In the second part of this essay, I use Miklós Rózsa's score to Ben-Hur as a kind of limiting case for the application of the leitmotif principle to film music. In many ways, the invocation of the leitmotif in film music discourse during the 1930s and 40s was driven by a desire to establish the cultural legitimacy of sound film: to establish (we might say) Hollywood as the logical successor to Bayreuth. Classical Hollywood film music scoring, I will maintain, fits very uncomfortably with this analytical tradition. The first section of this paper offers a critique of this interpretative tradition, by placing it in the context of Wagner's own discussion of the term "leitmotif" (in his essay "On the Application of Music to Drama") and its use in subsequent analytical works. It stretches back beyond Max Steiner’s frequently-quoted comments about his own indebtedness to Wagner into the very earliest years of sound film. The idea that the film scoring procedures of classic Hollywood composers descends from the leitmotif technique of Wagner (and other composers such as Richard Strauss) is so firmly embedded in narrative histories of film music that it hardly needs to be rearticulated.
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