double basses. Then the bassoons add the fifth, then the horns begin to climb the notes of the same chord, one after another, and the arpeggio multiplies until it becomes flowing water. The chord does not change for one hundred and thirty-six bars. This is the prelude to Das Rheingold, the first evening of the first complete Ring of the Nibelung, and that horn arpeggio is the cell from which Wagner will make four operas germinate.
Anyone who goes to hear the Ring today almost always arrives armed with a list: the sword motif, the Valhalla motif, the curse motif, sometimes a hundred or so entries with musical examples alongside. The list has an author, and it is not Wagner. The word Leitmotiv appears in print in 1871, in a catalogue of Weber’s works compiled by Friedrich Wilhelm Jähns, and becomes Wagnerian thanks to Hans von Wolzogen, who in his thematic guide to the Ring isolated the recurring motifs and gave each one a name. Wagner never christened them in public. He spoke of fundamental themes, of principal motifs, and the one time he wrote the word he did so at arm’s length: the so-called Leitmotive. In Cosima’s diaries there is a sentence that says it all: in the end people will think this nonsense is done at my suggestion.
The trouble with the label is that it freezes the motif, while in Wagner a motif is worth what it becomes. The best way to grasp this is to go back to that prelude arpeggio. You hear it again, nervous and rippled, when the Rhinemaidens swim; you find it again in the fourth scene, when Erda, the goddess who knows the future, rises from the earth, and here it has turned minor and slow, as if the river had frozen. There is no need to know that it is called the nature motif, or Erda’s motif. It is enough to recognise the profile, that line climbing in wide steps, and to notice that now it is dark. The transformation is the meaning: the wisdom of the earth is the same water as at the beginning, seen from the other side of time.
The second experiment is even more instructive. In the first scene the Rhinemaidens explain to Alberich that whoever forges a ring from the gold will have dominion over the world, and the orchestra sketches a sinuous figure that turns on itself without finding rest. Alberich steals the gold, the scene closes, and in the orchestral interlude that leads up to the mountains that same figure unfolds, slows, widens in the brass until it becomes the solemn music of Valhalla, the fortress of the gods. A list that keeps them on two separate lines does not say this; the ear does: the ring and Wotan’s castle are made of the same stuff. The thief’s power and the god’s power have a single music, and the entire tetralogy tells the price of this kinship.
This, then, is how to listen to a motif in Wagner. Keep a shape in mind, not a name: an interval, a rhythm, a colour of instrument. Then watch what happens to it. If it changes harmony, the character has changed state; if it passes from the strings to the brass, it has become public, or threatening; if it returns fragmented while on stage nobody mentions it, the orchestra is telling what the character thinks without saying it. Wagner wanted an orchestra that knew more than the singers, and all of that knowledge passes through transformations. The list of labels is useful the day before, like a street map. In the hall it is best left in your coat.
Wagner’s patience in growing those seeds is measured in years. The composition of Das Rheingold began in November 1853; the last page of Götterdämmerung is dated 21 November 1874. Twenty-one years in which the horn arpeggio never stopped changing shape.