The Artwork of the Future

"The Artwork of the Future" (German: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) is a long essay written by Richard Wagner, first published in 1849 in Leipzig, in which he sets out some of his ideals on the topics of art in general and music drama in particular.

The essay is one of a series which Wagner produced in a period of intensive writing following his exile after the Dresden May uprising of 1849. It follows "Art and Revolution" and precedes "Jewishness in Music", developing the ideas of the one and prefiguring some of the issues of the other.

Wagner wrote the whole essay over about two months in Zürich. He wrote to his friend Uhlig on November 1849, 'This will be the last of my literary works'. On this, as on many other matters in his life, Wagner was to change his mind. The essay is dedicated to the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose works (perhaps particularly Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), inspired some of its ideas. In September and October 1849, Wagner had read both Feuerbach's Reflections on Death and Immortality and his The Essence of Christianity. Wagner's biographer Ernest Newman opined that Wagner's prose style in this essay and others was also heavily influenced by Feuerbach, who was 'constitutionally prone to the antithetical'; whilst noting that within a few years Wagner rejected Feuerbach's philosophy for that of Schopenhauer.

The title of the essay was to haunt Wagner; thereafter his opponents were to taunt him as a self-appointed prophet of 'the music of the future'.

Immediately following the essay Wagner dashed off a draft libretto, mostly in prose, Wieland der Schmied (Wieland the Smith), outlined at the close of the essay itself, which he thought appropriate as material for his ideal music-drama, and originally intended to develop for production in Paris. However he abandoned this plan, and the draft eventually became the basis for the first Slovak opera, Kovac Wiland, by Ján Levoslav Bella, (produced in Bratislava in 1924).

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