ABSTRACT
The musician Becce, who was Italian by birth and a Berliner by adoption, was well aware of the random character of film music and grasped its vocation as an illustration that rendered moving images functional. The concept of the leitmotif has been borrowed very often and mediated in a very superficial way through Wagnerian dramaturgy, heavily conditioning the development of film music for a long period. The new systems of production and mechanical reproduction that coincided with film music's development created the basic conditions required to define aesthetics of listening. The arrival of sound film led to a radical change in the status of film music, which became more of a fully textual component of film and less of a performance. Film music's unclear identity might easily evoke the image of a large workshop whose artisans rely on communication with the composer, who in turn must understand their needs.
