leitmotif \LYT-moh-teef\, noun:
1. In music drama, a marked melodic phrase or short passage which always accompanies the reappearance of a certain person, situation, abstract idea, or allusion in the course of the play; a sort of musical label.
2. A dominant and recurring theme.
Each actor to appear on stage is accompanied by a musical phrase on the drum -- a sort of leitmotif to characterize an emotion, much like a Wagnerian drama.
--Eleanor Blau, "Connecticut's Shakespeare," New York Times, July 9, 1982
One theme had recurred so frequently in these conversations that it had become the leitmotif of the trip.
--Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire
As is so often the case in a crazy household . . . guilt becomes a leitmotif.
--Frederick Busch, "My Brother, Myself," New York Times, February 9, 1997
Such sudden whims, seeming to fly in the face of conventional expectations but really motivated by profound, if unexamined, psychological needs, become a leitmotif of the novel, whose chief concern is whether people can ever claim to know themselves -- or one another -- at all.
--Elizabeth Tallent, " 'Thou Shalt Settle for Less and Less,' " New York Times, May 7, 1989
Leitmotif, also spelled leitmotiv, is from German Leitmotiv, "leading motif," from leiten, to lead (from Old High German leitan) + Motiv, motif (from the French). It is especially associated with the operas of German composer Richard Wagner.