'Gesamtkunstwerk'

In the Western world—that is, Europe and the societies formed around its cultures—the performing arts are generally separated into dance, music and singing, and drama.  (The split seems to have occurred during the post-Roman era when theatrical performances essentially died out in Europe.  When they returned in the Middle Ages, dance, music, and drama seem to have become separate forms.)  We tend to keep these separate, only occasionally mixing them in experiments or for special events, but ordinarily, we don’t combine them. 

The division of the arts extends to the performers as well.  The artists began specializing—“dancers,” “actors,” “singers”—until in the middle of the 19th century, the separation was virtually complete.  As a rule, we don’t train our stage performers to be multi-faceted artists. 

(My friend Leonardo Shapiro, whom I’ll mention again later in this discussion, described in an interview what his ideal rep company would be like: the members would be trained to “speak in many languages at once . . . so that this piece is meant to be . . . in music and in movement and in circus and in verse and in theater.  Each of these things isn’t used for decoration but the story jumps from mode to mode, and still moves forward.”)

When we do blend the arts, one or the other dominates the performance.  Consider opera, which employs music/singing and drama (and sometimes also dance)—though through most of its history, the vocal music has been the prime focus.  In musical theater, formerly called “musical comedy,” though the music is important (and the dance increased in significance with Oklahoma! in 1943), it was the drama that usually dominated.

In the East, however, this kind of separation of the arts is less common in the indigenous classical performances.  Indian Kathakali, Japanese Kabuki and Noh, and Chinese (or Beijing) Opera are total works of art, melding dance, music, singing, and acting (as well as acrobatics and martial arts in many cases) into a single, integrated performance form.

In Asia, the performers in these classic forms don’t consider themselves exclusively “actors” or “dancers” or “singers.”  We in the West put them in categories—Kabuki performers are often called “dancers” by Europeans, and Chinese Opera is no more “opera” than Kabuki is (they’re actually related forms)—but in their own cultures, they’re all just “actors.” 

It happens that Noh, Kabuki, Chinese Opera, and Kathakali actors are all also master dancers, singers, martial artists, and acrobats—because their performance forms require them to be so.  (For a  look at how Kabuki actors, for example, are trained, see my article “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010.)  The distinctions we make in the West simply don’t exist.

In the West, when the integration of arts happens, it’s noteworthy.  In India, Japan, and China when it’s seen, it’s traditional.  Western theater history suggests that it may have been that way in classical Europe as well: what we know of Greek theatrical performances, admittedly very little, indicates that classical Greek drama may have looked (and sounded) more like Chinese Opera than a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth.

But the “total work of art” revived as an ideal for at least one important European artists, German opera composer-librettist, theater director, and essayist and writer Richard Wagner (1813-83).  He wrote in passing of das Gesamtkunstwerk (which he spelled Gesammtkunstwerk) in two essays, “The Artwork of the Future” (“Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft”) and “Art and Revolution” (“Die Kunst und die Revolution”), both first published in 1849. 

In “The Artwork of the Future,” Wagner described the Gesamtkunstwerk as “The great total work of art, which has to combine all forms of art . . . .”  This is the base definition of Gesamtkunstwerk as it’s generally understood in Western art, especially theater—but it requires some discussion.  By “all forms of art,” Wagner assumed the arts of the 19th-century stage, namely  poetry (that is, the text, language), orchestral music and singing, dance, pantomime (or acting), architecture (three-dimensional scenery), and painting (two-dimensional painted scenery, or flats).

First, let me acknowledge that I’ve provided my own translation of Wagner’s German because the standard English version, first published in 1895 by William Ashton Ellis (1852-1919), is a little stiff.  For instance, Ellis renders Gesamtkunstwerk as “United Art-work.”  The most common English translation of the German word is “total work of art,” but there are other possibilities: “ideal work of art,” “universal artwork,” “synthesis of the arts,” “comprehensive artwork,” or “all-embracing art form.” 

Each of these phrases denotes some aspect of the German word but has a slightly different connotation from any of the others—and from Wagner’s original word.  I think it’ll be easier, for this discussion, if I stick with the German word with all its implications.  (Like Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt [defamiliarizing effect], Gesamtkunstwerk has been accepted into English as part of the jargon of theater aesthetics.)

Second, I should acknowledge that Gesamtkunstwerk originally referred to Wagner’s ideal operatic production.  It’s been adopted by opera’s cousin, drama, and is part of the discussion of the aesthetics of theater since at least the middle of the 20th century.  In the last century, some writers about architecture, film, and other media have applied the term to their fields as well.  For this examination, I’ll confine its use to theater.

