Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera 9780520966550

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note on Presentation
Introduction: Opera, Staging, Technologies
1. Wagner’s Venusberg
2. Curtain
3. Gong
4. Steam
Epilogue: Wagnerian Failure
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Curtain, Gong, Steam

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Dragan Plamenac Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund in History and Music.

Curtain, Gong, Steam Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera

Gundula Kreuzer

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kreuzer, Gundula Katharina, 1975– author. Title: Curtain, gong, steam : Wagnerian technologies of nineteenth-century opera / Gundula Kreuzer. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2017052549 (print) | lccn 2017056145 (ebook) | isbn 9780520966550 (ebook) | isbn 9780520279681 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883—Aesthetics. | Opera and technology—History—19th century. | Opera—Production and direction—History—19th century. | Opera—Stage-setting and scenery—History—19th century. | Opera and technology—History— 20th century. | Opera—Production and direction—History—20th century. | Opera—Stage-setting and scenery—History—20th century. Classification: lcc ml1700 (ebook) | lcc ml1700+ (print) | ddc 792.509/034—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052549

Manufactured in the United States of America / Printed in China 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Barbara Kreuzer and the wise love she represents

contents

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Abbreviations Note on Presentation Introduction: Opera, Staging, Technologies

ix xi xvi xix 1

1. Wagner’s Venusberg

27

2. Curtain

54

3. Gong

109

4. Steam

162

Epilogue: Wagnerian Failure Notes Works Cited Index

215 239 291 335

illustrations

1.1. “ ‘Atlas’ in Music,” in Puck. Humoristisch-Satyrische Wochenschrift (1877) 43 1.2. Venus’s all-purpose pink drapery lures Tannhäuser in Wolfgang Wagner’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Bayreuth, 1985) 44 1.3. Venus charms through layers of rose-colored bodily extensions in Nikolaus Lehnhoff ’s staging of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Festspielhaus BadenBaden, 2008) 45 1.4. The Venusberg rendered as an inverted theatrical curtain in Werner Herzog’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 1998) 46 2.1. The Wagner curtain: draft of its mechanical construction by Walter Huneke 92 2.2. The Wagner curtain in 1897, framing the Bayreuth stage for Parsifal’s Grail temple in Wagner’s premiere production of 1882 93 3.1. Gong strikes at the beginning of Domenico Corri’s “dramatic opera” The Travellers, or Music’s Fascination (London, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1806) 118 3.2. Tam-tam used in Paris for François-Joseph Gossec’s Marche lugubre (1790) as part of the funeral cortège for Mirabeau on April 4, 1791 119 3.3. Use of a gong to induce catalepsy in Jean-Martin Charcot’s neurological clinic at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, during the 1870s and 1880s, as rendered in Paul Regnard’s Sorcellerie, magnétisme, morphinisme, délire des grandeurs (1887) 141

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illustrations

4.1. Interleaved stage manager’s score for productions of Das Rheingold at the Munich Court Theater showing Wotan’s descent into Nibelheim via sulfurous fumes 184 4.2. Bayreuth’s steaming dragon, as re-created for Angelo Neumann’s 1881 production of the Ring cycle in Berlin’s Victoria-Theater 187 4.3. A later satirical view of Siegfried’s dragon, likely referring to Angelo Neumann’s production as presented in London in 1882 188 4.4. “Steam Concert,” in [Jean-Jacques] Grandville, Un autre monde (1844) 194 4.5. “Steam Orchestra for Handling Wagner’s Scores,” in Kikeriki (1876) 195 4.6. Karl Klič, “The Bayreuth Music Steam Engine,” in Humoristische Blätter (1876) 195 4.7. Theo Raven’s production score for Das Rheingold documenting the 1914 Bayreuth staging and how it differed from earlier productions 200 4.8. The steaming hydroelectric dam in Patrice Chéreau’s centennial production of Das Rheingold, scene 1 (Bayreuth, 1976) 204 4.9. Mime’s industrial (and proto-steampunk) smithy in Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 Bayreuth production of Siegfried, act 1 205 4.10. Vera Nemirova’s cosmically misty unit set for the Ring (Opernhaus Frankfurt, 2010–12) 206 4.11. “Steam Swan,” in Berliner Wespen (1882) 210 E.1. Robot Myon arrives in front of a red velvet curtain in the Gob Squad production of My Square Lady (Komische Oper Berlin, 2015) 216 E.2. The “machine” in operation: models of Carl Fillion’s unit set for the Ring in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010–12) 228 E.3. The Rhinemaidens splash about and exhale interactive digital bubbles in scene 1 of Das Rheingold in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010) 229 E.4. Alberich has morphed into a skeletal dinosaur in scene 3 of Das Rheingold in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010) 231 E.5. Robotic giants and gods in mechanical cranes argue over the embodied Nibelung hoard in La Fura dels Baus’s Das Rheingold, scene 4 (Valencia, 2007) 236 E.6. The gods move towards Valhalla, an acrobatic body sculpture suspended in midair, in La Fura dels Baus’s Das Rheingold, scene 4 (Valencia, 2007) 237

preface and acknowled gments

In the digital age, opera may appear like a dinosaur among audiovisual media, illequipped to thrive in the fast-changing climate of virtual realities. Some directors therefore seek to boost its chances of survival through generous infusions of modern technologies, such as that giant computerized machine-set in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 production of Richard Wagner’s ever-challenging Ring cycle depicted on the cover of this book (see also figure E.4). Yet opera has long enlisted the latest gadgets from within and beyond the theatrical realm in an attempt to fuse its various contributing elements into one immersive spectacle. During my earlier research on Verdi I chanced upon and became fascinated by the release of water vapor in the first productions of the Ring—a use so striking and ample that it came to be associated both with Wagner and with a particular idea of what the Ring should look like onstage. While investigating these steam effects, I noted in turn that Wagner parodies frequently mocked the ways in which he deployed curtains, and discovered the freehand addition of the tam-tam to a wide range of scores and theatrical satires. My curiosity piqued, I launched an exploration of all three phenomena as both independent theatrical tools and technologies integral to the conception of individual nineteenth-century operas. Thus paradigmatically addressing opera’s mechanical conditioning, I strove to enhance our understanding of the genre as a multimedia art form. I also hoped to dismantle Wagner’s overbearing position in the historiography of operatic production by exposing his borrowing of technologies from his contemporaries. It was with some chagrin that I realized in due course how instrumental Wagner had been, after all: not for inventing but for pushing and twisting the uses of each technology.

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Put in more abstract terms, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera examines how composers since the Industrial Revolution began to integrate specific production details into their creative visions, thereby unleashing a quest for new or updated machineries. In particular, they cultivated what I call “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensorial illusionist devices intended to veil the artificiality of stage representation along with their own mechanicity. Each of these technologies mediated not just between sound and sight but also more generally between staged opera’s heterogeneous materialities, smoothing over the latter’s interstices. Concretely, I explore uses and effects of the curtain, the gong, and steam in a wealth of works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him, drawing on scores, historical performance documents, theatrical treatises, reviews, and wider cultural discourses. My book traces each titular technology’s (temporary) absorption into a common notion of the relevant operas as well as its gradual transformation over time—in later productions, in its mechanical evolution, as well as in its resurgence across various performance genres of the last half century. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work and offers a new, technological angle on the history (and historicity) of staging. As the term “Wagnerian technologies” suggests, my theoretical toolbox partly derives from Wagner’s writings and their later exegetes. I reexamine some of these texts from a dual perspective, both hermeneutic and stage-practical, to pinpoint their inherent failure to account for the gritty actuality of operatic production, which no idealist thinking could transcend. But I acknowledge that Wagner was not the only proponent of this elusive ideal of concealing opera’s artifice through the deployment of ever-more sophisticated technologies. Indeed, the devices and techniques harnessed for his coveted medial fusion all squarely derived from contemporaneous stage practices. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus embeds Wagner within a larger, pan-European concern among nineteenth-century composers with opera’s multimediality and teases out some of the latter’s pragmatic and theoretical implications, both then and now. My subtitle’s second term also invites explanation. While focusing on technologies, it is what I consider to be their medial aspiration—their affordance of creative perceptible interfaces with the audience’s sensorium—that defines their “Wagnerian” quality, in contrast to the “merely” enabling (and therefore ideally imperceptible) mechanics behind their operation. Here and elsewhere, Curtain, Gong, Steam builds on recent media theories, especially Friedrich Kittler’s provocative emphasis on the medial conditions of any form of human expression. Far from following his techno-determinism, however, I venture that the technologically mediated concealment of staged opera’s mechanics has always been doomed to fail. Instead, it may be opera’s very hybridity that can sustain the genre in our unprecedentedly mediatized age. The accelerating obsolescence of media technol-

preface and acknowledgments

xiii

ogies ironically continues to render a perfectly transparent illusionist stage chimeric. But with its imaginative and deliberate collaboration between bodies and technologies, opera may in the end prove anything but a medial dinosaur: it offers a welcome site for contemporary negotiations among ephemeral virtualities, a reviving interest in the material, and our own dogged corporeality. In this spirit, and with a nod to the book’s extended gestation, a framing look at some recent productions consciously historicizes my own scholarly endeavors. •

•

•

The bulk of Curtain, Gong, Steam was conceived, my eyes fixed on the tenure clock, during a Junior Faculty Leave at Yale University in 2011–12; and it was essentially completed while I held a fellowship at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in 2015–16. Chapter 1 partly derives from a lecture I gave in Bayreuth in 2011, published as “Venus als Wagner” in Tannhäuser—Werkstatt der Gefühle: Wagner-“Concil” Bayreuther Festspiele 2011, edited by Clemens Risi, Bettina Brandl-Risi, Anna Papenburg, and Robert Sollich (Freiburg: Rombach, 2014), 159–76. Large parts of chapter 4 are based on my essay “Wagner-Dampf: Steam in Der Ring des Nibelungen and Operatic Production,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011): 179–218. Chapter 3 and the epilogue profited from the interdisciplinary insights of my co-fellows at the superbly stimulating Italian Academy: Angelika Kaufmann, Arianna Cecconi, Beatrice Vallone, Cammy Brothers, Chiara Franceschini, Christine Jeanneret, Emmanuel Alloa, Emmanuele Coccia, Eric Bianchi, Federico Lauria, Federico Pierotti, Leon Chisholm, Manuela Bragagnolo, Michele Cometa, Paola Giacomoni, Thomas Hilgers, as well as Barbara Faedda and David Freedberg. Two Yale awards for my first monograph (the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize) supported my research, while permissions and illustrations were covered by a generous grant from the Frederick Hilles Fund. Curtain, Gong, Steam also bears significant traces of Yale’s intellectual community. I am particularly grateful to Brian Kane for his endlessly stimulating questions, challenges, and recommendations, without which some sections would have taken a less interesting course; Daniel Harrison for shepherding me through the administrative tangles of Yale’s notorious tenure system; Ellen Rosand for her prudent and candid mentorship; Ève Poudrier for her humane presence, now missed; Gary Tomlinson for pushing my arguments at decisive junctures; Ian Quinn for his friendship from day one; James Hepokoski for his critical eye and unfailing trust; Michael Veal for probing my short foray into popular culture; Patrick McCreless for our “Wagner lunches” and his all-around generosity; and Rick Cohn as well as, more recently, Anna Zayaruznaya, Henry Parkes, and Rebekah Ahrendt for enhancing the Music Department’s friendly vibe. Beyond Stoeckel Hall, Francesco Casetti, John Durham Peters, Katie Trumpener, Milette Gaifman, Paola Bertucci, Pauline LeVen, Rüdiger Campe, and Tim Barringer have added helpful

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perspectives. In the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Helen Bartlett, Karl Schrom, Remi Castonguy, and Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy went out of their way to obtain what they must often have considered obscure materials. Not least, a string of wonderful graduate students—many by now professional scholars in their own right—have aided my research in ways (and locations) too numerous to list: my heartfelt thanks to Alexandra Kieffer, Annelies Andries, Carmel Raz, Christy Thomas, Henry Balme, Joseph Salem, Julia Doe, Kamala Schelling, Marco Ladd, and Sylvia Leith. Leanne Dodge was an astute copyeditor in the earliest stages; and Hilary Purrington patiently set the music examples. Finally, at a time when the book should long have been in production, Rona Johnston abetted its extra editorial loop and requested slimming with her keen eye for linguistic detail. Although—like Wagnerian technologies—I will inevitably fail to cover everyone who has helped the genesis of this book, I would like to thank Alessandra Campana, Clemens Risi, David J. Levin, Jutta Toelle, Laura Tunbridge, Lydia Goehr, and Mauro Calcagno for their encouragement, feedback, friendship, and sometimes hospitality over the years; David Charlton for sharing his unpublished dissertation and his expertise on Parisian tam-tams; Benjamin Steege, Florence Grétreau, and Matthew Goodheart for their help with other gong-related matters; Anselm Gerhard, Charles Kronenberg, Daniel KL Chua, David Rosen, Francesca Brittan, Katherine Hambridge, Laurence Dreyfus, Mary Ann Smart, Ralph Locke, Thomas Betzwieser, and my interlocutors at various colloquia for their valuable comments on early presentations of individual chapters; Sarah Hibberd for inviting me to two science-andtechnology workshops that provided important stimuli for chapters 2 and 3; and Ryan Minor for being my most consistent interlocutor and conspirator in all things operatic (as well as lending a second set of eyes to chapter 4). Axel Körner, Benjamin Walton, David Trippett, Flora Willson, Gavin Williams, Katherine Fry, and Sarah Hibberd took it upon themselves to read and critique several chapters in a further workshop at King’s College, London. Roger Parker not only organized this unique occasion but, once again, accompanied my book’s path from the first ideas to its final shape; his uncanny ability to solve structural issues and stoke the creative fires—not to mention his enduring friendship—remain invaluable for my work and myself. I am likewise indebted to Stephen Hinton and my friend Emanuele Senici, the (then) anonymous readers of this manuscript, for their astute observations, critique, and constructive encouragement. At the University of California Press, Mary Francis and, more recently, Raina Polivka have been ardent advocates; Zuha Khan and Benjy Malings lent welcome help during the protracted final stages of preproduction editing, and Dore Brown, Kristine Hunt, and Nicholle Lutz saw the book into print. My research could not have been undertaken without countless librarians and archivists on both sides of the Atlantic. I am particularly indebted to the following representatives and their staff: Kristina Unger, Nationalarchiv der RichardWagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth; Marie-Luise Adlung, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer

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xv

Kulturbesitz, and Martina Rebmann, Musikabteilung der Staatsbibiliothek, Berlin; Rainer Maaß, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, and Silvia Uhlemann, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt; Ann Kersting-Meuleman, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt; Gerald Köhler, Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln; Sabine Kurth, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and Markus Schmalzl, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich; Andrea Harrandt, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, and Irmgard Pangerl, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna; Bérengère de l’Epine, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville, Magali Lacousse, Archives nationales, and Pierre Vidal, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, Paris; Mariagrazia Carlone, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, and Matteo Sartorio, Museo Teatrale alla Scala, Milan; Giovanna Caridei, Archivio di Stato, Naples; Gavin Dixon, Horniman Museum, London; Tara Craig, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York; and Christina Linklater, Loeb Music Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Personally, curtains, gongs, and steam have accompanied me through both the happiest and the most challenging times of my life. The book would not have taken its present shape without the loving support I encountered along the way. I am indebted to Shakur for the time we had; Jonah and Zachary for opening their worlds to me, and keeping them open (those Minecraft axes are for you); Elizabeth, Eve, Jaia, Leah, Lisa, Nora, and Penelope for caring like sisters; Mother Clare (now dearly missed), Christine, Johanna, Lucille, and Michael for their wisdom and time; Benjamin, Eric, Jackie, Jessamyn, Ryan, and Yuval for standing by in NYC; my parents, Arthur and Gisela, for their wholehearted backing in every possible way; and Anselm and Britta with Milla and Lale for so joyfully embracing me as an auntie. My own aunt Barbara has graced my life with her ongoing interest in my scholarly pursuits and, even more, with her empathy, her ability to listen without judgment, and her spiritual resonance. It is to her and her quiet love that I dedicate this book in gratitude. New Haven, June 2017

abbreviations

Aufführung

A-Whh A-Wn CCG CWD

CWT D-B D-Bga D-BHna D-DSsa D-F D-KNth D-Mbs D-Mhsa

Richard Wagner, “Über die Aufführung des ‘Tannhäuser.’ Eine Mittheilung an die Dirigenten und Darsteller dieser Oper” (1852), SD 5:123–60. Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, Vienna. Collection complète des œuvres de Grétry, publiée par le gouvernement belge. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1884–1936]. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries. Edited and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack. Translated and with an introduction by Geoffrey Skelton. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–80. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher. Edited by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack. 2 vols. Munich: Piper, 1976–77. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung. Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Richard Wagner-Stiftung, Richard-Wagner-Museum mit Nationalarchiv, Bayreuth. Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Darmstadt. Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Musik- und Theaterabteilung, Frankfurt am Main. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Musikabteilung. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich. xvi

abbreviations

D-WRdn ERO

F-Pan F-Pbmo fs GMO GMW GREC

I-Mas I-Mr I-Mt Kunstwerk NBE

m., mm. Mittheilung ML MLE ms OD OED PW SB

SD

xvii

Deutsches Nationaltheater, Archiv, Weimar. Early Romantic Opera: Bellini—Rossini—Meyerbeer—Donizetti & Grand Opera in Paris. Edited with introductions by Philip Gossett and Charles Rosen. 44 vols. New York: Garland, 1978–83. Archives nationales, Paris. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, Paris. full score Grove Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ grovemusic/. Giacomo Meyerbeer, Werkausgabe. Abteilung 1: Bühnenwerke. Edited by Jürgen Selk. Munich: Ricordi, 2000–ongoing. Gioachino Rossini, Edizione critica delle opere, sezione prima: opere teatrali. Edited by Bruno Cagli, Philip Gossett, and Alberto Zedda. Milan and Pesaro: Ricordi and Fondazione Rossini Pesaro, 1979–ongoing. Archivio di Stato, Milan. Archivio Storico Ricordi, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan. Biblioteca Trivulziana e Archivio Storico Civico, Milan. Richard Wagner, “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (1849), SD 3:42–178. Hector Berlioz, New Edition of the Complete Works. Issued by the Berlioz Centenary Committee in London in Association with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. 26 vols. Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter, 1967–2006. measure, measures Richard Wagner, “Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde” (1851), SD 4:231–345. Richard Wagner, Mein Leben. Munich: List, 1963. Richard Wagner, My Life. Translated by Andrew Gray, edited by Mary Whittall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. manuscript Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama. SD 3:222–321 and 4:1–229. Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Record of the English Language. http://www.oed.com/. Richard Wagner, Prose Works. Translated by William Ashton Ellis (London, 1892–99). 8 vols. New York: Broude Brothers, 1966. Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe. Edited by Getrud Strobel et al. Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik; from vol. 10 Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1967–ongoing. Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen. Volksausgabe. 16 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1911].

xviii

abbreviations

SL

Search Spencer

SW US-NNC Versuch

Vorwort vs WGV

Richard Wagner, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner. Translated and edited by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington. London: Dent, 1987. Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 2005. Stewart Spencer’s translation of Der Ring des Nibelungen. In Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, eds., Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung”: A Companion, 57–351. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993. Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Egon Voss. Mainz: Schott, 1970–ongoing. Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Anton Seidl Collection, New York. Theodor W. Adorno, “Versuch über Wagner.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 13: Die musikalischen Monographien, 7–148. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Richard Wagner, “Vorwort zur Herausgabe der Dichtung des Bühnenfestspieles Der Ring des Nibelungen” (1862), SD 6:273–81. vocal score The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, Series 1: Opera. Edited by Philip Gossett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Milan: Ricordi, 1983–ongoing.

note on presentation

All translations into English are my own unless a translated edition is referenced (sometimes alongside the original source) in the notes. Original-language citations are included only where a phrasing is particularly distinctive or the source text is not easily available in published literature or online.

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Introduction Opera, Staging, Technologies

New York, 2010. Like many opera houses around the world, the Metropolitan Opera prepares for the 2013 bicentenary of Richard Wagner by launching a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Boasts the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, “Since Wagner was way ahead of his time, I believe he would be pleased by what we are attempting.”1 Indeed, according to the season book, “this new Ring is faithful to the libretto and to Wagner’s vision. . . . Yet it is also strikingly contemporary. The production uses modern stage techniques and state-of-the-art technology.”2 In a truly Wagnerian paradox, the new Ring cycle is being heralded as both inviolate and innovative, as completing an “authentic” vision with hypermodern means. The gist is clear: the Met purports to show “the Ring that Wagner would have wanted all along” if only he had known the latest technologies that director Robert Lepage now introduces.3 Here, in twenty-first-century New York, not in Wagner’s own theater in nineteenth-century Bayreuth, we are to experience the fullest realization of Wagner’s complex illusionist music drama. To be sure, much of this rhetoric may be attributable to marketing tactics. Given today’s increasingly Wagner-saturated operascape, Gelb needed to emphasize something novel about his production, but he wanted to avoid radical innovation on the level of direction. For years, Gelb had been trying to placate fears among more conservative opera patrons that his company might be invaded by what has become known as Regietheater, or director’s opera—stagings with a strong interpretive concept that are often slanted toward updated sociopolitical or psychological readings and therefore frequently depart from the scenery and settings described in the score. Regarding the Ring, Gelb instead appealed to an “audience that is more visually astute than ever before, thanks to its exposure to a 1

2

Introduction

widening range of media”:4 he shifted the terms of innovation from conceptual revisionism to the staging’s optical surface and its pioneering technology. Even so, he faced opposition for discontinuing the Met’s previous Ring in the first place, a purposely “Romantic,” traditionalist staging created in 1986–88 by Otto Schenk that was partly based on Wagner’s original designs. Amid such conflicting demands, Gelb opted to veil the modern—the mere shock of a new production, or of up-to-the-minute stage devices—with a veneer of fidelity, selling his expensive technological enterprise and artistic compromise as the real(ist) deal. Such a chameleon-like PR campaign was understandable in the post-2008 economy, not least for such a costly work as Wagner’s Ring cycle. But Gelb’s particular recourse to authenticity in his sales pitch could seem surprising. For musicologists, any claim to an authentic production might appear both stale and problematic following the heated discussions of the 1980s and 1990s over historically informed performance practice (dubbed “HIP”) in the early music scene. As several scholars have argued, HIP is based on questionable claims about our knowledge (and the knowability) of composers’ intentions and “original” yet irrevocably lost sound worlds, performance traditions, and listening habits. Instead, in Richard Taruskin’s oft-cited analysis, it is driven by a very contemporary quest for the always new under a banner of authenticity that is merely “commercial propaganda,” and thus HIP stands as the truly modern performance style of today.5 Beyond such general skepticism, the Met’s rhetorical coupling of authenticity with technology raises a more specific set of issues. Unlike HIP or those historicist opera stagings of recent decades that employ “original” (often reconstructed) hardware—whether Baroque instruments, “period” costumes, or eighteenthcentury stage machines—in a claim to historical accuracy, Lepage displays ultramodern gadgets, including such novel features as interactive videos and 3D projections. Ironically, his means are entirely of our time—which is also to say that they are decidedly not authentic. It is their end that is supposedly HIP. The Met’s reasoning is that Wagner himself was dissatisfied with his original production since his demands far exceeded the possibilities of even the most advanced nineteenth-century stages. But in the early twenty-first century, technology has at long last caught up with Wagner, and Lepage professes to be realizing the composer’s utopian vision.6 In so doing, however, he highlights precisely the element of operatic production—its mechanical conditioning—that Wagner had been most eager to downplay in both theory and practice. Furthermore, Lepage’s equipment partially malfunctioned and (arguably worse for his cause) partly developed further even during the initial run of his production. The latter’s asserted authenticity proved tenuous at best, its finality fleeting. Although I leave a more detailed discussion of Lepage’s endeavor for the epilogue, its focus on enabling technologies and their historicity provides a useful starting point for my book. In the most general terms, Curtain, Gong, Steam exam-

Opera, Staging, Technologies

3

ines the relationship between opera and technology from the dual yet entwined perspectives of production and preservation. Its conceptual frame is the question of how composers since the late eighteenth century increasingly embraced select audiovisual details as integral to their creative efforts, inscribing certain facets of staging into their operas and thus expanding the notion of what constitutes the operatic work. These attempts involved technics both in their inclusion of evermore-specific stage technologies to facilitate the envisioned effects and in their quest to “fix” the latter for future productions. I suggest that it is precisely at the intersections of both technological processes—at operatic moments when composers required idiosyncratic mechanical procedures or audiovisual results—that we can clearly observe the importance of technology for the overall conception and efficacy of opera onstage. Curtain, Gong, Steam, then, explores select composerprescribed stage technologies in view of their dramatic, musical, aesthetic, and cultural meanings; their material functioning and sensorial effects; their absorption (at least temporarily) into a widely shared vision of the respective operas; and the gradual transformation of all these aspects in later productions or works. Although the study of opera has traditionally focused on text and music while committing the history of stage technology to specialist treatises, scholars over the last several decades have moved decidedly toward a concept of opera as existing on three signifying levels, frequently summarized as verbal, musical, and visual.7 Such a triangulation, however, risks obscuring the microcosm of agents and media involved in each of these levels. In particular, the visual component does not simply provide music and text with a pictorial surface or directorial playground: it comprises a host of media and materialities. Not all of these operate purely on the optical level, and each carries its own tradition, resilience, and interpretive potential. Indeed, the “performative turn” across the humanities has notably shifted attention to corporal aspects of performance, such as singers’ bodies or the physicality of voices.8 And still more recent investigations have begun to address the significance of specific mechanical procedures (and of technology as such) for staged opera and, consequently, for opera studies, usually in view of individual composers, works, or institutions.9 Even beyond opera, interest in the technicity of musical cultures—indeed, of all human expression—and in music’s medial qualities has begun to flourish, informed by recent media studies, a renewed fascination with the histories of science and technology, and the advent of what has been dubbed “new materialism.” Partaking in all these trends, my book aims to deepen our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of both historical operatic practice and individual works by exploring select technologies across a wide geographic and chronological spectrum and by showing how their implications often reach to the present day. Technology, of course, can mean many things, including the compositional techniques, orchestral instruments, or theatrical architecture required for the

4

Introduction

production of opera. In 1817 Stendhal described the reopened Teatro San Carlo in Naples wholesale as a “machine for music.”10 Lurking behind such a general notion of technology is the Aristotelian division between physis and technē, between nature and the human “bringing-forth” or making of something that, unlike nature, does not generate itself.11 According to Aristotle, all technē imitates nature. Yet it does so in two different modes: “On the one hand,” according to the exegesis of philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “techne carries to its end [accomplishes, perfects, epitelei] what phusis is incapable of effecting . . . ; on the other hand, it imitates.” From the latter sense was derived the classic construal of art in terms of mimesis; from the former emerged technē in its modern, narrow conception: the generation of something that was not previously in existence “but which supplements a certain deficiency in nature, its incapacity to do everything, organize everything, make everything its work—produce everything.”12 With regard to this notion of useful, manmade artifacts, in the late eighteenth century the neologism technology began to be cultivated, referring to the “branch of knowledge dealing with the mechanical arts and applied sciences.” As such, technology became increasingly associated with the practical and economic spheres of manufacture and industry as well as with specific equipment (or technics), in contradistinction to the arts.13 From this split emerged a somewhat dismissive perception of technology as a means to an end, a mere aid that was subordinate both to the vitality of nature and to what was now taken as the self-contained purpose of art. In turn, this condescension lies at the root of the trend to distinguish within operatic culture between the “artistic” (music, text, set designs, or staging concepts proper) and the mechanical—all those structures and devices that are necessary for the former’s “bringing-forth” onstage but that, as seemingly auxiliary appendages, have often been deemed irrelevant for hermeneutic exegesis. It is technology in this practical, mechanical sense that this book addresses. The relative neglect of the technical sphere thus circumscribed in favor of the artistic (or scientific) has a long tradition in academia. According to literary scholar Mark Hansen, that disregard results from a penchant for what he calls “technesis, or the putting-into-discourse of technology”—a tendency he believes to have persisted even among modern philosophers of technology, with their inclination to bracket out the material reality of technology in order to focus on what Heidegger famously postulated as its nontechnological essence. In Hansen’s analysis, this assimilation of the technical with thought perpetuated the priority accorded mind over matter.14 Indeed, even in early media studies (just as in opera studies) the focus was often on the end product, on shiny screens and their interactions with audiences and users, rather than on the nuts and bolts of their facilitating operations. Such medial myopia has epistemological consequences. First, it sidelines the often-troublesome details and unwieldy materialities that afford and effect those sensory interfaces to arrive instead at an essentially immaterialized and idealized notion of media (or

