Going into the Sound: Charlotte de Mille welcomes a multi-authored volume tracing the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ after Wagner

Review of Diane V. Silverthorne, ed., Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: The Musicalization of Art (Bloomsbury, 2019).

July 2020, Volume 14, Number 2, 91–4.

Our experience of music is multi-sensual and multi-dimensional. The nuanced voices in Diane Silverthorne’s volume take Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as their point of departure, demonstrating not only how hugely influential his articulation of the inherently performative and immersive qualities of musical experience has been, but how these ideas have been transposed by composers, artists and performance artists since – whether knowingly engaging with Wagner or not. Scholarly investigation of the interrelation of the arts is far from new, pioneered in the UK by Peter Vergo and Simon Shaw-Miller, yet there is still no one term for work of this kind. Silverthorne’s contributors vary from Jed Rasala’s open ‘interpenetration’ or ‘interanimation’ of the arts, those following Peter Dyan’s term ‘interart’, Dick Higgins’ ‘intermedia’, or Brandon Joseph’s ‘intermedia hybridity’, to authors cleaving to Wagner’s ‘total work of art’ more closely. Spyros Petratakis explores the Russian writer Vyacheslav Ivanov’s reinterpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk as ‘a site of artistic fusion’ made possible only by the fusion of the collective consciousness of the audience; whereas Silverthorne follows Adorno’s designation of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an unachievable ‘abstract utopia’, ever in a process of becoming.