  Drama, for Hegel, is the “highest” and most concrete art (PKÄ, 205)—the art in which human beings themselves are the medium of aesthetic expression. (Seeing a play performed by actors, as opposed to hearing it read aloud or reading it for oneself, is thus central, in Hegel’s view, to the experience of drama [Aesthetics, 2: 1182–5; PKÄ, 223–4].) Drama, indeed, is the art in which all the other arts are contained (virtually or actually): “the human being is the living statue, architecture is represented by painting or there is real architecture,” and—in particular in Greek drama—there is “music, dance and pantomime” (PKÄ, 223). At this point, it is tempting to say that, for Hegel, drama—to use Richard Wagner’s expression—is the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk). It is doubtful, however, whether Hegel would have been sympathetic to Wagner’s project. Hegel remarks that drama takes the explicit form of a “totality” in opera, which belongs more to the sphere of music than to drama proper (PKÄ, 223). (He has in mind in particular the operas of Gluck and Mozart.) In drama as such, by contrast, language is what predominates and music plays a subordinate role and may even be present only in the virtual form of versification. The Wagnerian idea of a “music drama” that is neither a straightforward opera nor a simple drama would thus appear, from Hegel’s point of view, to confuse two distinct arts.