The artwork of the people : a history of the Gesamtkunstwerk from Richard Wagner to Kim Jong IL
It is well known that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is no stranger to mass spectacle. Less widely known, however, is that Kim Jong Il is credited with the authorship of several aesthetic treatises on the principles of North Korean music and drama. Somewhat surprisingly, these principles accord remarkably with many of those of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, even though Wagner's works, whether prose or musical, are virtually unknown in the DPRK. The prospect of direct influence is thus minimal. My dissertation explores these unlikely parallels by tracing the evolution and development of the Gesamtkunstwerk idea from Wagner's Germany to Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and finally Kim Jong Il's DPRK. I argue that Wagner's ideas resonate at least as strongly with the political and artistic aims of these states as they do with those of the West, as evinced by the flowering of the total work of art across Eurasia that took place in the twentieth century
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2016