The Total Work of 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.

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.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables

Foreword
Celia Applegate

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Margaret Eleanor Menninger

PART I: FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 1. The Play’s the Thing: Schiller, Wagner, and Gesamtkunstwerk
Nicholas Vazsonyi

Chapter 2. From the Gesamtkunstwerk to the Music Drama
Sanna Pederson

Chapter 3. Richard Wagner, Parsifal, and the Pursuit of Gesamtkunstwerk
Anthony J. Steinhoff

PART II: ARTICULATIONS

Chapter 4. Epic Gesamtkunstwerk
Joy H. Calico

Chapter 5. Gesamtkunstwerk, Gestaltung, and the Bauhaus Stage
Melissa Trimingham

Chapter 6. Exposing the Political Gesamtkunstwerk: Hanns Eisler’s Nuit et Brouillard
Amy Lynn Wlodarski

Chapter 7. Reconciling the “Three Graceful Hellenic Sisters”: Wagner, Dance, and “Song-Ballets”, Set to Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder
Wayne Heisler, Jr.

PART III: INSPIRATIONS

Chapter 8. The “Translucent (Not: Transparent)” Gesamtglaswerk
Jenny Anger

Chapter 9. Quiet Audience, Roaring Crowd: The Aesthetics of Sound and the Traces of Bayreuth in Kuhle Wampe and Triumph of the Will
Theodore F. Rippey

Chapter 10. The Will to Heal: Gesamtkunstwerk and Memorial Music since 1945
Julia Goodwin and Margaret Eleanor Menninger

Chapter 11. Consuming Voices: Musical Film and the Gesamtkunstwerk of Mass Culture
David Imhoof

Afterword: Gesamtkunstwerk as Epistemic Space
Kevin S. Amidon

Bibliography
Index