File:Siegfried_leitmotif.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
leitmotif
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thumb|300px|Leitmotif associated with Siegfried's horn call in Richard Wagner's 1876 opera, Siegfriedcenter
~16 min read
Encyclopedic overview
8 sectionsContents
- Classical music
- Early instances in classical music
- Wagner
- After Wagner
- Critique of the leitmotif concept
- Entertainment
- See also
- References
thumb|300px|Leitmotif associated with Siegfried's horn call in Richard Wagner's 1876 opera, Siegfriedcenter
A leitmotif or '''' () is a "short, recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical concepts of idée fixe or motto-theme. The spelling leitmotif is a partial anglicization of the German Leitmotiv (), literally meaning "leading motif", or "guiding motif". A musical motif has been defined as a "short musical idea ... melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic, or all three", a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition: "the smallest structural unit possessing thematic identity".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “leitmotif” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.