David Lewin and Valhalla Revisited: Neo-Riemannian and Schenkerian Approaches to Motivic Corruption in Wagner's Ring Cycle

Graham Hunt, The University of Texas at Arlington

In his 1992 essay "Some Notes on Analyzing Wagner," David Lewin examines connections between two motives in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Valhalla and Tarnhelm, through the lens of neo-Riemannian operations. His analysis reveals striking connections between the two musical ideas that have important dramatic implications, and provokes the idea that further analysis of this kind could penetrate deeper into the musical-dramatic fabric of Wagner's complex technique of motivic transformation. Lewin's methodology can be extended by considering not only other occurrences of the "distorted" Valhalla motive and other motives in the Ring cycle (such as the Tarnhelm and Magic Potion motives), but by broadening the analytic lens to include new neo-Riemannian relations involving non-consonant chords and considerations of the motives' Schenkerian contexts. I specifically propose a pluralistic analytical approach that takes Lewin's insights a step further and traces the process of motivic manipulation not only from a neo-Riemannian "transformation of transformations" perspective, but also from a Schenkerian reading of the motives' changing diatonic contexts. A model that combines the two approaches, the "space model," integrates the findings from the two different analytic approaches and contextualizes appearances of the motives in "diatonic space" and "chromatic space."