Modernism after Wagner (review)

The reader of this book is best served by ignoring its vexing title. After all, how much modernism came before Wagner? I initially decided that the author would investigate modernism's debt to Wagner instead, so that "after" might mean "in the style of" or "in response to," but Wagner disappeared from the book for entire chapters at a time. I then thought that the author was using "Wagner" to stand in for the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a notion that, she rightly notes, is most often associated with, even if it did not originate with, Wagner. But despite marketing efforts to the contrary, the Gesamtkunstwerk is not really the focus of this study, either. (The book has even been hailed as "the first critical history of Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its impact on European modernism" by the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture; those who have read Matthew Wilson Smith's masterful The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace [Routledge, 2007], which I reviewed in Modern Drama 51.1, will beg to differ.) That lengthy passages and entire chapters of this book were published elsewhere at various times between 1997 and 2006 exacerbated my disorientation; aside from the introductory and concluding chapters, there is little effort to integrate the competing theses and themes of those disparate parts into a coherent whole.

Koss's real focus is a history of (mostly German) theories of spectatorship. Not surprisingly, given her training as a historian of architecture, she provides such a history very well in chapters centred on several German theatres: Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth in the 1870s, the Artists' Colony in Darmstadt in 1901, the Prinzregententheater in Munich in 1899, and the Munich Artists' Theatre in 1908. In each case, she builds a persuasive argument for these theatres as physical manifestations of their creators' visions for audience experience.

Chapters less grounded in architecture are less compelling, perhaps due to the ambitious nature of Koss's interdisciplinary project. Even in her otherwise well-researched chapters on Wagner, the occasional slip will give musicians pause: for example, she refers to all of Wagner's operas (even his first, Die Feen) as music dramas, when, in fact, that designation is generally reserved for works composed after Lohengrin, and the distinction is crucial to the definition of Gesamtkunstwerk. In chapter six, "The Specter of Cinema," she begins with an insightful argument linking George Fuchs's Artists' Theatre to cinema houses via a "discourse of flatness" (191 and elsewhere) amid the rising popularity of film. A lengthy detour in the middle of this chapter - an investigation of the constructed film spectator as female and what that meant for advertising and consumption - does not pay dividends, however, because it is not integrated effectively into Koss's analysis. (Shelley Stamp's iconic study Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon [2000] would have been very useful for this argument.) Chapter seven, "Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls," was first published in 2003 in the Art Bulletin, which may explain the following assertion: "The study of theater is often impeded by the nature of the medium: notoriously difficult to document and theoretically unruly, it falls easily between disciplines while claiming to incorporate them all" (207). Revising this essay for a book aimed at an interdisciplinary readership, Koss could have deployed the rich body of theory and methodology that theatre and performance studies have devised to address these very issues. It would have been particularly valuable to see her engage with Smith's chapter, "Total Machine: The Bauhaus Theatre"; while his book is listed in her bibliography, I did not see it cited in the footnotes.

In the final chapter, "Invisible Wagner," Koss returns to the composer via two philosophers: she highlights the fact that modernism's understanding of Wagner was far more indebted to Nietzsche's interpretation of him than to the composer himself; and she takes Adorno to task for the ahistorical approach to the composer...