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opera). Second, it disregards the ways in which these media are conditioned by, and in turn condition, technological developments that are themselves bound up with societal changes, thus limiting the site of critical engagement with cultural meaning.15 For opera scholars, such cultural half-heartedness with regard to technologies has created practical hurdles as well: unlike “artistic” sources, documents relating to mechanical aspects of historical productions tend to be scattered across administrative and musical archives or to have been discarded altogether.16 And yet, as Bruno Latour has observed, humanists will find that “if they add interpretation of machines to interpretation of texts, their culture will not fall to pieces; instead, it will take on added density.”17 More recently, media scholar Wolfgang Ernst has asserted that “media archaeology exposes the technicality of media, not to reduce culture to technology but to reveal the technoepistemological momentum in culture itself.”18 Curtain, Gong, Steam pursues precisely such material and conceptual enrichment, specifically for our idea of opera and historical operatic culture. In a way, then, this book could be described in Latourian terms as an effort to partially reverse the “blackboxing” of the operatic event—to unpack the carefully concealed machineries behind those illusionist stagings nineteenth-century composers desired.19 Put differently, it seeks to disclose the technological grounding of an opera’s staging as nontransparent and nonliteral—as not simply ready and available to “translate” a given work onto stage, but instead as contributing, significantly and idiosyncratically, to the overall effect, material reality, and hermeneutic potential of a work as both conceived and staged. Although striving to illuminate the nuances with which opera’s many technologies engage in specific works or moments thereof, however, I do not pursue an actor-network theory approach: I am less concerned with questions of agency or the collaboration between humans and nonhumans in the creation of staged opera than I am with composers’ visions and the technologies applied toward their realization. My focus is the historical context and hermeneutic potential of specific technologies in (operatic) action rather than their genesis or functionality per se. Ironically, though, my book embraces mechanical conditions of historical productions even as it simultaneously confirms the details of these conditions to be historiographically ephemeral. Uncovering the technological thus also sheds light on the historicity of production: it highlights staged opera’s fundamental instability from a perspective that is both practical and historical. After all, what David J. Levin has called opera’s “unsettledness” is not only synchronic, due to contingencies inherent in every performing art, but also diachronic.20 Despite their hardware materiality, what we might dub “special-effects technologies” tend to be fast-changing features of both operas and the modern world in general, caught as they are in a constant—and constantly accelerating—cycle of innovation and obsolescence; by contrast, other operatic elements (such as the proscenium stage or orchestral instruments), cultural artifacts, and societal structures have

6

Introduction

proven relatively durable.21 In focusing on the technologies of staged opera, Curtain, Gong, Steam implicitly offers a historically anchored backdrop to the oftposed question of why, in today’s operatic world, the ever-same scores are treated to always-new productions; why Werktreue at the level of music and text is frequently counterpointed with (often self-proclaimed) innovation in the realm of production; in short, why preservationist efforts for particular moments of staging are largely doomed to fail, whether in the Met’s new Ring cycle or elsewhere. S TAG I N G I N H I S T O RY

It is no coincidence that the Met pushed its authenticity-via-technology campaign for none other than Wagner. After all, no canonic composer tried to control and prescribe productions more energetically than did he. In this regard, my book’s focus on some of Wagner’s ideas and practices of staging—on Wagner’s technologies—makes good historical sense. Yet I do not want to imply that he was the first or only composer to care about the details of his operas’ physical manifestations. Wagner absorbed and pushed further a common aspiration among composers and institutions since the late eighteenth century to integrate certain facets of staging into operatic works alongside text and music. By the same token, he adopted and adjusted (rather than invented) the technologies involved in realizing this desire: hence Wagnerian technologies. Curtain, Gong, Steam is therefore about Wagner as much as it is about a larger cultural concern among nineteenth-century composers with the multimediality of their works and its practical and hermeneutic implications. In this sense, Wagner provides merely a useful focal point for this book. His voluminous (if often inflated, self-aggrandizing, or outright ideological) writings; his zealous pursuit of his ideals; the construction of his own theater; the copious commentary his works have garnered; and an uninterrupted performance history: all these factors make Wagner a suitable gateway—or paradigmatic technology—for delving into expanding nineteenth-century notions of the operatic work as implying its onstage realization. Admittedly, Wagner’s central position might seem rather conventional, for at least two reasons. First, it privileges a composer’s visions over collaborative or institutional efforts toward an opera’s staging. Such efforts could involve any number of people (and their respective artistic traditions), including librettists, stage directors, designers, and theatrical agents. But the paper trails that reveal exactly who made which decision are fragmentary at best, and finding even those remnants requires extensive archival digging. For the purposes of Curtain, Gong, Steam, composers’ names—including Wagner’s—must therefore sometimes stand in as shorthand for the creative team that might collectively have shaped a staged operatic moment. Beyond such practicalities, however, Wagner was not alone in advocating the composer as ultimate authority on all matters of production. The

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career of his exact contemporary Verdi reflects a similar shift of control away from impresarios and institutions (in Verdi’s case with the support not of his own theater but of his publisher). And both Verdi and Wagner took their cue from Meyerbeer and other composers of French operas who increasingly dominated the famously complex artistic and administrative apparatus of the Paris Opéra, that hotbed of lavish illusionist stagings. Second, my paradigmatic use of Wagner seems to echo the well-worn narrative that has him as a turning point in—even the pinnacle of—the history of opera. Wagner laid the foundation for this idealizing account when, in his seminal treatises around midcentury, he rejected the genre of opera (along with its generic label) wholesale; instead, he claimed to reinvent musical drama by going back to Greek tragedy. Despite such hyperbole, the notion of a victory of German music drama over French and Italian opera struck a chord with many (particularly Austro-German) music historians who were eager to perpetuate the ideology of Germanic dominance and superiority in the musical realm since Beethoven. In 1860, for instance, the influential music writer Franz Brendel declared, “Wagner above all could dare to break with everything existing, since he had the power to replace it with something greater.”22 From here, the notion of Wagner transcending the generic development of opera and literally forming a separate chapter in the history of music entered mainstream historiography; that perception largely persisted until both the underlying nationalism and the tendency to view all of nineteenth-century opera (and its successors) through the lens of Wagner’s theories were questioned in the twentieth century.23 Although my book is organized around what I call “Wagnerian technologies,” it does not perpetuate this outdated and ideologically suspect narrative. Instead, it seeks to problematize the idea of Wagner as operatic redeemer. For one, I examine something Wagner himself vehemently sought to deny—namely, his vital dependence on technology. Not only does this reliance put him on a par with his peers, but by looking at Austro-German, French, Italian, and some British developments before and around Wagner, my book shows just how much he took in this regard from his contemporaries, particularly from the French models he so denounced. A product of his time, he participated in, rather than broke with, important panEuropean strivings in opera. What is more, both my examination of select material realities behind Wagner’s claims to innovation and my longer-term perspective, reaching beyond his lifetime, challenge the idea that he successfully achieved his artistic agenda. What will emerge, alongside a rich contextualization of specific stage technologies, is a more complex historical embedding of a composer more ambiguous than he is frequently portrayed.24 My chronological purview, then, extends out from Wagner both ways into the “long” nineteenth century. This historiographical frame warrants further explanation. For just as Wagner was not the only composer to put a premium on opera’s

8

Introduction

multimediality, the nineteenth century was by no means the first era during which such a focus developed. Definitions of opera during its first century regularly referenced machines as seminal for the genre’s appeal. To cite just one instance: in 1648 Englishman John Raymond reported that during his recent grand tour to Italy he had seen “an Opera represented . . . with severall changes of Sceanes, . . . and other Machines, at which the Italians are spoke to be excellent.”25 The tradition of mechanic effects dated back even further, to the elaborate Renaissance spectacles and their predecessors out of which opera had emerged, and whose fabled stage tricks—monsters, chariots, and all—were proudly described in contemporary treatises on theatrical architecture and staging.26 Yet there were crucial differences between these early manifestations and nineteenth-century opera in the use and status of technology, both onstage and off. To mention just an illustrative few (and at the risk of oversimplification), Baroque opera was a decidedly collaborative venture in which staging “meant not only creating a show but also shaping the opera itself.”27 An opera’s conception and critical success depended generally more on librettists, machinists, and stage designers than on composers; already the storylines tended to be conceived so as to display a variety of magnificent scenic effects and devices specially constructed in line with the available budget.28 In summarizing the aesthetics of seventeenthcentury opera, Massimo Ossi has proposed its centerpiece “was a kind of competition between the audience and the architect in which the former tried to figure out the means by which the stage effects were carried out, while the latter endeavored to hide them.”29 The overall intent was to impress spectators with the quantity and quality of means (among which mechanics reigned supreme), which did not, though, necessarily cohere as integrated, illusionist musical multimedia. This wholehearted embrace of technology was furthered by the favored mythological subject matter and its dependence on supernatural interventions, sudden apparitions, and magical transformations: thus the inevitable deus ex machina arose as the quintessence of Baroque opera. So close did the association between fantastical plots and wondrous machines become that both were implied in the concept of the merveilleux, the marvelous.30 Technology, then, was not only a driving force for multimedia performance but also an artistic miracle in and of itself. It encompassed both “function and illusion, goal and play, math and magic”: hence the display of machines alongside classical art and natural objects in early modern Kunstkammern (or “cabinets of arts and curiosities”) and the widespread cultural fascination with automata and clockworks, mechanisms seen to mirror and, therefore, to reveal the hidden order of the world.31 However, early opera’s aesthetics of the marvelous and its attendant celebration of machines already displeased some seventeenth-century commentators. An influential critique came from the essayist Charles de Saint-Évremond, regarding Italian operas performed in Paris around 1660:

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Machines may satisfy the curiosity of ingenious Men, who love Mathematical Inventions, but they’ll hardly please persons of good judgment in the Theatre: the more they surprize, the more they divert the mind from attending to the Discourse; and the more admirable they are, the less Tenderness and exquisite Sense they leave in us, to be touch’d and charm’d with the Music. The Antients made no use of Machines, but when there was a necessity of bringing in some God; nay, the Poets themselves were generally laughed at for suffering themselves to be reduc’d to that necessity. If men love to be at expences, let them lay out their Money upon fine Scenes, the use whereof is more natural and more agreeable than that of Machines.32

This multilayered rebuttal of stunning machinery in opera prefigured many arguments that would become commonplace in eighteenth-century discourse leading up to the Enlightenment. At its core lay the emerging split between science and art, or a mutually exclusive separation of technē into technics and aesthetics, a division that was fundamental to the changing status of the mechanical in society at large. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp’s engaging account of the Kunstkammer and its demise, mechanics in the sixteenth century was considered a means of perfecting nature. Since it was the purpose of all art to imitate nature, animated mechanical devices surpassed even the revered classical arts, especially sculpture; moreover, such dynamic contraptions contained both godlike and playful qualities (which were summoned so resonantly in the dei ex machina). But with the growing—and reductive—spread in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of rationalism and the mechanistic worldview associated with Descartes, machines increasingly became codified as objects of scientific study and human progress. The rise of mercantilism and utilitarianism furthered the focus on the practical applicability of technology. Conversely (as evinced in Saint-Évremond’s reasoning), artists began to associate themselves with the intellectual realm, that other side of the Cartesian body-mind dualism. Eventually, idealist thinkers conceptualized the arts as superior to other forms of human activity and episteme, owing to their ideal grasp (rather than mere imitation) of nature, their metaphysical transcendence of materiality and functionality, and their access to the spiritual world beyond appearances.33 Add to this the unsettling changes to traditional lifestyles and environments engendered by the ever-faster pace of technological innovation and industrialization, and it becomes clearer why composers increasingly sought to cut themselves free of everything that smacked of mechanical forces, by now— in Bredekamp’s words—tokens of “lifelessness as well as stylistic aberration.”34 Bredekamp carves out one important trajectory that helps explain why the use of machines onstage, and the general dependence of theatrical success on technical effects, would appear infinitely more problematic during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Italy, fostered by the ascent of comic opera and a shift in serious opera toward historical subject matter, machines and anything supernatural (along with large casts and sensationally sprawling plots) became

10

Introduction

secondary. From at least the mid-eighteenth century through to early Rossini, Italian operas tended to come with minimal stage directions and to require few extravagant machines. Instead of stunning audiences (audio)visually, they sought to move them musically and morally.35 It was on the always more sumptuous French stages that the merveilleux lingered as a residue of mechanical magic. Yet even here, its metaphysical presence was sublimated into plots less dependent on physical spectacle, while its mechanical artifice began to be concealed, given the increasing demand by audiences for illusionist immersion, lifelike representation, and lyrical sensitivity—the “natural” and “agreeable” performance evoked by SaintÉvremond.36 An unencumbered embrace of modern technologies and spectacular effects would instead reemerge in popular entertainments of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a new cultural middle ground between the nowdivorced realms of technology and mass fabrication on the one hand and high art, with its cult of originality, on the other. So why did the stage-practical dimension eventually gain renewed importance in serious opera during the long nineteenth century, and why did composers themselves now address specifics of stage effects and their enabling machineries? Even in a nutshell, several factors contributed to what we might call the expansion of these composers’ creative visions. As Lydia Goehr has argued, around 1800 the “regulative concept” of the musical work began to influence compositional practice.37 This work-character was primarily associated with “absolute” instrumental music rather than with collaborative, heterogeneous, and occasion-driven opera, whose products were also highly amenable to changes in future productions on different stages. Nevertheless, a repertory began to emerge also in opera, implying a longer stage life and wider dissemination of successful operas—an extension that spatially and temporally transcended the composers’ direct sphere of influence on productions (as well as on casting and musical execution). It was to ensure their works’ optimal appearance and, with it, utmost economic profit that composers increasingly tried to prescribe the scenic realization as well.38 What is more, the Romantic movement fostered an appetite for descriptive detail and accuracy of representation across the arts, while the invention of photomechanical reproduction technologies, the concomitant flood of images, and the advent of optically focused mass entertainments such as panoramas, cycloramas, and dioramas resulted in what Jonathan Crary has described as a “new valuation of visual experience” during the long nineteenth century.39 Small wonder, then, that questions of staging and design became more urgent in operatic culture and for individual works, and that composers started to raise their voices in these debates. Between 1817 and his untimely death in 1826, for instance, Carl Maria von Weber overturned traditional rehearsal practices at the Dresden Court Opera when, as kapellmeister, he addressed not just the music but also the overall production. As his letters reveal, he even concerned himself with

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the mechanics of desired stage effects.40 And in the famous Wolf ’s Glen scene of his romantic opera Der Freischütz (Berlin, 1821), he set new standards regarding the quantity and quality of audiovisual stage directions and their integration into the musical drama, providing a model for the next generation of German composers. For his part, Weber had been influenced by French opera. The nexus between a growing attention to audiovisual detail in opera—traditionally the most complex of the performing arts—and the rise of new media was particularly evident in Paris, one of the nineteenth-century capitals of multimedia stimulation and technical invention. As the cultural flagship of the French nation, the Opéra, Paris’s primary opera house, had long lavished the largest sums of money on the mise-en-scène and boasted the most luxurious productions in Europe. Reflecting the splendor of the Napoleonic Empire, for example, Spontini’s historical operas of the early 1800s were of unprecedented scale and pomp. During the Restoration, serious opera declined in popularity; in response, the Opéra in 1827 formed a Staging Committee specifically to set higher standards of design and production, and by the early 1830s, the Opéra’s short-term yet influential director Louis Véron was encouraging the introduction of enticing methods of décor and dazzling optical effects found in boulevard theaters to modernize opera and attract a wider, more bourgeois audience.41 Thus emerged the spectacular genre of grand opéra, “a product of technology” (in Hervé Lacombe’s words) whose historical subject matters and often-gruesome denouements offered additional opportunities for immersive pictorial display and jaw-dropping shock effects.42 The arrival of production books—the so-called livrets de mise en scène—from 1828 on palpably manifested this recent concern with the “how-to” of stagings and their detailed relation to both music and drama, whether these manuals were primarily meant to preserve productions for posterity, to supply practical guidelines for other theaters of the time, or merely to offer a mnemonic aid for future performances at the original theater.43 Among composers, above all Meyerbeer came to personify grand opéra’s emphasis on extravagant showiness and audiovisual synthesis. Although he was far from the only composer for the French stage interested in details of production, his published diaries and correspondence testify to the remarkable power he achieved in this regard, as he obsessively commanded, rehearsed, and commented on each and every feature of his operas onstage. Moreover, after the 1849 premiere of Le prophète (his last grand opéra he saw into production), Meyerbeer was also involved in the creation of its stage manual. Along with other additions, he explicitly requested more detailed technical descriptions of this opera’s most innovative special effects as well as the inclusion of contact details for the Parisian distributor of the necessary mechanical contrivances. And he urged the livret’s author to make haste with its publication for the benefit of both provincial and Germanic theaters. As Arnold Jacobshagen has argued, the resulting and unprecedentedly extensive production book is “the first comprehensively documented evidence to

12

Introduction

date of a composer claiming for himself the ultimate control over the various aspects of both the musical and the scenic realization of his work, and not only for the premiere but as far as possible also for future stagings and performances elsewhere.”44 Toward the mid-nineteenth century, then, several composers began to expand their reign beyond music and text, developing a vision of opera as what we today would call immersive musical multimedia. G E S A M T K U N ST W E R K

Wagner significantly borrowed from and built on these holistic approaches to opera when he formulated his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” around midcentury. True, he was not the first to employ this term, nor did he use it consistently.45 Furthermore, his treatises are fraught with contradictions and sociopolitical ideologies, and he would later adjust his ideas in both writing and practice. Nonetheless, his theory was then the most sustained argument in favor of a centrally regulated unification of the theatrical arts. As such, it has recently garnered renewed attention in interdisciplinary scholarship on common tendencies across artistic modernisms.46 Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future” (which has tended to be eclipsed by the more music-focused Opera and Drama of 1850–51) is particularly worth revisiting from the perspective of staged multimedia, as it cuts to the core of his envisioned interrelationship of the various arts in performance. In turn, my book’s examination of stage-technological realities both recontextualizes and challenges his theoretical approach as well as its ties with general theatrical practices of his time. According to Wagner’s original articulation, “opera” had mistakenly made music dominant and thereby neglected both drama and stage representation. By contrast, the seed, unifying factor, and ultimate goal of their union “for the collective Artwork” (zum gemeinsamen Kunstwerke) was to be Drama writ large, that is, “the dramatic Action” (die dramatische Handlung) emerging from Life itself.47 Wagner consequently conceived this “true artwork” as “an immediate vital act” (als unmittelbarer Lebensakt) to be achieved only in its “immediate physical portrayal, in the moment of its liveliest embodiment”: short-circuiting intellectual mediation, it would come into full existence only when sensually experienced as materially staged.48 To this end, all means of human expression were needed: the individual arts were to unite and collaborate, each surrendering its separate identity and thus (paradoxically) fulfilling its true potential under the inspired stimulus and authorship of the poet-performer. To wit, Wagner cast himself as the all-encompassing “artist of the future” whose creations, once realized, would be served by and consummate all the arts, including all prior operatic achievements.49 This early theoretical framework helps explain why Wagner was obsessed not just with writing his own libretti, but also with providing details for and overseeing

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the stagings themselves. As early as his first public performance, the Dresden premiere of Rienzi in 1842, the then entirely unknown composer apparently surprised the Court Opera’s conductor and manager rather unpleasantly when he showed up to intervene at the rehearsals.50 And throughout his career, he would seek to coach performers personally in both singing and acting. Admittedly, it was common for nineteenth-century composers (even typically part of their scritture with Italian opera houses) to oversee the rehearsals and first few performances of new works. Moreover, we have seen how Weber and Meyerbeer had already expanded this involvement to embrace direction and design. By the same token, from the 1840s on Verdi would gradually extend the composer’s authority in Italian opera, insisting on the integrity of his scores in performance as well as his influence over stagings.51 But Wagner increasingly focused not just on the presentation but also on the perception of his works, to a point where everything—gestures, blocking, lighting, design, costumes, scene changes, even acoustics and architecture—became essential for the Gesamtkunstwerk’s desired multisensorial experience. This concern with the physical manifestation continued even after 1854, when his beginning encounter with Schopenhauer’s philosophy led to a shift in emphasis from drama to music as the Gesamtkunstwerk’s chief motivator. Thus, in 1872 Wagner pondered as a generic label for his works “deeds of music made visible” (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik)—a dictum he claimed he dropped only because post-Tristan he feared that his dramas no longer offered sufficient spectacle to warrant a moniker of such audiovisual synthesis.52 Yet this declaration was clearly coquetry, or a clever ploy to avert criticism of his hyper-Meyerbeerian show in the making. After all, it was precisely in 1872 that Wagner laid the foundation stone for his festival theater, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, whose primary purpose it was to enable the long-delayed complete premiere of the Ring cycle under his own direction. On the grounds of its libretto alone (which, unusually, Wagner had published, to raise money for the project, before even starting the composition), this work had become notorious for its extraordinary demands on stage technology, given its underwater seduction scenes, cosmic peregrinations, and other seemingly impossible episodes. At the cusp of the era of illusionist theater, with its proscenium stage and its quest for visual verisimilitude, these scenic fancies required the aid not only of those architects and painters Wagner had called forth in “The Art-Work of the Future,” but also of the most skilled engineers and their contraptions. Accordingly, Wagner had his theater equipped with cutting-edge machinery designed by Carl Brandt, the foremost German authority on the modernization of stage technology. In addition, the Festspielhaus’s amphitheatrical auditorium, unobstructed sightlines, and entirely sunken orchestra pit provided a unique immersive environment that was quickly considered revolutionary in Europe’s theatrical world, outshining in this regard even the Palais Garnier, the new home of the Paris Opéra, which had opened only one year

14

Introduction

earlier.53 And even apart from this architectural and technological finesse, a composer’s having a theater purpose-built for his own works and placed under his sole direction was unprecedented. With the premieres in Bayreuth of his last works— the Ring cycle (1876) and Parsifal (1882)—Wagner’s control over each and every aspect of production reached a new level indeed.54 Understandably, media and performance scholars have therefore tended to place Wagner at the beginning of a growing intersection of theatrical and technological modes of representation. In their view, Wagner spearheaded an emerging alliance of aural and visual media that ultimately led to their convergence in our virtual age. For instance, Wagner looms large in the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who regularly referenced the Gesamtkunstwerk as a “monomaniacal anticipation of the gramophone and the movies.”55 Multimedia artists and theorists have likewise dated the emergence of contemporary media performance with Wagner. Chris Salter starts his survey of the modern “entanglements” of mechanical (or computational) technologies and performance with Bayreuth, while Randall Packer and Ken Jordan prominently discuss Wagner as having made “one of the first attempts in modern art to establish a practical, theoretical system for the comprehensive integration of the arts.”56 His struggle for “aesthetic totality” as well as the Gesamtkunstwerk’s dialectically related reliance on mechanization is the connective tissue that allows literary scholar Matthew Wilson Smith to link Wagner to film, Disneyland, and virtual performance.57 And according to historian of modern art and media Noam Elcott, Wagner’s Bayreuth theater was unique among audiovisual devices of its time because it alone “could accommodate countless types of performances and images,” with its “most significant legacy . . . its adoption by cinemas.”58 In short, Wagner is frequently equated with his Bayreuth theater, which in turn tends to be construed as a historically new amalgamation of arts and modern technologies. His artistic vision has become a convenient reference point for bestowing both historical roots and a weighty artistic heritage on the development of cumulative, multisensory, integrative multimedia. In contrast to such general claims about the media-historical significance of Wagner’s ideals and their manifestation in the form of Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, I pursue a rich historical embedding of a number of specific yet oft-overlooked technologies. By opening out to a chronologically and geographically wider field of composers, locales, and traditions, these case studies show how Wagner based not only his theories but also his Gesamtkunstwerk’s staged realizations squarely on contemporary practices, and in this sense formed but a step in opera’s development toward medial integration. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus counteracts Wagner’s dominant position in media studies, while my focus on stage practice also serves as a corrective to the almost exclusive reliance of Kittler (and others) on Wagner’s idealized artistic claims. This reliance amounts to nothing less than a romanticized continuation of Wagner’s messianic self-stylization that is weirdly at odds with the

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otherwise blatant techno-determinism and anthropological skepticism permeating Kittler’s writings.59 After all, the incorporation of technē into Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was not without its drawbacks, even on the theoretical plane. One indication of this downside is that Wagner remained conspicuously silent about what we might call the mechanical underbelly of his envisioned music drama. Just as he originally charged opera’s music to have oppressed drama, so the three “material” arts that he invited into his drama (though architecture and painting more so than sculpture) now eclipsed the manifold technological underpinnings required to realize his vision onstage. In other words, Wagner’s theoretical recourse to the traditional arts veiled his concrete reliance on mundane theatrical mechanics. Far from being a high-flying theorist’s oversight, this diversion was precisely what Wagner—more adamantly than other composers—required in practice as well. In his 1862 Preface to the Ring poem, for instance, he expressly demanded that, if the tetralogy was ever to materialize onstage, “the cords, ropes, laths and scaffoldings of the stage decorations” should be carefully hidden from the audience.60 That is, the mechanisms facilitating the visual scenery qua art were at the same time to be cloaked (or what we might call “artified”) by it. In Adorno’s famously critical Marxist analysis, Wagner concealed his means of production by the “outward appearance of the product”: through simulating a fictional world as seemingly natural reality, Wagner glossed over both human labor and material machinations involved in its creation. Adorno likened the result to that of the phantasmagoria, a popular optical entertainment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which, for the first time, the supporting devices (a laterna magica and screens) were masked by total darkness, thus letting projections appear “real.”61 By similarly camouflaging the technological origins of his multisensorial spectacle, Wagner sought to render it autopoietic, self-animated, and—ultimately—natural. The intended seamless, and seemingly effortless, façade identified by Adorno’s metaphor of the phantasmagoria is yet another link to the surface-oriented aesthetics of both film and new media (and, for Adorno, evidence of the commodity character of Wagner’s works). Wagner’s apparent discomfort with the perceptibility of his enabling technologies had deep roots in his fundamentally skeptical outlook on both the arts and the world. Regarding the former, he pitted himself above all against grand opéra and what historian of science John Tresch has dubbed its “ever-escalating arms race for spectacular effects,” as epitomized by the so-called prophet sun—the first use of electric light in opera.62 Introduced at the Opéra in 1849 for the sunrise in act 3 of Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, this self-regulating electric arc apparatus was one of those technologies advertised at the composer’s behest in the production book. And it became Wagner’s bête noire of an “effect without a cause” (Wirkung ohne Ursache), a musical or scenic coup unmotivated by the drama and therefore apparently an end in itself. For Wagner, such a “master-stroke of mechanism” dissolved “the whole

16

Introduction

of Art into its mechanical components.”63 Freewheeling technological gadgetry would not only violate Wagner’s overall artistic ideal but also degrade each of opera’s other signifying components from art into technology. As such, opera’s multiple media would become mere tools for a purpose no longer achieved, and—hence— pointless technics. To the end of his life, Wagner dreaded that his own works might fall prey to such mechanistic procedures of production and perception, to which, he felt, regular operatic business was prone. Hence his frustration after the Ring premiere that many critics had focused mostly on the functioning (or failure) of his stage technologies, and his irritation that, owing to a miscalculation by his machinist, he had to deliver extra music for the overlong moving canvas of Parsifal’s firstact transformation, which thus exceeded mere dramatic necessity to become an explicitly “decorative-painterly effect.”64 Technology, Wagner continued to insist, was to be doubly concealed: by its dramatic cause as well as its artistic appearance. A similarly troubled stance emerges in the composer’s more general utterances against industrialization. Lamenting the negative repercussions of industrial development on nature, culture, and society was common coin in nineteenth-century Europe, and went hand-in-hand (among other tendencies) with the Romantic idealization of subjectivity, a preindustrial past, and the natural world.65 Indeed, Wagner argued in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution” that industry, that real-life embodiment of everything mechanical, threatened both art and life in contemporary society: it turned the former into empty, commercial entertainment, while the latter was now the lot of denigrated humans who had become factory workers (or multimedia components), their labor bereft of purpose. Salvation of this debased civilization was to come only from a revolution, followed by a return to nature.66 And this redemption would be achieved precisely through art writ large—art freed from the shackles of the mechanical that had crystallized in modern consumerism, artificial abstractions, and fashions. As Wagner explained the distinction between the technological realm and “real” art: the mechanical moves from derivative to derivative, from means to means, to finally bring forth but one more mean, the Machine. Whereas the artistic strikes the very opposite path: it throws means on means behind it, abandons derivative after derivative, to arrive at last at the source of every derivation, of every means, in Nature, with full satisfaction of its need. Thus the machine is the cold and heartless benefactor of luxury-craving mankind.67

Art, then, would lead humanity back from industrial society’s profit-oriented lifestyle into wholesome attunement with the natural world, the ultimate end of creation. And this could be accomplished all the more easily if the Gesamtkunstwerk represented the vitality of nature itself: “The Scene which is to mount for the spectator the picture of human life must, for a thorough understanding of this life,

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also be able to depict the living image of nature, in which alone artistic man can fully render a speaking likeness of himself.”68 In other words, beyond the thendominant credo of scenic realism, the onstage rendition of an idealized nature was crucial for the transformative effect of music drama. By the same token, Wagner’s Ring cycle was to be performed “in some beautiful solitude, far away from the fumes and industrial stench of our urban civilization.”69 Technological progress, in short, had crippled both society and art; and Wagner would remain doubtful of it to the end of his days, preferring nature and a sunny climate to the luxuries afforded by electricity. Small wonder that he was eager to mask the dependence of his stage creations on mechanical production—ironically precisely the cause of modern society’s ills that his total work of art was supposed to relieve.70 Given these close interconnections of industrial progress, artistic ideals, and their practical realization, it is time to wrest technology from Wagner’s ideology of concealment and to acknowledge its central role in nineteenth-century opera, whether by Wagner or anyone else. Curtain, Gong, Steam can thus be read as an attempt to approach the Gesamtkunstwerk less philosophically than materially: as a product of technological modernity. T E C H N O L O G Y V E R SU S M E D IA

