This piece has been cross-posted to Comp Title Book Club on Substack.
I'm a big fan of drawing ekphrastic inspiration from other art forms to inform my own creative writing, and in a stroke of luck (though maybe not for my husband), I recently rediscovered some of my teenage musical theater obsessions. As such, I thought I'd bring up one of my favorite elements to borrow from the world of music—the leitmotif.
What’s a Leitmotif?
A leitmotif is commonly found in operatic scores and is used as a way to signal the appearance or reappearance of a character or a theme for the audience.
It can also be played with! One of my favorite examples of a leitmotif being manipulated comes from one of my favorite musicals, The Phantom of the Opera.
Compare the hero melody of “Prima Donna,” in which the managers of the Opéra Populaire attempt to convince their leading lady, Carlotta Giudicelli not to bow out amid the Phantom's terrorism, with what should sound pretty familiar as one point in the musical’s love triangle, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny pleads with his childhood love and rising star of the opera, Christine Daaé, to be the bait in their plan to trap the Phantom, who is also enamored with her. Once you hear it, it becomes pretty clear he's using her, not comforting her!* (You can listen to “Prima Donna” here and the reprise of this melody starting at 3:20 in this clip of “Twisted Every Way.”**)
Using and Manipulating Leitmotif in Your Own Work
How can you use this musical device in your written work? By converting what would be a heard melody to the repetition of an image.
Perhaps you’ll use a character’s item, possession, or even a color related to them to create a symbol that stands in for them even when they're not there. (Think: the deep forest green Patricia Highsmith uses to denote Carol in The Price of Salt.) Perhaps the image’s symbolism changes from meaning one thing to meaning something else as the plot progresses and this character changes. It's fun to play around with, and I hope you enjoy doing so!
And, hey, just a heads-up: my schedule is a bit busier than it’s been over my entire freelance editing career, so I won’t be able to accommodate more than a handful of new editing client requests sent in via the contact form per year. Don’t worry, though! I plan to publish more blog posts than I have in the past (always for free) and to add more resources, tools, and educational modules to the Editing Vault quite soon.
Happy writing,
Jessica
Footnotes for My Fellow Musical Theater Nerds
*I used to be (and still kind of am) Team Phantom, but as I've gotten older, I've increasingly become Team Christine Don't Need No Man.
**Don't @ me for using clips from the 2004 movie musical. I get attached to whichever cast recording I hear of a musical first, and for Phantom, it was Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, and Patrick Wilson.