Gesamtkunstwerk
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Gesamtkunstwerk ("total," "integrated," or "complete artwork") is a German term coined by the German opera composer Richard Wagner (who first used the term in his 1849 essay Art and Revolution).
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[edit] Wagner's intention
Wagner used the term to refer to a performance which synthesised the three performative arts of music, poetry, and dance or mime, and the three plastic arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The Gesamtkunstwerk would be the clearest and most profound expression of a folk tale, though abstracted from its nationalist particulars to a universal humanist fable.
Wagner felt that the Greek Tragedies of Aeschylus had been the finest (though still flawed) examples so far of total artistic synthesis, but that this synthesis had subsequently been corrupted by Euripides. For the rest of human history up to the present day (i.e. 1850), the arts had drifted further and further apart, resulting in such 'monstrosities' as Grand opera. Wagner felt that such works celebrated bravura singing, sensational stage effects, and meaningless plots.
[edit] Before Wagner
Some elements of opera reform, seeking a more 'classical' formula, had begun at the end of the 18th century. After the lengthy domination of opera seria, and the aria da capo, a movement began to advance the librettist and the composer in relation to the singers, and to return the drama to a more intense and less moralistic focus. This movement, "reform opera" is primarily associated with Christoph Wilibald Gluck and Ranieri de' Calzabigi. The themes in the operas produced by Gluck's collaborations with Calzabigi continue throughout the operas of Carl Maria von Weber, until Wagner, rejecting both the Italian bel canto tradition and the French "spectacle opera", developed his union of music, drama, theatrical effects, and occasionally dance. However these trends had developed fortuitously, rather than in response to a specific philosophy of art; Wagner, who recognised the reforms of Gluck and admired the works of Weber, wished to consoldiate his view, originally, as part of his radical social and political views of the late 1840s.
[edit] Other artistic uses of the term
Paul Valery[1]argued that museums might be examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as they combined both the visual arts being displayed, constant background music, the design of the building and the presentation of the works of art, and the necessary ambience of the public place in which the viewer found themselves.
[edit] References
- ^ Valery, Paul. The Collected Works of Paul Valery: Degas, Manet, Morisot (Collected Works of Paul Valery, Degas, Manet, Morisot). Princeton Univ Pr. ISBN 0-691-09839-5.
[edit] See also
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