"The Artwork of the Future" (German : Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) is a long essay [1] written by Richard Wagner, first published in 1849 in Leipzig, in which he sets out some of his ideals on the topics of art in general and music drama in particular.
The essay is one of a series which Wagner produced in a period of intensive writing following his exile after the Dresden May uprising of 1849. It follows "Art and Revolution" and precedes "Jewishness in Music", developing the ideas of the one and prefiguring some of the issues of the other.
Wagner wrote the whole essay over about two months in Zürich. He wrote to his friend Uhlig on November 1849, 'This will be the last of my literary works'. On this, as on many other matters in his life, Wagner was to change his mind. The essay is dedicated to the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose works (perhaps particularly Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), inspired some of its ideas. [2] In September and October 1849, Wagner had read both Feuerbach's Reflections on Death and Immortality and his The Essence of Christianity . [3] Wagner's biographer Ernest Newman opined that Wagner's prose style in this essay and others was also heavily influenced by Feuerbach, who was 'constitutionally prone to the antithetical'; whilst noting that within a few years Wagner rejected Feuerbach's philosophy for that of Schopenhauer. [4]
The title of the essay was to haunt Wagner; thereafter his opponents were to taunt him as a self-appointed prophet of 'the music of the future'.
Immediately following the essay Wagner dashed off a draft libretto, mostly in prose, Wieland der Schmied ( Wieland the Smith), outlined at the close of the essay itself, which he thought appropriate as material for his ideal music-drama, and originally intended to develop for production in Paris. However he abandoned this plan, and the draft eventually became the basis for the first Slovak opera, Kovac Wiland, by Ján Levoslav Bella, (produced in Bratislava in 1924).
Wagner begins, 'As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.' [5] Man, or more particularly the Volk (the community of 'men who feel a common and collective want') creates Art to fill that want. Those who feel no want are outsiders to the Volk and crave only pointless luxury – true Art thus comes only from the atavistic needs of the Volk. When luxury (by which Wagner implies base entertainment posing as true art – i.e. Grand Opera and its like) has been abolished by the Volk they will be able to join to create the Artwork of the Future. [6]
Wagner goes on to talk of the three basic elements of art, which he lists as 'Dance, Tone [i.e. music] and Poetry' which were originally united in ancient Greek drama (as extolled by Wagner in Art and Revolution ). Modern attempts to unite these give rise to the 'unnatural abortion, the Oratorio', and to the 'shameless insolence' of contemporary opera [7] Only when these and other tawdry entertainments are swept aside will the Artwork of the Future arise.
This artwork will command all the arts – 'Architecture can set before herself no higher task than to frame' it, [8] (an early prefiguring of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus). The Artwork of the Future will of course bring forth the Artist of the Future who will be 'without a doubt the Poet.' Wagner points out that it is a matter of indifference whether this be a word-poet or a tone-poet, perhaps hinting at exactly what sort of a fellow this Artist must be. However the Darsteller (translated by Ellis as 'performer' but perhaps meaning rather the 'purveyor') of the Artwork will be a communal matter, a 'fellowship of all artists'. [9] In this communal aspect of the Artwork of the Future, Newman sees an anticipation of the Bayreuth Festival concept. [10]
The essay closes with a précis of Wieland the Smith .
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Der Ring des Nibelungen, WWV 86, is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from Germanic heroic legend, namely Norse legendary sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The composer termed the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel", structured in three days preceded by a Vorabend. It is often referred to as the Ring cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, WWV 96, is a music drama, or opera, in three acts, by Richard Wagner. It is the longest opera commonly performed, taking nearly four and a half hours, not counting two breaks between acts, and is traditionally not cut. With Hans von Bülow conducting, it was first performed on 21 June 1868 at the National Theater in Munich, today home of Bavarian State Opera.
Parsifal is a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner's own libretto for the work is freely based on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by the 12th-century trouvère Chrétien de Troyes, recounting different accounts of the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail.
Das Rheingold, WWV 86A, is the first of the four epic music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 22 September 1869, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, on 13 August 1876.
