[In the following essay, Vergo explores how Richard Wagner's notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) influenced the Expressionists' view of the dichotomy between the external and internal meaning of a work of art.]

Over the past several decades, a number of writers—among them Carl Schorske, Donald Gordon, and Reinhold Heller¹—have underlined the importance of the Idealist tradition in nineteenth-century German philosophy for any understanding of the genesis of Expressionism, pointing especially to the works of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It is also invariably the case that somewhere along the line, in any discussion of the philosophical antecedents of Expressionism, another major influence is mentioned—that of Wagner; but these seemingly obligatory allusions are usually unaccompanied by any more detailed discussion. For while it is true that a very great deal has been written about ‘Wagnerism’ and its influence on the Symbolist generation, as well as its wider cultural and political influence,² Wagner's significance for the 1900s and after, especially in the domain of the visual arts, has by comparison gone largely unexamined. I therefore propose to consider in this paper the influence exerted by Wagnerian theory and practice, in particular the Wagnerian notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), on the artists of the expressionist generation.

In discussing Wagnerian theory, it should perhaps be observed at the outset that the composer's ideas would, at least in the opinion of the present writer, have had relatively little impact had it not been for the power of his music. Even Wagner himself, in the preface to the second edition of his treatise Opera and Drama, referred to what he called the ‘obduracy’ of his ideas; and since then author after author has pointed to the composer's convoluted language and the turgidity of his rhetoric. Michael Tanner, for example, in his contribution to that well-known anthology, The Wagner Companion, describes Wagner's writings as ‘full of special pleading and, except when he is being practical or hits the odd inspired phrase, lacking in the astonishing energy and resource of both the man and his art’.³ Rather, what happened—and this can be clearly demonstrated in the case of the French Symbolists, for example—was that artists working in other media (writers, poets, painters) from the 1870s onwards were simply bowled over by the musical and dramatic effect of Wagner's operas; and then, having picked themselves up, they turned to his theoretical writings, which are of course voluminous, in search of a key which might unlock the mystery of the Wagnerian magic.

Unfortunately, Wagner's writings do not in themselves provide a very good key. His meaning is sometimes obscure and his arguments are often rambling and inconsistent, which is perhaps why so many subsequent admirers picked on the one notion that seemed relatively easy to comprehend: that of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Not only did they pick on it; they distorted it in ways scarcely credible, given that, in this instance at least, Wagner's own intentions were quite unambiguous. It is none the less the case that during the years around 1900, the term Gesamtkunstwerk was hurled around like a kind of verbal projectile, being applied to things that Wagner himself would never have conceived of, and certainly would never have sanctioned: book design and typography, interior decor and furnishing, architecture and design. The first editor of the Viennese periodical Ver Sacrum, Wilhelm Schölermann, described the relationship between typography and illustration, the layout of graphic material on the printed page, as creating a ‘kind of Gesamtkunstwerk’, while other writers found the same term equally appropriate in discussing, for example, the architecture and interiors of the Scottish art nouveau architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh—improbable though such a usage might seem.

Ironically, Wagner himself does not actually put that much stress on the term Gesamtkunstwerk, preferring, typically, more convoluted formulations such as ‘Gesamtvolkskunst’ or ‘das Kunstwerk des Gesamtvolkes’—the ‘work of art of an entire people’. He also refers repeatedly to ‘das gemeinsame Kunstwerk’, another term difficult to translate and which might perhaps best be rendered as ‘communal art’, or even ‘the common artistic endeavour’, the purpose of which was the expression of what Wagner calls ‘der künstlerische Mensch’—artistic man:

Artistic man can be wholly satisfied only by the unification of all forms of art in the service of the common artistic endeavour; any fragmentation of his artistic sensibilities limits his freedom, prevents him from being fully that which he is capable of being. The highest form of communal art is drama; it can exist in its full entirety only if it embraces every variety of art … only when eye and ear mutually reinforce the impressions each receives, only then is artistic man present in all his completeness.⁴

As so often, the language used in this particular passage is somewhat opaque, but the thrust of Wagner's argument generally is quite clear. What he means by ‘das gemeinsame Kunstwerk’ is a new kind of art which will express the identity, the character, the cultural and mythic aspirations of an entire people, while uniting them in a common ritualistic and—in Wagner's eyes at least—religious experience. At the same time, the ‘gemeinsame Kunstwerk’ was to unite the different forms of art—the arts with a small ‘a’—in the service of a higher idea, subordinating them to the overall dramatic purpose which, in his early writings at least, Wagner believed ruled supreme, taking precedence even over the purely musical element (hence his subsequent elaboration of the notion of ‘music drama’). Fortunately, his reading of Schopenhauer at the critical moment, between his completion of the text for his tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung and the composition of the music, convinced him—we might say ‘just in time’—of the intrinsic supremacy of music over all other forms of art as vehicle of pure expression.

