The principal aim of our organization is to bring to the stage new operatic works that unify the arts in the spirit and vision of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. But art is not to be understood as referring simply to creations of the imagination made concrete to the senses through various media like paper, stone, paint, sound, or movement. Rather, we take art in the broader antique sense of any human activity that produces or contributes to culture. By culture we mean a social way of life grounded in beliefs concerning man, the universe, and human destiny. These ideas, and the norms and values that flow from them, are enshrined in a society’s institutions, which structuralize such characteristically human occupations as politics, education, science, religion, and art in the narrow sense. Of central importance is the inspiration of the symbolic drama and archetypes of ancient rites. In this regard, culture is itself the total work of art and man’s earthly vocation, while opera its most synoptic expression. Grand opera, therefore, aspires to transform, especially through music, both the individual and society in a recollection of the beautiful and sublime — all this with a view to the cultivation of our faculties and edification of the soul.

The first project of Totum Artis Opus is a production, in collaboration with Delphic Forge, of Gracchus, a new opera by David Hughes and Richard Munkelt.