At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.

Chapter 5 returns to the primal Sikh moment, the divine revelation of Guru Nanak. Autobiographically recounted in Majh Ballad, his sensuous experience of the infinite One is corroborated in early Sikh sources like the Janamsākhīs. This chapter is a three-mirrored kaleidoscope: (1) how the songster/bard (ḍhāḍī) Nanak relays his revelatory event in sonic aesthetics; (2) how poet (shāir) Nanak shares his numinous encounter in poetic ingenuity; and (3) how jeweller/goldsmith (suniāru) Nanak artistically stages his revelations for his audiences to reexperience his transcendent aesthetics. Art as idealized by Martin Heidegger, Amrita Sher-Gil, Leo Tolstoy, and Rabindranath Tagore is fulfilled by Guru Nanak’s gesamtkunstwerk. His multiple art forms function as art to show how the transcendent One is aesthetically lived in this world. Raising spiritual and social consciousness, Nanakian art is not for art’s sake alone; it redresses issues of social and environmental injustice and suffering. With his voice recorded in the GGS as a rich resource, Guru Nanak’s own perception of his aesthetic vocation comes to light.

To illuminate the notion of ‘totality’ in Wagner’s conception of the ‘total art work’ or Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter invokes Schopenhauer’s claim that ordinary life is like a phantasmagoria or dream – a claim that epitomises his interpretation of Kant’s theory of knowledge. The chapter associates the notion of a phantasmagoria with that of a dream, and the latter with the nineteenth-century conception of the unconscious, in particular as presented in Freud’s characterisation of dreams as multidimensional semantic expressions. Wagner’s operas are accordingly considered to be phantasmagorias in this dream-associated sense. Wagner is often appreciated as a forefather of modernism, but by recognising the phantasmagoric, semantically-multidimensional quality of his operas he can be seen further as a forefather of postmodernism.

Though Theodore Thomas had introduced Wagner’s music to America in 1861, following a ‘Grand Wagner Night’ in Boston in 1853, it was not until 1872 that Wagner rose to fame in America with a performance of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Thereafter Wagner’s music assumed a dominant place in American music and cultural life for the better part of the next four decades.

This chapter explores unusual facets of Wagner in relationship to America, including the heretofore unexamined influence on Wagner of writers such as Friedrich Gerstäcker, the German migration to America, Wagner in the Yiddish theatre, and Wagner’s views on America. For Wagner, America was the harbinger of modernity and represented a new frontier for his pioneering music dramas, which enabled an untutored mass audience to experience the intensity and spiritual claims in Wagner’s alluring realisation of drama with music. Wagner’s innovations in narration through sound would have the greatest influence through a novel modern medium – motion picture – and would define how music in the twentieth century became an indispensable instrument of mass entertainment within American film.

This chapter explores Wagner’s rhetorical elisions across three substantives essential to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptual history: nature, culture, and humanity. It begins by explicating Wagner’s engagement with contemporary philosophies of language, cognition, and climate in developing the racialised identities and implications of these interlocked categories. Disclosing Wagner’s participation in what philosopher Stephen Haymes describes as an ‘axiological preference for Western “holism” regarding what is valued’, this chapter suggests that his nature-thinking enforced an exclusionary humanism by elevating a Germanic subset of nature, culture, and humanity as solely deserving these monolithic titles.

The chapter concludes by exploring Wagner’s treatment of these categories in his libretti, particularly in Siegfried’s ‘forest murmurs’. Where some stage directors have sought to resuscitate Wagner by suggesting that his environmental imagery is separable from his infamous racism, this chapter ultimately argues that these conceptual paradigms were inextricably entwined, and were part of a synthetic regime of knowledge.

The leitmotif of both American and British Krautrock reception in the 1970s was the continuing popularity of German stereotypes and clichés, with the music press coverage in both countries differing only in nuances. It was not before the end of the decade that those ascriptions and stereotypes slowly started to fade away; by then, in a broad consensus among critics and pop journalists, the ‘future sounds’ of Krautrock were widely regarded as a transformative contribution to pop music and culture. The shift in the Anglo-American music press’s understanding of Krautrock in the 1970s suggests that Krautrock’s mission to create a new and transnational cultural identity, for themselves and for West Germany, can ultimately be considered successful; British as well as American observers clearly placed Krautrock outside the Anglo-American realm of pop music, viewing it as a distinct West German phenomenon detached from pop music’s Anglo-American roots. In addition, and as a result, Krautrock’s soundscapes and performative elements were perceived as the first fundamental contribution to pop music from outside the Anglo-American sphere.

