International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

Classifying Leitmotifs in Recordings of Operas by Richard Wagner

This is the accompanying website for the following paper:

1. Michael Krause, Frank Zalkow, Julia Zalkow, Christof Weiß, and Meinard Müller
   Classifying Leitmotifs in Recordings of Operas by Richard Wagner
   In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR): 473–480, 2020. Bibtex PDF Details Presentation

   @inproceedings{KrauseZZWM20_LeitmotifClassification_ISMIR,
   address          = {Montr{\'{e}}al, Canada},
   author           = {Michael Krause and Frank Zalkow and Julia Zalkow and Christof Wei{\ss} and Meinard M{\"u}ller},
   booktitle        = {Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference ({ISMIR})},
   pages            = {473--480},
   title            = {Classifying Leitmotifs in Recordings of Operas by {R}ichard {W}agner},
   year             = {2020},
   url-pdf          = {2020-ISMIR-LeitmotifClassification/2020_KrauseZZWM_LeitmotifClassification_ISMIR.pdf},
   url-presentation = {2020-ISMIR-LeitmotifClassification/2020_KrauseZZWM_LeitmotifClassification_ISMIR_poster.pdf},
   url-details      = {2020-ISMIR-LeitmotifClassification}
   }

Abstract

From the 19th century on, several composers of Western opera made use of leitmotifs (short musical ideas referring to semantic entities such as characters, places, items, or feelings) for guiding the audience through the plot and illustrating the events on stage. A prime example of this compositional technique is Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Across its different occurrences in the score, a leitmotif may undergo considerable musical variations. Additionally, the concrete leitmotif instances in an audio recording are subject to acoustic variability. Our paper approaches the task of classifying such leitmotif instances in audio recordings. As our main contribution, we conduct a case study on a dataset covering 16 recorded performances of the Ring with annotations of ten central leitmotifs, leading to 2403 occurrences and 38448 instances in total. We build a neural network classification model and evaluate its ability to generalize across different performances and leitmotif occurrences. Our findings demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of leitmotif classification in audio recordings and pave the way towards the fully automated detection of leitmotifs in music recordings.

Dataset

The occurrence and instance positions of the ten leitmotifs considered in this paper are made publicly available as a dataset for further research.

In this dataset, we use the following naming scheme to refer to different parts of the Ring:

Occurrences

Occurrence positions are found in the .csv-files in the "Occurrences" subfolder of the zip-archive. For example, "Occurrences/B-2.csv" contains all motif occurrences in Die Walküre, Act 2. In these files, each line corresponds to a motif occurrence. Start and end positions are given in measures. For example, the line

Ring;778.5;780.25

in "Occurrences/B-2.csv" signifies that there is an occurrence of the Ring motif starting at 778.5 (a half measure after 778) and ending at 780.25 (a quarter measure after measure 780). Measure numbers correspond to the piano score from Richard Kleinmichel, available at IMSLP.

Instances

Instance positions are found in the .csv-files inside the 16 directories of the "Instance" subfolder of the zip-archive. For example, "Instances/Wagner_RingBarenboimKupfer_WC2009/B-2.csv" contains all motif instances in the Daniel Barenboim performance of Die Walküre, Act 2. In these files, each line corresponds to a motif instance. Start and end positions are given in seconds (for this, all CD tracks for a particular performance of an act have been cut and concatenated to form one continuous audio file for that act). For example, the line

Ring;2130.6;2137.2

in "Instances/Wagner_RingBarenboimKupfer_WC2009/B-2.csv" signifies that there is an instance of the Ring motif starting at second 2130.6 and ending at 2137.2.

A table of the performances used in this study, including ID, conductors, years of recording and length, can be found in the paper. The following table provides helpful information for identifying the exact CD releases:

Thus, the performance by Wolfgang Sawallisch (P-Sa) was released by EMI in 2012.

Acknowledgements

We thank Vlora Arifi-Müller for her assistance in preparing the data. This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG MU 2686/7-2, MU 2686/11-1). The International Audio Laboratories Erlangen are a joint institution of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS.

References

1. Richard Wagner
   On the Application of Music to the Drama
   In: Prose Works, Broude Brothers, New York: 175–191, 1966. Bibtex

   @incollection{Wagner66_MusicDrama_BOOK,
   author      = {Richard Wagner},
   title       = {On the Application of Music to the Drama},
   booktitle   = {Prose Works},
   year        = {1966},
   translator  = {William A. Ellis},
   publisher   = {Broude Brothers, New York},
   pages       = {175--191}
   }

2. Matthew Bribitzer-Stull
   Understanding the Leitmotif
   Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bibtex

   @book{Bribitzer15_Leitmotif_BOOK,
   author    = {Matthew Bribitzer-Stull},
   title     = {Understanding the Leitmotif},
   publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
   year      = {2015}
   }

3. Frank Zalkow, Christof Weiß, and Meinard Müller
   Exploring Tonal-Dramatic Relationships in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle
   In Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR): 642–648, 2017. Bibtex PDF

   @inproceedings{ZalkowWM17_WagnerHarmony_ISMIR,
   author    = {Frank Zalkow and Christof Wei{\ss} and Meinard M{\"u}ller},
   title     = {Exploring Tonal-Dramatic Relationships in {R}ichard {W}agner's {R}ing Cycle},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval ({ISMIR})},
   pages     = {642--648},
   address   = {Suzhou, China},
   year      = {2017},
   url-pdf   = {http://ismir2017.smcnus.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/132_Paper.pdf}
   }

4. Frank Zalkow, Christof Weiß, Thomas Prätzlich, Vlora Arifi-Müller, and Meinard Müller
   A Multi-Version Approach for Transferring Measure Annotations Between Music Recordings
   In Proceedings of the AES International Conference on Semantic Audio: 148–155, 2017. Bibtex

   @inproceedings{ZalkowWPAM17_MeasureTransfer_AES,
   author    = {Frank Zalkow and Christof Wei{\ss} and Thomas Pr{\"a}tzlich and Vlora Arifi-M{\"u}ller and Meinard M{\"u}ller},
   title     = {A Multi-Version Approach for Transferring Measure Annotations Between Music Recordings},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the {AES} International Conference on Semantic Audio},
   pages     = {148--155},
   address   = {Erlangen, Germany},
   year      = {2017}
   }

5. Richard Wagner
   Der Ring des Nibelungen. Vollständiger Text mit Notentafeln der Leitmotive
   Schott Music, 2013. Bibtex

   @book{Burghold13_Leitmotive_Schott,
   title     = {{D}er {R}ing des {N}ibelungen. {V}ollständiger {T}ext mit {N}otentafeln der {L}eitmotive},
   author    = {Richard Wagner},
   editor    = {Julius Burghold},
   address   = {Mainz},
   publisher = {Schott Music},
   note      = {Reprint of the original edition from 1913 (Ed. Julius Burghold)},
   year      = {2013}
   }