Wagner, of course, was notorious for not always practising what he preached—or rather, he rarely practised what he preached. In the case of his own operas he never actually applied the principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the kind of additive or accretive way he himself described—the piling of one art form upon another, as if the more varied the different kinds of art combined at the same time on the operatic stage, the greater would be the impact. Moreover, though he minutely specified the scenic effects he wished to achieve on the stage, he found himself obliged to leave their actual realisation in the hands of others, so that, even at Bayreuth, the scenic aspect of the staging of his operas continued as before to be left to professional stage designers. Wagner himself, in any case, had little real sensitivity to the visual arts, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining the coarse naturalism of the early Bayreuth productions—grandiose visions that were long on imagination and short on practicality and which were the frequent butt of critics and satirists.⁵ Even Wagner's admirers are frequently led to confess that they perceive a strain of vulgarity, not in his music, but in his dramatic conceptions. For whatever reason, the naturalist tradition continued to dominate the Wagnerian stage throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, and it not until well after 1900 that we encounter anywhere in Europe anything which, as regards its visual aspect, deviates in any significant way from the early Munich and Bayreuth productions.

An article such as this hardly permits further exploration of the history of the Wagnerian stage, fascinating though that subject is. What I do want to examine is the way in which the Wagnerian notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk was creatively misinterpreted by the generation of artists who came to maturity during the years after 1900—how it was subjected, as it were, to a series of fruitful misunderstandings. Of these misunderstandings two, in particular, were to be of profound consequence for the theory and practice of Expressionism.

First, during the early years of this century, Wagner's authority was frequently invoked in support of the idea that the various arts were growing ever closer together, that they even sprang from the same common root, and that the distinctions between them were becoming more and more irrelevant, of merely ‘external’ significance—a quintessentially expressionist view. In reality, Wagner had believed almost exactly the opposite: that both the character and purpose of the various forms of art were quite different. That did not bother the expressionist artists. They believed—and here once again the influence of Schopenhauerian philosophy is clearly seen—that the task of art was to give voice to an inner world, and that the inner experience of the artist and the inner nature of the world itself were in essence the same. Hence their disdain for everything external since it was the internal, not the external aspect of art that was important. The material differences between the different art forms were merely external; it was the inner message that was of crucial significance, and all that mattered was to choose the external form most appropriate to the inner message which it was the task of art to convey. And since ‘skill’ in the manipulation of a given medium was likewise a merely external attribute, the artist was at liberty to range freely from painting to poetry to musical composition—or all at the same time—no matter in which (if any) of these fields his or her formal training might have been.

In practice, what is striking is just how many expressionist artists in fact ‘crossed the boundaries’ which had previously divided one art form from another. Kokoschka, in addition to his pictorial work, wrote poems, plays and essays; Barlach was active both as sculptor and playwright; Kandinsky made paintings, graphics, poems, plays. His stage works afford a particularly interesting example, not least for their point of contact with the exactly contemporary experiments of Schoenberg. Kandinsky, admittedly, having little musical competence, turned to a professional composer, his compatriot Thomas von Hartmann, for the music for his play The Yellow Sound—just as Wagner, having no competence in the visual arts, had relied on professional stage designers. But for The Yellow Sound and his other dramatic experiments—‘stage compositions’, he called them—Kandinsky wrote his own texts, visualised both sets and costumes, and wrote down meticulous directions not only for the visual aspect of the staging, but also gesture, movement, expression etc. Indeed, in some dozen pages of the text of The Yellow Sound there are to be found no more than fifteen lines of spoken or sung dialogue. In this we may detect another obvious point of resemblance with Wagner's operas, where the obsessively detailed stage directions often rival in length the actual lines given to the dramatis personae.

