SOURCE: Vergo, Peter. “The Origins of Expressionism and the Notion of Gesamtkunstwerk.” In Expressionism Reassessed, edited by Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, pp. 11-9. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Vergo explores how Richard Wagner's notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) influenced the Expressionists' view of the dichotomy between the external and internal meaning of a work of art.

Over the past several decades, a number of writers—among them Carl Schorske, Donald Gordon, and Reinhold Heller¹—have underlined the importance of the Idealist tradition in nineteenth-century German philosophy for any understanding of the genesis of Expressionism, pointing especially to the works of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It is also invariably the case that somewhere along the line, in any discussion of the philosophical antecedents of Expressionism, another major influence is mentioned—that of Wagner; but these seemingly obligatory allusions...