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For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.
“Contributors are deft in negotiating and teasing out how aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk shaped the German cultural landscape and at the same time mirrored the changing nature of politics and consumerism. This collection will prove to be an invaluable resource for historians interested in all aspects of German culture.” • Choice
David Imhoof is Professor of History at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Bloomsbury Press recently published his textbook So, About Modern Europe: A Conversational History from the Enlightenment to the Present. He is the author of Becoming a Nazi Town (Michigan, 2013) and co-editor of a special edition of Colloquia Germanica (2016) on sound studies. He is currently writing a history of the German record industry. Imhoof also directs the Music and Sound Studies Network for the German Studies Association.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Foreword
Celia Applegate
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Margaret Eleanor Menninger
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
Chapter 1. The Play’s the Thing: Schiller, Wagner, and Gesamtkunstwerk
Nicholas Vazsonyi
Chapter 2. From the Gesamtkunstwerk to the Music Drama
Sanna Pederson
Chapter 3. Richard Wagner, Parsifal, and the Pursuit of Gesamtkunstwerk
Anthony J. Steinhoff
PART II: ARTICULATIONS
Chapter 4. Epic Gesamtkunstwerk
Joy H. Calico
Chapter 5. Gesamtkunstwerk, Gestaltung, and the Bauhaus Stage
Melissa Trimingham
Chapter 6. Exposing the Political Gesamtkunstwerk: Hanns Eisler’s Nuit et Brouillard
Amy Lynn Wlodarski
Chapter 7. Reconciling the “Three Graceful Hellenic Sisters”: Wagner, Dance, and “Song-Ballets”, Set to Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder
Wayne Heisler, Jr.
PART III: INSPIRATIONS
Chapter 8. The “Translucent (Not: Transparent)” Gesamtglaswerk
Jenny Anger
Chapter 9. Quiet Audience, Roaring Crowd: The Aesthetics of Sound and the Traces of Bayreuth in Kuhle Wampe and Triumph of the Will
Theodore F. Rippey
Chapter 10. The Will to Heal: Gesamtkunstwerk and Memorial Music since 1945
Julia Goodwin and Margaret Eleanor Menninger
Chapter 11. Consuming Voices: Musical Film and the Gesamtkunstwerk of Mass Culture
David Imhoof
Afterword: Gesamtkunstwerk as Epistemic Space
Kevin S. Amidon
Bibliography
Index