The two years between his failed revolutionary attempts and the beginning of his serious work on the Nibelung material were pivotal ones for Wagner. He wrote three very famous essays during this time, two in 1849 alone: Die Kunst und die Revolution (July 1849), and Das
Kunstwerk der Zukunft (November 1849). The third, Oper und Drama, was published in January 1851, and is by far the longest. A fourth essay arguably belongs in this group, A Communication to my Friends (1851), which originally appeared as a sort of prolog to the Textbücher (a.k.a.
libretti; Wagner preferred the former term) (Brown 28). These four essays together total over 1,000 pages, which is somewhat surprising, since Wagner reportedly did not enjoy academic (essay) writing (Brown 29). However, they represent a time of pivotal intellectual development for Wagner and are essential for any discussion of the Ring cycle, and, more importantly for this dissertation, the term Gesamtkunstwerk.
Wagner’s Essays: Die Kunst und die Revolution
Having fled Dresden, first for Paris and the Zurich, in late May 1949, Wagner’s pen was busy writing Die Kunst und die Revolution, which he finished in July 1949. Like much of his
philosophical writings, this essay has what Brown calls “tripartite form,” being laid out in three parts. Brown notes that there is an
‘historical’ section, looking back to the ‘Golden Age’ of Greek tragic drama . . . a section on the decline of art and culture since that pinnacle . . . finally a utopian vision of a new era when society will once more accord the significance to art which is its due – not by
imitating or replicating the Greeks, but by building on their outstanding features. (Brown, 33)
Wagner plays rather fast and loose with historical fact, however. In all four essays he continually holds up the ancient Greeks as the pinnacle of the arts, and as a model in particular for drama to which he and all writer-artists should aspire—not an uncommon view among classically
educated Europeans of his day. The central point of the essay is that Wagner sees the negative decline of art (since the Greeks) as resulting from fragmentation—what Brown describes as “a falling away from the Greek idea of integration of music, poetry, and dance.” It was the integration of these separate arts that Wagner sees in Greek art and which he holds up as the ideal, “an integrated total work of art, in which the Volk participated, and which Wagner here terms Gesamtkunstwerk” (Brown, 34).
In addition to illuminating Wagner’s preoccupation with the integration of arts and the Greek tradition, Art and Revolution also displays a marked concern with the connection between art and profit. In this line of thinking, Wagner is arguing for “revolution” in the art world—
freeing art from reliance on profit. Dan Venning notes:
In “Art and Revolution” (1849), an essay that is simultaneously leftist and elitist, Wagner explains that modern, mid-19th-century “art,” whether theatre, literature, or music, is debased and not really art at all because it is tied to the commercial viability of the work through ticket sales and must thus cater to the unrefined tastes of the general public.13 Wagner wants to create art for art’s sake and calls for art’s economic freedom. Venning wryly suggests that Wagner may not have felt so strongly on this point had it not been for the relatively
13 Venning, Dan. “Game of Thrones as Gesamtkunstwerk: Adapting Shakespeare and Wagner.” Vying for the Iron Throne: Essays on Power, Gender, Death and Performance in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Edited by Lindsey Mantoan and Sara Brady, McFarland & Co, 2018, pg. 150.
poor early receptions of his The Flying Dutchman (1843) and Tannhäuser (1845). But Wagner makes his point by arguing that it is precisely this reliance on profit that tethers art to
conventional attitudes and keeps it from reaching its full, integrated, potential, as exemplified by the Greeks. Venning notes that this is the crucial point for Wagner’s aims: “In ‘Art and
Revolution,’ Wagner argues that by separating art from business, whether through patronage or state subsidy, a more authentic art; along the lines of that experience by the ancient Greeks, could be achieved” (Venning, 150-1).
