Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
Further back I referred to Wagner's earlier and later use of the leit-motif. In its naive, primitive simplicity the device is certainly not highly artistic. When our academic gentry use it in their festival oratorios, they are supposed to show themselves very advanced.
But all that could be clearly distinguished was this LEIT-MOTIF: "I, a thief! ... I, a thief, I?" She choked with rage. She shouted: "I never heard of such a thing!" And, suddenly, she darted up to Richard again. "In any case," she yelped, "you, M. Richard, ought to know better than I where the twenty thousand francs went to!" "I?" asked Richard, astounded. "And how should I know?"
But the music written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more passive rôle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the intellectual game of the leit-motif system was substituted for the creative exercise.
Last, as in the song, the universality of the music is renounced in favor of the interpretation given to it by the program. In the leit-motif, indeed, as Wagner uses it, where a musical phrase is provided with a fixed connotation of ideas and acts which is understood by the hearer whenever it recurs, opera ceases to be music at all in the strict sense, and becomes a musical language.
He was in fact about to perform this manoeuvre when he was checked by the jolly young woman he had been having on his left and who had more to say about the Hotels, up and down the town, than he had ever known a young woman to have to say on any subject at all; she expressed herself in hotel terms exclusively, the names of those establishments playing through her speech as the leit-motif might have recurrently flashed and romped through a piece of profane modern music.
The sense of symmetry is strong in a complete melody of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and least stationary form balance; whereas the leit-motif is isolated. In domestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiar antithesis the very commonplace of rival methods of art. But the same antithesis exists in less obvious forms. The poets have sought "irregular" metres.
Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society.
"Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck." That is the leit-motif: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it, to the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men.
The leit-motif has crept into the high form of absolute tones to make it as definite and dramatic as any opera. Per me si va nella cit-ta do-lente; Per me si va nell'eterno dolore; and in still higher chant Per me si va tra la perduta gente. All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" In a violent paroxysm we hear the doom of the monotone in lowest horns.
There is a brief hint of the Marseillaise woven into the finely varied tapestry of martial music, and when the lover comes trudging home, his joy, his sudden knowledge of Perrine's faithlessness, and his overwhelming grief are all built over a long organ-point of three clangorous bride-bells. The leit-motif idea is used with suggestive clearness throughout the work.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking