The A~-C-E major-third constellation stands as a prototype for nineteenth-century composers' expressive and structural uses of chromatic major-third relations. After tracing the origins of the collection, this article presents a conglomeration of hierarchic and transformational analytic approaches to A~-C-E music by central European composers to demonstrate that recognition of the complex comprises a valuable added dimension to our structural i and phenomenological hearings of romantic-era music.

The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.

Conventional wisdom holds that the cadenza is a musical parenthesis. Like linguistic parenthetical remarks, cadenzas may be engaging, illuminating, and insightful, but they are not regarded as intrinsic to structural coherence. Perhaps for this reason, the topic has remained parenthetical in modern music theory discourse. Despite the connotations this neglect implies, the cadenza tradition stands as one endowed with great musical richness, worthy of further analytic investigation. This article seeks to define the dual function of the cadenza. Specifically, the cadenza is heard simultaneously as a local, harmonic event and as a global, formal event. On the local level, it may either prolong one harmony or progress from one to another. On the global level, it can serve a variety of formal functions: highlighting salient cadences; opening a space for virtuosic display; and developing, relating, and rehearing elements of the concerto movement proper. The cadenza's dual function grants it a potential far exceeding the simple characterization as parenthesis. Skillfully composed cadenzas exploit the tension between local and global functions and can initiate subtle yet profound rehearings of music outside cadenza space—rehearings that give us pause to reconsider both the cadenza-as-parenthesis metaphor and the artificial boundaries we construct among composer, performer, and analyst.

Examples of directional tonality, associative tonality, associative theme and motivic parallelism all appear in the Act III Finale to Die Feen, Wagner's first complete opera. The inter‐relationships evident among these compositional principles foreshadow a level of sophistication usually attributed to the more mature music dramas, suggesting that the keys to unlocking das Geheimnis der Form can, in some senses, be found in an understanding of the earlier works. The present study adopts a range of theoretical paradigms in order to address the variety of Wagner's musical and dramatic techniques. Used in conjunction, Schenkerian generative views of tonality, Robert Bailey's dramatic‐tonal concepts, neo‐Riemannian transformations and an understanding of thematic association enable a series of analytical observations unattainable through any single interpretative approach.

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