"leitmotiv" is a correct and usable word in written English.
It can be used to describe a recurring theme or idea that runs through a creative work, such as a novel, movie, or song. For example, you could say: "The leitmotiv of the novel was the power of friendship."
Of the three, passionate hostility to Communism was the leitmotiv of his policy.
Other leading figures include narrative writer Gottfried Keller, poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and novelist Robert Walser, and many exemplify the literary critic Karl Schmid's remark that the leitmotiv of 20th-century Swiss literature is "the malaise of a small nation".
It traces the leitmotiv of the myth of America's newness, and the secondary myth of nature.
The search for "some other kind of meaning" has been a leitmotiv in Johns's art and in his public statements.
Harriet is responsible, in a roundabout way, for the firing of the family's long-suffering housekeeper (part of a subtle but relentless leitmotiv of white housewives' casual mistreatment of their black maids).
This duality — outsider and insider, advocate and operator, insurgent against the established order and defender of the status quo — has been the leitmotiv of Ashcroft's life and career.
Aging and mortality were leitmotivs of the year.
In these less successful works, representative themes are interwoven in the manner of the leitmotivs of Wagner.
This texture would be woven from basic thematic ideas, or leitmotivs ("leading motives"); these would arise naturally as expressive vocal phrases sung by characters at crucial emotional points of the drama and then be developed by the orchestra as "reminiscences" in accordance with the expressive need of the dramatic and psychological development of the action.
One of the leitmotivs of a series of conversations I had in 1992 and 1993 with the painter David Salle was his unhappiness over the current reception of his work.
Several leitmotivs move through all three sections: the low hum of the Hindenburg's engines becomes the roar of a B-29 bomber named Dave's Dream, and the ominous drone recurs in the final section, as Reich and Korot present fragments of interviews with an array of scientific experts, some of whom are straight-facedly discussing the possibility of a superhuman race of clones.
