The Total Work of Art

The Total Work of Art PDF Author: David Imhoof
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533185X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
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.

The Total Work of Art

The Total Work of Art PDF Author: David Imhoof
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533185X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book

Book Description
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.

The Total Work of Art

The Total Work of Art PDF Author: Matthew Wilson Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867313
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
The Total Work of Art provides a broad survey that incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. With particular attention to the influence of the Total Work of Art on modern theatre and performance, this brief introduction will also be of interest to students in such fields as film studies, music history, history of art, cultural studies, and modern European literatures.

Tristan's Shadow

Tristan's Shadow PDF Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608227X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.

The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork

The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork PDF Author: Anke K. Finger
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801895821
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" was introduced in the romantic period. It describes the desire for and practice of combining various art forms into a whole, such as performances that combine text, visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. Richard Wagner was one of the early theorists of the concept, inspiring many modernist artists; yet, due to his ideological significance for the Third Reich, the concept has frequently been associated with totalitarianism since the Second World War. Nonetheless, artistic practice has continued to incorporate all-inclusive tendencies, even while avoiding the term “total artwork.” The contributors to this volume challenge us to think again about the total artwork, daring to suggest that it is alive and well, that it informs current art in ways that are deep, meaningful, contentious, and provocative. The essays come from authors steeped in literary culture, the world of art, philosophy, and music theory. Such diverse perspectives can only stimulate debate in the academy and beyond about the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk and open up paths that may be followed in its future.

The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

The Total Work of Art in European Modernism PDF Author: David Roberts
Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
ISBN: 0801460972
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

The Total Work of Art

The Total Work of Art PDF Author: Matthew Wilson Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867321
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This wide-ranging and topical survey incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. Beautifully illustrated, it pays particular attention to the influence of the Total Work of Art on modern theatre and performance.

The Gesamtkunstwerk in Design and Architecture

The Gesamtkunstwerk in Design and Architecture PDF Author: Anders V. Munch
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
ISBN: 8772194650
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The history of modern design and architecture has seen many attempts to embrace and merge different art forms, and to bring art into the framing of everyday life and the organisation of modern society, in a process understood as total design or total architecture. These attempts were historically based on the romanticist idea of merging all art forms into a uniting and transgressing work of art, mostly associated with – but certainly not limited to – Richard Wagner’s theoretical writings and musical dramas. This utopian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Work of Art, was intended both to bring unity to the people and to bring art into the everyday life of their homes, as well as into factories, cities and even modern media. As a result, the experiments ranged from music, poetry and drama to architecture, design, visual communication and city-planning. These ideas of merging art forms into more immersive and transgressive installations or design interventions to change everyday life are widespread today, but their complex and often problematic roots are mostly ignored. Design and architecture have delivered some of the broadest and most influential experiments with the Gesamtkunstwerk, from garden cities for workers and corporate identity design to the German AEG corporation.

The Gesamtkunstwerk As a Synergy of the Arts

The Gesamtkunstwerk As a Synergy of the Arts PDF Author: Massimo Fusillo
Publisher: P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales
ISBN: 9782807616172
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Conceived by Wagner as a way to recover the synthesis of arts at the core of the Greek tragedy, the Gesamtkunstwerk played a big role in post-Romantic aesthetics. This book revisits the "total work of art" as a variation of intermediality that captures the digital age's principle of open textuality through complex interplay and synergy of media.

The Quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner

The Quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner PDF Author: Hilda Meldrum Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199325448
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Gesamtkunstwerk ('total work of art'), once a key concept in Wagner studies, has become problematic. This book sheds light on this conundrum by first tracing the development of the concept in the 19th century through selected examples, some of which include combinations of different art forms. It then focuses on the culmination of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Wagner's theories and in the practice of his late music dramas, of which Der Ring des Nibelungen is the most complete representation. Finally, the book contrasts the view of the Ring as a fusion of dramatic text and music with the 20th century trend towards Deconstruction in Wagnerian productions and the importance of Régie. Against this trend a case is made here for a fresh critical approach and a reconsideration of the nature and basis for the fundamental unity which has hitherto been widely perceived in Wagner's Ring. Approaches through Leitmotiv alone are no longer acceptable. However, in conjunction with another principle, Moment, which Wagner insisted on combining with Motive, these can be ingeniously 'staged' and steered to dramatic ends by means of musical dynamics and expressive devices such as accumulation. Analysis of the two Erda scenes demonstrates how this complex combination of resources acts as a powerful means of fusion of the musical and dramatic elements in the Ring and confirms its status as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Richard Wagner's Prose Works V1: The Artwork of the Future (1895)

Richard Wagner's Prose Works V1: The Artwork of the Future (1895) PDF Author: Richard Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781436594134
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.