Motif Sketches

Motif sketches are available starting in version 1.5 of The Ring App.

Julius Burghold's 1897 guide to the Ring gave each leitmotif as a short musical example, gathered into eight parts: one each for Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, and three each for Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. We encoded his examples as MusicXML, and the app displays and plays them.

Below are all 364 of them, for 107 motifs. Press ▶︎ to hear one on the app's piano.

There are other good web sites that present the leitmotifs with different encodings and different philosophies with regard to naming and to the demarcation line between motif and non-motif: Peter Billam's site, Paul Heise's Wagnerheim, and Derrick Everett's Monsalvat.