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The Quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner. By Hilda Meldrum Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. [xii, 287 p. ISBN 9780199325436 (hardback), $90; also available as e-book (ISBN and price varies).] 15 figures, 4 color plates, music examples, appendix, bibliography, index.
What is a Gesamtkunstwerk, and how does it work? What kind of Kunstwerk could be qualified as "Gesamt"? Hilda Meldrum Brown's quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk explores a vast range of visual, vegetal, literary, and musical works from eighteenth-century landscape gardens to the more industrial setting of the 1976 "Centenary Ring" production in Bayreuth, asking which of these "deserve" the title of "total work of art," and which do not.
The book's title immediately raises a question: Why avoid the easier "Richard Wagner and the quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk"? The inversion shifts the focus on the concept at stake, showing that the quest began before Wagner and did not stop after him. The title tells us that "the Quest" is not only Wagner's enterprise but rather a collective one in which the composer participates. That Wagner enjoys a special status among the participants is clear from the outset of the introduction, beginning not with the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, as the title may lead us to expect, but with the "unique" figure of Wagner. The "source of this uniqueness," argues Brown, "lies . . . in Wagner's spectacular success in articulating a lofty vision by means of a fusion or synthesis of two major art forms, drama and music" (p. 1). This statement clearly articulates the book's leading argument: in the collective search for the "total work of art," Wagner was uniquely positioned to conduct it successfully.
The argument unfolds in three parts: the first presents different attempts at "the Quest" before Wagner, and the second and third deal with the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in theory and in practice-which shows, again, who plays the principal role in the adventure. Part 1 presents "works of quality and distinction which come close to achieving the status of Gesamtkunstwerk," as Brown announces in the introduction (p. 10). As "Gesamt-prototypes," we may call them, the author selected eighteenth-century case studies in three disciplines: the landscape garden (chap. 1), visual arts (chap. 2), and literature (chap. 3). In the first chapter,...