Wagner was obviously not alone in his deep ambivalence toward the technological sphere, whether in society or onstage. In fact, it was precisely the pervasiveness of this attitude that gave rise to the long-lasting theoretical neglect of technics we have observed. Over the last several decades, however, poststructuralist thinkers have expanded the originally pejorative notion of technology as “mere” supplement into an affirmative stance toward humans as essentially “prosthetic” beings— as creatures whose survival, communication, and cultural development are inevitably bound up with technics exterior to themselves. As the pioneer of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, famously proposed, technologies are “extensions of man”:71 they appear to be as indispensable (and thus, paradoxically, as natural) to human life as nature itself. Regarding Wagner, this approach proves fruitful. On the one hand, his conceptual neglect of stage machinery, the most obviously “technical” contributor to his Gesamtkunstwerk, can be pinpointed as dismissing the ancillary essence of technology. Hence Wagner’s condemnation to invisibility of ropes and pulleys, such annoyingly necessary mechanical aids. Yet, on the other hand, it was in part precisely this urge to conceal that confirmed their status as “mere” technology rather than an artistic medium. To explicate this difference, we can understand media with Kittler (following McLuhan) as “intersecting points (Schnittstellen) or interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other.”72 Qua interfaces, media offer “surface effects,” or what Alexander R. Galloway has

18

Introduction

evocatively called “those mysterious zones of interaction that mediate between different realities.”73 In other words, technical devices that appeal directly to our sensory organs (and thus simultaneously provide both means and end) may be considered media—or, in Wagner’s terms, fully legitimate constituents of the total artwork. By contrast, we can describe those devices operating in the background as a means to an end and, therefore, as remaining in the realm of technics: Wagner’s detested technologies. To be sure, this is a pragmatic distinction of degree, not of kind, as the common expressions “technical media” or “media technologies” imply: whether or not a contraption tends toward the technology or the medium end of my spectrum depends on its contextual use and (often subjective) reception. Nonetheless, my terminological differentiation between technology and medium offers a helpful heuristic that captures both the conceptual understanding and the concrete tools embraced by Wagner and other nineteenth-century composers in their efforts to generate and control their operas’ illusionist effects. That Wagner practiced such a hierarchical division into perceptible creative media and merely facilitating technologies is evident in his notion of the opera orchestra as a “mechanism for tone-production.” As he explained in the 1862 Ring Preface, this apparatus (like those ropes) should be veiled, lest the spectator, “through the inevitable sight of the mechanical auxiliary movements during the performance of the musicians and their conductor, is made an unwilling witness to technical evolutions which should really remain concealed from him.”74 Music, of course, was one of the key arts in Wagner’s music drama. But the orchestra amounted to a sheer “technical source” (den technischen Herd) of this acoustical art.75 As such, it was to stay hidden in order not to disrupt—and distract from—the multimedial illusion onstage. In other words, Wagner severed the orchestra’s optical and acoustic interactions with the audience, thereby turning the orchestra from embodied audiovisual medium into disembodied technology behind an acoustic medium. In the context of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the orchestra was no less technological than the stage’s ancillary ropes—a mere mechanical implement for the generation of one of his music drama’s constitutive media. And yet, the view of technology as human appendage highlights that Wagner the artist was himself in need of such accessories. After all, his unease with technology had very practical reasons as well. As the poet-performer he had envisioned in “The Art-Work,” Wagner was fully capable of writing his own libretti and music, of coaching singers and musicians, and of directing gestures and blocking: legends of him bounding onto stage during rehearsals and demonstrating the movements and expressions of his characters are legion. All he needed in this regard—as did all composers—were singers capable of personifying these roles: in this sense, singing bodies became extensions of Wagner. But he had much less command over the scenic, lacking as he did both painterly skill and technical acumen. As Patrick Carnegy has argued, Wagner’s inability to concretize his interior

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visions created serious hurdles en route to his stage productions: he had to find painters and costume designers able to realize his visual conceptions—mediators in the flesh who were not only receptive to Wagner’s inspirations but also amenable to having their sketches critiqued until they sufficiently approximated the composer’s ideas to be submitted to a studio for material execution.76 With regard to stage technology, Wagner’s need for support was even greater. This want was felt acutely by Brandt, Wagner’s chief machinist for Bayreuth. During the early stages of planning the theater’s equipment, Brandt observed that “Wagner rhapsodizes in the ideal. Everything real is too foreign to his nature.”77 Insofar as Wagner mentioned the machinist in his more practice-oriented writings (particularly those that advocated stagings of his works), he did so always in tandem with the painter; together, painter and machinist created a singular scenic art (rather than separate painterly and technological arts).78 In reality, though, Brandt became the right hand not of the painter but of Wagner himself: he was Wagner’s “most important helper” and the only person other than the composer without whom, as Wagner frankly confessed, producing the Ring would have been impossible.79 Brandt, then, functioned as technological supplement to Wagner and his artistic ideals. Again, such collaboration was typical for opera composers. But for a Gesamtkunstwerk artist set on total control—one who had even managed to establish his own theater—having to count on someone else’s ingenuity and on machines can hardly have been comfortable. His scant technological savvy and resulting dependency offer yet another reason why Wagner was so eager to obscure his productions’ reliance upon technics. From a wider perspective, this covering-up of dependence on others included also the inherited musical, dramaturgical, and stage-practical techniques on which Wagner built his Gesamtkunstwerk. The extent to which he used his contemporaries’ operatic models as multimedia quarries is perhaps most obvious with Rienzi, the work Wagner consciously designed in the late 1830s to make a name for himself. As he retrospectively admitted, he sought to achieve this repute by outdoing “in reckless extravagance” every aspect of grand opéra, “with all its scenic and musical splendor, its spectacular and musically amassing fervor.”80 Not only was Rienzi longer and arguably louder than any previous opera, but it also blatantly showcased many audiovisual effects borrowed from French works. For example, Wagner adopted interactive on- and offstage choirs, organ, and bells from Meyerbeer and from Halévy, whose 1835 La juive had left a striking impression on the composer. Processions, religious and military ceremonies, and (yes) sunrises had long been operatic staples, while conflagrations had more recently become fashionable: Wagner’s grim denouement expanded on Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe (1826) and the eruption of Vesuvius in Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828), one of the few French works Wagner admitted to admiring. And, as we shall see, he prescribed curtains and signaled with a tam-tam not one but two dramatic peripeties. Contemporary

20

Introduction

critic Ludwig Rellstab surely had grounds to decry Rienzi for an abundance of scenic “facts” without dramatic motivation—for providing “a number of effects without the cause.”81 Just how much this parade of mechanical wonders must have embarrassed the later Wagner of Opera and Drama is clear from the fact that he adopted Rellstab’s diatribe against himself in order to hurl it in turn at Meyerbeer, thereby allegedly stigmatizing the cause of all opera-technological evil. But this rhetorical deflection was not enough to cover over Wagner’s own earlier exuberant exposure of his music-dramaturgical armory. Instead, he also glossed over Rienzi itself: the mature Wagner disavowed his early opera as a “convolute of monstrosities” that had little to do with his later Gesamtkunstwerk. (And yet, as with his stage technologies, he continued to depend on the successful Rienzi—in this case for income.82) Wagner thus reduced this opera from medium to technology no less than he did his veiled orchestra. The example of Rienzi discloses the extremes to which Wagner would go to camouflage his—and his works’—historical, practical, and technological roots. Throughout his career, Wagner aspired to transform and conceal acquired techniques and gadgets through their specific multimedial integration within his music dramas. The resulting high demands on these technologies in turn fostered their further innovation. In this sense, the staged Gesamtkunstwerk functioned like a new medium whose content, according to McLuhan, “is always another medium”: the “total work of art” is opera and all its technologies remediated.83 Just as the outside of his brick-and-timber Festspielhaus, to the amazement of many contemporaries, resembled an industrial plant, so Wagner himself emerges as a transformer and merger of media. Finally, if Wagner so finely calibrated various stage effects for his works but depended on a congenial machinist for their realization, how could he reliably communicate the precariously balanced multimedia end-products to his contemporaries, let alone posterity? Here we come full circle to Lepage and the question of preservation. According to Kittler, both linguistic writing and musical notation are symbolic technologies of inscription, recording, and dissemination, and we can easily expand this notion to production books, with their abstract sketches of blocking and stage layout. Yet Wagner increasingly searched for nonsymbolic “real” means of conveying his multimedia ideas—for technologies in the sense of what Jonathan Sterne has called “repeatable social, cultural, and material processes crystallized into mechanisms” that mediated his Gesamtkunstwerk as multimedia performance.84 Put differently, Wagner pursued an exteriorization of individual and collective memories so as to store and communicate a performative event and its experience.85 Although neither the idea of an artist’s own theater nor that theater’s architecture was widely imitated at the time, Bayreuth did mobilize contemporary desires, not only for multimedial integration, but also for its conservation— strivings that would ultimately manifest in a range of twentieth-century media.

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Wagner has therefore been singled out in recent media studies as a conceptual steppingstone largely in view of relations between opera and newer media, rather than in light of his position within operatic history. WAG N E R IA N T E C H N O L O G I E S

Using the ideals and realities of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as an important lens, Curtain, Gong, Steam explores in detail three audiovisual technologies that proved vital to a range of nineteenth-century operas. These technologies were not necessarily newly discovered; but they came into vogue because of their potential to veil both other appliances and their own mechanical nature—in other words, because of the ease with which they could be pushed toward the media end of the spectrum. Their effects leaned toward the ephemeral, making them conducive to being reserved for important moments and, as such, to being requested in the score. At the same time, these devices could appeal to more than one sensory organ, something that rendered them particularly useful for glossing over the interstices between opera’s various media. I call them “Wagnerian technologies,” then, to emphasize both their mechanical essence and their propensity to be perceived—or conceived—as seemingly natural media. As a second introduction of sorts, chapter 1 fleshes out Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged beyond the thumbnail sketch of his key treatises found in this introduction. In order to take a fresh look at both his desire to mastermind productions and his concomitant dependence on technologies, I open up a third space between Wagner’s theoretical writings and his practical stagings by reading the Venusberg scenes of Tannhäuser, act 1 (1842–75) as an allegory of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its realization. These scenes, I suggest, provide a conceptual laboratory in which we can gain insight into Wagner’s inner vision of his operas’ staged appearances and the ways in which he sought to bring them about onstage. For instance, the Venusberg boasts lifelike simulations of nature and visual effects—red lights, veiling mists, sudden transformations—that Wagner would continue to evoke through Parsifal. Moreover, Venus seeks to overwhelm Tannhäuser, her audience, by micromanaging every aspect of her grotto’s multimedia appearance; and her realm is hermetically closed, artificially lit, removed from civilization, elevated on a mountain, and accessible only to the initiate—in a word, a proto-Bayreuth. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that Wagner abandoned his revisions of Tannhäuser a year before the opening of Bayreuth proper, where his conceptual grotto materialized as real theater: Wagner could henceforth act like Venus herself. And yet, even in his own theater Wagner would lack the goddess’s magical powers, necessitating auxiliary technologies instead. Indeed, Tannhäuser prefigures the practical breakdown of Wagner’s ideal. On the one hand, it is the opera that particularly incited his search for prescriptive and executive technologies, and on whose

22

Introduction

staging he spilled the most ink. On the other hand, Venus—the total director—fails to win over her audience by completely dominating its sensory experience. “Too much,” Tannhäuser moans before fleeing from her. Anticipating Nietzschean anti-Wagnerism, the Venusberg scenes thus cast doubt on the attainability of total control—something that, as chapter 4 will show, was ultimately borne out in Bayreuth itself. When, shortly before his death, Wagner pronounced that he still owed the world his Tannhäuser,86 he may have been referring not only to a final revision of the score but also to his overall artistic ideal and its facilitating technologies. Notwithstanding this failure of Venus, Wagner would pay ever-greater attention to production details throughout his career. And these features included not just attention-grabbing stage-technical challenges such as swimming nixies or singing dragons, but also those less obvious—and, hence, less frequently discussed— Wagnerian technologies that helped smooth over opera’s multimedia surface. Chapters 2 (“Curtain”), 3 (“Gong”), and 4 (“Steam”) each focus on one such technology and its historical, cultural, theatrical, and hermeneutic resonances before, within, and beyond Wagner’s works. Moving from the oldest contrivance to the newest and from an omnipresent machinery to a device expressly associated with Wagner, I combine analyses of technology-rich moments in both canonic and lesser-known scores by Wagner and the generations of opera composers around him with readings of historical materials on productions and technologies (both published and unpublished), theatrical treatises, and reception documents. In tracing these technologies and their effects into the twentieth century, I register the ultimate impossibility of inscribing technology-driven audiovisual effects into works to the same degree, and with the same historical durability, as text and music. In a sense, then, Curtain, Gong, Steam is about failure as much as it is about transformation: it shows how each Wagnerian technology continually morphs, reappearing over time in productions of the same and other pieces—even in new types of media—in different forms and shapes. The emphasis on technology in the Met’s new Ring is but one example. Raising the curtain on my discussion of Wagnerian technologies proper, chapter 2 addresses the curtain itself, that time-honored frame of the illusionist stage and paradigmatic cipher of theater per se. Particularly French composers of the late eighteenth though the mid-nineteenth centuries paid increasing attention to its movements, thus liberating the curtain from being merely a universal temporal frame of spectacles as a whole. Operating in a liminal space between stage and auditorium, architecture and performance, machinery and effect, the curtain became a commentator on the staged action. Its deliberate use allowed for the temporary dissociation of sound and vision and, thus, a newly expressive relation between auditory and visual media. In addition, the curtain’s functions and shapes became diversified with the rise of idiosyncratic procedures to mask mid-act scene changes. Wagner, then, built on contemporary practices when he began to pre-

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scribe tempi for curtains, although he did so more frequently than other composers, and his curtains became crucial atmospheric indicators. This heightened demand for flexibility stimulated a new mechanical curtain technology. First installed in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the diagonally pulled “Wagner curtain” both set the scene for and sealed the intended final impression of an opera, its newly variable gestures embodying Wagner’s wish to govern both stage and audience. So ubiquitous did Wagner’s agogic curtain become that few composers after him could ignore it. Small wonder that Brecht looked above all to the curtain when he sought to herald onstage his break with Wagnerian illusionism. Where chapter 2 traces the artistic transformation, during the long nineteenth century, of an old stage technology into an artistic medium, chapter 3 describes a more complex trajectory as it follows the ambivalent migration of a new sonic device—the gong or tam-tam—between the musical and the mechanical. As foreign import and curiosity, gongs initially wandered in Western Europe between science labs, collectors, and popular shows. But with their (partial) cachet as musical instruments rather than “mere” technologies, they left more substantial paper trails than did curtains, deemed simply material objects. (Likely for the same reason, the gong is also the only technology featured in this book on which Wagner himself commented.) Composers in the mercantile metropolis of London and in post-Revolutionary Paris promoted the instrument’s soon-to-be ubiquitous theatrical roles as exotic signifier and acoustic signal. Looking at its operatic employment through the 1830s, I lay out a gamut of semantic “gong topoi” that permeated operas and, later, symphonic music well into the twentieth century. By midcentury the loud tam-tam strike was so customary a sound effect that even Wagner added it to his 1861 Paris Tannhäuser, to mark the Venusberg’s disappearance. Yet his mature operas would utilize it more sparingly. Instead, he cultivated subtle sounds and playing techniques designed to mask the prototypical gong strike’s metallic essence. This musically tamed tam-tam added significant color to Wagner’s increasingly rich timbre and thus aided the dematerialization of his orchestra’s synthetic sound: it was a technology in the service of heightened sonic mediality. At the same time, production books and performance materials reveal an alternative to Wagner’s acoustic veiling: loud gong strokes helped coordinate backstage technologies or cover the sound of noisy machines. As such, theaters treated the tam-tam as a gratuitous accessory for earlier operas as well, which left it fluctuating between orchestra pit and backstage, music and machinery, intended artistic medium and technological supplement. By exploring this porous acoustic space, chapter 3 challenges the common equations of stage technology with optical effects and of stagings with opera’s “visual” side. Indeed, the piercing tam-tam strike might be perceived as epitomizing the Gesamtkunstwerk acoustically as much as the curtain typifies the Gesamtkunstwerk optically: it consummates the collaboration of all participating art forms in one orgiastic climax. When Puccini elevated

24

Introduction

the tam-tam to central stage prop in Turandot (1926), he ultimately staged its role as central dramatic agent. Chapter 4 turns to the most multisensorial and innovative technology directly linked to Wagner: the onstage use of steam. Although French operas had occasionally utilized vapor to enhance their beloved conflagrations, Wagner’s foggy Ring libretto summoned it excessively. By invoking mists to suggest both unspoiled nature and Nordic mythology, Wagner allowed actual steam to become the most “real” element of his scenic make-believe—a feature that embodied his desire to render art as nature. As such, it came to serve further theatrical functions as well, shrouding and simultaneously enlivening open transformations or simulating changes in the corporality of protagonists. Its amorphous physicality also superbly mediated between the scenery’s two- or three-dimensional contrivances and the singers’ bodies, thus providing a multivalent medial glue to connect opera’s various materialities into one multimedia interface. Steam was a real-life equivalent of Venus’s magic—the ultimate expression of the Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged. Accordingly, it was quickly (and closely) associated with Wagner. Employed for Ring productions around the world, it is perhaps the clearest example of a technology becoming part of the popular idea of a work itself. Like no other stage effect, however, onstage steam also pinpoints the friction inherent in Wagner’s conceptions and uses of technologies. Although intended to simulate nature, steam relied on Bayreuth’s most plainly industrial exploit: two huge locomotive boilers and a complex system of pipes and valves. Even as it boosted Wagner’s theatrical illusion, moreover, steam exposed this total—and totally controlled—artistic experience as a mirage: its smell transported spectators into the laundry room, its noise evoked the railway station. The new theatrical medium could not conceal its mechanical essence; unwittingly, Wagner staged the latter’s corruption of (idealized) nature. This paradox was prefigured in the Ring’s dramatic trajectory itself, where the smoke of artificial fires (according to Greek mythology, the oldest human technology) gradually replaces the fogs of mythical nature. Indeed, Wagner turned grand opéra’s ubiquitous stage fires from an isolated special effect into a quasi-natural ambient signifier. Unsurprisingly, Bayreuth used steam to simulate these extended blazes as well, seemingly merging nature and technology into a single vaporous medium. Steam might thus symbolize the illusory redemption of technology through art that Wagner had hoped to achieve through his Gesamtkunstwerk overall. And yet, precisely because of the tensions it inherently signaled—between medium and technology, nature and artifice, archaic myth and hypermodern progress, stage and life, and so on—steam was able to outlast the nineteenth-century illusionist theater, having long since become a fixed feature of light engineering across the performing arts. Ultimately, we can read steam as a cipher for the ephemerality and contingency of staged opera at large:

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the epitome of theatricality and a token of the rapidly changing meanings and uses of Wagnerian technologies. This longer-term perspective reveals that the incorporation of special technologies and audiovisual effects into the common idea of particular works was both volatile and transitory. Wagner was left notoriously disappointed by the premiere of the Ring but nevertheless continued to promote his staging as a “model performance” for other theaters. The epilogue addresses the resulting fissures between these preservationist efforts on the one hand and the short life cycle and limited transparency of stage technologies on the other by describing Wagner’s Bayreuth theater— along with its touring derivative—as a kind of recording mechanism: a technology of inscription and dissemination that advocated an unprecedented fixity of staged opera while eschewing the mediation of symbolic storage media. Yet precisely because of its material hybridity, this storage technology, too, disintegrated quickly. This observation will bring us back to the present day and to the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle. Examining Lepage’s production in more detail, I suggest that its most authentic trait was neither its emphasis on pioneering technology nor its re-creation of some aspects of the 1876 design: it was the failure of Adorno’s phantasmagoric illusion. With the introduction of digital 3D projections onto a fully kinetic stage “machine,” Lepage foregrounded matters of materiality, agency, and the interstices of opera’s contributing media. Yet his multimedia conception broke down along the same lines Wagner’s had, with mechanical glitches and misguided attempts at literal presentations of mythical magic. The creaks of Lepage’s hardware thus disclose that no technology can ever fully bridge the divide between singers and scenery, real bodies and artificial simulation, man and machine. Comparing both Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk ideal and Lepage’s practical realization to a recent postdramatic opera that explicitly foregrounds the relationship between humans and technology, I end with a question, wondering whether unified operatic illusionism and “transparent” technological remediation are goals worth pursuing onstage in today’s world of virtual realities and ubiquitous shiny interfaces. If there is a glimmer of promise in Lepage’s approach, it seems to lie in its self-consciously “hypermedial” features, emphasizing as they do the fundamental unsettledness of opera’s multiple media.87 A brief look at one further technology-savvy recent Ring production, by the theater group La Fura dels Baus, fosters this suggestion. Their 2007–9 staging revels in the display of Wagner’s characters as cyborgs that—like their mise-en-scène proper—enthusiastically wield both analog and digital gadgets. Thus defying any linear teleology of technological development, La Fura dels Baus enacts opera’s inherent reliance on the live interaction between humans and machines. As such, their production engages an ongoing cultural nostalgia for embodied technologies, corporeal media, and the machine age. By the same token, it may be precisely opera’s inherent material and medial

26

Introduction

hybridity that feeds a renewed fascination with this genre. Opera’s unapologetic embrace of mixed media, of singing bodies and reeling technologies, and its presupposition of a blatantly suspended disbelief in the reality of the audiovisual performance may in the end prove more forward-looking—or current, at least— than Wagner imagined. All the more reason, then, to give opera’s Wagnerian technologies their historic and conceptual due.

1

Wagner’s Venusberg

Bayreuth, 1891. Eight years after Wagner’s death, his widow, Cosima Wagner, defends her admittance of Tannhäuser to the Bayreuth Festival against critics who deem this early work unworthy of the shrine of Wagner’s mature Gesamtkunstwerk. Not so, she argues. Producing Tannhäuser presented “the task par excellence, because [this opera] was about the battle of life and death between opera and drama.”1 Her reasoning suggests that Tannhäuser (premiered in 1845) offers a particularly focused perspective on Wagner’s artistic struggle to break free of operatic conventions in order to devise the features of his future music drama. Indeed, shortly after completing his signature treatise Opera and Drama in 1851, the composer himself had construed Tannhäuser as a transitional work that provided the decisive step forward from Der fliegende Holländer’s first forays into a “new direction” (in 1843) to his “latest” period, which started with Lohengrin (1850)—a direction he hoped would one day be consummated with his projected Ring cycle at a special festival.2 There was, then, a direct line from Tannhäuser to Bayreuth. Unlike Rienzi (1842), which—as I discussed in the introduction—the composer later disavowed for its blatant adoption of the technologies of grand opéra (and which Cosima Wagner would indeed bar from the festival), Tannhäuser showed his “original” hand at work. It therefore earned admission to the Bayreuth temple. Apart from reinforcing Tannhäuser’s seminal position within Wagner’s oeuvre, though, Cosima Wagner’s statement allows for a second interpretation. If the style and structure of Tannhäuser reflect Wagner’s music-dramatic quest, the plot itself symbolically enacts this fight between opera and drama, between inherited forms and fresh approaches. The opera’s artist-hero, after all, is torn between two fundamentally different realms of existence, the tabooed underworld of the Venusberg 27

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and the social sphere of the Wartburg; upon leaving the former, he embarks on a utopian search for an individual mode of expression that integrates both worlds. This trajectory resonates with Wagner’s own creative project, as he implied once more when confessing in 1851 that “the figure of Tannhäuser . . . sprang from my innermost heart” and represented the essence of “a human being, right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist longing for life.”3 The mood in which Wagner professed to have conceived the opera—“a state of burning exaltation that held my blood and every nerve in fevered throbbing”—also corresponds revealingly with Tannhäuser’s emotional turmoil, erotic subtext included.4 Not surprisingly, it has become common coin to associate Tannhäuser the singer with Wagner the composer. Scholars have drawn parallels, for instance, between Tannhäuser’s Venusberg experience and Wagner’s painful sojourn in Paris, or between both artists’ cultural outsider positions, their grappling with sociopolitical norms, and their psychological developments. Nike Wagner even dubbed Tannhäuser “a kind of ingenious self-therapy,” since Wagner during the years of this opera’s genesis “is Tannhäuser.”5 Both the score and the plot seem to hold special potential for an understanding of Wagner and his larger artistic agenda. This is not to say that allegorical associations between Wagner and his operatic heroes are unique to Tannhäuser. Wagner as Sachs (or Stolzing), Wagner as Wotan (or Siegfried), Wagner as Parsifal: the composer’s self-concocted mythic plots as well as his abundant theorizing have fostered this interpretive move, more so than with other nineteenth-century composers. And while the correlation holds particularly for Tannhäuser, with its poet-musician as single male protagonist, the identification of Wagner with Tannhäuser has its limits. At the end of the opera, Tannhäuser dies without witnessing his earthly rehabilitation—hardly a future Wagner would have wished for. Moreover, as my introduction has shown, Wagner saw himself as not merely a composer (let alone a performing musician) but as an all-round theatrical artist. As such, his creative program did not follow a single, unified trajectory that could be represented onstage by a sole artist’s undertaking: too many were the contradictions, opposing pulls, and changes over time that drove his ideas. These complexities are evident in the fate of Tannhäuser itself. Not only was this the most popular as well as the most frequently transcribed and parodied of Wagner’s works in Germanic theaters through World War I, but it was also the work Wagner revised the most, and over the longest period of time.6 Starting immediately after the Dresden premiere of 1845, he effected myriad changes that were eventually reflected in the published score of 1860. For the Paris production of 1861, he added and revised large parts (particularly in the Venusberg scenes), which he then retranslated and modified for the Munich performance of 1867 and his “model production” in Vienna of 1875. Over the course of three decades, Wagner thus left what boils down to four different versions. That these reflect a good

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deal of his artistic development can be gleaned from the changing genre label: it morphed from “große romantische Oper” (betraying indebtedness to both French “grand” and German “romantic” opera) via the nondescript “Opéra” (1861) to “Handlung” (Action)—a moniker linking the Tannhäuser of 1867–75 to Wagner’s mature music dramas as epitomized by the “Handlung” Tristan und Isolde (1865).7 In addition to revising the score, Wagner was directly involved in several productions at major theaters. And for no other opera did he dedicate more ink to influencing stagings elsewhere. At the same time, Tannhäuser remained the opera that troubled him the most: his thoughts during his last years returned again and again to what he came to consider an unfinished project. In 1877, for example, Cosima Wagner reported that he was very preoccupied with the opera, considering further revisions to the Venusberg scenes; and merely three weeks before his death she famously noted: “He says he still owes the world Tannhäuser.”8 This opera, in other words, reveals a composer paradigmatically refining a work both on page and onstage throughout the better part of his career, in the face of his evolving creative thought as well as changing practical experiences and conditions. It can therefore shed new light on the emergence of Wagner’s artistic ideals prior to and in parallel with their theoretical formulation, in addition to their onstage realization. Tannhäuser, in short, provides a unique starting point for addressing nineteenth-century attempts at “completing” and preserving an opera in (and as) performance. More specifically, Tannhäuser’s opening, set in the legendary Venusberg, is particularly well suited to demonstrate the importance of technologies for manifesting opera as an illusionist multimedia entity—an ideal promoted most efficiently, of course, by Wagner himself. With their gradual medial engagement, I suggest, Tannhäuser’s Venusberg scenes are an epiphany of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. In the depths of the Venusberg, Wagner first displayed a music drama as fully enacted and embodied: Venus’s magic grotto seamlessly merges various art forms into an alluring multisensorial spectacle that fully absorbs its visitor. Yet it does so not within a diegetic play-within-a-play staged for onstage audiences. Instead, Venus’s spectacle emerges—and is perceived—as part of a natural setting within the opera. A proto-Gesamtkunstwerk in miniature, the Venusberg scenes thus afford precious glimpses into the ideal result Wagner desired for the stagings of his multimedia works, along with the strategies for their creation as well as their anticipated perception. Not coincidentally do these scenes evoke some of the major stage effects that Wagner and other composers consistently employed and refined throughout the nineteenth century (some of which will be addressed in my next chapters), including sudden transformations, lifelike simulations of nature, veiling mists, and a contested gong strike. Moreover, the Venusberg discloses the extent to which every detail of its (staged) appearance is minutely managed for utmost effect. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Venusberg scenes were the part of the Tannhäuser score Wagner retouched the most. As such, they emblematize his persistent

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attempts to reconcile his Gesamtkunstwerk ideal with the material conditions of nineteenth-century operatic practice by retrofitting both. In reading the Venusberg as an archetypal anticipation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter explores what happens if we associate Wagner not with Tannhäuser, the singer, but with Venus, the director. It traces the shift from composer to total director that Wagner and others sought to attain during the nineteenth century. By expounding and expanding this association, I take a fresh look at Wagner’s theatrical aspirations away from the well-trodden (and sometimes misleading) paths of his written utterances, or from the practicalities of actual, always-contingent stage productions. This approach fleshes out my introduction’s brief sketch of the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk with a view to its ultimate stage appearance. Like a prophetic dream, I maintain, the Venusberg scenes capture Wagner’s music-dramatic vision in vivid multimediality. In so doing, they also indicate the practical directions Wagner would explore for his future stage productions: Tannhäuser’s opening simultaneously foreshadows the means deployed by Wagner to realize his concept and their inevitable failures. Put differently, the Venusberg symbolizes— and helps explain—Wagner’s lifelong yet ambivalent pursuit of absolute directorial powers, his voracious appetite for stage technologies, and his desire for his own theater. To be sure, this chapter illuminates Wagner’s creative objective as pars pro toto in order to buttress the core themes of Curtain, Gong, Steam. It does not explicate the related ambitions of other composers, nor does it discuss the technologies employed in actual stagings: all these will be subjects of the following chapters. Likewise, I do not submit an exegesis of Tannhäuser as a whole, nor am I concerned with minute differences between the various versions: it will suffice to concentrate on the Venusberg scenes in what is commonly called the “Dresden version” (reflecting Wagner’s revisions between 1845 and 1860) or, when specified, the “Paris version” (first performed in its entirety in Vienna in 1875). By thus zooming in on a Wagnerian ideal in its pure and abstract state, undeterred by material actualizations, I offer a lively backdrop for the individual technologies and stage-practical issues that my subsequent case studies will address. To this end, I weave increasingly specific links between the Venusberg scenes and Wagner’s theoretical writings, between the Venusberg and Bayreuth, between Venus and Wagner. Observing the composer in his Venus grotto, in short, I expose the conceptual breeding ground of his multimedia approach to opera, a safely confined laboratory in which he tested those music-dramatic ideas and technological ideals that his later productions would famously seek to deliver openly to the world. Ultimately, my allegorical reading both explicates and complicates our understanding of Wagner’s persona and artistic aspirations as well as of the broader, deeply troubled nineteenthcentury utopia of total medial control in opera.