Now for a little language lesson, German edition.  Bear with me.  In German, gesamt is a polysemous word: it can mean ‘total’ or ‘whole’ or ‘entire’; but it can also mean ‘unified’ or ‘united’ or ‘integrated.’  (The verb sammeln means ‘to collect,’ ‘to gather,’ or ‘to assemble’; zusammen means ‘together’ or ‘collectively.’  Kunstwerk, incidentally, simply means “artwork” or “work of art”: Kunst is ‘art’ and Werk is ‘work’; Germans, as Mark Twain observed, like to stick words together to make long compound words.)  So here’s the first variation in the term’s application.

In English, when someone speaks of a “total work of art,” the implication can be, and usually is, that the piece encompasses many art forms.  If we’re talking about theater today, then we imagine a performance that includes text, acting, dance, singing, music, acrobatics and circus arts, lighting and sound effects, visual arts (scenography, costuming, and make-up), technology such as computer imagery, electronic effects such as sampling, holography, television and video, and perhaps many other arts and techniques. 

From Wagner’s thumbnail definition—and that’s really the only place he says what Gesamtkunstwerk is—this picture seems correct.  Lots and lots of sensory in-put from the stage and the entire performance venue.  And it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

Just a little short-sighted.  Because, remembering that Wagner was a stage director for both opera and drama, we’re talking about an artist who needs to be in control.  So it’s not enough that he has all these arts in his show.  They must be ‘unified’ or ‘integrated.’  This is where the “synthesis of the arts” sense comes in. 

All those different arts and technologies (and, no, Wagner wasn’t thinking in 1849 of all that tech because it didn’t exist then—but it does now, so the implication of the word expands to cover 21st-century applications) have to be coordinated to achieve the director’s artistic vision for the production.  (I’ll talk some later about what happens when it’s not the director who’s got the reins of the amalgamation.)  In Wagner’s ideal Gesamtkunstwerk, all the allied arts incorporated in the show were subordinated to the drama—which was heavily reliant on language or text.

So now there are two quasi-competing notions of what a Gesamtkunstwerk stage production is.  Wagner never really addressed this dichotomy and there are some directors who understand the concept to mean that all the arts that are brought into the production will operate independently and comment on one another and generate counterpoint.  My friend Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve written several times on Rick On Theater, thought this.  In his creation of Strangers (see my two-part post published on 3 and 6 March 2014), he called the technique “Tracks.”

Others, taking their lead from Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), want the whole thing to work together like a gigantic artistic machine, with all the parts meshing.  Meyerhold wrote in 1930:

There was a time when Wagner’s idea of a new theatre which would be a dramatic synthesis of words, music, lighting, rhythmical movement and all the magic of the plastic parts was regarded as purely utopian.  Now we can see that this is exactly what a production should be: we should employ all the elements which the other arts have to offer and fuse them to produce a concerted effect on the audience.

I’m convinced that Wagner intended gesamt to include ‘unified’ and ‘coordinated’ in its meaning.

(One more word on this dichotomy: there are several famous theater artists who reject the whole idea of Gesamtkunstwerk and aim for something more in the realm of the “poor theater” of Jerzy Grotowski, 1933-99, who eschewed all spectacle for his theater.  

(Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956, saw the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk as a “muddle.”  He didn’t reject the presence of the allied arts, but he merely demanded that in his Epic Theater, the director practice “a radical separation of the elements. . . .  Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another” [italics original].)

Outside the classic Asian forms I mentioned at the top of this article, very few producers are making modern Gesamtkunstwerk theater in the West.  The reason is principally money: the cost of a total-theater production as Wagner envisioned it would be astronomical.  Wagner, of course, was working in a subsidized 19th-century theater—but that world is gone now (and never really existed in the U.S.)

Other deterrents are size—for a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a producer’d need a huge theater with state-of-the-art, even futuristic facilities, or a prepared outdoor site.  Those are rare—if you can even find or arrange for one—and expensive.  And the coordination it would take to put together such an endeavor would also be monumental; I can’t even imagine the staff that would be necessary to keep all the (temperamental, artistic) balls in the air! 

So directors and producers interested in Wagner’s vision always end up settling for experiments that approximate a Gesamtkunstwerk: a show incorporating a number of arts—theater arts and non-theater arts—to the extent they can raise money for and recruit artists to collaborate on them. 

That latter consideration is no small issue, by the way.  Leonardo Shapiro was able to convince some astounding artists to work with him on projects—jazz percussionist Max Roach, saxophonist Gretchen Langheld, “improvisational violinist” and composer Julie Lyonn Lieberman, dancers Kei Takei and Eiko and Koma, visual artists David Wojnarowicz and Polly Walker, sculptor Leonid Sokov, and videographer Maria Venuto, among others—but that was largely due to Shapiro’s personal persuasiveness and the fact that in his productions, collaborators were given extraordinary artistic freedom and participation in the development of the production concept.  (Wagner would likely have never stood for such an arrangement.)