There are, however, not only striking similarities between these early expressionist stage works and their Wagnerian antecedents, but also a number of important differences—differences that spring, at least in part, from a second misunderstanding of Wagner's ideas. Wagner, as we have seen, had been content to leave at least some aspects of the staging of his music-dramas in the hands of others. Regarding music-drama generally, he even stated quite specifically that the composer and the librettist, for example, need not be one and the same person (though in reality he invariably wrote the libretto for his own operas, evidently attaching great importance to every detail of the poetic and verse forms which he, in many cases, more or less invented—another instance of the frequent discrepancies between what he said and his actual practice). By contrast, if we look at the dramatic experiments created by a number of expressionist artists during the early years of the twentieth century, we find the author or composer frequently assuming a kind of tyrannical role, almost a cross between artistic dictator and master of ceremonies. The fact that such artists sought to apply what they considered to be Wagnerian ideas in a way that is actually far more literal than Wagner himself intended or practised—taking, for example, every detail of costume and decor and choreography, as well as music and libretto, into their own hands—constitutes the second of those ‘fruitful misunderstandings’ referred to earlier.

To focus briefly on two particular examples, the early stage works of Schoenberg—his monodrama Erwartung, and the opera Die glückliche Hand—are a case in point. For Erwartung, while Schoenberg himself provided a whole succession of very detailed sketches for the staging, he in fact drew on a text by an amateur writer called Marie Pappenheim, whose portrait he also painted. But in the case of Die glückliche Hand, usually translated as The Lucky Hand, Schoenberg followed what he must have regarded as Wagnerian precedent with almost slavish loyalty,⁶ creating not merely the music but also the text and the set and costume designs with his own hands. Without doubt, The Lucky Hand is, in any case, by far the most Wagnerian of all Schoenberg's stage works and contains a number of quite specific Wagnerian borrowings, most notably the moment at which the sword-brandishing hero (or anti-hero), observing workers forging diadems, seizes a hammer which he brings down with a mighty blow on an anvil which then splits in two—an undisguised allusion to the forging scene in Act I of Siegfried, mixed with a dash of the enslaved Nibelungen from Rheingold for good measure. Schoenberg's use of the chorus in Die glückliche Hand, six men and six women who comment mordantly on the drama, also echoes Wagner's notions concerning the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy—however misguided those may have been.

There is, however, one major point of divergence compared with Wagner's operas—a divergence which has to do with the apparent lack of stage action and virtual anonymity of the characters in Schoenberg's operatic works. Erwartung, in particular, is strikingly devoid of action—or does it, indeed, all happen in the mind? All we know, or are told, is that an unnamed woman is found wandering alone in a forest at night. Approximately one third of the way through this drama—if ‘drama’ it can be called—she stumbles across the dead body of her lover. The remaining two thirds of the work pass in a kind of waking nightmare, in which the woman reproaches the corpse for its alleged infidelities—though whether these grievances are real or imagined it is impossible to tell. And that is all: nothing else happens, merely the unbridled expression of naked emotion of the most sinister kind by an anonymous female figure, alone, somewhere in a forest, in the middle of the night.

Die glückliche Hand has, it is true, somewhat more in the way of narrative than Erwartung, centering as it does around a triangular relationship between a woman and two men, but their roles are no further defined than simply by their sex, and we are told nothing about their identity nor indeed about their relationship to each other, save in terms of their mutual attraction, jealousy and desire. And in both these early Schoenberg stage works, external actions and events pale into insignificance by comparison with that which they in a sense symbolise: states of mind, fears and aspirations, love, jealousy, hatred—in other words, psychological states. It is by no means coincidental that Erwartung has often been seen as the archetype, as well as one of the earliest examples, of pure psycho-drama. Nor is it any coincidence that in other expressionist stage works, too (Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound, Kokoschka's Murderer, Hope of Women) we find the same lack of specificity, the same disdain for merely external narrative—characters identified merely as ‘giants’ or ‘people in flowing garb’, ‘warriors’ or ‘maidens’, without any indication of the relationship between them or indeed where or when the action might be taking place; all these ‘external’ details are stripped away in order to allow the inner message of the drama to sound forth more powerfully, more clearly, more unequivocally.