It is clear that Wagner’s experience with an actual revolution two months prior informed his thinking at this stage, although he now positions himself as arguing for artistic rather than political revolution. All the same, he argues at some length for the emancipation of humanity that would result from freeing art from the confines of concern with financial gain. Spencer and Millington emphasize that, in Wagner’s view, it is humanity that will benefit from this new artistic freedom. In Die Kunst und die Revolution Wagner
addressed himself to the fundamental questions of the social role of art, which most composers, whether successful or unsuccessful with their publics, had been content to ignore. Art and Revolution was outspoken and polemical, advocating an “art-work of the future” in which emancipated humanity would express itself through artistic structures that had at last been divorced from capitalist speculation and profit-making. (Letters 157) Koss notes that this essay, as well as his next, The Art-Work of the Future, show aspects of his disappointment following the political failure of the revolution and the political and social hopes he held for its promise (14n50).
Wagner’s Essays: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft
This failure of Wagner’s early revolutionary hopes seems to have precipitated a surge of energy by which Wagner directed his fervor towards the art-world rather than the social or political spheres. Despite this, he still seemed at this point to hope for social change through art. Brown notes this second essay, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849), together with Die Kunst und die Revolution, still holds a large measure of his revolution-minded political and social hopes:
In both these earlier essays, written barely a month or two after Wagner’s own
involvement at the barricades, the ‘utopian’ part of the triadic progression is still clearly linked to a call for a general Revolution, with overtones of political and social liberation at its heart. As a prelude to the re-creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a kind of moral rearmament is suggested. (Brown, 34)
Brown also notes that this essay specifically connects the strictures put on art through the necessity of financial gain with capitalism and that Wagner calls for reform in the form of art – collective art:
‘The Artwork of the Future’ attacks with zest capitalist greed and love of luxury, and points to the remedy once more in terms of the production of an artwork along the lines of the Greek model: this time it is termed ‘the communal artwork of the future’ (‘das gemeinsame Kunstwerk der Zukunft’) in which, as a collective enterprise, the Volk are once more to be involved as key players. (Brown, 34)
By connecting his art ideals with something that will benefit humanity (or at least further his revolutionary ideals), Wagner hoped to bring about social change through art.
This is the context in which Wagner famously coins the word Gesamtkunstwerk14 as shall be discussed in the next section. The word appears in both these essays. Dan Venning describes Wagner’s hopes in “The Art-Work of the Future” as follows:
Wagner . . . sees art as an “immediate vital act” that provides spiritual fulfillment to both individuals and a populace as a whole, though poetry, which inspires love, tone, which connects to a natural wellspring of spiritual energy, and dance and acting, which make these abstract elements corporeal. He describes the orchestral music that accompanied his operas as providing a “loam of endless, universal Feeling”. Wagner spent his career working towards creating such a work with his Ring cycle. (Venning, 150)
The Ring cycle is, of course, his attempt at a Gesamtkunstwerk. Overall, as Juliet Koss notes, these two 1849 Wagner essays, Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future, depict his disappointment following the political failure of the revolution and the failure of his political and social hopes. His hopes for art eventually turn him to the conservative side, while also
paradoxically possessing a somewhat utopian revolutionary nature, though not so utopian as the ideals of Christianity, notes Wagner (Koss, 14n50). The utopian-revolutionary nature of
Wagner’s proposed artwork is, moreover, decidedly intended as a collective or communal experience, which also plays a role in the nature of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Wagner’s Essays: Oper und Drama
The third of Wagner’s four core theoretical essays is also the longest: Oper und Drama. This is perhaps his most famous philosophical-theoretical text, although, interestingly, he makes no mention of the term Gesamtkunstwerk. Dan Venning notes that “In Oper und Drama (1851) [Wagner] builds on ‘The Art-Work of the Future,’ articulating how music and verse can
14 Let any future aspiring scholars learn from my woes and note that, for the purposes of searching an electronic copy of his writings, Wagner spells this word here and elsewhere: Gesammtkunstwerk.
organically intertwine and support one another. He describes these as “melodic moments” that could recur and highlight various elements” (151). Much of the essay (or, rather, book) is dedicated to such musical theoretical explanations.
William Ashton Ellis, the English translator of Wagner’s Gesammelte Schriften in the 1890s and 1900s, clarifies in the preface to his own translation the structure of Wagner’s text.
