Alumni

Wagner’s Themes: A Study in Musical Expression

By Professor of Music, Emeritus, Frank E. Kirby
Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2004

This is one of those occasions that justify the review of a scholarly book by a lay reader. I’m the layman and the book, by professor of music emeritus Frank E. Kirby, is Wagner’s Themes: A Study in Musical Expression. Kirby, who began teaching at the College in 1965, has tackled an aspect of Richard Wagner’s music that calls for the most sophisticated scholarship, which he has provided, but the color and clarity of his writing have made the final product both attractive and accessible to non-professionals.

Most of us are aware that Wagner’s mature operas are formed from themes, or leitmotivs, identified with elements of the stories being told. We know some of those themes by name—e. g. The Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannhäuser, the Prize Song from Die Meistersinger—and we recognize that they are musically appropriate to the passages of the drama they convey. Applying that recognition to the leitmotivs of all but the earliest Wagner operas, Kirby demonstrates in exhaustive detail how they express their various affective states. That would be impressive enough, but his most memorable achievement consists of his division of the leitmotivs into three categories and the reasons he gives for such identification.

In the first, or iconic, as he puts it, “the sound of the music is the same as it is in the real world” : a hammer striking an anvil or a bell being tolled, as in Parsifal. The second, or “analogic,” “portray motion by having the music—particularly its rhythm—mimic some aspects of its referent: the motion of wind, of water, of leaves and branches in the forest, of galloping and flying horses, and so on.” (One thinks of “Forest Murmurs,” from Siegfried.) The third is the “associative”: “The musical representation of a storm, as in Der fliegende Holländer and Die Walküre…belongs to the realm of pure association, because the musical sounds imitate or mimic, but are not the same as those of the actual storm in the natural world.”

Kirby is the first scholar to organize the composer’s leitmotivs in such a way. His accomplishment derives from so thorough a knowledge of the subject that the book seems certain to find high place in the Wagner literature. It is no less welcome an addition to the library of any lover of music, layman or professional.

Review by Betty Jane Schultz Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus, Franz Schulze. He plays the piano and guitar and often composes songs.