PausePassage 1 (Questions 1–5)Judging the opera of his day to be in a desperate state of decline, the 19th-century German composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner—arguably the most controversial, if not the most titanic, figure in the history of classical music—set out to revitalize and revolutionize the genre.  In his 1851 book-length essay, Opera and Drama, Wagner adopted the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," leading him to envision the ideal form of opera as a synthesis of the poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic arts.  Thus, rather than the opera's drama being subordinate to the music, as was typical in Wagner's time, the music would now be integrated with the drama.Subscribing to this aesthetic theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner produced his most celebrated operatic achievement, the Ring of the Nibelung, comprising four music dramas: The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods.  With the creation of this monumental work, commonly called the Ring cycle, Wagner also reinvented the musical language of opera.  In contrast to the practices of his predecessors and contemporaries, like Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner blurred the lines between the traditional operatic components of recitative (musical dialogue) and aria (solo) and virtually eliminated large choral segments.  Additionally, he amplified the role of the orchestra.However, the most influential Wagnerian innovation was the evolution and systematic application of what would later be known as the leitmotif, a recurring musical phrase or melody closely associated with a particular character, place, or object in the drama.  The composer referred to these repeating phrases as "melodic moments," "ground themes," or "carriers of feeling," and subjected them to endless modulation (changes in musical key) and variation.  They could, as Hans von Wolzogen explains, be "developed, interwoven, assimilated with each other, and multifariously transformed."  Wagner also strategically employed them as "motifs of memory" that reminded the audience of previous scenes in the drama.  Thus, leitmotifs not only served as dramatic devices to signal the appearance of different characters but provided the internal musical logic and unifying mechanism for the entire operatic cycle.  Through liberal use of leitmotifs, Wagner was able to generate something Michael Halliwell describes as "a dense, constantly evolving, and fully enclosed dramatic world" whose musical complexity was staggering.Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote not only the musical scores to his works but also the libretti (the lyrics and narrative), which he dubbed "poems."  The Ring cycle's libretti were based on the medieval epics of Norse and Germanic mythology, such as the Eddas, the Volsung, and the Nibelungenlied.  Furthermore, the composer found a structural prototype for his masterpiece in the ancient Greek festival of the god Dionysus, for which playwrights produced four related dramas to be performed on successive days.  Wagner's own magnum opus would debut over four nights in August 1876 at the Festspielhaus, a state-of-the-art opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany, at the composer's behest.In a life and career marked by controversy and scandal, Wagner endured debt, poverty, broken marriages, and political exile.  Yet his accomplishments in opera surpassed that of any other composer, including his Italian counterpart Giuseppe Verdi.  In fact, few areas of European and world culture have escaped Wagner's influence.  Most notably, his Ring cycle combined story with visual elements and dramatic music to anticipate the not-yet-invented art of cinema.  Indeed, early film score composers were schooled in Wagnerian techniques; they understood the versatile and subtle power of the leitmotif to unify all aspects of the drama and influence the audience emotionally.  Nevertheless, moviegoers today would struggle to identify Wagner's innovative use of the leitmotif as the progenitor of musical film scores and, particularly, of the popular phenomenon of the "theme song."Passage Title: Wagner's Leitmotif Question 2Based on the information in Paragraph 3, which of the following conclusions could most reasonably be drawn?A.Various leitmotifs overlapped with each other.B.A single leitmotif represented different entities.C.Some leitmotifs were played only once.D.Only a few leitmotifs occurred frequently in any single work.Submit