Now, Wagner, as I suggested earlier, was imagining a theater in which the complexities of the Gesamtkunstwerk were all selected, designed, conceived, and blended together in production by the director.  Playwright Paula Vogel characterized this system as

a director-run process modeled on [George II,] the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen [1826-1914], the German Duke who reigned not only over his duchy but as the artistic director of the Meininger players, and who exacted complete obedience and exercised rigid authority over his actors and designers, very much in the mold of Wagner.  Wagner insisted that the director, as the visionary genius, should have control over all artistic functions in the theatre as a synthesizing force. 

What I had in mind when I raised the notion of a total-theater work where somebody other than the director was in charge was something along the lines of Tennessee Williams’s (1911-83) “Plastic Theater,” about which I blogged on 9 May 2012 (“‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater”).  There’s a connection between Williams’s concept and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, except Wagner was talking about the director and production, while Williams pushed the idea back to the playwright and the creation of the text. 

Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk refers to the integrated production with all the artistic elements working together under one, ruling vision (that is, the director’s concept).  Williams’s idea also means employing all the available aspects of stage art, but the playwright was referring to writing scripts that draw on all the theater arts—and can’t be staged successfully without employing them. 

Williams wanted all the so-called production elements traditionally added by the director and designers to be aspects of the script and part of the playwright’s creative process.  Instead of merely composing the text of a play and then turning it over to a director and his team of theater artists who will add the non-verbal elements that turn a play into a theatrical experience, Williams envisioned a theater which begins with the playwrights who create the theatrical experience in the script because they aren’t just composing words, but theatrical images.  Here’s an example of how I see these competing concepts working:

Imagine a modern production of Hamlet, say Michael Chekhov’s expressionistic one in November 1924 (see part 2 of my profile of Michael Chekhov, posted on 5 November 2019).  It would need to be a Gesamtkunstwerk, with Chekhov (1891-1955) coordinating all the elements of his remarkable production—stylized acting, scenic design, costumes, make-up, sound, music—to serve his vision. 

But Shakespeare’s play is not Plastic Theatre since it doesn’t require anything but language and good acting to work.  Sets, costumes, and other effects are all unnecessary since Shakespeare didn’t write for their use.  Nothing in Hamlet requires visual or aural imagery—except what the poetry conjures up in a viewer’s own mind.  You can do “Alas, poor Yorrick” without the skull and, God knows, the play’s been done in modern clothes and even jeans and T-shirts.

Williams’s Summer and Smoke (1948), on the other hand, must have the visual image of the scenic triptych to work.  The two open-sided houses on either side of the fountain with the stone angel, the anatomy chart, the fireworks, and so on, are all images Williams wove into the text.  They have meaning independent of the words, which don’t communicate as clearly without them.  That’s Plastic.

By extension, Richard Kostelanetz in Theatre of Mixed Means (RK Editions, 1980) and Bonnie Marranca in Theatre of Images (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) wrote about theater which went beyond the stage arts to incorporate non-theatrical arts and technology into performances.  Unlike Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, though, these later notions don’t require that all the various elements “coordinate.” 

The Post-Modern theater which was born in the second half of the 20th century mostly used the different aspects of production to speak independently of one another, complementing, counterpointing, or commenting on one another, but not necessarily “coordinating.”  As Kostelanetz (b. 1940), a writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields, including contemporary art and literature, put it: “the components generally function nonsynchronously, or independently of each other, and each medium is used for its own possibilities.”

This all, of course, leads to Happenings and performance art, as well as the theaters of Robert Wilson (b. 1941), Richard Foreman (b. 1937), Robert Lepage (b. 1957), Wooster Group, the Théâtre de Complicité (later called just Complicité), and my friend Shapiro, among others.  This stuff isn’t exactly gesamt, in Wagner’s sense, but it is “plastic,” in Williams’s. 

To carry on the Hamlet allusion, Charles Marowitz’s (1932-2014) Hamlet collage (first staged in 1964, but continually revised over the decades) used visual stimuli independently of the text in order to point viewers in different directions.  The characters appearances and actions were often logically unrelated to what they were saying. 

Wagner felt that Aeschylus’ tragedies were the finest models in Western performance of the total synthesis of the arts.  This synthesis has been diminished since the classic period, he felt, and during the rest of the history of Western culture, up to his day (and beyond, I might add), the arts had drifted further and further apart. 

But there are always those who envision a modern Gesamtkunstwerk and keep trying to stage one.  Now and then, someone does—or comes damn close.  But it largely remains a theater person’s castle in the air, something to reach for but never attain.

On the other hand, maybe it should be the exceptional happening and not the rule.  Consider the effect a true Gesamtkunstwerk could have on the viewer—from all that stimulation.  We’d be exhausted!  Maybe we’re better off if it remains the rara avis and not the commonplace.  Then, when we do get to see one, we can revel in its specialness, like the unicorn it is.