All this contrasts dramatically—or at least appears to do so—with Wagner's stage works, which are not only rich in both musical and visual symbolism but are also heavily dependent on narrative, in the sense that at almost every moment something quite specific is happening on the stage. We are also told in almost excessive detail about the relationship between characters, about their identities and respective roles, even their subterfuges—Wotan in the guise of the Wanderer, Freia the bringer of eternal youth, Hagen being Alberich's son and so on. This, indeed, was the burden of the criticisms levelled at Wagner by the expressionist generation, no matter how much they owed him: that his operas, with their convoluted plot and intricate symbolism, tended to remain on the level of ‘merely external narrative’. Kandinsky, in his essay ‘On Stage Composition’ published in the epoch-making Blaue Reiter Almanach of 1912,⁷ alludes specifically to Wagner in a not very flattering way, complaining at some length about what he sees as the composer's excessively materialistic manner of identifying the principal characters, as well as individual symbols such as sword, ring and so on, by means of the famous Wagnerian device of the Leitmotiv. He also caricatures what he calls the ‘crude parallelism’ which he sees as the dominant characteristic of Wagner's operas (heightened emotion, for example, being invariably accompanied by a crescendo in the orchestral writing) contrasting this with his own practice whereby, in order to highlight what he calls events of an inner character, a particular climactic moment may be ‘externally’ at odds with the musical or scenic material, a ‘crescendo’ of stage lighting being accompanied by a diminuendo in the orchestra, and so forth.

But in reality, has not Kandinsky here failed to grasp something absolutely crucial in Wagner—the disjunction between verbal and musical content? Despite the vagueness of many of Wagner's more general utterances about art, in describing his own operatic practice he made it perfectly clear that he envisaged a fundamental difference, a difference in kind between the verbal messages carried by the singing voice and the more abstract emotive content embodied in the purely orchestral writing. ‘The particular genius of the human voice’, wrote Wagner, ‘is that it is circumscribed in character, but also specific and clear … it represents the human heart in all its delimitable, individual emotion.’ ‘In the instruments,’ on the other hand, ‘the primal organs of creation and nature are represented. What they articulate can never be clearly determined or stipulated because they render primal feeling itself, emergent from the chaos of the first creation when there might even have been no human beings to take it into their hearts.’⁸ In other words (to paraphrase Wagner's somewhat lurid prose) while the characters are singing their hearts out on stage, the orchestra is actually carrying on its own extremely complex, convoluted and in many ways independent musical argument, unseen in the darkness of the orchestra pit.

We ourselves might add, of course, that the orchestra deals neither in concepts nor in images, but works upon our deeper emotions by means of the resources peculiar to music itself. The Wagnerian invention of the Leitmotiv, which Kandinsky disdainfully likened to the ‘all-too-familar label on the accustomed wine bottle’,⁹ in fact put into the composer's hands an extraordinarily subtle and flexible means of conveying thought—not conscious, rational thought, but the most secret purposes and repressed emotions of which the characters themselves are at times partly unaware. Indeed, it is striking that, more than half a century before the expressionist artists launched their battle cry, their call for a new art, Wagner in his writings of the early 1850s had already clearly articulated this crucial distinction between the external and internal meanings inherent in the work of dramatic art, between conceptual reasoning and the communication of emotional states, between the rational and deductive on the one hand and the irrational, the inspirational on the other. In so doing he foreshadowed, however unwittingly, a dichotomy central to expressionist thinking as to the nature and purpose of art.

Notes

1. See Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna; Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea; R. Heller, Brücke: German Expressionist Prints from the Granvil and Marcia Specks Collection, Evanston, 1988, and the same author's Art in Germany, 1909-1936.

2. See D. Large and W. Weber (eds), Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, London, 1984.

3. ‘The Total Work of Art’, in P. Burbidge and R. Sutton (eds), The Wagner Companion, Boston and London 1979, p. 148.

4. ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’, in W. Golther (ed.), Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen in zehn Bänden, Berlin and Leipzig, III, p. 105 (author's translation).

5. See E. Kreowski and E. Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur, Berlin, 1907.

6. For an English translation of The Lucky Hand see Kandinsky and Schoenberg, Letters, Pictures and Documents, pp. 91-8.

7. Translated in Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, pp. 257-65. See also, Kandinsky and Schoenberg, Letters, Pictures and Documents, pp. 111-17.

8. Cited after Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner, London, 1972, p. 56.

9. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, p. 261.