The Total Work of Art

Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations

David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, Anthony J. Steinhoff, David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk —the ideal of the "total work of art"—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk 's lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea's evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

I

Foundations

CHAPTER 1

The Play’s the Thing

Schiller, Wagner, and Gesamtkunstwerk

NICHOLAS VAZSONYI

Gesamtkunstwerk—A Label with No Meaning

One issue that makes the case of Wagner so unusual is that he comes with a special vocabulary all his own—terms associated with him either exclusively or in the first place: Leitmotiv, music drama, Festspiel, Gesamtkunstwerk. Ironically, most of these labels were not coined by Wagner, some of them Wagner never used in connection with his own work, some he even rejected. Nevertheless, they are now part of that distinct and distinctive package I have been calling the Wagner “brand.”¹ With the possible exception of leitmotif, none of these terms has had as complex a history, or as rich an afterlife beyond Wagner, as Gesamtkunstwerk.

This special vocabulary of Wagnerian terms—and particularly the ideas that accompany them—almost never begin with Wagner. So, while the complete “package” that he put together is distinctly and uniquely Wagnerian, the specific elements that make up that package were all taken from established sources and then adapted to suit his own purpose. This is as true of the music festival (based on the ancient Greek model, then revived in the early nineteenth century) as it is of the musical motif that is repeated and takes on some form of meaning in the process. It is no different with Gesamtkunstwerk, which, as an idea, predates Wagner by almost a century in terms of the aesthetic and ideological motivations that are its driving forces. In order to construct his own theory, which he would marry to the term Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner borrowed elements from a number of different sources, ranging from Schiller to the first generation of Romantic authors. None of these predecessors used the actual term Gesamtkunstwerk which, as Alfred Neumann has shown, was first used in 1827. It is unclear whether Wagner would have been aware of this.² When Wagner did use the term, it was only on six occasions, in the course of two essays and one letter, and none of them was directly in connection with one of his own works. Nevertheless, because of Wagner’s uncanny ability to make noise about himself and his project, the term Gesamtkunstwerk stuck and quickly became the label used perhaps most often to describe the goal, if not the reality, of his mature project and the resulting works for the stage. If and when the word Gesamtkunstwerk is used today, the Wagnerian stamp is an essential component, even if the aim is to oppose or ignore him.

The problem is that, as with much else that essentially starts with Wagner, for a variety of reasons its afterlife often does not have much to do with him anymore. Indeed a brief survey of recent literature on Gesamtkunstwerk leaves the sobering conclusion that the term has by now been applied to so many different aesthetic projects and has been used in so many different situations that it can mean almost anything. In other words, through overuse, it has been virtually emptied of meaning, as Erika Fischer-Lichte noted already in 1989, and Roger Fornoff repeated in his massive study of 2004.³

I suspect that Anke Finger would disagree with this conclusion, but she nevertheless addresses the same phenomenon by observing that, after his death, “Wagner’s original idea” was “set free from Wagner himself.”⁴ Randall Packer completes this thought by adding that the idea of the total artwork “has been a catalyzing force through which artists from a myriad of artistic disciplines have freed themselves from the constraints of traditional artistic thinking.”⁵ Indeed. Not unlike the fatal consequences of the destabilized tonality in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, artists have grabbed on to the term Gesamtkunstwerk, and used its seemingly “unsteady” definition as a license to apply it to any form of artistic project with some claim to a multimedia or totalizing dimension. The fate of the so-called “Tristan” chord has been no different. While Wagner’s harmonic instability is totally dependent on the existence of a powerfully functioning tonal system—in other words, the “instability” can only be perceived as such against “stability”—Wagner’s gesture was nevertheless taken as an opening gambit that would lead to the elimination of tonality per se. Clearly, artists are free to do as they please, and modernism would have happened sooner or later, with or without Wagner. Nevertheless, the arbitrary or, better said, sloppy use of terminology has become symptomatic of our times. In the case of Gesamtkunstwerk, I am suggesting that it also derives from a misunderstanding of its Wagnerian conception. This is not the case for all uses of the term after Wagner, which do indeed continue and further develop his main ideas. However, in the case of artists who subsequently used the term freely without any sense of obligation to further develop Wagner’s concept, I submit that they should have devised a different, more meaningful and appropriate expression. There are also those who have modified or played with the term, again to the point of meaninglessness. For instance, Roy Ascott uses “Gesamtdatenwerk” to describe a global art project on the internet,⁶ and Simon Shaw-Miller talks of music as a “Gesamtsensorischeswerk” which “becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk when other art forms are joined with it.”⁷ Rainer Guldin suggests that “another way of achieving” the Gesamtkunstwerk “is by juxtaposing and mixing different languages” in a work of literature.⁸ Really?

In the following, I would like to tease out the fundamental criteria that inform the Gesamtkunstwerk idea at the heart of Wagner’s project, a term that he wisely did not apply to any of his completed works, not because he was unclear on what he meant by the term, but because he went one better by assigning unique and specific genre terms for most of his later works: Handlung (Tristan), Bühnenfestspiel (Ring), Bühnenweihfestspiel (Parsifal)—arguably yet one more way of branding his products.