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T H E V E N U SB E R G S C E N E S A S G E S A M T K U N ST W E R K

Let us, then, imagine ourselves in the Dresden Court Theater in 1845, for the premiere of Tannhäuser. After a substantial overture, the curtain rises, but not onto the busy introductory chorus that we as mid-nineteenth-century operagoers would expect. Instead, the title hero and Venus, one of the opera’s two leading ladies, are immediately disclosed. Yet we do not hear these singers. It takes roughly a minute and a half (or 112 measures) of iridescent orchestral music before the onset of any singing, albeit only the gentle backstage chorus of invisible sirens inviting love. Wagner allows a further four minutes (172 measures) before the protagonists open their mouths. (The Paris version would have us wait even longer: almost seven minutes for the sirens and over twelve for the first solo.9) During this exceptionally extended singing-free time, however, we see and hear a good deal else. After all, we are inside of the Venusberg, and the goddess of love does not live poorly. Her grotto is animated by sirens and loving couples arranged around its sides, with bathing naiads in the background; at center stage, dancing nymphs are soon joined by a train of bacchantes. In Paris, youths, fauns, satyrs, the three Graces, and cupids also participate: they hustle and bustle, dance and chase each other to chromatically charged and dazzlingly fluctuating orchestral music in a bright E major, with dominating high strings and winds accented by sparkling cymbals and triangle. Instead of an opening chorus, in a word, we are faced with a glittering ballet. Yet Wagner did not envision “dance as is usual in our operas and ballets.” As he explained in his 1852 “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser,” he had in mind “a consolidation of everything the highest art of dance and pantomime can accomplish: a seductively wild and enchanting chaos of groups and movements ranging from the softest delight, yearning, and longing to the most delirious impetuosity of frenzied riot.”10 About the much more lavish Paris version, the composer similarly confessed that what he demanded in “the huge and unconventional dance scenes of the first act . . . was unheard-of and departed radically from traditional choreographic practices”11—a remarkable claim for a production in Paris, the European capital of ballet. After all, fusing dance and pantomime was not uncommon. In France it had most recently yielded the independent genre of ballet pantomime (or ballet d’action), which during the 1830s and 1840s was arguably as important to the Paris Opéra as grand opéra proper.12 Some French operas also included pantomime in addition to (or as part of) their obligatory ballet, a practice Wagner had adopted in Rienzi to adorn the celebratory act 1 finale. In underlining the otherness of Tannhäuser’s beginning, however, he did have a point. Its wistful evocation of chaos (in Paris of “utmost fury” and “extreme rage”) seemed a far cry from the “ballet du genre noble et gracieuse” for which the Opéra had the prerogative among

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nineteenth-century Parisian theaters.13 Moreover, pantomimic elements were typically included at the ends of acts to suspend tension, and ballets would usually occur in the second (and never in the first) act, as Wagner’s Parisian detractors gleefully reminded him.14 Flying in the face of these conventions, the Venusberg opens Tannhäuser with a closed dramatic scene—a miniature enactment of mythic nature’s orgiastic power—that sets the stage both visually and allegorically for the ensuing action.15 For the Paris Tannhäuser, Wagner animated his stage with a further type of artistic expression, in addition to dance and pantomime. After the frolicking couples have dispersed, two successive visions of erotic mythological scenes appear in the background: the abduction of Europe by Zeus in the form of a bull, and the seduction of Leda by Zeus as a swan. Labeling these visions Nebelbilder, or “dissolving views,” Wagner alluded to their seeming immateriality, as he pictured them emerging from the “scent” of the grotto. Yet the term also referred to the homonymous optical medium popular in London since 1839 and introduced to Germanic spectators in Vienna in 1843. This new entertainment produced dissolving views through two (or more) magic lanterns that enabled the fading of one image into the next, thus simulating animation and change over time.16 It seems deliberate that Wagner likewise prescribed not one but two related Nebelbilder, separated by a period of “fade” (albeit an extended one to allow for the backstage set-up of the second vision) during which the three Graces “interpret” the first vision in dance. In turn, the dissolving views correlate with the siren chorus and its echo, providing a visual commentary on, or dramatic motivation for, the sudden outburst of acousmatic vocal music that, in the Dresden version, had merely interrupted the dance. In the Paris Venusberg, Wagner merged dance, pantomime, and live enactment of a recent optical medium with orchestral and choral ambient music to generate a minutely choreographed multimedia experience. Tannhäuser’s most innovative scene thus acts out Wagner’s goal of media integration—“this most frank mutual permeation, generation, and completion of each art form out of itself and through each other . . . [through which] is born the united Lyric Art-Work.”17 In other words, the opening Venusberg scene (in both versions) exemplifies the theories laid out in Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future” on how to meld the individual arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk that transcends the sum of its parts. That the Venusberg includes figures from classical mythology (in an opera based on Germanic myths, no less) seems only to underline Wagner’s belief that the resulting work would succeed the hitherto unsurpassed Greek tragedy as ultimate Drama.18 Similarly, the three Graces of the Paris version call to mind Wagner’s own allegory, found in “The Art-Work,” of three closely entwined sisters representing the coveted fusion of dance, music, and poetry in his anticipated music drama.19 Small wonder that he placed special emphasis on the staging of this opening “dance.” Even in the Dresden version, he considered this “not an easy” task:

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“to produce the desired chaotic effect undoubtedly requires the most careful artistic treatment of the smallest details.” The director was to follow his scenic directions meticulously and listen intently to the music for additional instructions.20 This equal emphasis on words and music as indicators for stage action is another token of the close audiovisual alignment he coveted. Moreover, with its temporary abstinence from solo song the Venusberg prefigures a basic premise of Wagner’s early conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk: it enacts the birth of music drama out of dance, the art that in “The Art-Work” Wagner would call “[t]he most realistic” and place at the helm of his three “purely human” (reinmenschliche) arts of dance, poetry, and music.21 As such, the Venusberg scenes exhibit the relationship between dramatic situation, orchestral music, and sung melody (Versmelodie) that Wagner would theorize a few years later in Opera and Drama. Just as the musical melody emerged out of the “speaking-verse” (Sprachvers), he explained, “so have we to picture the dramatic Situation as growing from conditions which mount, before our eyes, to a height whereon the Verse-Melody appears the only fit, the necessary expression of a definitely proclaimed emotion.”22 That is to say, the dramatic situation was to intensify gradually to a point of emotional specificity that naturally required the singing voice for adequate expression. Thus Wagner strove to remedy opera’s perennial quandary regarding the artificiality of onstage singing. Such a careful medial buildup is indeed precisely what happens in the Venusberg. The set, the lighting, the dancers, and the orchestra’s consistent “sound fields”—its high trills and narrow-ranged chromatic motifs—conjure the sensually charged atmosphere of the fabled mons horrisonus (the horribly sounding mountain), while the brief sirens’ chorus expands this ephemeral sonic architecture more than it adds meaning.23 Only once the dramatic setting has been established visually, viscerally, and acoustically can the orchestra turn to the protagonists. In three brief, markedly distinct, and rhythmically disjointed passages that Wagner left intact in all later versions, the orchestra now reveals the state of affairs between Venus and Tannhäuser (example 1.1). The first passage, a dryly sculpted, marcato forte motif for unison strings, strikingly departs from the previous musical fluctuation; according to the stage directions, it renders Tannhäuser “as though starting from a dream.”24 Next, two solo clarinets in parallel thirds softly and slowly outline a dominant chord with major ninth, their gentle swell floating in uncertain tonal territory, a musical expression of the “caressing” (schmeichelnd) intensity with which Venus pulls Tannhäuser toward herself.25 The strings then burst into a rising eighth-note passage of quickly increasing density in texture, chromaticism, pitch, and dynamics, while Tannhäuser “covers his eyes with his hand as if to hold fast a vision.” Tellingly, it is at this point of introspection—of shielding a mental picture—that the orchestral expressivity grows to such a degree that only the singing voice can continue its trajectory. Over the loud diminished chord that ends this passage like a question mark,

example 1.1 . Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2: opening of the 1845 “Dresden version.” © By kind permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. Allegro

Moderato (Venus zieht ihn schmeichelnd zurück.)

(Tannhäuser zuckt mit dem Haupte empor, als fahre er aus einem Traume auf.) str 3

A A

@ C @

3

@

@

@

G M3

@

cl



G

(

(

M

3

Moderato (Tannhäuser führt die Hand über die Augen, als suche er ein Traumbild festzuhalten.)

6

VENUS

GK

 3



str

@

@ K K@  K

@

M G @ @ KK

@ 



10

 sag!

4

@K

GK

G



( C

(

@   K K @@

(





Ge - lieb - ter,



( 

Wo weilt dein

Sinn?

TANNHÄUSER (schnell)

( Zu - viel!

G 

Zu - viel!

(langsamer und leise)

O,

daß ich nun

G K

(

er - wach - te!









K

34

( ( M  ( (

Wagner’s Venusberg

35

Venus vocalizes her anguish by asking her beloved: “Where are your thoughts?” As the voice enters, the orchestra simultaneously recedes into the more traditional role of recitative accompaniment: verbal articulation temporarily takes over from visual, gestural, and orchestral communication.26 In these first fourteen measures of Tannhäuser’s act 1, scene 2, Wagner thus illustrated what he would soon describe as the ideal relationship between drama, gesture, orchestral music, and sung words: a dramatically motivated progression from audiovisual ambient scene setting via increased orchestral expressivity to the inclusion of signifying language. In so doing, he also framed the raising of the singing voice as a natural process. As Wagner explained in Opera and Drama, confronting the audience immediately with a “complete, ready-made melody” would render the latter just as unintelligible as a prefabricated dramatic situation. Only by observing both music and action as something “whose Becoming is ever present to us,” like that of nature, could the spectator comprehend them. Therefore, the Gesamtkunstwerk was to be presented “in continuous organic growth,” lest it turn into a cold “masterpiece of mechanism.”27 The Venusberg scenes, then, do not only trace the evolution of music drama out of dance; they also demonstrate how all its media ought to merge gradually and naturally. And this was a seminal strategy for Wagner, one used to fend off the charge of mechanistic (that is, dramatically unwarranted) effect: it prevented his artwork from declining into the merely technological. Given Wagner’s conviction that his music drama was to effect the regeneration of society through its release from alienating industrial civilization and its return to nature (as discussed in my introduction), the Venusberg emerges as a prime location to experience the craved purification of art from anything mechanical. The aspiration to return to (albeit idealized) nature was fostered by yet another way in which the Venusberg scenes presage Wagner’s theories. Regarding the scenery and stage setting, he declared, the theater must “be able to depict the living image of nature. . . . The walls of this Scene, which look down coldly and impassively upon the artist and towards the public, must deck themselves with the fresh tints of Nature, with the warm light of ether, to be worthy of taking their share in the human artwork.”28 And nature is where Venus has made her home. Wagner’s stage directions quite literally “deck out” the three visible walls of her grotto: for the background, he envisioned a seemingly endless extension with a blue lake; for its sides, raised shores and rocky ledges; and the entire space was to be illuminated by “rosy light.” For the staging at the Paris Opéra, with its—for Wagner—unprecedented financial and technical possibilities, he expanded these already extensive directions into a detailed dramaturgy of color and light. In addition to the reddish-rosy light (now emanating from below the foreground), some “dim daylight” shines through a rocky opening, while “blue haze” hovers in the distance. Complementing the horizontal blue lake, a “greenish cascade falls the whole height of the grotto,” its white waves “wildly foaming,” and the irregularly shaped ledges are “overgrown

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with wonderful coral-like tropical vegetation.” The Paris Venusberg, in short, features reds, blues, greens, and whites in various gradations and all possible spatial dimensions. (Only yellow is missing, being reserved for the sunny aboveground world and Tannhäuser’s final redemption.) Just how unusual such elaborate directions were can be gleaned from Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling of 1833. Its prologue is similarly set in a cave governed by a queen—a netherworld from which the title hero flees for the sake of earthly ventures and to which he will eventually return. “Subterranean, widely arched cave, which shows the entrances to several lateral caves, illuminated by reddish dim light” and showing “ragged walls”—thus the initial setting: a mere sketch of (if likely an inspiration for) the sumptuous Venusberg.29 By contrast, Wagner’s directions read like a paint-by-number manual. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that his description of the Venusberg, with all its intricate details and mythic resonances, inspired visual artists for decades to come.30 This continued inspiration must have pleased Wagner, for his call in “The ArtWork” was for the collaboration of true landscape painters, rather than routine stage designers: “What the painter’s expert eye has seen in Nature, . . . he dovetails into the united work of all the arts, as his own abundant share. Through him the scene takes on complete artistic truth: his drawing, his color, his warmly stimulating application of light, compel Nature to serve the highest purpose of art.” In return for thus providing the stage with the colors and appearances of nature, Wagner promised that painting would be consummated within the Gesamtkunstwerk: That which the landscape painter . . . has erstwhile forced into the narrow frames of panel-pictures—what he affixed to the egoist’s secluded chamber walls, or offered for the random, incoherent, and garbled stacking in a picture-storehouse [i.e., museum]—with this he will henceforth fill the ample framework of the tragic stage. . . . The illusion which his brush and finest blend of colours could only hint at and merely distantly approach, he will here bring to perfectly deceptive representation through the artistic use of every known device of optics and artistic lighting.31

In its new, theatrical frame, Wagner expected painting to reach—and move— much larger audiences and receive wider appreciation. What is more, it would “effect a livelier impression” through the use of real light and the participation of living humans.32 The Venusberg and its gamboling creatures thus display Wagner’s ideal of a painterly set animated by light, colors, and bodies. In so doing, they also fulfill Wagner’s principle that everything in his Gesamtkunstwerk must become sensually perceivable in order to proceed “from imagination into actuality, that is: physicality [Sinnlichkeit]”; conversely, nothing was to be left to the “fancy” (Einbildungskraft) of the audience.33 In short, the opening Venusberg scene is both ballet pantomime and tableau vivant—the “image of life” manifesting his desired true drama.34

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Finally, the most distinct feature of the Venusberg is arguably its “rosy scent.” Metaphorically, Wagner uses this term to denote the pinkish light that magically illuminates the grotto, as well as the clouds and vapors that envelop the dancers and give rise to the Nebelbilder. At the same time, the fragrance signals the grotto’s sultry, erotically suffused ambience that is impossible to evade since olfaction is the most archaic and unmediated of all human senses.35 Wagner’s theory, to be sure, does not encompass smells. But the all-pervading scent neatly symbolizes the function Wagner accorded the music of his invisible orchestra: by merging physical and artistic elements, it “encloses the performer as with an atmospheric ring of Art and Nature.”36 Furthermore, just like critics would soon claim for Wagner’s music, the aroma seems to have an enchanting, even narcotic, effect:37 Tannhäuser, the only human in the Venusberg, is in a state of trance, his posture betraying passivity and submissiveness. In both versions, he is “half kneeling,” his head resting in Venus’s lap. Such an attitude illustrates precisely what Wagner desired for his audience. Its attention, he held, “should never be led to the mere art-media employed, but solely to the artistic object realized thereby,” so that it could fully “enjoy without the slightest effort of an Art-intelligence.”38 That is to say, the spectator was not to pay critical attention to the technologies behind the artwork but solely to experience it sensually—a mode of reception epitomized by the Venusberg’s singular object of lust. Not by chance does Venus remind Tannhäuser of “lovely wonders,” “rapture,” and “blissful song” when attempting to bewitch him once more. The complete absorption she demands fully encapsulates Wagner’s concept of audience perception: “from the auditorium the public . . . vanishes to itself, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork, which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage, which seems to it the wide expanse of the whole World.”39 Like Venus’s scent, the music drama was to meld artist, performers, and audience into a common surge of devotion to Wagner’s goal. In the fleeting, animated exhibition of the Venusberg, then, Wagner momentarily envisaged what his Gesamtkunstwerk might feel like onstage, and how it ought to be enacted and perceived. In its structure, dramaturgy, gestures, and colors, as well as in its physicality, sensuality, and multimediality, the Venusberg offers a fully realized snapshot of Wagner’s life-long artistic zeal. Small wonder that Wagner originally considered calling his opera Der Venusberg.40 T H E BAY R E U T H V E N U SB E R G

The Venusberg thus unfolded a concrete demonstration of Wagner’s absorptive Gesamtkunstwerk first before its theoretical conceptualization and subsequently in interaction with it: in a topically resonant way, we might construe the Venusberg as the womb out of which was born Wagner’s theatrical objective.41 Yet how was this ideal to be realized? How was Wagner to create onstage the flawless medial

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integration Venus magically achieved in his vision? Once again, the Venusberg scenes themselves provide clues—evidence that may help us understand more fully how Wagner imagined the final appearance of his Gesamtkunstwerk, and how (and why) he went out of his way to control its onstage realization, technologies and all. As a goddess, Venus has complete power over her realm. In the Dresden version, this is suggested by her dominating presence; indeed, the preface to the 1845 libretto explained that in the mountain “Lady Venus held her court of luxury and voluptuousness”—in other words, she was in charge.42 Her autocracy was underpinned in Paris by the fact that the three Graces (no less) report to her. Furthermore, at the height of her conflict with Tannhäuser, Venus conjures a second grotto with a mere sign of her hand.43 One can easily picture Wagner longing for such authority and honors, particularly in the theater. As we saw in the introduction, he had always been keen to influence his works’ staged appearances, and over the course of his career he developed an acute desire to achieve a “correct,” exemplary rendition.44 Along these lines, he admitted of the 1860 preparations for the Paris Tannhäuser that he had never fared better regarding performances: “Everything I possibly demand is being done: nowhere the slightest resistance. . . . Every detail is being submitted for my approval: . . . Now everything will be perfect.”45 A goddess could barely ask for greater subservience. Total rule over all of theater’s multiple media was key to actualizing Wagner’s vision. Yet even in Paris Wagner would not fully achieve this goal. Precisely as he exercised that willpower, he made enemies by resisting local conventions and audience expectations, affronting his collaborators, and snubbing the public.46 Such diva behavior did not go well with critics and the audience’s influential Jockey Club members: Wagner was no goddess, after all. The performance that he had hoped would become “the best that has ever happened or that will take place in the near future” thus turned into one of the greatest scandals in operatic history.47 Venus had avoided such a debacle—and thereby proffered another roadmap to theatrical success: the territory she commanded was her own. To wit, Wagner would need his own theater, perhaps even his own audience. And these requirements are precisely what he began to realize as plans for his Ring cycle unfolded. In the early 1850s, he dissociated this gargantuan project from the “theater of today” and its repertory business; instead, he craved a provisional theater purposely built for the exclusive execution of his tetralogy, to which he would invite solely interested spectators. A decade later (tellingly, after the Paris failure), he conceived of these performances as a summer festival for which he could gather the best performers from across the country—like Venus summoning her Graces.48 Analogies between Venus’s grotto and what would materialize, during the 1870s, as Wagner’s Festspielhaus did not end with the creation of the latter. Venusberg and Bayreuth’s so-called Green Hill: both heights are widely visible yet located—as Wagner had requested in 1852 for his theater—“in some beautiful sol-

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itude.”49 Venus’s grotto and Wagner’s Festspielhaus: both are outwardly unassuming. True to the German idealist preference for inner essence over outer appearance, they reserve their magic for the inside, revealed exclusively to those who truly seek (and gain) access, and are willing to travel and pay the price of admittance. Both are sui generis, affording unique alternatives to established society and its (then) institutionalized culture. And both offer exile to their masters, sheltering Venus from medieval Christianity and Wagner from urban Munich’s political and personal strife.50 Like the grotto, the Festspielhaus is constructed for enhanced audience absorption, allowing spectators to rest their visually and aurally engrossed heads, Tannhäuser-like, directly in the lap of Venus (or artistic pleasure). The auditorium is only dimly lit, closing off the senses to everyday reality. And just as Venus’s grotto “bends to the right in the background so that its end seems invisible,” the Bayreuth theater’s double proscenium extends the illusion of the stage into the distance.51 The depth of the grotto obscures the source of the siren songs much as the “mystic abyss” of Bayreuth’s famously sunken pit hides the orchestra.52 And those same depths produce multimedia wonders just like Bayreuth’s unusually high stage house. (The heat and smells pervading the Festspielhaus during the inaugural festival were unintended evocations of Venus’s sultry ambience.53) The Venusberg, in short, foreshadowed Bayreuth in significant ways. For over three decades, it endowed Wagner with a safe and secluded allegorical laboratory in which he could experiment with his Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged. Bayreuth’s debt to Venus did not escape the composer. In 1872, when taking a walk to the construction site of the Festspielhaus, Cosima Wagner reported on the “colorful, volcanic appearance, the earth green and pink: ‘There is the Venusberg already,’ says R[ichard].”54 Nature and theater, the primal force of Earth erupting and the lure of artistic artifice, merged in Wagner’s notion of the Venusberg as vibrant locus of the Gesamtkunstwerk. It seems hardly accidental, then, that he abandoned this conceptual workshop (along with revisions of Tannhäuser) only after 1875, the year rehearsals in the actual Festspielhaus began. Tannhäuser’s Venus had stood in for Wagner; but now the composer could fill his own theater with sensual performances. He did so by following Venus once more, adopting some ways in which she had transformed her grotto into a charmingly decorated and gracefully animated space. With Tannhäuser’s ballet pantomime and the dissolving views of the Paris version evolving in the background, the grotto’s far end serves as a natural stage for which the veiling perfumes become organically moving, flexible curtains like the ones that Wagner dreamed up for his Ring cycle (as chapters 2 and 4 will show). By the same token, Venus commands the music in a way that heralds the notorious opening of Das Rheingold with which the Festspielhaus would be inaugurated in 1876:55 it is she who performs the shift from orchestral to vocal melody, and only at her command does Tannhäuser pick up his harp and break into stage song for the opera’s first aria. All in all, Venus’s seemingly natural realm is carefully groomed,

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its artificiality simultaneously signified and masked by the “rosy scent” and the Paris version’s “wonderful, coral-like” vegetation.56 Venus demonstrates that all the arts and their sensorial stimuli are needed to give rise to the craved naturalness of multimedia spectacle, and thereby enhance the latter’s quasi-erotic appeal.57 Even Venus’s choice of a grotto appears instructive regarding Wagner’s theatrical agenda. True, grottos and caves had been favored settings in opera since the genre’s inception. But the rise of pleasure gardens since the sixteenth century had also brought about a fashion for manmade grottos that were often ornately decorated with shells and tuff (that is to say, with inorganic yet natural substances), equipped with complicated waterworks (Wagner’s greenish cascade), and, increasingly, animated by automatons (or nymphs) to complete their illusion of lifelike nature. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp, such grottos were “a perfect location in which to manifest the transition of apparently untouched yet structured nature to art . . . [since they] were viewed as anthropomorphic ‘wombs’ where metals became more highly developed, as though in an underground laboratory.” Indeed, subterranean grottos and mines had long been considered living microcosms of the world. Producing precious stones and minerals, they served as both model for and locus of early empirical (i.e., technological) and theoretical studies of nature.58 Perhaps it was because of this alchemical association that Wagner used the term grotto for a location that, in light of its width, common parlance would usually have considered a cave.59 His Venusberg, then, was not only the womb in which his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk took shape. Qua grotto, it also indicated the necessity of technology for the transformative process that would lead to the total artwork’s realization, while its location in—and appearance as— nature at the same time obscured these mechanics.60 Venus achieves her highest vocation as mistress of technology, as commander of the nimble combination of multiple media. If the Venusberg spectacle of mythic nature is (multimedia) theater, Venus embodies the total artist-director. V E N U S A S WAG N E R

This artistic affinity between Venus and Wagner is supported by their kinship in the private sphere. Like Venus, Wagner dominated not just the physical domain but also personal relationships: the servile rhetoric of Cosima Wagner’s diaries and her submissive posture in Fritz Luckhardt’s famous 1872 photograph of the couple— with a seated Cosima adoringly gazing up at the composer—are just two resonant evocations of Tannhäuser’s half-kneeling pose.61 Like Venus, moreover, Wagner was enamored of all things rosy. In the 1860s, for instance, he repeatedly ordered ample lengths of pink sateen while fussing about its hues. The darker shade, he warned, was not to be confused “with the earlier violet pink, which is not what I mean here, but genuine rosa [pale pink], only very dark and fiery”; a decade later, he commis-

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sioned brocade in “my pink, very pale and delicate.”62 More than light blues, yellows, beiges, and whites, he favored the rose color for those luxurious clothes he liked to don at home, and that inspired him both erotically and compositionally. Ribboned bedspreads and pillows, waistcoats and breeches, dressing gowns and undergarments were tailor-made in various shades of rosa, while some of his outerwear concealed, Venusberg-like, his fetish on the inside—as pink lining.63 By 1880, Wagner joyfully admitted “that life in fact begins with rosa” and “rosa is life itself.”64 Pale pink, that is, represented the least artificial and most animate—even primal— color for the composer. As such, it offered an intimate yet vital link between Wagner’s Venus grotto, his weltanschauung, and his private self. More tellingly yet, the composer was obsessed with rosy scents. The quantities in which he ordered rose oils, rose powders, and rose essences astounded even his London supplier, who worried about detrimental influences on Wagner’s health.65 In the late 1870s, Wagner kept urging his amour Judith Gautier not to hold back on the amounts of fragrance sent from Paris; among other reasons, he confessed that his bathtub was below his studio and he liked “to smell the perfumes rising.”66 Roses themselves also served as stimulants. In 1863–64, Wagner personally had the boudoir of his opulent Penzing lodgings near Vienna furnished with, among other luxury items, lush satin rose garlands as would decorate the Venusberg of the 1867 Munich Tannhäuser or the Venus of the opera’s Bayreuth premiere of 1891; the “colorful magnificence” of the room, to which he rarely admitted anyone, afforded an aphrodisiac just like Venus’s grotto.67 Gautier, too, was later asked to send silk “strewn with threads of blossoms—roses” for his chaise longue, where he would spend his mornings composing Parsifal—perhaps sprawling like (the Paris) Venus on her “sumptuous couch.”68 The Venusberg’s affinity with Wagner’s effeminate sensual materialism was not lost on contemporaries. As early as the 1850s, Wagner himself had dreamt of sharing “a little Venus chamber” (Venusstübchen) with his first wife, Minna Wagner, whom he wished dressed “in velvet, silk, and satin”; just weeks before his death, Cosima Wagner’s comparison of his Venice room with a “blue grotto” led to the couple ruminating on Wagner’s “desire for colors, for perfumes, the latter having to be very strong, since he takes snuff.”69 More acerbically, in 1865 a Munich satirical journal featured a “new-German composer” named Rumorhäuser who is unable to work unless his colored stockings, silk nightgowns, Oriental carpets, and exotic flowers are all impeccably arranged; to this end, Rumorhäuser issues orders from a “gorgeous bedroom” with velvet tapestries, silk curtains, and “a rocky grotto planted with fragrant moss, ivy, and box,” complete with streamlets and goldfish.70 Away from Wagner’s oft-ridiculed material life, the rose-scented Venusberg thus presented a safe space for the composer: a place where he could enjoy his private fantasies and activate his artistic potency. In a sense, the Venusberg functioned as a technological supplement to amplify his creativity. And ironically, this technical

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link, too, was symbolized by the Venusberg’s pink hue: Wagner’s quintessence of life was actually foreign to natural color schemes—a synthetic derivative whose rise in both painting and fashion since the seventeenth century was intimately tied to the growing chemical industry.71 Overall, the Venusberg’s gear revealed and simultaneously fulfilled Wagner’s innermost creative needs, just as Venus personified some of his most clandestine traits. The latter, in turn, intriguingly matched the effeminate, sensuous, or erotic qualities often associated with Wagner’s music—and nowhere more so than in the soundscape of the Paris Venusberg.72 To be fair, the mid-nineteenth century did not yet associate pink exclusively with the female wardrobe. By the 1840s, however, the fad for early Romantic dandies to sport bright colors—including pink—as coat linings as well as for scarves and other accessories was giving way to the use of pastel colors for women’s dresses. (That pink underwear and stockings were often utilized by prostitutes made matters worse.73) Sure enough, caricaturists of the 1870s delighted in the discovery of Wagner’s fabric-and-clothes-obsessed letters to his milliner by casting him as a megalomaniac cross-dresser (figure 1.1).74 Yet they could more aptly have depicted him as Venus herself. While scholars have tended to elide this tantalizing kinship, some productions of Tannhäuser have alluded to it in ways that may help us gauge more deeply the implications of Wagner’s Venus fantasy.75 Wolfgang Wagner’s Bayreuth staging of 1985, for example, heaved Venus onto a stage-like pedestal, where she was bedded on nothing but Wagner’s pale-pink satin. As she rises during her showdown with Tannhäuser, the pink cloth appears as an overlong cape she seductively wraps around herself (figure 1.2). It is when she abandons it (and the pedestal) to approach Tannhäuser imploringly that her strength suddenly fails and she collapses onto her knees in front of him, inverting his opening pose: the pink drapery (Wagner’s artistic stimulant), or so this staging suggests, constituted Venus’s power. At the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, Nikolaus Lehnhoff in 2008 expanded this play on Wagner’s fetishism and the concomitant materialization of the Venusberg’s scent as pink fabric to explicate the theatrical self-construction of Venus herself. The more Tannhäuser withdraws, the more she sacrifices her artificial image: first her statuesque and elevated pose, then her rosy silken gown (figure 1.3) followed by her light pink dress (which henceforth replace her as the object of Tannhäuser’s sexual fantasies), and finally her wig and hairdo. The goddess deflates before our eyes into an ordinary, fragile woman by casting off all synthetic body enhancements, thereby divulging them as such—and as appendages of theatrical seduction. For a 1998 production in Naples, film director Werner Herzog construed the Venusberg itself as nothing but red fabric. Shimmering crimson curtains form the Venusberg’s sides and ground, temporarily veiling the green meadows of the Wartburg valley. The oversized fringes of the curtains’ ropes supply the couch for Venus,

figure 1.1 . “ ‘Atlas’ in Music,” in Puck. Humoristisch-Satyrische Wochenschrift (Leipzig, July 1, 1877), 205. The title plays on the name of the Greek Titan who carried the heavens (or the musical heights); in contemporary German usage, “Atlas” also referred to satin cloth. In another pun on Wagner’s fetish for luxurious rosy fabrics, the caption has the composer secretly (“sub rosa,” here literally under a rose garland) esteem his political influence as higher than that of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Klassik-Stiftung Weimar.

