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Updated: June 23, 2025
Other but comparatively unimportant features in the Wagner music drama are, e.g., the use of the Leitmotiv, or leading motive found occasionally in Gluck, Mozart, Weber, etc., but here first adopted with a definite purpose, and the contention for mythological rather than historical subjects now largely admitted.
In a kind of "leitmotiv" Merezhkovsky has shown us the Tolstoyan characters individualized by very particular corporal signs. "Tolstoy," he says, "has, to the very highest degree, the gift of clairvoyance of the flesh; even when dead, the flesh has a tongue." He is the subtle painter of all sensations and he is a master in this domain.
Wagner, I think, repeated himself quite unconsciously very often: when the repetition is conscious of course we have at once the genuine leitmotiv; but it is the maddest of errors to see in every resemblance between phrases the deliberate employment of the leitmotiv.
This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective. Still, we must not accept this formula as a definition of the comic. It is suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical and perfect, in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do we offer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations.
All the characters in the book, from Sanine to Karsavina, are continually preyed upon by carnal desires. Long passages of funereal scenes alternate with pictures of the transports of love and the descriptions of masculine and feminine bodies. "Your body proclaims the truth, your reason lies." This is the "leitmotiv" of all the theories that the characters in the book preach.
It is necessary to discuss as briefly as may be the leitmotiv, because with Lohengrin Wagner first began to use it with serious purpose. In the Dutchman two themes may be rightly described as leitmotivs; in Tannhäuser not one theme may be rightly so described.
Thus, like a "leitmotiv," the murmuring of the water interrupts the course of the story.
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