The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (review)

Matthew Smith's book testifies to the recent and long overdue resurgence of interest in the idea and history of the total work of art. Despite the centrality of Wagner's theory and practice to any discussion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it is important to recognize that the idea goes back to the German Romantics and the festivals of the French Revolution, which mobilized the arts to celebrate the People, the Republic, and the Nation, and that the history of the total work of art since Wagner extends from the avant-garde movements of the early years of the twentieth century through to Hollywood and contemporary mass culture. Smith has not set out to tackle the still unwritten history of the total work. His aim, rather, is to illuminate this history through the prism of the relationship between the total work, technology, and mass culture, with reference to Wagner (Chapter 2), Germany between the wars (Chapters 3–5), and postwar America (Chapters 6–8). This history is one of discontinuities as much as of continuities. Between Wagner and the Bauhaus and Brecht lies the First World War. Between the German avant-garde and Disneyland lies the Second World War and the Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich.

Smith takes his cue from Theodor Adorno's analysis of Wagner: "The inseparability of Wagner's theory and practice from nineteenth-century mass culture is ultimately a subset of the larger inseparability, ab origine, of modernism from mass culture, a larger inseparability on which Adorno insisted throughout his career" (10). That modern art shares with mass culture a dependence on the market is beyond dispute; its corollary, however, proves to be of greater interest for Smith's purposes. The chapters focused on America demonstrate that the idea of the total work of art is more central to mass culture than has been recognized. In relation to Wagner, however, Adorno's thesis, supplemented by Walter Benjamin—"the total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction" (the title of chapter 1)—suggests a confusing equation, under the one heading of "mechanical reproduction," of industrial production and stage machinery. Wagner was certainly opposed to capitalist production and to an emerging mass culture, but he was much less resistant to the technology of stage production in the service of his vision of the total work of art. If Wagner's need to conceal the mechanics of stage production reflected his hostility to the mechanization of society, Bayreuth's technology was nevertheless intimately tied, as Smith shows, to the heightening of theatrical illusion (31–32), that is, to the search for the auratic as the Other of the disenchanted, mechanized world.

Even if we accept, with Smith, that Wagner was a pioneer in the concealment of the machinery of stage production (46) and the first celebrant—through the electric lighting of the Grail at the Bayreuth premiere of Parsifal—of an emerging society of the spectacle, these observations need to be located within a wider historical context. In fact, the theater reform movement after 1900 was set in motion by Adolphe Appia's experiments with electric lighting, driven by his dissatisfaction with the naturalism of Bayreuth productions. If we want a precursor of the society of the spectacle, surely the contemporary department store is a better candidate or, if we prefer a Wagnerian connection, Ludwig II's Neuschwanstein (the Grail castle, provided with all modern conveniences), fits the bill better, as both Walt Disney and Guy Debord, the theorist of the society of the spectacle, recognized.¹

What Smith in fact brings out in his chapters on the total work of art after the First World War is the importance of media technology to its various realizations. The "total stage" of the Bauhaus, the "total montage" of Brecht's epic theater or Erwin Piscator's productions, and the "total spectacle" of the rebirth of Germany projected in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens shared, for all their radical political differences, a...