The total work of art — Quaerere Veritatem

Introduction

The term Gesamtkunstwerk — “total work of art” — is usually associated with Wagner and with the idea of bringing several arts together. It is advisable to specify where it comes from, what it meant in its context, and what critique it provoked.

1. The term and its attribution

The term Gesamtkunstwerk was not coined by Wagner, but by the philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff in Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst (“Aesthetics, or the Doctrine of Worldview and Art”, 1827). Wagner used it, although not as his main label. His central formulations appear in three writings — Die Kunst und die Revolution (“Art and Revolution”, 1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (“The Artwork of the Future”, 1849) and Oper und Drama (“Opera and Drama”, 1850–51) — in which he speaks above all of “the artwork of the future” (das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) and of “the common work of art” (das gemeinsame Kunstwerk).

2. The model: Greek tragedy

Wagner’s starting point is a historical diagnosis. In Greek tragedy (Aeschylus) the arts remained united — word, music and dance formed a single act —; after the Greeks they separated and degenerated into isolated genres. The Gesamtkunstwerk is the attempt to rebuild that lost unity.

And it does not consist in “mixing” juxtaposed arts, but in reuniting them in a single drama where each art finds its necessity. Dance contributes the gesture, music the inwardness, poetry the word and the action. Drama is the end, and music and poetry are subordinated to it as means. What Wagner censures in conventional opera is precisely the mere mixture of “effects without causes”: each art seeking its own effect without dramatic necessity.

The writings of 1849 are marked by revolutionary socialism (Feuerbach, Bakunin, Proudhon): the Gesamtkunstwerk is the work of the people (Volk) and not of the individual artist, and it rises against the “art industry”. The Bayreuth festival was his attempt at realization, although in practice it remained controlled by Wagner himself, in tension between the collective ideal and the control of the genius. Moreover, the project is entangled with Wagner’s nationalism and antisemitism and was later appropriated by Nazism.

4. Benjamin’s critique

The decisive critique is that of Walter Benjamin, who coined the expression “aestheticization of politics”: fascism would be the “total work of art” of politics, the fusion of art and politics destined to absorb the individual into a mass spectacle. The Gesamtkunstwerk thus possesses a totalitarian ground: the aspiration to totality can become total control. The concept turns out to be ambivalent — an aesthetic ideal of unity and, at the same time, a risk of totalization that annuls the particular and the free.

The later reception confirms that ambivalence: Nietzsche embraced it in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) only to reject it later, and the concept influenced Symbolism, the Bauhaus and cinema, always reinterpreted.

Conclusion

It can be safely asserted that the term is not original to Wagner, that his ideal is the reconstruction of the unity of the arts on the model of Greek tragedy, and that it carries a totalitarian ground pointed out by Benjamin. It should not be asserted that the Gesamtkunstwerk is a simple “mixture of arts”, nor that Wagner designated it with that term as his main label. The tension between unity and totalization that this concept raises is related to the question of the unity of knowledge, treated in Reality, disciplines, and the unity of knowledge.

References

Primary sources

Wagner, R., Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) and Oper und Drama (1850–51).
Benjamin, W., Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936).
Nietzsche, F., Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872).

Secondary sources

Trahndorff, K. F. E., Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst (1827).