Gesamtkunstwerk

Festspielhaus at Bayreuth in 1882

This summer I’m embarking on travel with, I admit, an obsessive pursuit of German opera. I have the chance to visit, if briefly, some of the big summer festivals. Munich, Berlin, and the festival of festivals, Bayreuth.

Wagner’s theater, which is only used for his operas, isn’t even called an opera house. It’s a festival house (Festspielhaus). I’ve passed through sleepy Bayreuth in the off season, but this year I’m finally able to go and hear for myself, in that fabled space, creations that the composer hoped would be the artwork of the future.

Notwithstanding Mark Twain’s bon mot — “Wagner is better than he sounds” — a lot of you are allergic to the composer’s music. This post isn’t an attempt to convert you, nor is it a place for me to go into detail about the ways in which Wagner exasperates even people who find his works among the great musical achievements of the 19th century.

Even if you’ve never sat through six hours of Twilight of the Gods or a mere two and a half of Das Rheingold,  you’re likely to know — and maybe even use — the term Gesamtkunstwerk (the “total work of art”), which Wagner made famous when he wrote of his theatrical ambitions to combine all the arts into one.

Or something like that. I’m never exactly sure as to what Wagner meant, and how that ambition was worked out in his operas.

As a refresher, I’d been rereading some of Matthew Wilson Smith’s excellent The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace as part of my travel prep, when I came upon a recent New Yorker essay by D.T. Max on  the internet phenomenon SKAM Austin, an American version of a Norwegian internet phenomenon,  SKAM (“shame”).

SKAM Austin is a teen drama — that part is familiar enough — but delivered in daily snippets over the internet. The characters even have Facebook pages. If you know girls between the ages of 16 and 18 (the target audience) you can ask them what they think of SKAM Austin’s depiction of high-school life.

By the way, Wagner’s opera Siegfried is totally a teen drama.

Max’s essay reminds us that teenagers spend up to nine hours a day online, and that they watch a lot less TV than their parents did. Which partly explains the uncontrollable explosion of online series and programs: No TV critic can review everything because no TV critic could possibly see everything.

The New Yorker essay asks if “these seemingly disparate activities and digital platforms could be marshalled into a single narrative — a Gesamtkunstwerk for the Internet age.” There is no gesamt of home media, at least not as there was in the pre-cable days of my seven-channel television wonderland. We’re already postnetwork culture.

Who talks of things being gesamt these days? What’s total, anyway?

We’ve had total war (a coinage that dates to Von Clausewitz’s posthumous On War, published in 1832) and The Total Woman (a grisly celebration of female marital subservience that became a best-seller in 1974).

And there’s General Mills’s breakfast cereal Total, marketed with the confident, worry-producing query “Are you getting 100 percent?”

Wagner’s achievement has had too many complicating overtones since his death in 1883. It can be hard to hear the music for the noise.  So it’s puzzling to see the word gesamt drift into modern Anglophone usage without further explanation, as if anybody who reads the newspaper recognizes it.

We already use lots of words and expressions that are about being about everything. Some are scientific, some have language parents, some feel completely made up.

There’s GUT (grand unified theory), the whole kit and caboodle (an expression allegedly from a Dutch phrase meant to describe one’s moveable property), the whole ball of wax  (the origins of which provoke hearty debate), or the whole nine yards (go ahead and invent an origin; it’ll be as good as anyone else’s explanation).

Add to this hodge-podge the German gesamt and you’ve got a bucket of terms that might just point to the folly of trying to make all the pieces of something — and particularly something theatrical and artistically ambitious — hold together.

In the achronological flatness of late modernity, Wagner‘s operas butt up against and just miss out on SKAM Austin and a thousand other internet narrative projects.

I won’t be surprised, though, if a production of Wagner’s Ring is soon set in a high school, bristling with digital messaging, and delivered piecemeal, in what looks like theatrical live time, to our smartphones.

Meanwhile, we can watch for the appearance of Wagner’s term, which may be enjoying a new life beyond operatic theorizing as artists, architects, and filmmakers — practitioners whose mediums Wagner would have brought within his embrace — find new ways to think about how art — or anything else — might be made total, right here, right now.