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figure 1.2 . Venus’s all-purpose pink drapery lures Tannhäuser in Wolfgang Wagner’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Bayreuth, 1985; set design: Wolfgang Wagner; costumes: Reinhard Heinrich; Tannhäuser: Richard Versalle; Venus: Ruthild Engert-Ely). Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth—Zustiftung Wolfgang Wagner.

whose interminably long dress is literally cut from the same red cloth (figure 1.4). This Venus cannot but disappear together with the curtains: they are her drapery. And yet, they seem to be upturned, their surplus flowing onto the stage floor as festoons would usually decorate the top of the proscenium arch. By rendering the Venusberg as theatrical curtain, Herzog seems to imply that the remainder of the opera—its aboveground world—is show: a performed make-believe only fleetingly revealed by the vanishing of Venus’s curtains, or a fantasy world into which Tannhäuser escapes. If the Venusberg amounts to a (however inverted) theater, it is itself the technology through which Venus produces the simulation of the “real” world. Herzog thus stages Adorno’s conviction that Tannhäuser’s escape is but pretense.76 And all three productions depict Venus’s power of conquest as fundamentally theatrical. Even the goddess is in need of accessories—of technologies exterior to herself—to immerse Tannhäuser in her multimedia empire.77 Light and color, cloth and stage, and even her own body become the means to simulate perfected nature in the service of total theatrical seduction.

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figure 1.3 . Venus charms through layers of rose-colored bodily extensions in Nikolaus Lehnhoff ’s staging of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, 2008; set design: Raimund Bauer; costumes: Andrea Schmidt-Futterer; lighting: Duane Schuler; Tannhäuser: Robert Gambill; Venus: Waltraud Meier). TV director: Patrick Buttmann; Arthaus Musik, 2008 (screenshot).

These readings of Venus as goddess of (stage) technologies lead us back to Wagner, whose lifelong pursuit we might now construe as becoming Venus, the total director. The Venusberg vision captured Wagner’s dream of easily summoning all theatrical media into a smooth multimedia surface. Yet in real life (even in his own theater), this dream could be realized only cumbersomely and partially—as was the case for every composer. Aside from the inevitable contingencies of musical performance, staging required ample technologies, which in turn entailed money, collaborators, and ingenuity. Ironically, this dependence on technology and its masters applied particularly to the Venusberg scenes. Granted, Wagner’s meticulous stage directions as well as his 1852 pamphlet (in which he pleaded with directors to take seriously his scenic imaginations) provided a solid baseline for the

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figure 1.4 . The Venusberg rendered as an inverted theatrical curtain in Werner Herzog’s production of Tannhäuser, act 1, scene 2 (Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 1998; set design: Maurizio Balò; costumes: Franz Blumauer; Tannhäuser: Alan Woodrow; Venus: Mariana Pentcheva). TV director: Walter Licastro; Image Entertainment, 1998 (screenshot).

stage design and layout. Moreover, the composer had been actively involved in shaping the set designs for the 1845 Dresden premiere, and—uniquely among his operas—during the 1850s he imitated the French practice of publishing production books by having copies of the original decoration plans, sketches, and costume designs for Tannhäuser sent to German-language theaters. He even recommended these materials as a starting point for the stagings in Paris (1861) and Vienna (1875) that he guest-directed.78 This tradition was continued by Cosima Wagner for the 1891 Bayreuth premiere, which in turn became the model for German productions for decades to come.79 Albeit featuring an increasing amount of exotic floral detail, the Venusberg’s basic color scheme and setup—a richly decorated stalactite cave, with Venus’s luxurious couch tucked to the front left—thus remained remarkably constant.80 And yet, the Venusberg scenes were particularly difficult to codify and actualize. We have already seen how concerned Wagner was about the execution of the ballet pantomime—which would remain a focus of directors and critics (and a gateway for experimental, avant-garde choreography) through the 1891 Bayreuth premiere and beyond.81 Wagner was similarly preoccupied with the rosy scents veiling the pantomime, and in his “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser” (as chapter 2 will show) he detailed the various procedures he had tried to achieve the desired natural fades.82 For the Venusberg’s brief “spectral apparition” in act 3, by

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contrast, he simply described the intended result and appealed to “the inventive talent of the scene-painter and machinist . . . [to] devise some contraption whereby the effect may be produced as though the glowing Venusberg were drawing nearer, and stretching wide enough—being transparent—to hold within it groups of dancing figures.”83 Wagner did not possess the gifts to magically conjure up such animated apparitions, nor did he command full knowledge of the mechanics that could stand in for Venus’s powers. Realizing his Venusberg vision would instead become a lifelong work in progress that evolved with each production. Yet Wagner remained disappointed with the outcomes, and he accounted for this dissatisfaction with his limited control over the execution. “The orchestra lifeless, the ballet quite out of keeping with the music, the singers inadequate, the decorations deficient, the stage mechanics bungled”—thus did Cosima Wagner sum up her husband’s impression of the 1875 Viennese dress rehearsal for the last production he was to see. “Only in Bayreuth,” she had already anticipated, “will he ever achieve a really good performance of Tannhäuser.” Indeed, a mere week before his death, Wagner named Tannhäuser as the first opera after Parsifal to be produced at the Festspielhaus.84 All this explains why Cosima Wagner went to the mat over the 1891 production. Beyond being legitimized by the work’s enactment of the struggle for music drama, the Bayreuth premiere was also a quest to achieve Tannhäuser’s ultimate stage realization. Hence her desire to inform her staging with as many documents and eyewitness accounts as she could gather from performances in which Wagner had been involved. Gestures, blocking, number of dancers, cuts, and mechanical procedures were among the details she painstakingly requested, above all from the Paris Opéra, “in order to recover the authentic Tannhäuser, that which it is my obligation to represent in Bayreuth.”85 In other words, similar to Peter Gelb’s PR strategy for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle discussed in the introduction, Cosima Wagner carefully promoted her staging as faithful—the ultimate fulfillment of Wagner’s dream that could only be achieved in Bayreuth. Yet this did not deter her from flouting the composer’s instructions where such disrespect might help her push the opera further toward music drama. Nor, in the production’s 1904 revival, was Siegfried Wagner averse to incorporating spectacular stage effects (such as a Rheingoldlike thunderstorm and rainbow in act 2) that had meanwhile become tokens of Wagner’s mature works and their Bayreuth stagings. That is, Cosima and Siegfried essentially continued Wagner’s project of revising and adapting Tannhäuser in accordance with changing production standards and advancing technologies.86 My brief preview of actual stage practices thus highlights the rift between the faculties of Venus and Wagner, between a multimedia vision and theatrical reality. In turn, this gap explains why technologies became so central to Wagner’s project of actualizing the Gesamtkunstwerk, and why he was so devoted to communicating to collaborators, fellow directors, and posterity both his audiovisual ideas and

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the means for their closest onstage approximation. The entire transference of his ideal from allegory to real space might be viewed as a technological undertaking. And yet, Wagner’s attitude to technology remained as ambivalent as was Tannhäuser’s relation to the Venusberg. Just as the singer would initially veil his sojourn there as a peregrination “far, far afield,” the composer (as we have seen in this book’s introduction) sought to keep his machineries shamefully (if elaborately) hidden in order to achieve the seamless multimediality that his allegorical Venusberg had paradigmatically modeled.87 TA N N HÄU SE R’ S F L IG H T

If the Venusberg scenes paved the road toward the Gesamtkunstwerk by developing a vision of its onstage appearance, they also already prefigured a central aesthetic conundrum, a challenge that Wagner would painfully encounter when seeking to realize this ideal in actual theaters, even—and specifically—in those productions over which he had the most control. For although Venus qua goddess commands her technologies flawlessly, she does not succeed in capturing Tannhäuser for good. This might seem paradoxical. Inasmuch as the Venusberg shares crucial structural traits with the Gesamtkunstwerk and Venus herself so closely resembles Wagner, why does Tannhäuser, the representative spectator, not appreciate it? Why does the effect of Venus’s media magic wear off even in the elaborate Paris version? And what does this failure mean for the validity of Wagner’s theatrical project overall? By way of concluding my allegorical reading, let us ask Tannhäuser himself. “Too much! Too much!” (Zu viel! Zu viel!), he laconically responds before explaining in his Venus song what exactly this overkill consists of. There is, first, the daunting prospect of eternity—the timelessness that Venus’s grotto congeals into endless space. This eternity, along with the perpetuity of a single sensual pleasure, makes Tannhäuser long to return to temporality and its rhythms, to the natural changes of feelings, seasons, light, and life. His rejection of infinity can easily be translated into musical terms and associated with the ubiquitous charges levied against Wagner’s works (and his diva-like megalomania) from the 1840s on. Key was what Wagner later sanctified as “endless melody” (unendliche Melodie) and linked to the continuous orchestral flow of emotional expression.88 Critics tended to find this seemingly unending, artificial declamation boring. Instead, they wished for traditional musical numbers with their clear melodic phrases and hummable tunes, the timehonored change between recitative and aria (along with their different modes of temporality), and a variety of forms—which is to say, the same ebb and flow of emotions and appearances whose absence Tannhäuser laments. Not coincidentally, commentators missed such temporal structures particularly in the “aphoristic” Venusberg music.89 By contrast, the remainder of Tannhäuser consists mostly of traditional operatic scenes, complete with arias, ensembles, and grand finales. To

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begin with, though, there is tranquility after the musical dissolution of the Venusberg into ethereal high strings and flutes (the “blue skies and serene sunlight” of the “beautiful valley” indicated in the score).90 The pit orchestra keeps silent for almost five minutes (seventy-three measures), inverting its long, voice-free presence at the opera’s opening. Instead we hear a rare succession of purely diegetic music—sounds that emanate quasi-naturally from the onstage world: a shepherd’s song, piping, and an a cappella pilgrims’ chorus. Only in anticipation of Tannhäuser’s reaction does the pit orchestra sneak back in. Its temporary muteness outside the Venusberg thus underlines its affinity to technology we observed in the introduction to this book. It also renders audible just how central Wagner’s orchestra was for his effort to overwhelm audiences with the Venusberg-Gesamtkunstwerk. Ironically, then, Tannhäuser seems to side with Wagner’s critics, questioning the artistic premises of his music drama by suggesting that breaks in the stream of orchestral data are required to maintain audience attention. More importantly in our context, Tannhäuser’s flight from monotonous eternity may also challenge Wagner’s efforts to tightly prescribe the productions of his operas, which imbued stagings with “workness” and, by implication, with a claim to quasi-timeless validity. Does the Venusberg scenario insinuate that a natural emergence and life cycle of productions could be more satisfying? Did Wagner sense, perhaps inadvertently, that spectators would long for change not only during one operatic evening but also in the staged experience of a single work over time? And is this why Tannhäuser initially buries his head in Venus’s lap, to avoid seeing too much and to safeguard his own inner vision? Tannhäuser’s second stanza substantiates this suspicion. Too much, he now says, of “rosy scents,” as opposed to “forest airs.” Too much, that is, of intoxicating perfumes, just like many critics felt anesthetized by Wagner’s ceaseless and chromatically suffused music. Too much, more generally, of artificiality, which simply cannot replace what Tannhäuser misses: natural light and the warmth of sunshine, “fresh green meadows” and “the clear blue of our skies,” birdsong and the peal of bells—in other words, the touches, sights, and sounds of a pastoral landscape. Venus here learns what Wagner would later experience in Bayreuth: no matter how perfectly her technologies function, her Venusberg theater cannot fully simulate nature, cannot indefinitely pretend to present “real life.” By the same token, even the best-equipped nineteenth-century theater would ultimately prove unable to stage Wagner’s most challenging scenes realistically. As we shall see in chapter 4, critics of the 1876 Ring premiere would sneeringly observe that artifice was lurking everywhere. Tannhäuser’s weary reaction to such pretense, in turn, shows that even Venus lacks the power to control her audience’s reception completely. Although she minutely aligns every detail of her spectacle with its sensuous purpose, she cannot shut out the sensations emerging from Tannhäuser’s inner world—the spectator’s imagination that in “The Art-Work” Wagner had hoped to silence.

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Too much, then, of Venus’s dominance. As Tannhäuser laments in his third stanza, her grotto has made him but a slave. He may sing only at her command, can live for only one emotion. Along with nature, temporality, and air, he ultimately longs for freedom. This pronouncement rounds off Tannhäuser’s anticipation of anti-Wagnerian polemics, as pronounced above all by Wagner’s fiercest and most astute nineteenth-century detractor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Many a passage from Nietzsche’s 1888 “The Case of Wagner,” in which the philosopher began to settle accounts with the composer, could indeed be substituted for—or read as elaborations of—Tannhäuser’s complaints. “Enough! Enough!” (Genug! Genug!) is how Nietzsche grinds to a halt his cynical account of Wagner’s theories, where he bewails Wagner’s “infinity . . . without melody” and the theatricality of Wagner’s music, in which “[t]he whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, an artifact.”91 He contends this artifact arose “from a hallucination—not of sounds but of gestures,” just as happens at the opening of Tannhäuser; and he struggles with “[t]he way Wagner’s pathos holds its breath, refuses to let go an extreme feeling, achieves a terrifying duration of states when even a moment threatens to strangle us.” He insists: “Wagner’s art has the pressure of a hundred atmospheres: stoop, for what else can one do?”92 Like Tannhäuser emerging from this endless submissive pose, Nietzsche begins to rebel when he recognizes that Wagner’s “seductive force increases tremendously [and] clouds of incense surround him,” like the aroma enveloping Venus. And, dreading suffocation, Nietzsche—like Tannhäuser—calls for “Air! More air!”93 A few years earlier, Nietzsche already likened his escape from modern music’s beguiling sickness to a flight from “the nymph’s grotto.”94 Now, the philosopher bids farewell to Wagner the “tyrant” and “old magician”: it is Wagner as Venus whom he can suffer no longer.95 Tannhäuser’s fate thus presages the destiny of many early Wagnerians. Religiously devoted to Wagner in their youth, they later often strove desperately to disentangle themselves from him, embracing instead Bizet, Mozart, or the previously snubbed Italian number opera as the equivalent to their—ostensibly saving—conventional Wartburg world.96 With their treasure-trove of metatheatrical commentaries, therefore, the Venusberg scenes not only forecast the theoretical and stage-practical development of Wagner’s ultimate music-dramatic goal, but also uncannily portend the initially dominant course of its reception. WAG N E R’ S V I SIO N

The Venusberg, then, showcases Wagner’s vision for the staged music drama he would strive to produce for the rest of his life. At the same time, as miniature Gesamtkunstwerk, it enacts its own breakdown—the failure to overpower operagoers through ceaseless and seamless multimedia spectacle. As such, it might also anticipate a change in Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself. From the

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mid-1850s on, inspired by his reading of Schopenhauer, the composer gradually moved emphasis from drama back to music. When explicating this shift in his influential “Beethoven” essay of 1870, he drew on Schopenhauer for an analogy between allegorical dreams and the truth content of music. While the visible world would always remain at the level of mere appearances, music answered the call for true nature: the cry of the awakening dreamer, he held, symbolized the rise of music as the core of all art.97 This analogy obviously resonates with the second Venusberg scene, where Tannhäuser rouses “as though starting from a dream” and instinctively refers to sound as cause and emblem of his unfulfilled desires. Accordingly, his awakening is ceremonially followed by the opera’s first aria—a stage song, moreover, in which he articulates his longing for true nature we observed above. Wagner’s later theoretical move thus reinforces Tannhäuser’s complaint that real life cannot be generated or replicated by amassing artificial media. In the end, Wagner might have wanted it both ways, identifying with both Venus and Tannhäuser, seeking to reign over the staging while simultaneously breaking free of Venus’s directorial tyranny in search of expressive musical freedom. Within the opera, though, Tannhäuser’s dream remained elusive, and the Venusberg experience became a nightmare for both Tannhäuser and the goddess.98 The failure to reconcile their positions signals, perhaps, the crucial dilemma of Wagner’s career, as well as of nineteenth-century opera at large: the impossibility of incorporating the staging into works to the same extent as music and text. For all of Wagner’s sly promotion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in theory and practice, my allegorical reading suggests that he may have known all along that he would ultimately fail to forge a complete—and completely natural—multimedia unity, and that it was unfeasible to regulate its presentation and reception entirely, even in his own theater. Perhaps it was this hunch that (along with his discovery of Schopenhauer) motivated his conceptual return to music as the total artwork’s primal seed, and that eventually caused him to abandon revisions of Tannhäuser as well—an opera whose plot structure would always thwart the integration of the theatrical as crystallized in the Venusberg. When Wagner professed at the end of his life that he still owed Tannhäuser, then, he may have referred not only to further changes to the score but also to his overall failure to fully live up to his vision and outdo Venus—that is, to attain total control over both stage and audience. Small wonder that both he and Cosima Wagner were so eager to produce Tannhäuser at Bayreuth: they must have thought that the allegory of the Gesamtkunstwerk might be redeemed in (and by) the Venusberg incarnate. And yet, figuratively speaking, Wagner had already devoted the Festspielhaus to nothing other than bringing the Venusberg aboveground. From this perspective, his efforts to veil the stage technologies on which he so heavily relied (just like his hiding from the public eye the stimulating pink silk inside his cloaks) appear as a struggle to repress the Venusberg scenes’ premonition of failure.

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Like the magician Nietzsche accused him of being, Wagner knew the mechanism behind his creations, the pretense on which his claims rested. And in order to mask this inconvenient truth (or his own darker side), he all the more doggedly sought to make his vision appear plausible in writing and onstage. Arguably, the closest he came to achieving this goal was not with any production of Tannhäuser but with his last work, Parsifal (1882). This was the only opera written specifically for Bayreuth, and Wagner’s original staging was preserved there exclusively for an unprecedented administrative eternity (the thirty years’ duration of contemporary copyright protection). Tellingly, Parsifal’s plot inverts seminal aspects of Tannhäuser’s trajectory and its relation between nature and artifice, society and underworld. Once again—though this time in the middle act—(dark) magic appears as perfected theatrical wizardry to conjure an occult and dimly lit artificial realm, complete with tropical vegetation, charming maidens, and an ageless seductress emerging from the depths of the earth. (So similar are Venus’s and Klingsor’s dominions that the Brückner studio’s original set for the magic garden clearly rubbed off on their design for Bayreuth’s 1891 Venusberg.99) Once again this enclosed magical fortress is contrasted with the religious sphere, chanting believers, sunny meadows, and the redeeming sounds of the “Dresden Amen.” But Parsifal’s Venusberg no longer provides the source and frame of the drama, or the nucleus of multimedia enchantment. Dramaturgically, it remains mere episode; dramatically, it gets undone once and for all; musically and visually, it appears as the most traditionally operatic scene. As Wagner himself admitted, he was using his “old paintpot” while composing act 2—a metaphor for “sensuous intervals” that nevertheless evokes both the Venusberg’s colorful interior and its overall artifice.100 The redeeming Gesamtkunstwerk proper has meanwhile been aired out and transformed into a truly natural, even sacred, landscape. In the Holy Grail meadows, time famously “turns into space” and visitors are free to come and go. Nature and art, time and space, ritualistic performance and audience here fuse. By the end of his life, Wagner’s artwork was no longer in need of allegorical seclusion. Not even Tannhäuser might have fled this gracious (and spacious) landscape—just as critics tended to be less polemical about Parsifal than about any previous Wagner opera. In Parsifal, in short, Wagner confidently pursued the Gesamtkunstwerk’s victory over artifice. Innocence, compassion, and faith overcome the magic castle and its technological wonders that were built on—and symbolic of—modern society’s capital offense against nature, Klingsor’s self-castration: no operatic moment illustrates more literally (and ghoulishly) media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “[a]ny invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies.”101 Klingsor’s magic realm is a prosthesis to take the place of his virility, the epitome of a manmade mechanical effect displacing the organic power of nature. By implication, its rejection and destruction reinstate nature’s principles. As Wagner had outlined in his early theories, the newfound return to nature enacted in

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Parsifal thus not only opens up a space for his total artwork, but also heralds—at least on the level of plot—the salvation of mankind. Moreover, the simple belief exhibited by Parsifal, “pure fool made wise by compassion,” might suggest the attitude an ideal audience was to assume for this salvation to take place—and for the illusionist staging to succeed. Still, this victory could be made perceptible onstage only through those same technical means that Wagner (like other contemporary composers and practitioners) had honed, with variable success, throughout his life. Even the overcoming of technics by nature had to be staged within the realm of technē. Let us descend, then, into opera’s technological Venusberg, the mechanical underbelly of Wagner’s theories and practices, and peer at the instruments he and others wielded in the attempt to turn into a directorial Venus. Just like Tannhäuser, though, we shall eventually resurface to full daylight at the end of each of the following chapters, taking a bird’s-eye view of the durability of technologies and stage effects, the perpetuity composers at least implicitly desired for aspects of their stagings, and these facets’ Venusberg-like transformations over time. Having used Wagner’s Tannhäuser as a lens through which to view the nineteenth-century desire to achieve multimedia fusion on the opera stage, we shall now zoom in on select material practices and mechanical procedures by which composers sought to realize—and force onto stage—this metaphysical utopia.

2

Curtain

Berlin, 1858. The popular satirist David Kalisch starts a parody of Wagner’s Tannhäuser: “The curtain rises slowly.”1 His mention of an opening curtain would seem unremarkable were it not that it occurs not in the stage directions but in the rhymed verses proper, where the narrating singer describes the curtain’s motion before evoking Venus “sprawled out on roses.” As chapter 1 has shown, Tannhäuser’s first scene might well have incited scorn among contemporaries, given its long initial vocal silence—something perhaps alluded to by the slowness of Kalisch’s curtain. But the curtain’s opening was, one should think, standard theatrical fare. And yet, other Wagner skits similarly spoofed the curtain. In 1890, a muchperformed sendup of Der Ring des Nibelungen by Martin Böhm (another successful author of Berlin farces) listed as central dramatic components “completely new decorations, machines, and bright lights, as well as a curtain made of Filet [finely laced cloth] that neatly separates the four days’ works.” The stage directions later explain that this Filet-Vorhang falls “quasi as a drop scene; thus, while the backstage is being changed, one can see everything through it.”2 In other words, the specially announced Filet curtain is revealed as a red herring and, hence, ridiculous. In the 1878 satire Der Ring, der nie gelungen by Berlin-based journalist Paul Gisbert, the curtain does fall properly. But it does so with a vengeance. At the end of the Rheingold skit, it comes down “with horror, dumbfounded” at Fasolt’s death. After Die Walküre, it falls “with dignity and decency” on the (apparently uncomfortable) sight of a sleeping woman. In Siegfried, the title hero knowingly provokes an indignant curtain when calling for love out of wedlock; as a “precaution,” the curtain “indeed comes down little by little” lest the illicit couple exhibit their love publicly. And at the end of Götterdämmerung, nothing is left for the curtain but “to 54

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fall, thoroughly speechlessly.”3 Gisbert’s satire turns the curtain into a mute character whose movements pronounce emotional reactions and ethical judgments: in the manner of a commentator or chorus, the curtain proclaims the moral, protecting, bonding with, and gesturing toward the spectators. Beyond just participating in the farce, this curtain becomes its master. Mediating between audience and author, it has the final (scoffing) word. All three parodies highlight Wagner’s curtains as unusual, whether by means of their speed, their ineffectual fabric and virtual absence, or (on the contrary) their explicit intervention in the drama. Indeed, Wagner is the only composer—and, along with Brecht, the only dramatist tout court—to have a particular type of curtain named after him, a circumstance that seems to confirm his extraordinary attention to curtain practices. Aside from satirists, though, nineteenth-century critics rarely mentioned the workings and effects of the curtain in ordinary Wagner productions, save some observations on the innovative curtain technology of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The composer himself, otherwise so verbal about every artistic aspect of his creations, likewise remained curiously shy about the subject, thereby suggesting its association with “mere” technology (as discussed in the introduction). And most composers and opera scholars have shared in this silence. An integral part of theatrical architecture from the time of opera’s beginnings, the curtain has mostly been taken for granted. As a character in Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park laconically declared, “there is very little sense in a play without a curtain.”4 In other words, the curtain appears fundamental for establishing a performative situation, which it achieves by separating the latter from everyday actions. Even outside the theater, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, a curtain alone can manifest that fundamental “line . . . between a staging area where the performance proper occurs and an audience region,” thereby signaling both the transformation of actors into characters and the onset of make-belief that together establish what he dubs the “theatrical frame.”5 It is thus unsurprising that the red velvet curtain so beloved of theaters since the nineteenth century has turned into an icon of theatrical performance per se.6 Precisely because of its ubiquity, however, the curtain has received much less critical attention than have other, more novel aspects of nineteenth-century stage technology, such as electric light effects or contraptions rendering complex scenic fantasies ever more realistic. Despite its blatant visibility, the curtain has— ironically—tended to remain conceptually invisible: its practical, artistic, and hermeneutic contributions to staged opera have often lingered in obscurity. This is the case even where, since the late eighteenth century, composers increasingly employed the curtain as an individual, expressive ingredient. To be sure, as I will show, this perceptual “disappearance” was part and parcel of the immersive illusionist aesthetic that drove the customization of curtain uses in the first place. (In this regard, our satirists’ very noticing of the curtain points to a failure of Wagner’s

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endeavor to conceal his technologies.) But only recently have scholars begun to theorize the aesthetic import of curtains since the establishment of the Baroque stage—that is, after curtain technology had ceased to be a novelty. And they have tended to do so either from a dramaturgical angle and often concerning contemporary theater,7 or with regard to select composers who paid special attention to curtains. Foundational studies of the latter kind are Patrick Taïeb’s examination of how French composers began to connect overtures to the ensuing opera during the half century around 1800, and Helen Greenwald’s insightful discussion of Puccini’s carefully crafted opening curtains a century later: both analyze the multifaceted potential of relating sound and sight at an opera’s beginning by means of deliberately placed curtains. Michael Anders has expanded this discussion to address Puccini’s closing curtains, while Johanna Dombois’s recent metaphorical exploration of the Wagner curtain’s signification pioneers an anatomic approach to curtain technology.8 Building on all this work, this chapter pursues a longer, transnational perspective on nineteenth-century opera’s growing use of the curtain as creative artistic medium. By tracing its gradual rise as what I have called a Wagnerian technology, I show how composers progressively scripted the curtain to precisely entwine opera’s visual and aural domains. The curtain not only furthered multimedia smoothness, but also opened new spaces, literally, for creative—and increasingly subtle—mediations between opera’s various media. Historically, the curtain does emerge as time-honored theatrical equipment that has undergone relatively few changes over the past four centuries. After its early uses in classical Roman theater as well as medieval mystery plays (among other ritual performances), the curtain had intermittently appeared only as part of stage sets, to close off particular onstage areas.9 In Shakespeare’s theater-in-theround, for instance, small curtains occasionally covered doors, alcoves, or other “diegetic” spaces within the set to obscure the entrances or exits of characters.10 The proscenium curtain proper was reintroduced in sixteenth-century Italy with the emergence of the enclosed box-theater and its picture-frame stage: for the Baroque theater (as this illusionist, perspective stage is often summarily called) a large front curtain became quasi-constitutive for hiding the stage setup and its ornate decorations until the beginning of a performance. This function was particularly important for the new genre of opera, with its unprecedented media complexity and scenic pomp. Indeed, the stage curtain was popularized across Europe above all by Italian opera.11 As one of the earliest commentators on stage technology, the Italian-trained German architect Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, explained in 1640, “Since the spectators, on entering the theater, should not be able to see the complete scene of the stage, a curtain appropriate to the following action is hung in front of the scene. . . . When the spectator takes his seat he must be content for a short time with anticipation, which will only whet his appetite.”12 By veiling the scene, the front curtain marked both the stage space and the impending perfor-

