ABSTRACT
The contrary mistake is to find Wagner essentially formless on the strength of a L eitm otiv-based analysis. Alfred Lorenz's m onum ental syntagm atic study (Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner) is an attempt to redress this, but the work has not been popular. Deryck Cooke's paradigmatic study The Language of M usic may perhaps be defended as an explicitly and exclusively synchronic approach. It is irrelevant to complain, as have some critics, that Cooke makes nothing of the ongoing development of musical ideas in time.
