The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, and: Modernism after Wagner (review)

For those who prefer to think of Richard Wagner as the embodiment of proto-fascism, as Hitler's favorite composer, and as the spiritual progenitor of the Holocaust, two recent books will serve to complicate that image considerably. They are quite different from each other, have different objectives, different reach, and yet both have Wagner as their starting point and both intersect at Bauhaus on the eve of the National Socialist takeover in Germany.

Matthew Smith is interested in the concept and fate of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "Total Work of Art." Most commonly associated with Wagner and his revolutionary essays from 1849–50, the term was not coined by him, but appeared a couple of decades earlier. Nevertheless, in part because of Wagner's uncanny knack of making himself visible, the term has become synonymous with his project of creating a new form of "opera"—a term and genre he rejected completely—which would somehow unify all the arts into a work of greater coherence and power than any mere opera had ever been. Wagner specifically thought of reuniting the so-called "sister arts," meaning dance, poetry and music, as exemplified by ancient Greek drama. But it soon became clear that he had a keen interest in making all the arts, including the visual and plastic ones, serve his greater purpose. All the stranger then, that Wagner only used the term Gesamtkunstwerk five times and never to refer to a completed work of his own.

Nevertheless, as so much else to do with Wagner, the term and the idea stuck. Not only that, it captured the imagination of his contemporaries and those who came after. For Matthew Smith, following that trail as far as possible has yielded an absolutely fascinating study. Wisely, however, Smith begins with Friedrich Schiller, whose critical response to modernity in the eighteenth century privileged drama as the genre, and the theater as the institution, best placed to convey to an audience the crisis of modernity and the possibilities of resistance. The Gesamtkunstwerk, though not part of Schiller's idea, comes directly from his ruminations on the inherent power of the theater to effect political and social change.

From its inception, the Gesamtkunstwerk has been a utopian project with considerable political stakes; a project that aspired to liberate humanity from the yokes of commerce and industrialization, and to restore a holistic and therapeutic community, based in part on an idealized vision of ancient Greece. Although he gave up on many aspects of his original project, Wagner nevertheless managed to build his own, specially designed, festival theater in Bayreuth, a pristine location to which the devoted would make and have made an annual pilgrimage since its opening in 1876, exclusively to experience Wagner.

The Gesamtkunstwerk is thus both a response to modernity, and, like modernity itself, a project in the process of becoming. In a series of case studies, Matthew Smith takes us on a journey through several incarnations of the seemingly persistent notion that the ideal work of art will be a "total" fusion of all the arts. After an excellent introduction to Wagner's ideas, Smith starts with the Bauhaus theater, then moves on to Bertolt Brecht's aesthetics, Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film, Walt Disney's theme parks, Andy Warhol's "factory," and ends with experiments in virtual reality.

As he moves from one case study to the next, issues that link these contradictory moments become apparent. Starting with Wagner himself, Smith notes perceptively that, despite his rhetorical opposition to the effects of modernity, especially industrialization and commercialization, Wagner's Bayreuth enterprise is dependent on and invested in its tenets, whether it be the railway system to transport audiences from the "decadent" metropolis to his idyllic getaway, or the concealed deployment of advanced mechanical and lighting devices in...