According to Ellis, in Part I of Oper und Drama Wagner is concerned with the essence of opera, which he considers the female parent to the true poetic aim, that is tone-speech, clarified in Part III. The male parent is drama, which is the subject of Part II.15 Wagner clearly intended Part I to be a criticism of opera as an art genre, while Part II deals with theater, and Part III lays out his own ideas (OD, 3). Ellis also notes that Wagner did not proofread or refine Part III very closely due to timing and various pressures in the publishing process, as well as health concerns, and it is true that the third part does contain the occasional difficult passage where clumsy wording somewhat obscures the meaning (OD, viii). However, according to Wagner’s own introduction, Parts I and III were originally most popular, but later Part II was more widely read and
discussed, which led to the release of a second edition (OD, 4).
The revolutionary undertones noted in the first two essays are still present in certain elements of Oper und Drama, but the style has become more measured and less polemical. Ellis does however note in his preface that in researching the history of the manuscript, he uncovered a private dedication to Theodor Uhlig (who corresponded with and supported Wagner in his writing) in which Wagner hints at the revolutionary undertones in his ideas about art expounded in the text (OD, xi).
15 Wagner, Richard. Opera and Drama. Trans. W. Ashton Ellis. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska Press, 1995.
pg. vii. Further references to are marked in the text with OD and page number.
In the text itself, Wagner takes great pains in endeavoring to elevate the art of poetry to the same level of significance as that he attributes to music. Even in his own introduction to Oper und Drama, Wagner begins with a discussion of art critics, specifically critics of operas. He first points out, reasonably enough, that art (in this case, opera) is charged with producing something, whereas critics merely make criticisms in reaction to art, and can therefore not exist without art.
Art is necessary to the existence of art criticism; but the opposite is not true. He continues to disparage critiques of opera calling for better drama (his definition of which is somewhat unclear; he seems to mean both storylines/plot, and acting) in opera by pointing out that such critiques are aimed at musicians, who produce music, not drama. Opera critics believe that the better opera would result simply by adding in more drama. But this, Wagner says, is an error, an error which moreover offers no practical improvement for opera.
Their error, is, however, more fundamental than it seems. Prevalent throughout the conception, creation, production, performance, and critiquing of opera, the fundamental misconception is “that a means of expression (music) has been made the end [of opera], while the end of expression (the drama) has been made the means” (OD, 17). This readily
understandable error is evident everywhere, but must in fact be expressed in so many words in order to effect change in opera. By way of supporting this claim, Wagner points (rather
inexactly) to the history of opera, to show that poetry (encompassing drama, libretto, and librettist) has long been subservient to music. The drama is merely a scaffold to support and provide occasion and context for musical feats. This is what Wagner wishes his readers first to recognize, and eventually to change. In this way he introduces the first part of Opera and Drama: “Opera and the Nature of Music,” in which he proposes to explore opera thoroughly in order that we may see the depth of this error (prioritizing music so far above drama in the opera).
His ultimate goal for the book is to lift poetry (drama) to equal footing and significance vis a vis music within opera, and thereby to imagine an opera which is the result of a precise and perfect collaboration between music and poetry (OD, 12-20).
This perfect collaboration between music and poetry, is, of course, what Wagner himself attempts in composing the Ring cycle, having first written his own libretti – a practice unheard of at the time, and hardly more common even today. Early in the text, Wagner expounds his ideas of opera, both modern (from Wagner’s perspective) and historical. The main focus here is the great error of those creating opera: that music is prioritized far above drama. Wagner desires that poetry (drama) should be on equal footing with music in opera.
