Did Wagner call his recurring themes 'leitmotifs', who did, and what did he call them?
In Ellis's English translations, Wagner's own accounts (1851 'A Communication to My Friends'; 1879 'On the Application of Music to the Drama') describe a 'tissue' or 'web' of 'thematic Motivs', 'root-themes' and 'chief-moods'; the only place the word Leitmotive appears in the volumes inspected is in the 1879 essay, in quotation marks, attributed to his younger friend Hans von Wolzogen ('what he calls my Leitmotive'). Ellis's Vol. II translator's preface also uses a word the OCR renders 'leitmotivtn' (read as leitmotiv-) as a metaphor for recurring words, not for music. Within these texts, the term is therefore Wolzogen's name for the phenomenon that Wagner himself describes differently. Whether Wolzogen first coined the word, or someone else, was not established.
Structured fields
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"citations": [
{
"url": "https://archive.org/details/cu31924022322527",
"note": "archive.org cu31924022322527_djvu.txt (Ellis, Prose Works vol. VI) lines 8556-8612, 17684"
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"url": "https://archive.org/details/cu31924022322485",
"note": "archive.org cu31924022322527_djvu.txt (Ellis, Prose Works vol. VI) lines 8556-8612, 17684"
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"url": "https://archive.org/details/richardwagnersp00elligoog",
"note": "archive.org cu31924022322527_djvu.txt (Ellis, Prose Works vol. VI) lines 8556-8612, 17684"
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"url": "https://archive.org/details/guidetomusicofri00wolz",
"note": "archive.org cu31924022322527_djvu.txt (Ellis, Prose Works vol. VI) lines 8556-8612, 17684"
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}Evidence claims
- [sourced_fact] In Ellis's English translations, Wagner's own accounts (1851 'A Communication to My Friends'; 1879 'On the Application of Music to the Drama') describe a 'tissue' or 'web' of 'thematic Motivs', 'root-themes' and 'chief-moods'; the only place the word Leitmotive appears in the volumes inspected is in the 1879 essay, in quotation marks, attributed to his younger friend Hans von Wolzogen ('what he calls my Leitmotive'). Ellis's Vol. II translator's preface also uses a word the OCR renders 'leitmotivtn' (read as leitmotiv-) as a metaphor for recurring words, not for music. Within these texts, the term is therefore Wolzogen's name for the phenomenon that Wagner himself describes differently. Whether Wolzogen first coined the word, or someone else, was not established. · locator: archive.org cu31924022322527_djvu.txt (Ellis, Prose Works vol. VI) lines 8556-8612, 17684 source
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| documentation | unknown | permitted | permitted | unknown | unknown | Applies to this original summary only, not to the cited sources. |