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Updated: July 13, 2025
But, of course, when one has heard the opera many times and twenty performances, supplemented by a study of Von Bülow's incomparable piano arrangement of the score, are hardly enough to enable us to begin to comprehend the real richness and vastness of Tristan then gradually new features are found, new lights are thrown by the use of leit-motifs, and slowly the music yields us that multiplicity of complex delights delights intellectual, emotional, or purely sensuous that only the greatest works of art can give.
standing for Vanderdecken, the curse laid on him, and the whole idea of the phantom ship; the second for Senta. They are short and clean-cut; they recur when wanted, and are subjected to little modification. There is not a single theme of this description in Tannhäuser. The first act is perfectly easy to follow. There are no leit-motifs.
The methods are those of Tristan; we have the themes used as leit-motifs, and also long passages woven out of them and new matter; we have the harmonic freedom of Tristan, the same gorgeous orchestration, and even more than the same marvellous polyphonic writing. But, broadly speaking, the drama counts for comparatively little, and the opera consists of a series of enchanting songs and scenes.
The text deals with the three great thoughts, the leit-motifs that are sounded over and over again in the prophet's message. A true prophet's words are of universal application, even when they are most specially addressed to a particular audience.
But what purpose, musical or other, is subserved by arbitrarily allying a musical phrase to a personage or an idea and blaring it out whenever that personage or idea comes to the front? Wagner early realized the uselessness of the proceeding, and, as I pointed out, in Tannhäuser there are no leit-motifs, though passages and parts of passages are repeated.
There is another danger. People easily go leit-motif mad, and their insane imagination creates a leit-motif out of any two phrases that have a superficial and accidental resemblance. Tristan and the Ring are not musical puzzles. The themes are quite able to look after themselves, and to assert themselves at the proper moment. Many of them are not leit-motifs at all.
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