SOURCE: "Fiction and the Leitmotiv," in Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts, University of Georgia Press, 1948, pp. 208-18.

In the following essay, Brown argues that the compositions of Richard Wagner have been the principal musical influence on the novel, and he illustrates how Gabriele d'Annunzio and Thomas Mann used the musical device of the leitmotiv, as Wagner developed it, in their novels.

For fairly obvious reasons, music has exerted considerably more influence on poetry than on prose fiction. By its very nature, poetry demands a constant attention to problems of sound, and thus is likely to suggest musical analogies to its creators. Also, except for narrative poetry (in which musical influence is slight) poetry demands the conscious search for form to a much greater degree than does fiction. Even if we ignore the great mass of fiction which is really a commodity on the market rather...