The chapter approaches Kraftwerk‘s oeuvre from a conceptual perspective and treats the band as performance artists. After discussing the artistic major influences, the first three albums from 1970 to 1973, later disowned by the core team of Ralf Hütter and Florin Schneider, are considered aginst the conceptual notion of ‘industrielle Volksmusik‘ (i.e. electronic pop music). Next, Kraftwerk‘s concept albums from 1974 to 1981 are analysed using key themes and lead aesthetics such as retro-futurism, man-machine, and post-humanism. The chapter then examines the impact of digitilisation on the artistic production of the band and discusses the reversal of the primary mode of operaton from the recording of new studio albums towards the curation of the core work in the period between 1983 and 2003. To conclude, the chapter looks at the evolution of their stage craft up to the current fully immersive and ritualistic audio-visual performances. I evaluate to which extent Kraftwerk can be seen as a paradigmatic example of a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, fulfilling Richard Wagner‘s promise of a true Zukunftsmusik (future music).

Bertolt Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, is unthinkable without music.Many of his poems, as well as his forty-eight completed dramas and roughly fifty dramatic fragments, are connected to music.There is hardly another writer or dramatist of the twentieth century who based his work as clearly and decisively on the complex relationship between music, text, and drama.Brecht worked with some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, in particular Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau.Although Brecht rejected some of the aesthetic ideas and ideology of Richard Wagner, in his ambition to combine the arts together and to leave a major legacy, he nevertheless in some respects ultimately came to resemble Wagner.The music connected to Brecht‘s texts is performed and passed on in the media throughout the world, from the early recordings made by the young Brecht himself all the way to innumerable versions of his “Ballad of Mack the Knife” created and spread by the globalized music market.

The premiere of the Ring and the opening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 was the most significant European cultural event of the later nineteenth century. The idea of a festival after the model of classical Greek theatre was integral to the Ring. Performances were to be given free of charge under ideal conditions in a temporary theatre constructed for the purpose in a location away from the corrupting influence of modern industrial civilisation. The festival idea as finally realized was, however, far removed from the utopian ideals of the original conception. The scale and practical demands of Wagner’s enterprise forced him to compromise with shifting political paradigms and harsh economic reality. The first Bayreuth Festival thus became a meeting place not for Wagner’s classless society dedicated to the ideals of art, but of aristocracies and plutocratic elites. The democratic festival, originally conceived in the white heat of revolutionary fervour, became a symbol of artistic hegemony and the aggrandisement of the newly founded German Reich. The resulting artistic, cultural and highly potent political legacy was to extend far beyond the historical context in which the festival first came about.

This chapter by Thomas Grey presents a focused yet far-reaching account of the significance of dance to Richard Wagner. First, it explores how Wagner theorized the roles of dance, music and text in his ‘total artwork’; then it considers historical practice – examples of the actual dances (and also what the author calls the ‘sublimated choreography’) in several Wagnerian music dramas, especially Tannhäuser, with its infamous Venusberg ‘Bacchanal’. Wagner’s feelings towards dance were double-edged. On the one hand, the composer acknowledged the importance of movement and gesture in the creation of his ideal artwork. Indeed, as Grey suggests, Wagner sought to play up the two, emphasizing the role of the erotic, sexualized body onstage. On the other hand, Wagner liked to ridicule contemporary ballet. But, to Wagner, ballet’s problematic status did not relate to its explicitly bodily and human aspects. Instead, it was the genre’s association with an institutional context – ballet as produced and consumed at the Paris Opéra – that troubled the composer.

In Western literature music functions ‘as the vehicle for everything that cannot be represented or denoted.’ Anglophone literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries works with a specific musical tradition that we broadly term ‘classical music’ which encompasses a set of intellectual, aesthetic, historical and cultural ideas. From Wagner’s Total Art-Work to Walter Pater’s claims about music as the ‘consummate’ art form, classical music as an aesthetic paradigm has not just offered literature a set of cultural reference points, but philosophical and intellectual traditions that shape its aesthetic experiments and styles. Nowhere is the idea of music more fully delineated by a composer than in the work of Wagner, and his music has had perhaps the greatest influence on literature. Wagner provides a focal point for discussions of classical music in literature in this chapter, especially around the role of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Virginia Woolf’s negotiations with aesthetics and the artwork. Laura Marcus has argued that literary modernism took on filmic devices. This chapter argues that it did the same with music. Newly conscious of forms, languages, systems and somatic effects, modernist writers turned to music and particularly Wagner as a paradigm of artistic expression.