바그너와 독일 문화민족주의

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to review Richard Wagner's cultural nationalism. In the nineteenth century, the German romantics consciously created the national cultural products for national purposes. The national culture was to motivate and legitimate the striving for a unified nation state. The german romantics were orie nted towards the past, which was seen as providing the basis for the unification project. This was also realized by Wagner.Wagner was profoundly convinced that it was his destiny to compose works that would give expression to the ture Germany. His definition of Deutschtum was dedicated to the quest for unification. The establishment of a musical shrine at Bayreuth was intended to counteract what he saw as the superficial and trivial versions of Germanness that the Bismarckian state had created. His aim, which in a sense was highly political as well as musical, was to provide an alternative to the kind of art that German nationalist culture had thrown up: products of a state wrapped in military pomp and a capitalist system dedicated to the pursuit of material gain. By invoking in music the historic archetypes of German national consciousness, as embodied in the epic poems of the Middle Ages and the World of the Mastersingers of early-modern Nruemberg, Wagner hoped to give new life to the essence of the German spirit, which builds from within. The Wagner's works actually sprang from a defunct ear of neo-Romanticism and cultural pessimism.