Robin Holloway's essay, Motif, memory and meaning in Twilight of the Gods, begins as follows.

No artist has attempted a task more intimidating than Wagner’s in writing the last and largest instalment of the longest musico-dramatic work yet completed. Coherently but not laboriously to tie up all the threads, to synthesise without artifice, to get the ending absolutely right, required almost super-human powers. He also made huge demands of his performers in terms of understanding and stamina, of his theatre in technical resources and illusion, and not least of his audience for long-distance concentration upon a drama that unremittingly fuses emotional intensity with dense intellectual argument. Yet he was at pains to make what he is doing at all points self-elucidating. Wagnerian music-drama is mass-communication rather than arcane secret; there are no meaningless ciphers or inexplicable mysteries; the complex entity glares out with comprehensive exhaustiveness, offering, whatever the depths, a surface that shows everything needed for its own apprehension. It invariably gives the listener a foothold, and sometimes the emphasis of a didactic finger. Tovey’s ‘first article of musical faith’—that ‘while the listener must not expect to hear the whole contents of the piece of music at once, nothing concerns him that will not ultimately reach his ear, either as directly audible fact or as a cumulative satisfaction in things of which the hidden foundations are well and truly laid’—applies as well to Wagner as to the wordless forms which prompted it. How this huge structure works in the small and in the large, how we take in what we hear, how we hear it in the first place, and how we make sense of and interpret it: these are the questions this essay will consider.

They boil down to one: how does Wagner interfuse his music and his meaning? In the large, by his manipulation of musical memory by recapitulations and other formal symmetries, familiar from the music of other periods (though never before so extensive nor so complex); in the small by the leitmotif. Large and small are, of course, closely related. The function of the leitmotif is to build, to describe, to recall. First it gives something a name and sound; every subsequent incidence is a reminder; at the point when the sound becomes the thing named and we have learned to think in this language, the leitmotif becomes a building-unit from which the structure is formed.

Even at its most straightforward this is not simple. The most purely demonstrative motifs are not one-dimensional, and as the work advances most of them accumulate a web of associations that makes any one name inadequate. An activity (smithying) becomes the whole race of Nibelungs or an individual Nibelung of particular importance (Mime); an object (his horn) becomes a character (Siegfried). That his sword also comes to ‘be’ Siegfried is a yet more complex development because we have seen its history—its discovery by his father, the fight in which it was shattered and the father killed, the forge in which it was remade. With Wotan’s spear, the history (slowly divulged, though not seen on the stage, throughout the tetralogy) is such as to make the equation Wotan/spear/authority/contracts/restraints a drastic shorthand whenever the motif is heard. Thus when sword splinters spear in the third act of Siegfried, the cycle reverberates from beginning to end. Twilight contains the subtlest example of this process: Alberich’s use of the Tarnhelm in The Rhinegold is simply to become invisible and to transform himself into serpent and toad; in the first two acts of Twilight this fairy-tale device (almost forgotten meanwhile) comes to represent deception, becoming the means whereby deception can be manipulated to play upon an inner weakness. As such it is indispensable to the meaning as well as the mechanism of the plot.

From the most onomatopoeic (the waters of the Rhine) to the most abstract (the motive often simply labelled ‘destiny’, ‘renunciation of’, or ‘redemption by’, ‘love’), the leitmotifs always do their work successfully because they are musical objects of great distinctness. Not only things—objects, places, types, individuals—but activities and ideas are rendered in brief, memorable musical things which scarcely ever change and, when they do, always remain recognisable. As Wagner’s paragraphs grow longer, the harmonic usage more supercharged, the motivic combinations (whether fluent or ‘yoked together by violence’) more bold and subtle, the range of reference further-flung, these essential nuggets can always be apprehended and identified.

Since leitmotifs are memory-containers as well as building-units, the vital facts come to mind whenever the sound is heard. Without this constant reminder of things past we would not be able fully to understand the present. Moreover with leitmotifs memory works forward too; the present is made omniscient by this commentary from fore and aft. ‘It takes a sound realist to make a convincing symbolist’, as D. J. Enright once wrote; the wealth of interpretation The Ring attracts would not be possible without its strong basis in specifics.

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