In prioritizing music, Wagner feels that opera composers are simply using music for profit, or else using music to convey much more that music ought to convey, that is, inserting music in the place of words. Moreover, he sees that makers of opera are trying to merge multiple art forms (music, drama, and dance; represented by aria, recitative, and dance tunes) together, but while making all other forms subordinate to music. Wagner then reviews the operas of Christoph Gluck, and later those of Gaspare Spontini, which he praises saying that they help to elevate the composer over the singer, but criticizes that they do not go far enough in also elevating the poet. His discussion continues with analyses of French and Italian opera, and of Mozart, whom he praises (though Mozart did not elevate the poet either, because the right poet was not at hand), and of Gioachino Rossini (OD, 38). He then covers the history of opera as he sees it, with many opinions but few facts. He likes the nationalistic tendency he sees in Carl Maria von Weber, and mocks the French attempts at national opera, explaining why, in his opinion that they fail. The next section considers the relationship of the masses (distinct from the Volk) and of religion to opera. The next considers Ludwig van Beethoven and Hector Berlioz,
indicating that he finds a song without poetry pointless (OD, 70). The next considers what, for Wagner, were modern characteristics in opera, looking at Gluck, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Giacomo Meyerbeer.16 He notes that “we have seen [that] the frivolous Opera-melody––i.e.
that robbed of any real connexion with the poem’s text––grow big with taking up the tune of National-song, and seen it swell into the pretence of Historic Characteristique [sic]” (OD, 91).
Hilda Brown clarifies Wagner’s overall goals in writing Oper und Drama, finding that it still contains “pet themes such as the exemplary quality of Greek tragedy,” but is otherwise made up of primarily new material (Brown, 36). She also notes that is also by far the longest of the four essays. Parts I and II look at the histories of opera and drama, respectively. Wagner reviews German drama from the 1700s onward, but for him stage plays (what he calls word-drama) are a crucial part of his vision. Brown explains: “word-drama is a key building block in his own plans for reform, and his review of what he sees as a major crisis in this genre in his own time and his own country serves as justification for his plans for a complete restructuring of the opera”
(Brown, 36-7). Wagner’s goal, is, of course, to combine the arts of music/opera and drama to make a new and better art-form. Brown clarifies:
According to the imagery used here by Wagner, the process of unification of these two expressive modes of communication, or ‘languages’ – words and music – resembles that of a force of nature: ‘Wortsprache’, as it were, pouring forth in a. torrent (‘Erguß’) to merge with ‘Musik’- or ‘Ton-sprache.’ (Brown, 37)
The third section of the text, in keeping with Wagner’s three-part structure in each of these essays, is the climax of the text. Here, he explains his ideal goal to combine music and drama, though notably without actually using the term Gesamtkunstwerk at any point. Brown shows “the
16 It is in this section that Wagner differentiates between Effekt (something without a cause) and a Wirkung (which has a cause). (See pg. 95.)
progression he had been following through in Part II from myth and music (‘Tonsprache’) and thence to ‘vollendetes Drama (i.e. Gesamtkunstwerk, and ‘Worttonsprache’)” (Brown, 37). Part III, says Brown, “concerns the technical means whereby the new, completely restructured form of opera is to be achieved in musico-dramatic terms. The multifaceted analysis in this crucial section is both challenging and technically exhaustive” (Brown, 38). Brown continues by explaining Wagner’s goals in writing Opera and Drama: “First and foremost is Wagner’s
original, proposed solution to the task of creating fusion and binding together musical, verbal and dramatic ideas and themes: the development of the motivic web, a device which in his hands achieves a level of complexity unparalleled in the history of opera” (Brown, 39). Stewart
Spencer and Barry Millington also note “It is the third and final part of this vast essay . . . that is of most interest, for Wagner develops there the principles underlying his concept of the music drama. Essentially the argument centers on the relationship of poetry to music” (Letters, 158).
Ultimately, Oper und Drama lays out Wagner’s plan for a the integration of music, drama, and other art forms into one great art form, which would be both unified and unifying – a quasi-religious experience for the spectator – uniting Wagner’s own twin roles as both poet and composer.
Wagner’s Essays: Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde
The fourth essay in this series, Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde (generally rendered in English as “A Communication to my Friends”), deserves some slight explanation here as well, being rather less widely known and read than the others. Completed in 1851, the same year as Oper und Drama, the Mittheilung in many ways serves as a summary and as a reflection on the former three, and for this reason, deserves a mention with the rest.