Musical-Narrative Motives and Themes
In Pearl, the topical approach described above is closely interlinked with a motivic-thematic musical design that both provides common points of reference across the piece, but also supports the evolving nature of the narrative events and their changing environments and affective connotations. Musical materials return throughout the work, cast in different lights and playing different functions, in response to the evolving musical plotline, in a fashion that could be compared with operatic leitmotivs. They are musically more specific than topics (which are archetypal in nature); indeed, the motives occur within different topical environments throughout the piece. However, without specific words attached to them, semiotically they are vaguer and (intentionally) left more open to listener interpretation.
While some were included in Table 1 (such as the journeying motive associated with the rising topic), Figures 3 and 4 below show the frequently recurring Pearl motive and breathing chord-pairing (so labelled because of its evocation of an inward then outward breath).1 These two motives are stated in the opening measures and reappear throughout the work in a large number of contexts, generating long-range continuity between the different sections of the narrative (perhaps akin to the recurring images, such as gleaming gems, found throughout the poem).
The historical role of such motives, particularly in larger scale dramatic works is notoriously rich and complex (see, for example, Whittall 2001), yet without wishing to simplify and too precisely quantify their role here, I would like to emphasize the narrative function of their continual transformation through the course of the work, which might be compared to one crucial aspect of Richard Wagner’s famed operatic use of the device. As Whittall puts it, ‘the dramatic context justifies the nature of the musical transformation’ (2001).
So, in Figure 3 showing the Pearl motive, what begins as a musically rather neutral, even innocuous figure decorating a G-sharp, in bar 4, gradually undergoes a journey, with the Jeweller, in which it finds itself transformed, according to the narrative trajectory of the work, into new forms (such as plainsong in bar 29 to suggest the medieval setting of the poem; an important melodic element within the ‘tragic violin theme’ (bar 160 onwards); a climatic iteration on the trumpets in bar 430; a more disguised ‘reminiscence’ within the mournful cor anglais melody from bar 532).
Similarly, as shown in Figure 4, the reprise of the opening breathing chords in the chorus after the Jeweller awakes (from bar 568), serves to remind listeners explicitly of the piece’s start, to suggest a return to the original ‘garden of herbs’. Yet, now rescored for voices, stretched out, and harmonically rather more fluid, they depict the medieval garden in a transformed light following the protagonist’s dream-journey; the chorus itself perhaps distantly reminding him of the heavenly chorus of his dream-vision. Before this, harmonically and/or melodically more distorted forms of the motive (e.g. in bars 294–95; 301–02 and 404–onwards) might suggest the increasingly surreal, and hazy mental perception, for the jeweller, of his surroundings.