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mance upon it as extraordinary—so exceptional as to be revealed only temporarily and at particular, predetermined times. Thus it also increased expectations for this special event. In creating anticipation, however, the curtain reinforced its own subsidiary essence. After all, it was a placeholder or blank space, a promise of something yet to come, and its chief purpose was to be eventually—and inevitably—removed to disclose the “real” show behind it. This indexical function of curtains was pinpointed as early as the first century ad by Pliny the Elder in his famous account of the legendary artistic competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. After the former painted grapes so realistically that birds came to feed on them, the latter produced a picture veiled by a curtain that Zeuxis instinctively went to draw to see the alleged painting—only to realize that the curtain itself was painted.13 Casting the curtain as mechanism to protect an artwork, Pliny at the same time stresses the anticipated effect of its removal precisely by denying it—by having Parrhasius’s touch transform the (painted) curtain into the artwork itself. Conversely, Baroque proscenium curtains in particular were often richly decorated or painted with landscapes or mythological scenes.14 This appearance was intended not only to elevate the theater’s splendor, but also to channel the spectators’ gaze toward the stage before a show and, thereby, amplify the impression of both perspectival depth and realism once the static, flat canvas gave way to animated stage action. Curtain and picture merged to elevate claims to artistry—of Parrhasius’s painterly skills or of theatrical performance in general. In order to intensify the anticipation incited by the theatrical curtain, Furttenbach and other early seventeenth-century authors recommended that it be removed as quickly as possible, making audiences suddenly feel transported into the stage action.15 To this end, around 1600 some Italian stages imitated classical models by having the curtain drop into a groove at stage front.16 Alternatively, curtains were pulled up, rolled up, or parted in the middle and drawn aside. Either way, they moved primarily at the commencements of performances. Only gradually did it become customary to veil the stage again at the ends of shows or (even later) of individual acts; as we shall see, this development was related to a growing emphasis on uninterrupted illusion and the concomitant ambivalence about the visibility of machines.17 Against this brief historical snapshot, it is small wonder that the curtain could easily be understood to operate merely outside and independently of individual theatrical performances. And yet, this chapter shows that in opera the use of the curtain became more frequent and more nuanced from the late eighteenth century on, as composers gradually took cognizance of it: they drew the curtain into their operatic visions by coordinating its movements ever more purposefully with the drama, envisioned stage imagery, and music. The old technology of the curtain thus no longer just enhanced audience enchantment, demarcated performances as out-of-the-ordinary,

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and signaled their beginnings and endings. Instead, I suggest, it became an operatic medium in its own right. As such, the curtain operated across multiple spatial, temporal, medial, and conceptual borders. This left it moving between total visibility and (almost) complete concealment, static architecture and dynamic performance, permanent machinery and ephemeral effect, stage and auditorium, actors and spectators, dramatic time and real time, fictional world and reality, musical evocation and visual presentation. Wagner’s idiosyncratic curtain dramaturgy to which the parodies alluded was thus but part of a longer-term development, one that partook of the budding concern among composers with key aspects of staging. In order to assess this larger history, the first sections of this chapter survey operatic curtain practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, moving from opening curtains via intermediary drops to closing curtains, and from standard procedures to composers’ specification of curtains to align sound and vision in dramatically resonant ways. Having disclosed how these conventions developed before Wagner began his career, I will then zoom in on both his works and the actual curtain he used in Bayreuth to examine the sites where his zeal to conceal everything technological manifested most literally, and to understand why our satirists would alight on his curtains as unusual. A concluding peek into the twentieth century confirms Wagner’s influence on the continuing exploration of the curtain’s expressive potential as well as the eventual rejection of that potential in light of an anti-illusionist (and anti-Wagnerian) reemphasis on the technological conditioning of all theater. Lifting the operatic curtain on itself, as it were, this chapter thus expands our awareness of a facet of opera’s material complexity in performance that brings new insights into opera’s characteristic interplay of acoustic and optical media. In the end, the curtain might epitomize not just theatrical performance but also the smooth multimedia surface commonly aspired to by operatic composers and producers of the long nineteenth century and beyond. F R A M I N G A SHOW

Until well into the nineteenth century, operating the theatrical curtain seems to have remained mostly a mechanical concern. As the voluminous Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon explained in 1839 for both opera and spoken drama, “The opening of the curtain should, as an absolute rule, occur immediately after the completion of the overture or interlude. Every pause has a disruptive effect.”18 An Italian stage directors’ manual of 1825 additionally warned not to interrupt the overture “with the inopportune raising of the curtain.”19 The latter was, then, to be aligned exactly with the end of the musical introduction and the beginning of the show proper. By the same token, it would close with the end of the stage performance. More of a novelty was the practice of lowering the curtain at the close of each act—pioneered, it seems, in Germanic theaters. German plays, in fact, habitually mention the

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curtain simply to indicate the beginnings and endings of acts. Hence the traditional German term for “act,” Aufzug (literally, the pulling open or drawing up), a term to which Wagner reverted beginning with Der fliegende Holländer (Dresden, 1843) in his quest to create a distinctly German national opera.20 At the Paris Opéra, by contrast, open transformations had traditionally taken pride of place. But the Staging Committee, established in 1827, appears to have instituted the closing of curtains not just before intermissions but also at the ends of intermediary acts—a practice otherwise known in France from less well-equipped stages in the provinces as well as from spoken theater and comic opera. The first such curtains may have appeared in Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828) and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829).21 That they were adopted at the Opéra partly for practical reasons can be inferred from the fact that Meyerbeer, who had envisioned an open transformation after the first act of Le prophète (1849), suggested, in rehearsal, that the curtain be lowered after all.22 And such “act curtains” quickly became the norm. By 1860, a comparative manual for German, French, and English stages stated plainly that the curtain “closes the opening [of the stage] during the entr’actes.” Similarly, in 1885 French music writer Arthur Pougin defined the main or proscenium curtain (rideau d’avant-scène) as that “which closes the scene from the eyes of the spectators, [and] which one lifts and lowers at the beginning and end of each act”:23 the curtain provided an on/off switch for the audiovisual drama. Across European opera houses, in other words, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the curtain established as a default frame for each act. While the proscenium itself optically resembled the static, material frame around a painting, the curtain provided a dynamic, temporal equivalent for the time-bound art of stage performance. Much like the traditional gilded picture frame, it functioned primarily to delimit and present, in the words of a late eighteenth-century aesthetician, “that which is already complete”:24 it marked the end of everyday reality and the onset of the represented world that would transport the spectator into a different spatiotemporal as well as narrative universe.25 This boundary was regularly permeable only to “mere” instrumental music before or between acts. In spoken theater, in fact, at least until the 1850s musical entr’actes normally reinforced the curtain’s frame; they were to start “right after the curtain has fallen and cease not until it rises again.”26 Curtain and musical interludes thus joined forces to mark the “edges” of individual acts and bridge the time between them both visually and sonically. And since audiences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rarely left the auditorium (foyers were not yet common), entr’actes also helped sustain the emotional “space” of the drama or afforded relaxation, their length regularly exceeding the time required to change the stage sets.27 By comparison, the operatic curtain carried more bordering weight on its own. After all, music marked the stage performance proper without necessarily being suspended between acts, while silence (conversely) did not always immediately

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signify the end of an act. An 1841 Theater-Lexikon therefore recommended that in opera the sign for maneuvering the curtain (usually a bell—hence the saying “to ring down the curtain”) should be given to the stagehands not by the stage manager, as in spoken drama, but by the prompter, by means of a wire connected to a backstage bell. The prompter would have received the signal—via a noiseless wire pull attached to moveable sticks—from the conductor:28 obviously, the latter knew the musical structure best. In addition to the preelectric transmission technologies involved in perfecting the curtain’s timing (effected by telegraph later in the century), this arrangement reveals an inverted hierarchy of music and stage technologies when compared to spoken theater. For opera, the machinists ideally accorded with musical timings rather than themselves determining the length of entr’actes. In practice, though, directing curtains remained a collaboration between stage manager and conductor, to be worked out for each piece. When intermediary acts were preceded not by an intermission but by an entr’acte, for example, the conductor needed to be notified at the appropriate time that the stage was ready.29 Furthermore, the stage manager oversaw the riggers who in most nineteenth-century theaters manually operated the curtain by pulling its counterweighted rope. In Paris, the curtain therefore remained part of the stage manager’s purview until 1875, when Charles Garnier’s new opera house pioneered an electric curtain mechanism that conductors themselves could activate (or play like an instrument) via a simple button.30 This electrification neatly symbolizes composers’ increasing control of the curtain that this chapter will trace, while highlighting the curtain’s continuing practical dependence on (and essence as) technology. Nonetheless, the artistic decision as to when the proscenium curtain should reveal or conceal the stage was mostly a done deal in early nineteenth-century theaters. The existence of such standard practices may make one suspect that opera composers did not need to indicate curtains, at least not for works that followed musical conventions; and this assumption seems to be borne out by contemporary scores. Admittedly, some caution is in order when conjecturing about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century curtain routines on the basis of scores. A look at the recent critical editions of Meyerbeer’s trend-setting grands opéras underlines the liberty with which curtain cues were omitted, adjusted, or added in the often abridged published scores of the era (whether orchestral or vocal), and even more extensively in later editions. Moreover, original performance materials, where extant, reveal further discrepancies between written instructions and actual procedures. This situation thwarts any conclusive findings on when, why, and by whom curtains were first prescribed, what or who might have motivated this development, and how exactly the practices of various countries, theaters, and composers influenced each other. What is more, changes in the placement of curtains between houses or over time (as evinced in many performance scores) were related not only to artistic considerations but also to the variable speed of curtains, a product of their weight, cloth, and mech-

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anisms. Alas, hardly any documentation survives for this material aspect or for the precise tasks and physical labor performed by the stagehands operating the curtains.31 But a sampling of available critical editions, facsimile autographs, nineteenthcentury scores, production books, and occasional performance materials does reveal general trends among the core French, Italian, and Austro-German repertories— tendencies that increasingly individualize the generic framing described above. P R E C O C IOU S O P E N I N G S

Before approximately the 1820s, curtains at the beginnings of operas tended to be notated in the score only where the onset of the first scene was musically ambiguous or—relatedly—where a composer sought to achieve a special effect. Both situations occurred particularly in operas that blended the overture seamlessly into the music of the first act proper, often by eschewing musical closure. As Patrick Taïeb has shown in his extensive study of French opera overtures between 1770 and 1820, their integration with the main drama was a chief objective of French composers who, in the wake of Gluck’s reforms, wanted to make all music dramatically relevant. In Taïeb’s analysis, beyond acoustically heralding a performance and thereby hushing the audience, overtures were now often tailored to serve either or both of two main functions: to set the general atmosphere of the opera (or its key moments) and/or to prepare for the first scene.32 Particularly in the latter case, it was expedient for overtures to link directly into the first act, so as not to interrupt the established sonic ambience with a pause and applause. This intended continuity encouraged closer interaction of music and curtain, which in turn required the curtain’s opening to be specified. The oeuvre of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, who was known for—among other innovations—experimental treatments of overtures and entr’actes, offers a helpful platform for gauging how the curtain consequently became more relevant in specific musical and dramatic situations. What emerges from this exploration is that the joining of overture and first act frequently precipitated what we might call a “precocious” curtain relative to the onset of the first scene. In his comedy Le magnifique (Paris, Comédie-Italien, 1773), for instance, Grétry asked for the curtain to be raised seventeen measures before the triumphant end of his substantial overture, during the forte repeat—turned from minor to major—of a four-measure closing motif that leads into two cycles of emphatic I–IV–V–I cadences and five loud tonic chords before a half-measure rest. With a two-measure general pause following, this caesura would have been the traditional—and natural—place for the curtain. But Grétry requested that the first scene be “linked” with the overture. And since act 1 starts with a sole drum tattoo sounding “in the distance,” it was necessary to raise the curtain earlier, for only thus could the silence initiating act 1 become dramatically meaningful (rather than occasioning applause for the emerging scene)

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and the tattoo audible.33 Its audibility is all the more important as the tattoo frames the overture itself: it recalls the drumbeats that had sounded in the wings behind the closed curtain at its beginning and that continue to punctuate the first scene’s military marches. The launch of act 1, then, retrospectively reveals the overture to have been partly diegetic music (including its sometimes polyphonic texture and the inclusion of a popular song). This unusual format was inspired by Michel-Jean Sedaine’s libretto, according to which during the overture “a file of prisoners will be seen passing behind the scene; the chanting of priests will be heard”: Grétry designed his overture as an imaginary, musically stylized “representation” of this pantomime. And its effect depended on the curtain first denying and then prematurely granting vision.34 Grétry’s operas Amphitryon (Versailles, 1786) and Anacréon chez Polycrate (Paris, Opéra, 1797) merged their overtures with the subdued first scenes not merely via an early curtain but also through an explicit musical transition that impeded a break. As Taïeb has argued, such sonic links were generally favored for nocturnal scenes (as in Amphitryon) or the sunrises recurrently launching French operas (as in Anacréon)35—dusky settings that did not lend themselves to sudden exposure and applause. Accordingly, Grétry did not close the overtures harmonically but specified the curtain opening at caesuras fifteen and eight measures before their ends, respectively. In Amphitryon, the curtain coincides with a sudden rallentando and a thinning of texture and dynamics for a temporarily static sound field on the dominant that seamlessly morphs into the subtle sunrise evocation of act 1 (example 2.1); in Anacréon, the curtain opens, conversely, with the triumphant return of the full orchestra on the tonic leading to a drawn-out modulation—a passage that sonically prepares a space for the shimmering pianissimo figurations of scene 1 that paint the dawn proper. Interpolated curtain-raising passages thus provided time for the curtain to open as part of the show,36 while the curtain only began a process of makingvisible that continued with the slowly increasing light onstage. Overture and first scene were welded together both aurally and through a continuing process of optical revelation initiated by the premature curtain. Grétry was not the only composer exploring early curtains as a means of interlocking overtures and first scenes. Gluck, for one, employed the device to enhance a not subtle but instead unusually forceful opening. In his widely influential Paris Alceste of 1776, he indicated “lever la toile” eight measures before the overture’s close, during a passage that repeats an otherwise unassuming motif from four measures earlier with an increasingly wider harmonic and dynamic range leading— again—to the dominant. The instruction was likely added because the first act starts immediately with the full chorus rather than an instrumental introduction and recitative, as had been the case in the 1767 Vienna version. Thus, the steady buildup in dynamics and texture over a pulsating dominant pedal during the overture’s last six measures leads breathlessly to the ensuing choral outcry on a diminished chord.

example 2.1 . André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Amphitryon: after the return of the overture’s opening material in m. 102, a subtle curtain-raising passage leads smoothly into the nocturnal act 1.

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example 2.1 . (continued)

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Le théâtre représente, sur un des côtés, la façade extérieure du palais d'Amphitryon. On remarque un balcon, et un perron par lequel on peut descendre sur le théâtre. Le reste du théâtre et l'autre aile sont occupés par de grands arbres, au-delà desquels on aperçoit dans les intervalles quelques édifices d'architecture grecque.

SCÈNE I Mercure, sous la figure de Sosie, sur le balcon; La Nuit, sur son char.

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By asking for the curtain to (begin to) raise about fifteen seconds before that chorus, Gluck achieved a continual accumulation of audiovisual tension while ensuring that the audience could marvel at the stage sets before focusing on the action and singing proper. As Taïeb has argued, the choral anguish, in turn, explained the overture’s unusually dramatic transition. The early curtain thus drives home the urgency at the onset of the opera—the exceptional circumstance that it begins, rather than ends, with the impending death of a king.37 This is not to say that every idiosyncratic beginning required the written placement of a curtain. In his 1784 opéra-comique Richard Cœur-de-lion, Grétry fully integrated a condensed overture into the first number, which—following Italianate models—was a choral introduction. Here, the music itself suggests the timing of the opening curtain at the end of the short initial Allegretto, after an emphatic turn to the dominant (complete with a long-held chord whose pragmatic utility is obvious) and right before a 6/8 Larghetto whose lilting rhythm both alludes to the first scene’s rustic setting and leads into the introductory chorus.38 Conversely, curtain instructions might occasionally appear without obvious dramatic motivation or despite musical closure of the overture.39 But in general, it was overtures leading directly into act 1 that tended to align their precocious curtain with suitable musical

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material: the curtain might open during a caesura or fermata; before a shift of key, dynamics, or texture; or to final cadential chords. And the fact that these curtainraising moments often commenced an even number of measures before the first scene suggests that they were a function of the music more than of the emerging visual setting. Given this evident desire to tie some overtures into the action by repurposing their endings, it is unsurprising that some composers experimented with raising the curtain even earlier, so as to utilize more (or all) of the overture for nonvocal stage setting. An obvious way to do so was with mimed action during the overture. What he had not dared in Le magnifique, for instance, Grétry risked in his farce Le jugement de Midas (Paris, Palais Royal, 1778): its curtain opens right with the overture, which satirizes both musically and through pantomime some well-worn topoi of tragédie lyrique, including a sunrise and deus ex machina. And in Guillaume Tell (Paris, Comédie-Italienne, 1791), the composer simply declared the opening pastoral pantomime (complete with ranz de vaches, echo effects, and the ubiquitous dawn) to be the first scene of his “drame.”40 Such use of the overture to evoke an opera’s key locale was expanded by Meyerbeer to illustrate the drama’s motivating conflict. The Sinfonia of Il crociato in Egitto (Venice, La Fenice, 1824) not only includes a banda, but less than a third into it, the curtain discloses a minutely scripted pantomime of Christian slaves who (once more at daybreak) begin their forced labor and suffer mistreatment before breaking into a lamenting chorus—the opera’s introductory number.41 The early curtain was crucial for Meyerbeer’s gradual buildup of audiovisual information. Rather than merely separating instrumental music from vocal and visual drama, the curtain’s placement guaranteed that the overture would be infused first with diegetic sounds and then with both scenic and pantomimic visuals before the dramatic situation was clarified in song. As we have seen in chapter 1, the resulting crescendo of medial signification would become characteristic of Wagner’s theories, although he never mentioned the curtain, a central catalyst thereof. Even without the addition of pantomimes, the specification of early, musically accompanied curtains widened the curtain’s operation from a momentary, quasiautomatic action outside the audiovisual diegesis into a deliberate aligning of music and the emerging visual expression. As such, curtain-raising moments became not only perceptually longer but also dramatically more meaningful: they established a transitional space between the “real” time of the musical introduction and the represented time (and space) of the drama. Not unlike Gérard Genette’s literary paratexts conceived as a threshold or vestibule, they provided “an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside” of the drama.42 Albeit transient and unidirectional, this vestibule expanded the quasi-two-dimensional border marked by the traditional opening curtain into a multidimensional space— one that allowed for novel ways to interlink musical and visual media. By

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acoustically underlining and dramaturgically exploiting this space, Grétry and other composers directed the spectators’ senses to (and between) specific moments of an opera’s beginning to heighten dramatic effect. Intricately mediating “between different realities,” early curtains became akin to what Alexander R. Galloway has theorized for digital interfaces as “autonomous zones of activity.”43 D E L AY E D V I SIO N

Such attention to the timing and musical rendition of opening curtains became more widespread during the first half of the nineteenth century, not only in French but also in German works. Unlike in the above examples, however, some German Romantic composers tended to postpone the curtain into the first act. This deferment might have been related to an originally Germanic view of the overture as a symphonic piece in its own right, with a musical integrity that was not to be disturbed by the rustling of drapery or the distraction of the emerging scene.44 Granted, German composers also began to tie overtures more closely to their operas with regard to mood, anticipated dramatic trajectory, and musical material. But built-in curtain music or harmonically open endings would have thwarted an overture’s expressive independence, along with its ability to stand on its own in concerts, where opera overtures were regularly performed across nineteenthcentury Europe.45 In Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Berlin, 1821), it is therefore after the majestic closure of the sizeable overture and ten further measures of fast, tensionbuilding, and quickly crescendoing arpeggios and rising scales over a pulsating dominant pedal that the curtain opens, on a dominant chord at a moment of changing texture, just as a shot is heard onstage; eight measures later, the chorus enters on the tonic. Weber’s musical curtain-raiser did not close the overture but rather opened the first act. Moreover, by having it precede (rather than accompany) the curtain and by supporting the latter’s movement instead with diegetic sound, he boosted anticipation of the curtain’s rising and explicitly incorporated the latter into his introductory tableau. This propelled the forward drive of the turbulent scene and drew the audience right into the action.46 Just how unusual this audiovisual coordination was emerges from extant scores as well as twentiethcentury recordings, many of which either indicate the opening curtain after the more typical eight, rather than the original ten, measures or postpone the shot (presumably to ensure its audibility). A related case is Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling (Berlin, 1833), whose musically closed overture is placed between a prologue and act 1. To clarify this unusual beginning, Marschner prescribed an opening curtain in measure sixteen of the Prologue. It follows a four-measure crescendoing chromatic

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ascent to the highest pitch and dynamic levels yet and coincides with the entry of the brass, leaving ten measures of descending chromatic figuration and a drawnout tutti cadence before the first chorus (example 2.2).47 The curtain’s rising is here set up as an important event within the compact orchestral introduction to the taut Prologue that portrays in medias res the conflict out of which the subsequent drama arises. Moreover, the same curtain music (plus additional cadential chords dwindling to a ppp) later closes the Prologue, thus supporting the curtain’s framing function acoustically. Together with the unorthodox placement of the subsequent overture, this orchestral-cum-curtain frame lets the Prologue’s condensed drama recede into the temporal distance. The resulting effect resembles that of a dissolving view—here of the gnomes’ cave—fading temporarily in and out of the sensual field, or of the cinematic narration of a prehistory before a film’s opening credits. Analogously to Hans Heiling, opening curtains were also frequently specified in operas that lacked overtures altogether. In his one-act opera Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe (Paris, Opéra, 1794), Grétry specified the curtain after twelve measures of generically introductory sequencing material at a return to the tonic (example 2.3). The cue coincides with the beginning of a four-measure modulation to the dominant, with “Scène 1” (and its respective stage direction) indicated only toward the end of this modulation. The interpolated curtain passage thus suggests how long it might have taken for the curtain to disclose the stage. And to offer audiences a chance to absorb the scenery, Grétry added a varied echo of the modulatory passage and a return to the tonic before the title hero starts singing.48 Similarly, Jean-François Le Sueur desired for Ossian, ou Les bardes (Paris, Opéra, 1804) that the curtain be down at the beginning of his comparatively short orchestral introduction and raised (notably on another somber night scene) eight measures before the first chorus, at the end of a temporarily thinned orchestral texture and dominant cadence. Merging influences from Grétry and Gluck, Le Sueur followed this instruction with a dominant pedal, chromatically descending figurations, and a half-measure general pause (that is, by a generic transitional passage), after which the chorus enters on the tonic.49 In both Denys and Ossian, such musical transitions were expedient precisely because the instrumental introductions were uncommonly brief: explicit musical curtain-raisers audibly reinforced the curtain’s visual signal for the beginning of the audiovisual drama and the call for audiences to attend to the stage. The tendency to condense and musically integrate instrumental preludes would become more pronounced with grands opéras, which increasingly abandoned long overtures. In the widely circulating orchestral score of Halévy’s La juive (Paris, Opéra, 1835), for example, the overture was cut, and a shorter instrumental prelude led directly into the innovative stage music emanating from the church that

example 2.2 . Heinrich Marschner, Hans Heiling, Prologue, mm. 1–26: opening curtain. Allegro non troppo. (N = 120.) str

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Unterirdische, von röthlich trübem Licht erhellte Höhle. An den zackigen Wänden klettern Zwerge und putzen die Erdadern, tragen geschäftig Stufen und Juwelen herbei, welche sie kniend der Königin und Heiling vorzeigen. Diese sitzen in der Mitte auf einer ronerhöhung. vn

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(Heiling mit reichem Mantel und blitzender Krone, hält gedankenvoll ein goldenes Stäbchen in der Hand. Gnomen wälzen Felsblöcke u.s.w.)

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example 2.3 . André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe: the opening of this one-act opera, with its curtain music, as rendered in CCG 28:3. L'action se passe dans un faubourg de la ville de Corinthe. Le théâtre est divisé en deux compartiments égaux. Celui de droite est occupé par la rue; le compartiment de gauche est le local d'école, entièrement visible, et enclos d'un mur à gauche . . . .

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SCÈNE I. Denys, dans son école. – 16

    



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Aprés s'être assuré que la porte de la rue est bien fermée, il tire de la manche droite de son vêtement un diadème qu'il contemple amoureusement.





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example 2.3 . (continued)

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formed part of the first set. This format made a curtain indication appropriate. It occurred during the confirmation of a tonic cadence a mere measure before the full-throttle entrance of an offstage organ (whose lengthy prelude itself introduced the offstage opening chorus). Here the curtain did not allow the audience to take in the elaborate medieval scenery before the onset of diegetic music. Instead, the latter acousmatically became part of the scenery itself (thus also helping legitimate the organ, a still novel instrument in the operatic toolbox).50 Similarly, for Le prophète Meyerbeer himself replaced the overture with a prelude of merely twenty measures; the curtain rises during its final three measures of a cadential pizzicato bass line, and is likewise immediately followed by pastoral diegetic music (two clarinets imitating echoing shawms) that the emerging rustic landscape seemingly emits.51 The shorter and more integrated the musical introduction, then, the more precisely composers for the Opéra tended to time the opening curtain, and the more powerfully could that curtain transport the audience into the audiovisual setting. Particularly in introductory scenes that started with offstage music, the curtain functioned as a signal that applause be suppressed and attention channeled to the visual and acoustic scenery. By contrast, composers of primo ottocento Italian operas seemed on the whole to favor separate overtures—both in the sense that the curtain would usually lift, without special mention, during a pause after the overture, and, relatedly, that the overture’s musical material was often independent of the ensuing opera (Rossini’s trading of overtures between works was notorious). But a link between unusual musical layout and curtain cues is obvious here as well. Rossini notated opening curtains in some Neapolitan works—for instance his “azione tragico-sacra” Mosè in Egitto of 1818 and Zelmira of four years later—that lacked overtures.52 And Donizetti, who leaned toward shorter preludes, sometimes ended them with a questioning gesture on the dominant, followed by a half-measure pause. That the curtain

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would routinely rise during this pause is suggested by the well-nigh ubiquitous fermata and confirmed by indications in several scores.53 Rather than simply remove the shroud between independent numbers, Donizetti thus musically prepared a silent but suspense-packed space for its vanishing, drawing all the more attention to the curtain as the musical resolution would follow only after its rise. Put differently, he rendered the silence “accompanying” the curtain both musically resonant and dramatically enticing. Expectations for the curtain’s raising could be further amplified by the music that preceded it. Just as some composers added evocative or narrative pantomimes to overtures via an early curtain, so others sought to enhance the musical introduction by means of diegetic sound behind the curtain—which, conversely, might appear to delay its opening. Rossini’s “azione tragica” Ermione (Naples, San Carlo, 1819) includes a lamenting chorus of Trojan prisoners during its mighty overture, which sets the tone for—and exposes the dramatic crux of—the opera no less than does Il crociato’s pantomime. Indeed, Meyerbeer himself (among others) followed suit: the entr’acte to act 3 of Le prophète begins with a stage-band in the wings before the curtain goes up and the band draws closer.54 And by 1859, Meyerbeer told the tragic prehistory—the separation of a bridal pair during a thunderstorm— of his comic opera Dinorah (Le pardon de Ploërmel; Paris, Opéra-Comique) in an overture with chorus and wind-machine behind two curtains, the second curtain further distancing the sound. The proscenium curtain’s refusal to open and thereby optically present (or re-present) the narrated events thus banishes these events into the past acoustically, much like a black-and-white filmic flashback might do visually. This time-shift is all the more apt for Dinorah as the title heroine has since gone mad and forgotten the cause of her misery. Although Meyerbeer evidently hoped for at least some visualization during this overture in the form of a diorama,55 he might also have taken a page from Berlioz’s book: Berlioz’s “mélologue” Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (composed in 1831, but revised and published in 1855) had placed the entire orchestra, chorus, and soloists behind the curtain, leaving only the narrator visible in the proscenium. Here the function of the curtain is not, as is usual, to eventually unveil both a fitting stage set and the source of vocal sound, but, on the contrary, to deny any representation. All musical forces sound acousmatically, as if from the depth of the narrator’s memory or imagination. Only once he decides to rehearse his latest composition does the curtain reveal the orchestra and chorus, framing the last musical number as stage music. Accordingly, the curtain is lowered again at the end for the narrator’s final musings.56 Berlioz’s “extreme” curtain thus separates the narrator’s (merely audible) thoughts from the (both visible and audible) reality happening “live” for him. Put differently, in line with Romantic idealist aesthetics of music, the curtain privileges sound as a medium of the mind while resisting the “scopic regime” that had begun to dominate nineteenth-century life.57 Berlioz furthered the resulting audiovisual

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tension in Les Troyens (Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 1863), where he placed behind the curtain—albeit momentarily—not just a vocalizing chorus but also dancers, with the sound of tapping feet additionally whetting the visual appetite. Such inclusion of singing or ambient sound effects in precurtain music unsettled the temporal boundaries between musical introduction and audiovisual drama, widening the dramaturgically ambiguous curtain-opening space. Yet it also pushed the medial boundaries between visual and auditory stimuli. Precisely when concealing the source of already audible diegetic music, the curtain, a membrane between both media, became porous; its eventual rise signaled less the long-expected arrival of the dramatic world than the visual revelation of something already aurally present (or, in fact, acoustically created). In this sense, self-conscious curtain cues were part and parcel of an increasingly graphic—which is to say, visually suggestive— musical aesthetic. More than that, they reflected a growing nineteenth-century interest in sensory correspondences between the different arts and the concomitant expansion of each medium’s sensory borders.58 All this challenged the conceptual foundation of automated curtain openings, which relied, as we have seen, on the strict separation of musical preparation and audiovisual narration. To be sure, “delaying” the curtain emphasized its essence as what Brian Kane has called an acousmatic technique, whose general function was “to split the sensorium—to separate the ear from the eye—and intensify the act of listening”:59 the descriptive nature of orchestral music would be noted all the more as vision was denied. But this buildup of aural pointers at the same time multiplied expectations for the unveiling of the scene, thereby intensifying the audience’s gaze at the curtain. By dint of its increasingly individualized movements, in other words, the curtain began to draw more attention to itself.60 On the one hand, it became newly perceivable as a material, oblique barrier to (seeing) the stage. On the other hand, as Jacques Derrida has observed of the parergon or frame in the visual arts, it “is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”61 Despite its increased artistic prominence, the curtain’s destiny was still its eventual vanishing, and it could do so the more effectively the more audience expectations had been raised. This dialectic between presence and absence, visibility and concealment was reflected in debates on the curtain’s materiality. Contemporaries, for example, were not of one mind on whether decorating the main curtain would be pleasant or distracting—that is, whether it was primarily part of the theatrical architecture (in which case visual grandeur was in order) or of performances (in which case modest neutrality would be helpful).62 Once liberated from being an automatic switch between overture and audiovisual drama proper, then, the curtain began to mediate in increasingly complex ways between sound and vision as well as between theatrical space, the audience’s imagination, and the multimedia presentation of the drama.