Gesamtkunstwerk—A Brief Genealogy

As four recent books emphasize, Gesamtkunstwerk as an idea is bound up with the project we call modernity.⁹ For Danielle Follett and Anke Finger, there are essentially “three aspects of the total artwork”: aesthetic, political, and metaphysical.¹⁰ Different artists at different times have emphasized these three to varying degrees, sometimes to the point of ignoring one or more entirely. In the hands of some, the Gesamtkunstwerk has meant an aesthetic means to rectify everything that is wrong with modernity, politically and spiritually; for others, the Gesamtkunstwerk, if realized, would be the quintessential expression of modernity, an expression in the aesthetic realm of everything that modernity promises: liberation from old forms, a joy in experimentation and innovation, human enlightenment and, perhaps most of all, an all-encompassing work that, like modernity itself, leaves nothing untouched. Both conceptions invest tremendous power in the redemptive or regenerative potential of the artwork and, by extension, in the artist who creates such works. It is an extraordinary power, in part because it has both a social/political and a spiritual/emotional dimension. Such a transcendent potential is expressed most clearly in the Romantic notion of Kunstreligion (religion of art), an idea Karl Friedrich Schinkel formulated succinctly in 1809/10: “Die Kunst selbst ist Religion,”¹¹ an idea that had already begun to dominate eighteenth-century discussions of art, linked, as they are, to the Enlightenment understanding of Greek antiquity which offered a holistic symbiosis of religion and art.

Most genealogies of the Gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps because of this, settle on the pioneers of German Romanticism as the original architects of the concept, and cite them as the immediate antecedents of Wagner’s notion, even if the Romantics did not specifically coin the term. Such approaches tend to ignore the specifically political dimension of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a lacuna that David Roberts seeks to rectify in his recent and comprehensive genealogy by adding the French Revolution and its socio-aesthetic outcomes to the mix. According to Roberts, while Wagner is the “dominant reference” for subsequent theorizing on the term, he is at the nexus of two separate strands (German and French) originating in the late eighteenth century.¹² Both of these are rooted in a reception of ancient Greece, though importantly, Roberts argues that the French sociopolitical model originates in Sparta, while the German aesthetic strand is rooted in Athens.¹³ The festival idea, so crucial to Wagner’s project, with its celebratory and communal elements that transcend the architectural and formal constraints of the established theater, is an outgrowth of the French Revolution—an attempt, Roberts argues, to realize in palpable terms Rousseau’s “general will” as well as eliminate the boundary between actor and audience. The currently scant literature on the German music festivals of the early nineteenth century—foremost the Rhine music festival—notes their link to ancient Greek models, but makes little mention of French influences.¹⁴ Given the geopolitical situation in the Rhine area during the Napoleonic years, though, it does seem plausible that there would have been a French impetus. Even if this were not the case, it is difficult to discard the direct significance that French models might have had on Wagner’s ideas, given the profound impact of Wagner’s stay in Paris between 1839–42, which, as I have argued elsewhere, must be viewed as the formative experience that triggered his mature project, including the Gesamtkunstwerk, even if it was not until 1849/50 that he came to formulate these ideas forcefully.¹⁵

Turning to Germany, Roberts argues that the country with no political revolution waged its campaign for reform not, as the French had done, in deeds, but in thought. This familiar trope from the early 1800s of Germany as the land of “poets and thinkers”,¹⁶ which later led to Friedrich Meinecke’s distinction between the Staatsnation (“political nation,” namely France) and the Kulturnation (“cultural nation,” namely Germany), actually undermines Roberts’ thesis about the twin roots of the Gesamtkunstwerk.¹⁷ In the absence of a political revolution, German thinkers posited their ideas about social reform in theory, articulated perhaps foremost in the realm of aesthetics, with the argument that it would be the artwork that would have the capacity to change men’s hearts and mold a new society. This flight into the realm of art was as much a reflection of the political impossibility of revolution in the loose conglomerate that was Germany as it was prompted by horror at the brutal realities of the recent upheavals in France. Roberts bases much of his evidence on Matthias Brzoska’s compelling study of the Gesamtkunstwerk concept in France around 1830.¹⁸ However, as Brzoska himself concedes, much of the impetus for these ideas can actually be traced back to German influences. So, I would argue that it is the German aesthetic reaction to modernity in general and the French Revolution in particular, and not so much the French models for communal events, that lie at the heart of the Gesamtkunstwerk project as it came to be formulated. It is precisely the notion that the sociopolitical, and resultant spiritual, problems of modernity can best be resolved in the aesthetic realm that is the German, and not the French, idea. If Wagner did briefly toy with physical revolution in 1848–49, he retreated into aesthetics shortly thereafter and remained true to his German ideological roots for the remainder of his career.

Nevertheless, Roberts’ comprehensive and inclusive study is perhaps the most authoritative to date, which makes all the more interesting what he neglects or to what he pays insufficient attention. Foremost among these is Friedrich Schiller who, as I will argue in the core of this essay, is something like Gesamtkunstwerk’s spiritual godfather as an aesthetic project with sociopolitical consequences. True, Roberts titles one of his subchapters “Aesthetic Education: Schiller,” but this is largely cosmetic, as the discussion of Schiller’s theories spans little more than a single page.¹⁹ Roberts also misses the point, by looking at Schiller’s post-revolutionary writing—especially Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man)—as his contribution to the discourse, with the consequence that while the untranslatable concept of Bildung (human character formation) is addressed, however briefly, Schiller’s vitally important discussion of theater is ignored. Schiller’s theater project actually predates the French Revolution, while his essay on aesthetic education is a reaction to it. So, by his own selective attention to German ideas, Roberts yet again privileges the French Revolution and its consequences. Without wanting to minimize or dismiss the legitimacy of such a contention, I suggest that Schiller’s work prior to the revolution already conveys what I argue is the core complex of issues that the Gesamtkunstwerk, as Wagner formulates it, entails. The French Revolution only intensified for Schiller the role of art and its creator. In other words, th...