The chapter offers a focused historical account of Anglophone analysis of Wagner’s music, particularly that of the Ring, beginning with the work of the British Wagnerians Ernest Newman and Deryck Cooke, and continuing to that of more recent American scholars such as Robert Bailey and Warren Darcy. The central task of the chapter is to trace the analytical approaches of these and other scholars to three critical elements of Wagner’s music: leitmotiv, tonality and harmony, and form. The scene between Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens in Act 3, Scene I of Götterdämmerung serves as an example of how these analytical approaches can work, either separately or together, to enrich our understanding of Wagner’s musical practice in his penultimate opera.

Chapter 4 approaches “Erwartung,” Op. 17, as a leitmotivic opera, in contrast to previous literature that emphasizes its “athematic” and “amotivic” qualities. The process within which the opera’s central motive transforms from <D, F, C#> (and its set-class 3-3) to <D, F, A, C#>, and finally into a quotation from Schoenberg’s Op. 6 song “Am Wegrand” portrays a two-step image of emergence – first of the dead body of the Woman’s lover, and then of the realization that he is dead, and she will live the rest of her life without him in “collective loneliness.” This process of motivic emergence is similar to the “cumulative settings” that J. Peter Burkholder proposed for the music of Charles Ives (but the elements that undergo this process in Schoenberg's music are much smaller). In addition, my analysis shows how families of set classes also serve leitmotivic functions: representing the lover’s body, the Woman’s fear, startling objects in the forest, and momentary feelings of reassurance. In this way, Erwartung can be understood as an inspiration for Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck.