Wider Listening; Richard Wagner – Der Ring des Nibelungen: - Wagner uses leitmotifs (short musical ideas representing characters, emotions, or objects), which, like the idée fixe, recur and transform throughout a large-scale work.
Both Berlioz and Wagner develop these motifs to reflect changes in narrative or psychological state.Both use recurring themes for programmatic storytelling.
Where Berlioz's idée fixe represents a single obsession (the beloved), Wagner’s leitmotifs are more varied, but serve a similar unifying dramatic function.