The Gesamtkunstwerk of Retail

The composer Richard Wagner believed that the different disciplines within the arts had grown too far apart. Poetry, theatre, set design, and music had each become their own separate world, and in that separation something essential had been lost. They had become incompatible. Wagner had a radical idea. He wanted to bring the arts back to a single, indivisible experience, in which no element was more important than another, and in which the whole would be greater than the parts. He called it the Gesamtkunstwerk. A total work of art.

The idea found its clearest expression in the opera Tristan und Isolde. The opera opens in 1865 with a chord that has not been resolved since that first evening. Four notes that break every rule of harmony, leaving the listener in a state of longing that lasts three and a half hours. The Tristan chord is perhaps the most important four notes in Western music history, not because they are beautiful, but because they refuse to end.

That was the point. Wagner wanted to make the longing between Tristan and Isolde audible. And he knew that one chord could not carry it. There had to be a text, a set, a lighting, a perfect hall. Everything had to work together, or nothing would work at all.