Richard Wagner and rock culture

Section 1. Modern Revisions of Musical and Historical Heritage

Abstract

Statement of the problem. Recently, Richard Wagner’s creative heritage has been attracting increasing attention not only from creators of modern musical and theatrical art, but also from music lovers and art historians who are interested in mastering it. This is evidenced by the publication in 2022 of the collective scientific monograph “The Ukrainian Book about Richard Wagner”, which examines various aspects of the perception of his creative heritage, its role in the world cultural process at different historical stages and its place in various national and cultural environments, in particular the Ukrainian one. However, neither in this monograph nor in other domestic scientific publications will we find texts, in which the topic of the interaction of Wagner’s cultural world and various layers of mass culture would be the focus of research attention. The world cultural reality of the second half of the 20th – first quarter of the 21st centuries is already full of such phenomena, in which R. Wagner, his ideas and music are involved in a multi-layered cultural dialogue that acquires significant importance within the framework of the postmodern aesthetic paradigm and its transformations in modern realities. It seems that the already accumulated experience of such a rather specific intercultural interaction is worthy of scientific understanding and generalization. Recent research and publications. The study of the topic of multilevel dialogue of R. Wagner’s creative heritage and rock music as one of the phenomena of mass culture is at an early stage, at least in domestic art history. Several published materials belong to the author of this article, but they pay more attention to the topic “Richard Wagner and Cinema”. Links to these publications are placed in the section “Ukrainian Wagner: Bibliography of Major Works (1993–2022)” of the collective scientific monograph “Ukrainian Book on Richard Wagner” (2022: 392). Thus, today there are practically no scientific investigations published in professional publications that would focus on the proposed topic. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The study applies a complex approach, which determines the use of the following research methods: historical and cultural, philosophical and aesthetic, structural and semantic, textological and semiotic, and comparative one. This work is the first attempt to characterize certain features of the interaction of rock culture as one of the powerful phenomena of mass culture with Richard Wagner’s artistic and aesthetic world.

Research results. Some features of the interaction of rock music as a phenomenon of mass culture with the artistic heritage of Richard Wagner were considered. The relevance of Wagner’s ideas of artistic synthesis for rock culture is proven, in particular the idea of “Gesamtkünstwerk” as a collective work of art, as well as the idea of the “universal theater”, which erases the line between real life and art. The emergence of the rock opera genre is considered in the context of the actualization of the idea of “Gesamtkünstwerk” in new cultural and historical conditions. The role of the creators of the first rock operas and film adaptations of their works in the formation of new signs of artistic synthesis based on the principles of postmodern aesthetics is considered. Selected examples reveal the specifics of involving the creative figure of R. Wagner, his ideas and music in a multi-layered cultural dialogue, which is of significant importance within the framework of the postmodern cultural paradigm and its transformations in contemporary cultural realities. Particular attention is paid to how the idea of “Gesamtkünstwerk” turns into a mythologeme, and Wagner’s creative figure is subjected to fetishization and is also disassembled into separate mythologemes, becoming an object of play.

Conclusion. In the end, it was determined that the vast majority of the analyzed examples of the interaction of rock culture with the artistic world of R. Wagner have a mystical-mysterious context and are based on spiritual and cultural messages of a global nature, demonstrating a willingness to open dialogue with a wide audience; built on the cross-rhythm of a paradoxical multilayered content of the text, which implies a kind of parallelism, discreteness of understanding its meanings and, to a certain extent, explains the specifics of their formation in the conditions of the still relevant dominance of postmodern aesthetics in the modern cultural space, at least the musical and theatrical one.