Philosophical Views of Novalis and F. Schlegel as a Precursor to the Gesamtkunstwerk Concept

The concept of the total work of art, Gesamtkunstwerk, is commonly associated with the German composer Richard Wagner, who manifested it in the mid-nineteenth century in his treatise “The Artwork of the Future”, although he was not its inventor. However, the intellectual ground on which Wagner builds his concept was prepared by the early German Romantics - Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Wackenroder, the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. In different contexts and expressions, they wrote about the possibility, and sometimes the necessity, of merging individual art forms into a single synthetic work. This paper explores the Romantic anticipation of Wagner's utopian concept. The main question of this study is: what are the preconditions for the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk revealed in the works of Novalis and Schlegel, and why do they emerge in the works of the Romantics. The steps to be taken to answer this question are to consider and analyze the roots of German Romanticism that shaped it as we know it; to discover and examine the preconditions of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk in the works of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Special attention in this paper will be paid to the Romantic theory of poetry, the novel and the fairy tale.