Die Walküre, WWV 86B, is the second of the four epic music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 26 June 1870, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 14 August 1876.
"Das Judenthum in der Musik", is an essay by composer Richard Wagner which criticizes the influence of Jews and their "essence" on European art music, arguing that they have not contributed to its development but have rather commodified and degraded it.
A Gesamtkunstwerk is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. The term is a German loanword accepted in English as a term in aesthetics.
Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen is an 1842 opera by Richard Wagner in five acts, with the libretto written by the composer after Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel of the same name (1835). The title is commonly shortened to Rienzi. Written between July 1838 and November 1840, it was first performed at the Königliches Hoftheater Dresden, on 20 October 1842, and was the composer's first success.
Tannhäuser is an 1845 opera in three acts, with music and text by Richard Wagner. It is based on two German legends: Tannhäuser, the mythologized medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and the tale of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story centres on the struggle between sacred and profane love, as well as redemption through love, a theme running through most of Wagner's work.
Wolfgang Wagner was a German opera director. He is best known as the director (Festspielleiter) of the Bayreuth Festival, a position he initially assumed alongside his brother Wieland in 1951 until the latter's death in 1966. From then on, he assumed total control until he retired in 2008, although many of the productions which he commissioned were severely criticized in their day. He had been plagued by family conflicts and criticism for many years. He was the son of Siegfried Wagner and he was the great-grandson of Franz Liszt.
The evolution of Richard Wagner's epic operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen was a long and tortuous process, and the precise sequence of events which led the composer to embark upon such a vast undertaking is still unclear. The composition of the text took place between 1848 and 1853, when all four libretti were privately printed; but the closing scene of the final opera, Götterdämmerung, was revised a number of times between 1856 and 1872. The names of the last two Ring operas, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, were probably not definitively settled until 1856.
The German composer Richard Wagner was a controversial figure during his lifetime, and has continued to be so after his death. Even today he is associated in the minds of many with Nazism and his operas are often thought to extol the virtues of German nationalism. The writer and Wagner scholar Bryan Magee has written:
I sometimes think there are two Wagners in our culture, almost unrecognizably different from one another: the Wagner possessed by those who know his work, and the Wagner imagined by those who know him only by name and reputation.
Opera and Drama is a book-length essay written by Richard Wagner in 1851 setting out his ideas on the ideal characteristics of opera as an art form. It belongs with other essays of the period in which Wagner attempted to explain and reconcile his political and artistic ideas, at a time when he was working on the libretti, and later the music, of his Ring cycle.
"Art and Revolution" is a long essay by the composer Richard Wagner, originally published in 1849. It sets out some of his basic ideas about the role of art in society and the nature of opera.
"Music of the Future" is the title of an essay by Richard Wagner, first published in French translation in 1860 as "La musique de l'avenir" and published in the original German in 1861. It was intended to introduce the librettos of Wagner's operas to a French audience at the time when he was hoping to launch in Paris a production of Tannhäuser, and sets out a number of his desiderata for true opera, including the need for 'endless melody'. Wagner deliberately put the title in quotation marks to distance himself from the term; Zukunftsmusik had already been adopted, both by Wagner's enemies, in the 1850s, often as a deliberate misunderstanding of the ideas set out in Wagner's 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future, and by his supporters, notably Franz Liszt. Wagner's essay seeks to explain why the term is inadequate, or inappropriate, for his approach.
Wieland der Schmied is a draft by Richard Wagner for an opera libretto based on the Germanic legend of Wayland Smith. It is listed in the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis as WWV82.
Geoffrey David Skelton (1916–1998) was a British author and translator. He specialized in German music, writing biographies of Richard Wagner, Cosima Wagner, Wieland Wagner and Paul Hindemith. He also translated numerous plays by leading German-language writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Max Frisch and Peter Weiss.
Wieland der Schmied(Wieland the Smith; Slovak: Kováč Wieland) is an opera in three acts by Ján Levoslav Bella first performed in 1926, to a libretto by Oskar Schlemm based on an original libretto draft by Richard Wagner.
