Richard Wagner’s Blueprint for Multimedia

Abstract

Writing thoughtfully about the 19th century composer Richard Wagner without offending some people is no easy task. To do so, one must acknowledge his antisemitism and set it aside to review his work as an artist, a theorist and a composer. In this essay, my hope is to address his ideas as a music and drama theorist with regard to what he called, “The Art-Work of the Future.” At the heart of his theory was an abstract idea he described as “the total work of art,” which he identified as Gesamtkunstwerk. To achieve the “total work of art,” he suggested that the artist of the future would find a way to artfully blend what he described as the muses for “dance,” “music” and “poetry” to create a complete and total work of multimedia storytelling. Wagner published his thoughts on this idea back in 1849, which means, the concepts for multimedia storytelling have been around for over 170 years. In this essay, I address the blueprint for multimedia as prescribed by Richard Wagner and then review some of the recent experiments produced by legacy media during the last decade. Along the way, I make some observations about Wagner’s understanding of “dance,” “music” and “poetry” and close by offering some conclusions about where multimedia storytelling may be headed.