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M U LT I P LY I N G C U RTA I N S

In view of curtains’ growing temporal flexibility and audiovisual mediation, it was logical that composers would eventually indicate them not just for an opera’s beginning but also for subsequent acts. After all, unless these acts started in a more eighteenth-century fashion with recitative, they regularly featured at most a short orchestral prelude, making the point of transition into the scene less obvious than in the case of an overture. The same concern for signposting held also for musical entr’actes or interludes, which became more common through the nineteenth century, partly because of the growing desire for dramatic continuity we have already observed regarding overtures, and partly—like the spread of act curtains themselves—for practical reasons.63 Responding to a budding appetite for historically realistic stagings encouraged by French opera since the Napoleonic period (a development that was closely tied to the fashion for historical detail in literature and the visual arts), throughout the nineteenth century operatic sets became grander, and they increasingly used practicable scenery—three-dimensional constructions and architectural set pieces—rather than just painted flats and drops. All this rendered scene changes more cumbersome and time consuming. While act curtains made invisible the maneuvering of such heavy structures and dampened the inevitable noises, entr’actes were designed to ensure performative continuity between acts and to hold audience attention, often acoustically evoking dramatic events or atmospheres in the manner of preludes. Given the entr’acte’s generically transitional function, however, it was all the more important that the actual moment of the curtain’s (re)opening be marked sonically. Thus, true to his reputation for micromanaging every detail, Meyerbeer included not only short entr’actes but also curtain cues for virtually every act of the three works he saw into production at the Opéra. In so doing, he paraded a whole gamut of suitable orchestral curtain-raisers, whether a rising fanfare (for act 2 of Robert le diable, 1831), calming cadential passages (Robert, act 3; Les huguenots, act 2, 1836), emphatic fortissimo unisons (Les huguenots, act 4), the repeat of an opening motif (Robert, act 5), or—most frequently—chromatically rising scales over a dominant pedal (Les huguenots, acts 3 and 5; Le prophète, act 4).64 In short, most of his curtains open at musically suitable places, facilitating the listener’s understanding that vision would return while letting that vision take form in close alignment with the auditory stimulus. Particularly when rising at the end of a chromatic crescendoing ascent over the dominant (as in act 5 of Les huguenots, where the ramp ends abruptly on an augmented chord leading into the boisterous ball scene), the curtain seems to be pulled up not by invisible ropes—that is, by external technology—but by the music itself: at a point where harmonic tension, dynamics, pitch range, and texture can hardly increase further, the disclosure of the stage provides a visual relief to the musical suspense. Small wonder that

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Meyerbeer insisted that stage director and conductor meticulously time their mutual signals to effect this exacting coordination.65 Small wonder also that it was often under Parisian influence that composers of Italian operas became more attentive to act curtains. For example, Donizetti composed out his curtain-opening space in his last work written for the Opéra, Dom Sébastien, roi du Portugal (1843). For its final act, the curtain precedes the prelude’s concluding pause by two measures, rising on a sudden fortissimo tonic chord that is then followed by a seventh chord and fermatas. This curtain postpones the harmonic suspense into the opened stage, thus shifting expectations from the scene’s revelation to the beginning of the dramatic action proper.66 Similarly, although Verdi’s overtures or preludes were usually tonally closed and followed by the curtain, in Don Carlos, his 1867 magnum opus for the French capital, he musically integrated no fewer than four opening curtains. Rather than interpolating transitional passages, though, Verdi aligned these curtains with structural shifts in thematic material. The first-act curtain coincides with the sudden turn from a miniature atmospheric prelude to the more energetic lead into the choral introduction. And for the last two acts, the curtain opens at the repeat (with heightened melodic urge) of each act’s opening orchestral motif, thus visually intensifying the already expressive—and oppressive—musical scene-painting while leaving audiences free to take in this setting before tending to the soloists’ heartaches.67 The shockingly immediate beginning of Otello (Milan, La Scala, 1887) would barely have been possible without such a concise coordination of graphic music and timed curtain. In addition to the more widespread use of act curtains, the generally sloweddown scene changes also encouraged curtains to transcend the outer edges of an act by descending in its midst. A traditional method for transformations within acts had been to alternate between “short” and “long” sets: an intimate (often interior) scene was played at the front of the stage while the next set was being prepared behind a painted backdrop whose removal would quickly disclose the subsequent, grander scene.68 Hence the longstanding equation, in French and Italian parlance, of toile or tela—meaning “canvas”—with theatrical curtains of all sorts, even after the more materially or functionally appropriate terms rideau (in reference to the folded texture) and sipario (linking to ancient Roman practice) began to be applied to the heavy proscenium curtain.69 Swift transformations via midstage drops continued to be practiced in the nineteenth century, especially among Italian composers (French production books for Donizetti operas detail them copiously). But after around 1830, the number of sets and changes per opera decreased dramatically in French works, which instead emphasized the finesse, originality, and splendor of each individual set. Various opera houses therefore started to employ curtains for transformations within acts as well—a procedure already common in spoken theater and popular shows across Europe.70

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As the notion of the curtain as theatrical frame suggests, the introduction of such intermediary curtains was no small disruption of operatic habits. In the absence of interludes, an intermediary curtain could mislead spectators into believing that an intermission was afoot. Within acts, theaters therefore usually moved not the main (proscenium) curtain but a second curtain, hung behind the first. This so-called drop scene (Zwischenvorhang or rideau de manœuvre) was lighter and could veil scene changes faster, while the main curtain maintained the spatiotemporal frame of the performance.71 True, practices and nomenclatures varied widely; just like tela and toile, the simple terms rideau, sipario, Vorhang, or curtain were often used interchangeably for both proscenium and act curtains, while Zwischenvorhang and drop scene sometimes specifically referred to painted canvases lowered in the middle of the stage (rather than in front of it) to veil a long set.72 But, clearly, different kinds of curtains marked various structural places within an opera, thereby helping along appropriate audience behavior. Aesthetically, however, the introduction of drop scenes within acts remained contested, even beyond opera. In 1837, the Prussian actor, playwright, and theatrical director August Lewald observed of transformations on Parisian stages that “a curtain is always lowered for a few moments, which conceals the stage from sight.” And he recommended this method to German theaters, since their frequent open changes within acts, with their “jumps from the forest into the living room, from the church into the garden etc.,” did not foster theatrical illusion.73 But not everyone agreed. As early as 1802, the French architect Louis Catel had suggested darkening the theater during transformations in spoken drama instead of lowering curtains, since the former procedure was more stimulating to the human imagination, which conjures images from darkness. Two years later, an anonymous Parisian reviewer praised the performance of a pantomime for not having been “unpleasantly interrupted by a drop which comes down and destroys the illusion by leaving the spectator to himself for too long.” Similarly, in 1877 the Dresden theater historian Robert Prölß maintained that open transformations, for all their clumsy expediency, were more inspiring to watch than was a curtain, which inappropriately interrupted the drama and usually prolonged the pause between scenes as well.74 In other words, Prölß pointed out that any attempt at veiling stage machineries was itself an act of technology—and inevitably prone to be recognized as such. At stake, then, was the issue of how best to preserve the theatrical illusion, both during individual performances and regarding the artistic nature of theater in general: directors had to decide whether the exposure of the theater’s internal mechanical workings was less disruptive than the use of a drop scene. That this question was raised at all epitomizes the changes in theatrical aesthetics since the Baroque era, when—as we recall from this book’s introduction—the open play with machines was very much part of the spectacle’s attraction. Individual drops (often in the shape of a cloud) might therefore conceal parts of the scene but never the

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full stage at once.75 Given the growing emphasis, during the long nineteenth century, on a show’s seamless artistic surface, it is not surprising that drop scenes soon carried the day. By the 1840s, German theater manuals mentioned them as customary in London, Paris, Berlin, and other “reasonably important” theaters; and in 1851, for instance, Verdi explicitly demanded one in Rigoletto for the first-act transformation from a “magnificent room in the ducal palace” to the “deserted end of a street”—that is, for a change between two elaborate long sets.76 The novel technique was aided by the expanding material diversification of curtains themselves. Just as their movements began to be integrated into the musical flow, so drop scenes could be tailor-made to match specific productions or dramatic situations. In 1829, the Opéra mitigated the (then) unusual curtain after act 1 of Guillaume Tell by having it depict a suitable historical scene.77 Two years later, the infamous nocturnal cemetery scene in act 3 of Robert le diable was to be prepared—that is, the transformation from mountainscape around the cloister to cloister graveyard was to be accomplished—behind a lowered drop painted with clouds to sustain the gloomy supernatural atmosphere during a short orchestral postlude: the Parisian production team cunningly dubbed this drop a “magic curtain” (rideau de magie). Its merely auxiliary purpose was emphasized in the published score: theaters that could pull off a quick, open transformation were permitted to dispense not only with the curtain but also with its accompanying music (which mostly recycled motifs from the preceding duet before petering out into lower-string rumblings befitting the ensuing necromancy).78 Cloud pieces had been a staple of opera since its very beginnings, not least because they offered suitably celestial vehicles for dei ex machina. But expanding them into full-size stage curtains was aesthetically and pragmatically different—so much so that “cloud curtain” became a synonym for all manner of locally colored drop scenes. The Opéra’s midcentury inventory of machines and decorations listed a sizeable collection of “rideaux de nuages”; and by 1885, Pougin devoted an entire entry of his theatrical dictionary to specific procedures whereby such curtains could efficiently veil a transformation without interrupting either action or illusion.79 In addition, gauzes, scrims, or transparencies that had long been used in popular shows were also deployed to veil the stage to various degrees; Meyerbeer himself, for instance, mentioned black gauzes for the end of Robert’s act 3.80 (The diaphanous curtains mocked in Böhm’s Ring parody, then, had roots in reality.) Towards midcentury, in short, not only the use and timing of curtains but also their fabrics, shapes, and optics multiplied. This profusion afforded ever more opportunities for composers to employ curtains as customized dramatic devices rather than cut-and-dried routine. What is more, drop scenes that were visually fitted to the preceding or emerging stage representation functioned both as curtains and as scenery—which is to say that they were simultaneously stage technology and pictorial medium. Accordingly, the resulting transformations could

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appear to be at once open and covered. Chameleon-like, the curtain adapted to its dramatic surroundings to strive for invisibility: as drop scene, it began to veil itself. AC T C L O SI N G S

If musically driven opening curtains or locally colored drop scenes thus enhanced the smooth transition from prelude or interlude to visual scene, closing curtains traditionally signaled the imminent ceasing not just of visual information but of the entire multimedia performance. Accordingly, indications for final curtains were initially less frequent, at least in French and German scores. At the ends of works, the timing was usually less ambiguous than at their beginnings, which—as we have seen—had to establish both performative and dramatic situations. And even when composers did specify a final curtain (for which Rossini seems to have been an early advocate), there was normally less orchestral time available within which to locate the closing. Besides, musical codas by definition conveyed a strong sense of closure, necessitating little compositional adjustment to be aligned with lowering curtains. Some curtain cues therefore simply coincided with final chords, as in Rossini’s Armida (Naples, San Carlo, 1817) or Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.81 No gap would then arise between musical and visual ending, the opera ceasing simultaneously for eyes and ears. More often, curtains would come down right after (and no later than the second full measure following) the typical concluding chorus, often a full—if mostly cadential—musical phrase before an opera’s end. This is the case in several Italian works such as Rossini’s Il turco in Italia (Milan, La Scala, 1814), Bellini’s Norma (Milan, La Scala, 1831), and Verdi’s La traviata (Venice, La Fenice, 1853) and Macbeth (in its 1865 version), as well as in Marschner’s Der Vampyr (Leipzig, 1828) or in Meyerbeer’s Les huguenots.82 Similar to Grétry’s interpolations for opening curtains, these specifications turned the musical conclusion into natural curtain-closing sounds: they added a visual fade-out to the opera’s end. This increasingly deliberate veiling of the scene was particularly obvious in cases where the curtain fell more than a closing phrase before the end. In last acts, such curtains were often part of extended stage directions, implying either that the action was not fully completed or that its final result would not be shown onstage. In Rossini’s Ermione, for instance, the curtain comes down while a “nearly senseless” Orestes is being dragged toward the beach for his rescue, the tension of his betrayal and near murder still reverberating in twelve measures of fast violin figurations and timpani rolls before thirteen further measures of conventional triadic closure.83 That the original Parisian livrets de mise en scène for Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe (1826) and Auber’s La muette de Portici similarly indicate a mid-action curtain is related not only to these operas’ unusually “horrific” finales but also to stage-practical necessities:84 it was impossible to sustain the illusion of infernos and erupting volcanoes indefinitely. Moreover, the presentation of cataclysms

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demanded awe in and of itself; a quick closing curtain could thus channel audience admiration for the pyrotechnics into—and thereby whip up—the final applause. Such an extension of stage action into the curtain space (and of the latter into the music), though, occurred more commonly in internal acts. Here the coordination of curtain and musical coda with applause-provoking exactness was less important than the creation of a sense of continuing drama. Rossini suggested as much in Mosè in Egitto, whose stage direction for the end of act 1 states plainly: “Everything is chaos: the curtain falls.” The production book for the 1827 French remake of this opera explicated the desired action-suspense effect: the first-act curtain ought to fall “even before the exit of the Egyptians is fully completed, which makes for a great tableau.”85 At the end of act 1 of Rossini’s “melodramma” La gazza ladra (Milan, La Scala, 1817), the score itself detailed that the curtain was to close on the complex final tableau (quadro).86 Rossini, in short, repeatedly masked a frantic imbroglio with a calculated internal curtain, letting the scene recede while suggesting that the dramatic conflict and emotional confusion were anything but resolved. Verdi adopted such “immediate” curtains for sudden turnsof-events, such as Manrico’s flight at the close of act 2 of Il trovatore (Rome, Apollo, 1853) and the unveiling of Amelia ending act 2 of Un ballo in maschera (Rome, Apollo, 1859). Such closing curtains became standard in French production books of the 1830s and 1840s, where they were increasingly coupled with the indication “Tableau générale.” Indeed, while we have seen that composers tended to align curtains with musical events, some livrets reveal greater concern with the visual perception of the final stage picture. If, for example, the curtain fell before the main characters “have entirely disappeared from the eyes of the spectators,” this might foster audience identification with these (often troubled) personas and impress the concluding tableau vivant on their minds.87 Helping keep spectators focused on the plot during intermissions, breaks, or interludes, an early intermediary curtain could thus function like a dramatic cliffhanger. Although less commonly than opening curtains, specified closing curtains also occasionally linked sonic and visual diegesis in new, dramatically resonant ways. One example is the 1837 Berlin version of Spontini’s last opera, Agnes von Hohenstaufen: the middle act’s curtain descends, amid a raging thunderstorm, during the last four measures of a choral prayer. Yet “as soon as the curtain touches the ground,” thunder, lightning, and wind not only continue but increase during eight fast, concluding measures of ferociously rising scales. The optical fade-out here blatantly precedes the aural conclusion, with only the most basic light effects penetrating the drapery. More than diegetic music behind as-yet-closed curtains, Spontini’s curtained thunderstorm deliberately shifts attention to the independent ability of descriptive music to convey the ongoing drama. Beyond negotiating acoustic and visual information, the closing curtain could also become expressive in its own right: its very manner of ending an act bore the

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potential to influence the audience’s emotional experience (as Gisbert’s Ring parody revealed). This potency became particularly obvious where composers or directors prescribed not only the moment of the curtain’s lowering but also its speed. An early instance appears in Beethoven’s incidental music (Vienna, Burgtheater, 1810) for Goethe’s “Trauerspiel” Egmont. True, as the Theater-Lexikon had noted, the neat interlocking of music and dramatic action was particularly apposite in spoken plays, since sustaining audience attention was the raison d’être for interludes. Beethoven thus preceded the first two entr’actes with the explicit instruction that “the music commences [fällt ein] as soon as the curtain has been lowered.” But after the third and fourth acts, the orchestra was to sound—loudly, no less—right after the final words, even before the curtain came down: inversely analogous to Rossini’s premature closing curtains, this advanced musical entry expanded the emotional state of the concluding scene into the entr’acte. Accordingly, both interludes begin with some introductory, curtain-closing measures that are separated from the entr’acte proper by both tempo and a fermata. In act 4, the title hero’s sudden capture warrants this musical intervention (just as in the case of Verdi’s early closures). But act 3 ends with Egmont’s melancholy final love scene: in line with its presentiment of death, Beethoven asked for the curtain to come down slowly, during two measures of a modulatory rising scale and an improvisatory oboe cantabile. Both curtain and music thus cast a reflective shadow on the doomed lovers;88 indeed, more than amplifying the preceding scene’s mood, they establish an emotive response—and thereby interpret the scene—in the first place. Small wonder that, in opera, Parisian production books from the 1830s on began to indicate occasional curtain speeds. The midtableau curtain, for example, is frequently described as fast, thus cutting off the scene rather than gently fading it out.89 Conversely, by 1841 the Theater-Lexikon routinely mentioned the dramaturgical option of “noiseless, slow, and gentle” closing curtains.90 All this does not mean, however, that such detailed curtain cues were strictly adhered to. Surviving performance materials tend to reveal entire layers of modifications to, and experiments with, the signals for closing curtains, and these in turn reflected not necessarily changing directorial tastes but the working-out of backstage communication processes as well as the respective curtain’s mechanics.91 But what is clear is that the curtain assumed a more active role in opera between the 1770s and the mid-nineteenth century. With composers pulling it purposefully into their works and sometimes outfitting it with its own music, its movements began to gain expressive meanings in themselves. What is more, the curtain occasionally afforded not just visual but also acoustic fade-in or fade-out effects. In a way, like Derrida’s parergon, this newly deliberate curtain was “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work (hors d’oeuvre), neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work. It is no longer merely around the work.”92

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Indeed, the curtain partakes in operatic performance during those moments when it moves with—or in willful relationship to—the music or dramatic action. Between these movements, it recedes into the perceptual background. There it merges with the architectural frame of the proscenium arch to leave behind the imaginary fourth wall, or what practitioners tellingly called the “curtain line,” which actors were not supposed to cross. Thus, even when drawn, the curtain invisibly forms what we might dub a “peephole” onto opera’s diegetic world. It not only “gives rise” to the staged work as an enabling technology that allows the audience to visually encounter the operatic performance, but it also continually sustains this work by its ability to deny vision at any time, to cut off the precious vista even before the music ends, or to cover stage accidents and technical mishaps. Conversely, where the whole curtain was lifted for curtain calls (rather than performers merely stepping out in front of it), it participated in the destruction of the very illusion it had helped create.93 A conventional pragmatic mechanism for the veiling of the stage thus began to turn, in early nineteenth-century opera, into a creative artistic mediator in its own right, not because it may have been painted (and thus aspired to a visual medium, as in Pliny’s anecdote), but because of its unique power to join, sever, or modify seeing and hearing. Insofar as we follow Friedrich Kittler’s definition of media technology as that which “must first isolate and incorporate individual sensory channels and then connect them together to form multimedia systems,” the curtain appears paradigmatic.94 Neither a visual nor an auditory medium per se, it became a mediating agent, not just between audience and stage, but also between the main sensorial data streams that together create the multimedia spectacle that is opera. WAG N E R’ S C U RTA I N S

If the curtain was thus established by the mid-nineteenth century as a creative constituent of opera; if it offered composers a technology to heighten illusionist effects or add interpretive meaning to their operas’ opening and closing moments; if even transparent gauzes were already in play, why, then, did satirists after midcentury alight specifically on Wagner’s curtains? For one thing, Wagner continued to expand the increasingly complex curtain directions we have observed by paying ever more attention to exact timings. Starting with Lohengrin (Weimar, 1850), he imitated Meyerbeer in notating almost every curtain (only the musically less continuous Die Meistersinger of 1868 lacks some). And while his earlier scores tended to incorporate these indications into temporally somewhat ambiguous stage directions, from the Ring on, Wagner followed the Meyerbeer of Le prophète in placing curtains by the beat.95 This specificity correlated with an increasingly intricate music-dramaturgical choreography of the curtain. In some early works, it is true, Wagner acoustically underlined its

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opening much in the manner we observed with Grétry, Meyerbeer, and others. In the third act of Der fliegende Holländer, for instance, the curtain rises during a short tension-building passage before the repeat of the “Steuermann!” chorus material: lo and behold, the passage consists of a rising and swelling chromatic scale over a dominant pedal.96 And for Tannhäuser’s act 2, the curtain ascends with the return of the exuberant instrumental introduction’s initial material, beginning with a two-measure crescendoing lead-in over a dominant pedal that was in itself an appropriate enough curtain-raising passage. For Lohengrin’s last act, by contrast, Wagner notated the curtain at the end of the orchestral introduction above the double bar, right before the entrance of the stage band and four measures before the onset of the wedding chorus. That this structural placement was by then unusual—particularly in light of Wagner’s desire for musical and dramatic continuity—is revealed by the exclamation point following the direction.97 However, Wagner did not intend a pause. The orchestra precedes the curtain with a transition from its celebratory opening to solemnly dotted chords, and these lead seamlessly into the diegetic band music behind the scene. This effect was possibly inspired by Mendelssohn’s famous bridal march (premiered in Berlin in 1843), which starts as an entr’acte after act 4 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream before allowing the curtain to reveal the wedding procession proper.98 But Wagner rendered the choir invisible even after the curtain rose: the bridal procession only gradually approaches until entering the stage thirty-six measures later. Raising the curtain on (rather than prior to) this beginning furnishes an additional layer of acoustic unveiling, one that intensifies the initial da lontano effect: the curtain facilitates less a visual than an audiovisual fade-in on the triumphal wedding scene. Furthermore, unlike musically emphasized curtains that open onto a busy introductory chorus (as in Der Freischütz), this unaccented disclosure of an empty but resonant stage reinforces the spectator’s position as observer outside the stage action—someone who has to wait patiently until the source of the acousmatic music literally moves into the picture framed by the curtain.99 Thus control of the curtain not only directs the spectators’ gaze, thereby taking autonomy away from it, but also focuses their hearing, that sensory ability Adorno considered more “archaic”—and less technological—than seeing because the ear “is unconcentrated and passive. Unlike the eye, it does not have to be opened.” Adorno claimed that Wagner took advantage of this “dozy and inert” nature of the ear to musically influence the listeners’ subconscious.100 But here the composer rendered the eye more passive while giving some focus to the ear—and thereby drew attention to his acoustic might. In other cases where the curtain opens just before the onset of diegetic music, it helps coordinate between different aural strata. In Siegfried, it first moves as Mime starts hammering onstage: he joins in, and thereby “explains,” the harsh rhythms of the preceding orchestral measures. Rather than being energetically

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summoned by emphatic music (as in some Meyerbeer examples), the curtain sonically recedes gently, allowing the orchestral sound—as it were—to flow onto the stage, and the stage-music to blend into the orchestra. Put differently, the curtain confirms a perspectival switch of the orchestra from observer to participant. More than the first Venusberg scene, where (as we have seen in chapter 1) vocal music emerges à la Opera and Drama out of both pantomime and orchestral melody, the beginning of Siegfried seems to demonstrate Wagner’s later, post-Schopenhauerian view that the seed of music drama was music, after all.101 In order to augment its expressive specificity, pure instrumental music first becomes illustrative and then joins with diegetic sound before adding vision, stage action, and—finally— the sung word for full multimedia effect. Wagner’s most refined example of multilayered interactions between instrumental music, curtain, stage action, and song is perhaps the famous underwater beginning of Das Rheingold. Wagner asked for the curtain to open in measure 126 of the 136 instrumental measures of crescendoing E-flat-major arpeggios (example 2.4). This is fourteen measures after the entry of the trumpets and first violins, with virtually every string and wind instrument now engaged and seemingly no further increase of E-flat-major undulation possible: it is at this breaking point that the orchestral waves push up or burst through the curtain. Its opening, in turn, lets the arpeggios spill over into the lower woodwind’s four upward swooshes of E-flatmajor scales. Beginning three measures (or less than four seconds) after the curtain begins to move, these scales mimic its upward pull, wash up the first Rhinemaiden, trigger a first harmonic change, and—finally—prompt singing.102 The gradual rise in media signification from raw orchestral sound via descriptive music and pantomime to vocal song is continued even into the singing: the Rhinemaiden’s inaugural words are notoriously onomatopoetic, as if a signifying language had yet to be formed in this primal opening scene that Wagner dubbed “the world’s beginning.”103 The curtain thus participates in—even facilitates—the emergence of the Gesamtkunstwerk out of music. It is the knowing intermediary between music and scene, aware of the moment when the orchestral depiction concentrates to such a degree that it is time for vision to be added. As a contemporary critic observed, “the curtain opens, and the eye beholds what the ear has heard.”104 The curtain thus embodies the impression that Wagner—according to one of his musical assistants, Heinrich Porges—desired for the prelude as a whole: “It will be as though we were experiencing the magical effects of an ideal presence; as though, no longer conscious of the music, we . . . were peering directly into the inner workings of natural forces.”105 The orchestra, in other words, prepares the immersed gaze beyond the curtain, while the curtain epitomizes this mysterious passage of listener into absorbed spectator. Again the curtain “sees for” the audience, toggling between its sensory organs and the unfolding multiple media. A kind of (audiovisual) stethoscope for the emerging music drama itself, this curtain

example 2.4 . Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, prelude and scene 1, mm. 122–35: opening curtain. © By kind permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. ˙. b 6 ˙. &bb 8 ˙. b 6 &bb 8

