The Total Work of Art provides a broad survey that incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. With particular attention to the influence of the Total Work of Art on modern theatre and performance, this brief introduction will also be of interest to students in such fields as film studies, music history, history of art, cultural studies, and modern European literatures.

At first glance, modernism and opera may seem like strange bedfellows-the former hostile to sentiment, the latter wearing its heart on its sleeve. And yet these apparent opposites attract: many operas are aesthetically avant-garde, politically subversive, and socially transgressive. From the proto-modernist strains of Richard Wagner's Parsifal through the twenty-first-century modernism of Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, the duet between modernism and opera, at turns harmonious and dissonant, has been one of the central artistic events of modernity. Despite this centrality, scholars of modernist literature only rarely venture into opera, and music scholars generally return the favor by leaving literature to one side. But opera, that grand cauldron of the arts, demands that scholars, too, share the stage with one another. In Modernism and Opera, Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith bring together musicologists, literary critics, and theater scholars for the first time in a mutual endeavor to trace certain key moments in the history of modernism and opera. This innovative volume includes essays from some of the most notable scholars in their fields and covers works as diverse as Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, Berg's Wozzeck, Janacek's Makropulos Case, Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, Strauss's Arabella, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Britten's Gloriana, and Messiaen's Saint Francois d'Assise. A collaborative study of the ultimate collaborative art form, Modernism and Opera reveals how modernism and opera illuminate each other and, more generally, the culture of the twentieth century. It also addresses a number of issues crucial for understanding the relation between modernism and opera, focusing in particular on intermediality (how modernism integrates music, literature, and drama into opera) and anti-theatricality (how opera responds to modernism's apparent antipathy to theatricality). This captivating book-the first of its kind-will appeal to scholars of literature, music, theater, and modernity as well as to sophisticated opera lovers everywhere.

The Total Work of Art provides a broad survey that incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. With particular attention to the influence of the Total Work of Art on modern theatre and performance, this brief introduction will also be of interest to students in such fields as film studies, music history, history of art, cultural studies, and modern European literatures.

The Georg Buchner Prize is the highest literary honor for German language writers, and the full extent of Buchner's influence-from Gerhart Hauptmann to Christa Wolf, Max Reinhardt to Robert Wilson, Alban Berg to Tom Waits-defies cataloging. When Georg Buchner died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three, he left behind a small and heterogenous body of work, most of it unpublished: three plays, a novella, a political pamphlet, a dissertation, medical lectures, and letters. Matthew Wilson Smith has newly translated Buchner's introduction to On Cranial Nerves. Each text is accompanied by explanatory annotations. The editor's introduction examines the complexities of Buchner's short life and how they informed his writing. The volume also contains ten illustrations. "Contexts" includes Buchner's correspondence with the people who knew him best, impressions of Buchner from a fellow medical student, excerpts from Buchner's diary, the wanted poster calling for Buchner's arrest for political conspiracy as well as the real-life inspirations his novella, Lenz, and his best-known play, Woyzeck. For ease of reference, "Criticism" is topically arranged by work and includes assessments by, among others, Laura Ginters, Victor Brombert, Bertolt Brecht, Henry Schmidt, Andrew Webber, Rainer Maria Rilke, and George Steiner. Three accounts of important productions of Danton's Death are reprinted, including John Houseman's remarks on Orson Welles's staging. Finally, the speeches of four winners of the Georg Buchner Prize-Paul Celan, Christa Wolf, Heiner Muller, and Durs Grunbein-are reprinted in their entirety. A Chronology of Buchner's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.