Gesamtkunstwerk: Two Looks

by Jaren Feeley

Tristan und Isolde Premiere

1865, Munich, Germany

Two lie already dead on the rocky grey ground, as a third gives a death rattle and slumps into the background. Opposite the scene, spectators sit in uncommon darkness, fully absorbed. Airborne harmonies twist into knots as a bearded King walks to center stage: “O fraud and deception! Tristan, where are you?” Tristan, of course, is dead. His anguished lover Isolde begins to sing, slowly, almost religiously, and as her words conjure images of ecstatic love, a tide of music begins to carry the audience away.

Parade Premiere

1917, Paris, France

Two acrobats, a Chinese magician, and an American schoolgirl twirl around in circles to the sound of a bright little orchestra, which is churning out, over and over again, a three-note melody. The music accelerates, coming now in sharp angles, and the dancers twirl with abandon. In the background, a horse subtly clops to the beat. Suddenly, the music ceases—the dancers freeze in positions—and two 10-foot tall cube-creatures, half-human half-cardboard, hobble ponderously into their midst.

One may not expect it, but these two wildly different scenes actually share a fundamental point of reference—an artistic concept which has been the source of raging debates in aesthetics and politics for over a hundred years. This is the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The revolutionary conception of composer Richard Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk was to be a large-scale music drama which would synergize the scattered artistic disciplines (e.g. music, poetry, dance) while engaging deeply with notions of spectatorship and community—ultimately creating an overwhelmingly powerful aesthetic that served to both emancipate and unite the audience. This essay explores the grand ambitions of the Gesamtkunstwerk through an illuminating juxtaposition: Wagner’s archetypal music drama Tristan und Isolde against composer Erik Satie’s collaborative ballet Parade. These particular pieces have intricate links to the aesthetic and political concerns of their times, and I will investigate how these cultural-historical contexts contributed to their differing conceptions of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Uniting the Arts and the Audience

In the years after Tristan und Isolde’s 1865 premiere, Richard Wagner’s music drama came to be widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of music. Wagner had a special brilliance for creating music with emotional affect, and in Tristan und Isolde he addressed the molten-hot alchemy of sexual yearning and death. In his musical score, Wagner pushed tonal harmony to its functional limits, coiling dissonances into ever more unbearable shapes over extended periods of time. The effect is profoundly unnerving, yet made bearable—thrilling even—to audiences through the dramatic actions of the singers, who give visual and conceptual expression to the music. This powerful cohesion of the arts, in which each is permitted to push its own aesthetic boundaries through the support of the others, is a prime example of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This aesthetic concept of a united arts also had political resonance for Wagner, manifesting as a self-conscious metaphor for democratic values. Each individual art would “by working in common attain the capacity to be and do the very thing which, of their own and inmost essences, they long to do and be.”

Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk also demonstrated an unprecedented concern for the relationship between art and audience. The mosaic plenitude of artistic forces demands a correspondingly grand audience, and Wagner recognized the opportunity to address the proper role for the masses. Wagner’s descriptions are frequently evocative of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic (‘the united thing is free, because unfettered and made independent through love’). He hypothesizes a mutual absorption of performer and audience, each making the other whole. This unity-in-observance became ever-more subsuming, as late-career Wagner designed opera houses that would render the orchestra invisible, plunge the audience in unprecedented darkness, and strategically confound depth perception. Many have argued that in works such as Tristan the audience becomes merely another tightly controlled element of the Gesamtkunstwerk, putty in the hands of the proto-fascist artist par excellence. Indeed, individual critical reflection never had a place in Wagner’s theories. He writes that “nothing should remain for the synthesising intellect to do in the face of a performance of a dramatic work of art; everything presented in it must be so conclusive that our feeling about it is brought to rest." This feeling of course is demanded in unequivocal quantities by Wagner’s music. Thus, despite Wagner’s assertions that the audience be free through their unification, Wagner’s implementation of the Gesamtkunstwerk has raised some of the most serious questions of psychological and social control in the history of art.

The Anti Spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk

As the impact of Tristan und Isolde’s revolutionary aesthetic (and the German military) swept across Europe, French artistic circles searched for a homegrown alternative to the Wagnerian aesthetic. Works such as Parade au cirque, painted by Georges Seurat in 1887, responded to Wagner’s influence through steely-eyed parody, subverting the pretense “of any forms of verisimilitude” by parading onto the canvas a naked and emaciated Gesamtkunstwerk, “an anti-phantasmagoria.” It was perhaps the prescient work of Seurat which inspired avant-garde French artist Jean Cocteau to conceive, in the darkest days of WWI, of another Parade, an epochal ballet and full-blooded subversion of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

From its very inception, the 1917 ballet Parade turns everything about Tristan on its head. Conceived by Cocteau, produced by the well-known Ballet Russes company, with set design and costumes by Picasso, and music by Erik Satie, Parade was created under the conditions which Wagner himself lamented as necessary for the true Gesamtkunstwerk: “in community and in a mutual co-operation”. Yet Parade is no self-conscious metaphor for the synergistic power of democracy or communism; seemingly unpolitical, it resembles a cubist collage writ large. In contrast to Wagner’s “endless melody”, Satie’s score moves dispassionately from one musical theme to the next, interspersed with the jarring rhythms of typewriters and other urban sounds; Cocteau’s “plot” entails a bizarre amalgamation of circus performers; and Picasso’s costumes and staging seem to be from another production entirely. Yet this threadbare aesthetic was the aim—in resisting the psychological nectar of Tristan, the makers of Parade produced “an exercise in coordinated incongruity,” in which the artistic team revolutionized the use of dissonance—not as harmonic dissonance as in Tristan, but rather dissonance between the art forms. Seemingly apolitical, this “cultivated apathy” could be seen as “one of the profoundest artistic responses to the Great War.” In an era in which everyday life was fraught with false spectacle and true horror, Parade was devoid of grand gestures or the desire to change your mind. It was, in the words of Cocteau, beauty "without an intrigue of mysticism, of love, or of annoyance.”

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