Gesamtkunstwerk. A utopia de Wagner.

Abstract

Th e Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total artwork, has its ideological roots in nineteenthcentury Romanticism and since then has become a recurring concept in the modern artistic practice and later postmodernism. Th is means, essentially, a search of a true art, arising from its modes of integration or immersion, and that according to a principle of aesthetic totality asserts, similarly, the idea of a necessary complementarity between art and life, between art and society : the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is then simultaneously artistic, social, political and, above all, moral. Richard Wagner is the most signifi cant historical appropriation of this idea, and in Art and Revolution and Th e Artwork of the Future, he sets out the principles of his total work of art that, in view of the composer, had its most perfect realization in the musical drama. Music, dance, poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture itself celebrate the reunifi cation of artistic modalities, which stems from anachronistic models of the past, especially of Antiquity. Th us, the wagnerian ambition for the future reinstates the culture of the Greek tragedy, reinterpreting it in the form of drama as aesthetic whole. Th e Wagnerian criticism would focus heavily on the modern state and on the regulations of the new bourgeois society; Wagner sought, thereby, to lay a path for the future of art and modern society, depositing, in the community of the men of the future, a utopian hope, immediately determined by the idea of wholeness in all dimensions of life. Architecture features a contemporary ideological crisis or, if you will, ontological; the distance between architecture and the individual, as a function of external and abstract powers which now regulate the practice, does not comply with the essential nature of the discipline itself. Th e art of space can foster an aesthetic ideal that includes all its oppositions, all its paradoxes, in short, a principle of wholeness in all aspects of architectural practice. Th e individual and the community, the ideal space and the real space, the relentless pursuit of beauty and harmony between the natural world and the constructed one, can arise from a new project of reunifi cation of the arts "under the wings of a great architecture", in close correspondence with its primary subject: the actual fi guration of a community and a properly human order in the world.