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temporarily directs the eyes and ears much like the leitmotifs guide the listener’s musical understanding. In this sense, it is a bodily supplement less for Wagner than for his ideal audience. More expressive of dramatic moods but less explicitly involved in medial coordination (and less suggestive of the curtain’s actual motion) are those moments in Wagner when curtains rise during low-pitched and lingering recitative-like passages. In the last act of Tannhäuser, the curtain moves over the lower strings’ meandering, pensive descent to the tonic. Anticipating the interrogative atmosphere of the opening scene, this musical curtain symbolizes the question that has been haunting protagonists and audiences since the close of act 2 (in dramatic time, half a year previously): has the title hero been redeemed? Along similar lines, the first Tristan curtain opens over a single, unresolved, probing gesture in celli and basses that foreshadows the entire (and entirely unsettled) drama to come.106 Yet arguably nowhere is an opening curtain more redolent of a drama’s ambience and trajectory than in the Götterdämmerung Prologue, the only example in Wagner of an opening curtain with a specified speed: it “opens slowly.” After two waves of ascending Rhine-motif undulations (each preceded by ominous chords first heard during Brünnhilde’s awakening toward the end of Siegfried), the curtain’s slow motion coincides with the muting of the strings and the inversion to descending figurations (example 2.5). The curtain thus forestalls the stage directions’ demand for the ensuing Norn scene: “Somber silence and absence of any movement.”107 Moreover, its hesitancy seems to summarize both what has occurred since the close of the previous opera and what is to follow: it communicates the underlying lethargy that has befallen Wotan as well as the heaviness that will soon affect the remaining characters. Reinforced by a momentary musical stagnation, the exceptionally slow curtain functions like a temporal condenser that catapults past events and their repercussions into the dramatic present. As such, it prefigures—more than the Norns’ rope—the entire cycle’s denouement: the slow curtain is a psychic channel of cosmic knowledge, a technology of clairvoyance short-circuiting both time and space. Wagner’s dramatically evocative use of curtains is equally evident at the ends of acts, where he designated speeds more frequently. Many of his closing curtains are perfectly in tune with the midcentury patterns we have observed: some come down shortly after the concluding chorus, while others close internal acts seemingly in mid-action.108 Nor, as we have seen, did Wagner invent the regulation of speeds. In fact, it seems hardly accidental that Wagner started to indicate curtain velocities in 1840 during his first sojourn in Paris, where he completed the last acts of Rienzi. A slow curtain descends on this opera’s fourth act during a reiteration of the offstage chant with which the church had earlier anathematized the title hero. The curtain’s gravity corresponds to the “stupefaction” of Rienzi, who stands immobile through the end of the act: it drags and at the same time distances this

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distressing situation like a cinematic freeze-frame.109 At the ends of Lohengrin, Tristan (in the libretto only), and Parsifal, by contrast, Wagner draped a slow curtain like a halo around his quasi-religious—if conflicted—apotheoses, extending them seemingly into eternity. With Lohengrin, the curtain’s gradual descent over eleven cadential measures (or roughly twenty seconds) stresses the hero’s painfully protracted disappearance, which Wagner also minutely choreographed to steadily reduce Lohengrin’s vanishing figure in perspective.110 In Parsifal, the last curtain’s slowness stands out all the more because its predecessors had closed with rare exactitude on the respective final chords. The concluding curtain’s lingering during fifteen measures (over one minute) of dense leitmotivic apotheosis thus glorifies— and is in turn glorified by—the grandiose longish postlude to the spiritual redemption accomplished in Parsifal’s last act. (Its deliberation might also have helped suspend applause after the premiere of this “Bühnenweihfestspiel”—a reaction caused by Wagner’s directives to withhold from applauding after the first acts.) As Gisbert’s Ring parody revealed, though, more typical of Wagner were his fast closing curtains, whose swishing and speed were contrariwise prone to solicit applause. Like an exclamation point, they frequently rushed down on a shocking development. At the end of Der fliegende Holländer (in its revised version), a swift curtain over the three-measure final chord emphasizes the surprise effect of the couple’s ascension, rather than their glorification.111 Such a fast cut was—à la Rossini—particularly apposite at the end of a middle act’s turmoil, as in Tannhäuser (in the libretto only), Die Meistersinger (where it coincides with the disappearance of the night watchman), and Die Walküre (whose curtain dashes down like Wotan’s thunder with his vanishing). More piquantly, Wagner specified rapid curtains to hide illicit couples who are either suddenly exposed to the public eye (Tristan, act 1) or about to commit adultery (Die Walküre, act 1). Hence Gisbert’s ridicule of what we might dub a decency curtain. Its moral watch is particularly acute in Die Walküre. For twenty-two measures, the agitatedly laboring, heaving, rising, and descending violin figurations; the accelerated fortissimo fragments from the earlier love duet; the hint of the entrance motif of Freia (traditionally the goddess of love) from Das Rheingold; the timpani roll; and the awkwardly timed but triumphant final chord on an off-beat here continue to express what the scene must hide.112 The curtain’s haste only fuels this acoustic urgency while simultaneously—as in Rossini—indexing the ongoing action from outside the diegesis. Our satirists clearly hit the mark when casting the curtain as commentator: it was Wagner’s ultimate means to seal his work spatially, temporally, morally, and emotionally. Overall, then, it appears that Wagner’s careful attention to the curtain was nothing new in and of itself. What distinguished his approach, to the point of its becoming notable, was instead his consistent accumulation of curtain directions, as well as the degree to which he used them to guide the listeners’ sensorium. In line with Wagner’s foundational desire for medial collaboration, however, this

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function was achieved not by the curtain alone but by its finely calibrated interaction with Wagner’s unprecedentedly graphic music. This tie between musical scene painting and conscious (un)veiling of the stage becomes most obvious in view of Wagner’s attitude to scene changes. From the introduction and chapter 1 it is clear that the contemporary discourse around drop scenes must have resonated with the Wagnerian ideal of a continual illusion that forever veils its artifice. And his libretti seem to suggest which side of the debate he came down on. Defying midcentury trends towards drop scenes, they notoriously called for an unprecedented number of open transformations without interrupting the orchestral music; thus in act 1 of Tannhäuser (1843–75) and the first and last acts of Siegfried’s Tod (1848, later to be revised into Götterdämmerung), as well as, more radically, all three transformations—between complex long sets, no less—of Das Rheingold (drafted in 1852) and the famous gradual scene changes in the outer acts of Parsifal (conceived in 1877). Not that Wagner was entirely averse to curtained transformations: he did prescribe one for the end of the Götterdämmerung Prologue to mask the scene change during the interlude commonly nicknamed Siegfried’s Rhine Journey. But for transformations within acts, even locally colored drop scenes were evidently unpalatable for Wagner. And yet, his scores and writings reveal that he did not unconditionally root for open transformations. As we recall from the previous chapter, Wagner’s libretto for his Venusberg vision had poetically evoked “rosy scent” to shroud the initial ballet pantomime as well as the dissolving views of the Paris version, leaving only Venus and Tannhäuser visible on a small strip downstage for scene 2. And at the end of this scene, it demanded that Tannhäuser “suddenly finds himself ” transplanted from inside the Venusberg to “a beautiful valley” near the Wartburg: the change from the gloomy underworld to its bright, earthly counterpart required a rapidity befitting the spiritual means by which Tannhäuser effected it. In the 1845 score, Wagner therefore added (somewhat desperately, one imagines) that this set change must occur “with lightning speed.”113 Seven years later, his “Notes on the Performance of Tannhäuser” urged directors not to destroy the Venusberg’s “intended magic.” For its transformation into the valley, he envisioned a traditional change from a shorter to a long set—albeit with an individual touch: gauzes and an intermediary backdrop were to fly out in darkness, so that a spotlight could swiftly reveal the valley meadow waiting upstage. And regarding Venus’s “rosy scent,” it was not enough merely to hide the scene “by pushing forward, and dropping down, a massive cloud-piece”—that is to say, a static drop scene. Instead, Wagner recommended his laboriously tested Dresden procedure of “gradually lowering a number of vaporous sheets of painted gauze.” These would achieve a slow and “natural” shrouding to the point of invisibility of the scenery, which could then be covered by a solid painted canvas (both to dampen the machinery’s noise and to conceal the back of the stage completely).114 Wagner thus fine-tuned

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the use of drop scenes by individually choreographing them according to dramatic situation and musical flow. In order to keep the audience’s sensorium fully attuned to the drama even during scene changes, then, Wagner avoided both standard drop scenes and entirely open transformations. Instead, he sought to merge both practices by incorporating diegetically appropriate curtain materials into the scenic transitions, which were thus only partially visible. In act 1 of Götterdämmerung, for instance, the libretto instructs a “downstage curtain” to close while the Gibichung Hall morphs into the Valkyrie Rock. Wagner’s score specified that this curtain—a rug—should previously have framed the front of the hall.115 In other words, it was to emerge as part of the scenery, rather than from the extradiegetic theatrical machine. In the third-act transformation after Siegfried’s death, the composer advanced this tactic by evoking as a drop scene not the traditional sinking clouds but “rising mists.” These not just transpire organically from the preceding Rhine Valley set but also gradually lead to the next location, the riverside Gibichung Hall. Aided by the darkness of night, the mists allow for a continual, diorama-like transition, simulating the foggy Rhine banks that Siegfried’s funeral procession traveres during the lengthy orchestral interlude.116 Conceived after Götterdämmerung, the remaining operas of the Ring cycle continued to enhance the veiling potential of mists, above all Das Rheingold, whose libretto Wagner tellingly completed around the same time as his essay on the staging of Tannhäuser. (And, as chapter 4 will show, his idea of vapors as diegetic, animated drop scenes would fuel the most explicitly modern Wagnerian technology: onstage steam.) In Parsifal, finally, Wagner required Wandeldekorationen, or moving canvases, for his two slow transformations from forest setting to Grail temple. This technology had been reintroduced from the Baroque era into early nineteenth-century boulevard theaters as well as more popular musical multimedia such as opéras féeries, magic ballets, and Zauberpossen—genres that benefitted from its explicit kinship with such spectacular optical entertainments as dioramas and panoramas, which aspired to realistically simulate changing weather or nature scenes.117 In applying such moving panoramas to Parsifal, Wagner intended no longer simply to mask his scene changes as naturally as possible. Instead, he performed them by letting the audience observe the characters’ voyage from one locale to the next. Put differently, the transformation did not interrupt or suspend the drama but actively participated in it. So appealing was this idea of performed scene changes that Wagner retrospectively considered it also for the vertical Rheingold transformations to and from the chthonic Nibelheim.118 That it was meant to supersede stationary drop scenes is clear from the fact that the difficulty of exactly aligning music and moving cloths forced Wagner for Parsifal’s opening run of 1882 to lower a curtain in act 3, after all. He could do so because the characters here journeyed silently, as in the Nibelheim transitions. In act 1, alas, their singing during the transformation ruled

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out a curtain. To accommodate the overlong canvases, Wagner (and his assistant Engelbert Humperdinck) therefore had to furnish additional measures and eventually looped the music. This procedure was even more disturbing to Wagner than the curtain, which already resided (quite literally) between stage technologies and artistic media. By contrast, music—Wagner’s most immediate and expressive medium—would be degraded to a merely mechanical accompaniment, thereby (as I have discussed in the introduction) exposing the entire production as artifice.119 Throughout his career, Wagner thus sought to advance contemporary efforts to individualize curtains and drop scenes in ways that would sustain both the theatrical illusion and the gaze fixed upon it, without a splinter from the stage-practical machinery hitting the audience’s eye. On the one hand, curtains could be considered the paradigmatic technology of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—the most basic means with which to edit out its merely enabling machineries, or the diaphragm that separated these technologies from the perceptible artistic media. On the other hand, precisely qua visible editorial tool, curtains threatened to be recognized as such, and thereby to debunk the entire operatic production as mechanical trickery. For this reason, surely, Wagner put so much pressure on precisely choreographing the curtain. If properly aligned with his descriptive music, the curtain might be immersed in the drama, in turn becoming a momentary contributor—an expressive medium and multisensorial Wagnerian technology. Perhaps it was this consistent application and insistent demonstration of their music-dramatic importance that made Wagner’s curtains such easy prey for satirists. T H E WAG N E R C U RTA I N

The artistic potential of the curtains indicated in Wagner’s scores, then, was not principally new: it hinged on the curtain’s release from rigid mechanical and spatiotemporal boundaries. Yet Wagner’s heightened demand for dramaturgical and agogic flexibility did stimulate an innovation in actual curtain technology: the socalled Wagner curtain. Although the nature of Wagner’s personal involvement in its design is uncertain, this type of proscenium curtain was first installed in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus for the 1876 Ring premiere and has been standardized under Wagner’s name since the twentieth century. It did not fly up vertically, as in traditional German (and most European) theaters. Nor did it simply part in the middle in order to open sideways (as was the case with the “Greek” or “traveler” curtain), or to move outwards diagonally (as did the “Italian” curtain), or to the sides and then up (as in the more complex “French” version). Instead, the Wagner curtain parted centrally and then moved simultaneously both sideways and upwards (figure 2.1). This intricate move was aided by the curtain’s comparatively light fabric and effected manually via a diagonal pull and special conic winches. (Ironically in view of Wagner’s ideological technophobia, these so-called Wagner

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figure 2.1 . The Wagner curtain: draft of its mechanical construction by Walter Huneke, technical director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1966 to 1990. By kind permission of the heirs of Walter Huneke.

winches have remained the only stage-mechanical component named after a composer.)120 As some contemporaries confirmed, the Bayreuth curtain could be operated faster and with greater precision than traditional curtains. The resulting effects were captured vividly by French music scholar Albert Lavignac: The curtain [of the Festspielhaus] itself is expressive. It does not rise, as everywhere else; it parts in the middle gracefully, rising towards the top corners with a suddenness or with a deliberate majesty according to circumstances, regulated, like everything else, by the scrupulously careful Master, who left nothing to run the risks of interpretation. For instance, after the terrifying scene with which Götterdämmerung ends, the curtain closes as if regretfully, letting us gaze for a long time on the affecting flames of the pyre and the conflagration of Walhalla; whilst it brusquely shuts out [more joyous scenes] . . . by falling at a single blow.121

In other words, the Wagner curtain was custom-made technology designed to afford the practical execution of Wagner’s gestural audiovisual framings. Its mechanism imbued the curtain with a new brio that underlined its own transition, over the course of the nineteenth century, from “mere” technology into participating operatic medium. In addition to this augmented temporal elasticity, the Wagner curtain’s spatial domain was expanded as well. Once raised, it could either disappear entirely or line the sides of the stage and fill in the proscenium’s top corners with its variously proportioned round swathes (figure 2.2). It thus appeared as a third, soft, and

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figure 2.2 . The Wagner curtain in 1897, framing the Bayreuth stage for Parsifal’s Grail temple in Wagner’s premiere production of 1882. This vertically striped curtain with additional festoons at its rear was probably not the original curtain of 1876. Nationalarchiv der RichardWagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.

painterly frame inside the Festspielhaus’s already dual proscenium.122 The Bayreuth curtain’s effortless integration into the architecture was boosted by its featuring neutral stripes of likely the brownish or yellowish hues of the theater’s interior décor; the very fact that contemporary reports and illustrations disagree on the exact color or direction of the stripes only confirms that this curtain garnered less attention and merged better with its surroundings than would have a traditional red curtain.123 By the same token, several early reviewers found the dividing line between auditorium and stage to be optically deemphasized by the Festspielhaus’s near-complete darkness as well as its lack of a prompter’s box, its well-hidden footlights, and the famously sunken orchestra pit (which might itself be considered an innovative, permanent kind of curtain technology).124 Traditional mechanical hinges between the real and the represented world were thus either veiled or disbanded altogether. Instead, the Festspielhaus observed the physical threshold between worlds by more subtle processes that buttressed, rather than counteracted, Wagner’s craved total immersion. For example, the singers (as some spectators marveled) never stepped in front of the curtain line, nor did the curtain rise again after a performance for the sake of applause:125 Wagner’s curtain protected the stage’s illusionism even after the end of a performance, thereby extending the

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latter’s quasi-sacred temporal frame into the applause. Moreover, the Bayreuth curtain was “hemmed in by a golden border” whose horizontal line—as the Swiss theatrical reformer Adolphe Appia later observed—appeared to indicate the height of singers or some other important feature of the veiled stage: when it parted and the characters fell short of this measure, the stage picture automatically appeared to be transported further into the distance.126 Even the new diagonal trajectory of Bayreuth’s curtain supported the emerging stage picture’s almost protocinematic smoothness.127 The naturalness of its movement, as the composer and Yale music instructor Gustave Stoeckel admired, “leave[s] the impression that some unseen hands have moved it very gracefully out of sight.”128 In other words, the curtain’s complex pull further distracted from its own technological conditioning. By contrast to the angular and rigid—which is to say, obviously mechanical—vertical curtains of old, its animating mechanism appeared instead as a quasi-vital force. Moreover, vertical curtains opened and closed on the sight of the actors’ feet, while the Wagner curtain exposed the stage from its very core, zooming out concentrically like an iris diaphragm; in Porges’s words, “the stage picture . . . is revealed to our astonished eyes in a single instance.”129 Not coincidentally, as Johanna Dombois has shown, this mechanism seemed tailored for the opening of Das Rheingold with which it was inaugurated: for the Ring’s first set, Wagner prescribed a strong central focus with a “middle riff ” emerging out of darkness and the Rhinemaidens circling around it.130 Thus the curtain’s inconspicuous surface entailed various trappings that buoyed its mediating function. The Bayreuth curtain materialized the nineteenth century’s increasing focus not on the operatic curtain’s (technological) objecthood but on its (mediating) transparency, dubbed an “interface effect” by Galloway. “Frames, windows, doors, and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do,” according to Galloway, such that “the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate.”131 For Wagner, this mandate included the invisibility of his media’s technological conditioning. Yet by its discreet looks and moves, Wagner’s curtain not only concealed its own technical nature; it also aided the perceptual deception about the entire staging’s artifice. The overall effect was of the stage space as a perfectly smooth, two-dimensional yet animated picture. Particularly the notoriously darker-than-anticipated auditorium during Bayreuth’s opening run reinforced, in Eduard Hanslick’s words, the appearance of “the brightly lighted stage . . . like a brilliantly coloured picture in a dark frame. Many scenes have almost the effect of transparent pictures or views in a diorama.”132 His Viennese colleague Max Kalbeck similarly associated the unimpeded vision of the stage with a dissolving view (Nebelbild)—another link to the Venusberg’s early enactment of Wagner’s staged Gesamtkunstwerk.133 Along with the Festspielhaus’s unobstructed sightlines (channeled by further, perspectively

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arranged proscenium-like pillars at both sides of the auditorium), in short, the Wagner curtain helped transplant the audience from “the confines of the auditorium” onto the stage and shut out their inner imaginations and visual fantasies, as the composer had demanded in “The Art-Work of the Future.”134 In this dark auditorium, where the gaze could affix to nothing else, the curtain morphed into the eyelid of both spectator and artwork.135 Just as Wagner had envisioned in the Venusberg, this lid would open and close only according to his directorial will. Merging the retina of the stage with that of the audience, the choreographed Wagner curtain thus embodied Wagner’s ideal of himself as master of both the spectacle and its perception. Small wonder that contemporaries quickly associated the Wagner curtain with the Bayreuth theater as well as with the Ring cycle itself, which it had unveiled. These correlations became manifest when in 1882 the resourceful theatrical director Angelo Neumann begged Wagner to cede the Bayreuth curtain for his imminent European tour of the Ring.136 His request topped off a close collaboration with the composer in which the touring production was carefully fashioned after the 1876 Bayreuth premiere. Neumann’s craving for authenticity brought together the conductor Anton Seidl (who for six years had lived with and assisted the composer in his “Nibelung Chancellery”), many important Wagner singers (along with others who were either trained or approved of by Wagner), as well as the original sets, costumes, and props (purchased from Wagner after years of pleading). To herald the production’s claim to faithfulness, Neumann eventually gained permission to use Wagner’s name: henceforth he toured under the banner of “Wagner Theater”— the moniker then commonly applied to the physical Festspielhaus.137 It was, then, in lieu of this theater that Neumann, as a last step, acquired Bayreuth’s curtain, which was to stand in for the unique audiovisual experience of Bayreuth, literally framing Neumann’s staging “authentically” and marking it as exceptional even when given within an ordinary theater. The curtain’s striped cloth wrapped the touring production in legitimate Bayreuth packaging, branding it as an “original” product—the closest one could ever get, the curtain insinuated, to (re)experiencing the 1876 Bayreuth staging. By becoming part of the popular image of, and special stage accoutrements for, Wagner’s Ring, then, the curtain ultimately morphed into a marketing device. It was an eye-catcher signaling the originality of Wagner’s Ring and its stagepractical realization, as well as the purported “accuracy” of Neumann’s production. Consequentially, Wagner curtains began to be installed in other theaters as well, even if their cost and spatial requirements meant they appeared less frequently outside Bayreuth than did other aspects of the first Ring production.138 Aside from its commercial contribution, the Wagner curtain, with its oft-noted emphasis on the stage’s picture quality, highlights some vital associations of the nineteenth century’s multivalent operatic curtains in general. Since antiquity, as Pliny’s anecdote has shown, curtains have served to veil precious paintings, “both

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to protect them and to remind viewers of the privileged nature of viewing.”139 Although both intentions ring true for Wagner, his overall artistic goal—discussed in the introduction—was more than the revelation of a perfectly illusionist, animated stage picture. He strove for the representation of ideal nature for the sake of purifying humanity (or at least the German nation) from its social, political, and technological debasement, and of returning it to harmony with the natural world. Hence the importance of the Bayreuth curtain’s “natural” movements. Moreover, its careful choreography evoked those painted curtains that often adorned devotional or revelatory images in Christian iconography.140 Similar to shrines, altars, or the Holy of Holies in the Judaic tradition, Wagner’s stage was to be uncovered only by initiates (his trained assistants) and at prescribed times, literally promising unique insights into a higher sphere—“the inner workings of natural forces” Porges had mentioned. Wagner’s dramaturgically integrated curtains underscored that his Gesamtkunstwerk was ultimately designed to disclose a deeper truth; they are one instance of nineteenth-century art posing as (and borrowing from) religion. In line with this conception, Wagner—never a friend of the visual arts—confessed in 1880 that he found himself more and more “turning away from the plastic arts, from painting—it is like a curtain one pulls to conceal the seriousness of things.”141 That is, he equated paintings with drawn curtains, both of which he believed to merely mask reality. By contrast, his theatrical curtain was to throw into relief the illusionist realism of the stage image as nature. In this it conjured trompe l’oeil paintings that, since the Renaissance, frequently included partly visible curtains to foster—according to art historian Sybille Ebert-Schifferer—“the movement of the painted object from the surface towards the observer” and, thus, make the main object look more real.142 At the same time, Wagner’s evocative curtains—along with their mysteriously moving Bayreuth embodiment—bestowed a voyeuristic quality onto the operatic experience. They promised sensual pleasure (or the fulfillment of vital human needs) like their most mundane forebear in everyday culture, the traditional bed curtain.143 As with the Venusberg’s “rosy scents,” this association was fostered by Wagner’s personal penchant for luxurious fabrics we observed in chapter 1. From this perspective, the seemingly animated curtain (like Venus’s erogenous fragrance) appears as a tool of seduction, as a means to subconsciously overwhelm the sensorium, narcotize the mind, and unhampered draw spectators into the artwork’s orbit. Wagner’s desired total illusionism emerges as at base erotic.144 More than expressing a plethora of moods or offering dramatic interpretations in its few but willful gestures, then, the Wagner curtain was overdetermined, lending itself to multiple readings. From a technical point, it was both more and less materialized, both more and less present than the traditional curtain. Constructed with advanced technology to be less optically obtrusive and less materially weighty, it physically manifested the individualization of curtain functions we have observed in this chapter. In so doing, it gained in artistic clout, becoming—as we

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have seen—entwined with specific works and aesthetic agendas. Earlier I compared conventional eighteenth-century curtains, with their standard fabrics and quasi-automated movements, to the gilded picture frame ordinarily used in museums of the time; the Wagner curtain renders the increasingly nuanced curtain cues by nineteenth-century composers equivalent to painters’ designing their own frames for specific paintings. Ushered in by the Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century, this initially contested trend had become de rigueur by 1900. Yet, while art historian Wolfgang Kemp has argued that such self-generating frames often garnered public attention at the expense of the painting itself,145 the Wagner curtain was less noticeable and disappeared more easily than its predecessors. It consisted of the minimum materiality that allowed it to mediate between the audience’s ears and eyes, auditorium and stage, purely musical and audiovisual expression. As such, it ultimately typifies the technological grounding of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk endeavor as such: the veiling of basic stage technologies as artistic or “natural” media. M U SIC A L I Z I N G T H E C U RTA I N

All this is not to say that Wagner was alone in putting novel spins on already advanced curtain practices. Given the curtain’s generally expanding artistic application and dramatic importance, virtually every opera composer from the midnineteenth century on—both alongside and beyond Wagner—seized upon it, indicating at least its basic actions in their scores. Lowering the curtain gently on this longer-term development, I shall allude here only to the most salient tendencies through the early twentieth century: practices that shed more light on the aesthetic and historical resonances of the curtain’s transformation from rote technology into creative medium. As we have seen, curtain directions generally proliferated around midcentury. By the early 1860s, composers began to specify curtain speeds more frequently as well, much along the lines we have observed in Wagner. For instance, horrific scenarios in interior acts were increasingly brought to an end with a fast curtain, as were the gruesome finales of many verismo operas. (In spoken theater, quick final curtains had likewise become so ubiquitous by the early 1900s that the Berlin stage director Max Grube suspected them of masking weak dramatic endings.)146 By contrast, slowly closing curtains continued to extol apotheoses or sacral ceremonies (as in the redemptive 1869 finale of Verdi’s La forza del destino, the enshrinement of the titular princess ending the Prologue of Massenet’s Esclarmonde in 1889, or the angelic dream vision in act 2 of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel of 1893).147 Massenet additionally liked to let unhurried curtains descend on tormented women: a remorseful Manon after her erstwhile lover’s arrest (Manon, act 2, 1884), the dishonored and exorcised Esclarmonde (Esclarmonde, act 3), or—with a “very slow”

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and exactly timed closure—the despairing Charlotte fainting near her lover’s body at the end of Werther (1892). An experienced audience might thus have gleaned from the deliberate intermediary curtain in act 2 of Thaïs (1894) that the title heroine was more conflicted than her previous laughter let on, and, indeed, she would contemplate deeply during the ensuing famous “Meditation” interlude. More commonly, though, drawn-out curtains let audiences savor the sight of (legitimate) couples blissfully strolling offstage after act 1 to consummate their love, as in Berlioz’s Beatrice et Benedict of 1862 and Verdi’s Otello. By the turn of the century, what we might call the “lovers’ curtain” had become so familiar that it appeared even where composers had failed to prescribe it, as with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in its 1906 Paris premiere.148 Experiments with curtained diegetic music continued as well. In act 3 of Massenet’s Manon, to cite just one example, a drop scene falls on the stillsinging crowd, which soon gives way to an organ behind the curtain to indicate the heroine’s abrupt voyage from a park to the seminary. The Wagnerian touch of some such indications is particularly evident with Humperdinck, who adopted even Wagner’s exclamation point for a tightly timed opening curtain. Richard Strauss, meanwhile, in his first opera, Guntram (1894), specified a “parting” rather than a “rising” curtain—in other words, a Wagner curtain.149 At the same time, choreographing curtains became trendy also outside the reach of living composers. In 1882, the writer Herrmann Starcke published seven production books of what he considered to be badly treated repertory warhorses, and he offered measure numbers for most opening curtains along with occasional speed indications, no matter whether these directives coincided with instructions potentially provided by the composers.150 In his voluminous 1897 study of Wagner’s operas, Albert Lavignac improved even on “the Master” himself when rounding off his synopses with a full array of nuanced curtains, such as a slow curtain to end Das Rheingold and a “very slow” curtain to conclude Die Walküre.151 Nor was Bayreuth immune to this trend: the production notes of Cosima Wagner’s 1891 Tannhäuser assigned a speed to every single curtain.152 More aggressively, printed libretti began to be enhanced with an increasing number of stage directions and other visual pointers (including occasional graphs of blocking and stage layouts in the manner of French production books). In this context, the popular, pocket-size German libretto translations issued by the Leipzig publisher Reclam since the mid-1880s liberally sprinkled texts of earlier operas with curtain prescriptions. The series’ editor Carl Friedrich Wittmann, a former actor and theater director, provided an exact measure number for opening curtains (whether at random or at entirely obvious places) as well as occasional speed directives in keeping with the archetypes I have discussed. For La traviata, for example, he insisted on a curtain “after measure 22” of the prelude (the climax of the lyrical melody later underlying Violetta’s act 2 exclamation “Amami Alfredo”), that is, during the first half of the prelude rather than at its end. This instruction rendered a

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pause before the onset of act 1 unnecessary. But it also retooled the rest of the prelude as acoustic backdrop to the emerging party scene, undermining the prelude’s carefully designed reverse trajectory of the opera’s dramatic moods. Less controversially, the last act opened onto the dying heroine with a slow curtain casting Götterdämmerung gloom.153 Finally, and still more influentially, curtain cues quickly proliferated in new musical editions of older works. Just as it became fashionable for opera guides to list musical extracts in the manner of leitmotifs even for nonWagnerian operas,154 so curtain directions were, by the late nineteenth century, apparently deemed compulsory, both to enhance an opera’s modern (read: musicdramatic) appeal and to facilitate its staging. Among turn-of-the-century composers, this development is perhaps most obvious with Puccini. As revealed in his correspondence and noted by several commentators, he was all but obsessed with his curtains’ exact musical timing and applause-provoking effectiveness.155 At the end of act 3 of La bohème (Turin, 1896), to cite but one instance of a purposeful closing, he asked for a slow curtain during the last ten measures of the troubled lovers’ farewell, allowing about one minute to its complete closure on the pickup to the final chord. This dilatory curtain—an example of what the singing coach and Puccini’s sometime collaborator Luigi Ricci hailed as “a miracle of extended slowness”—viscerally manifests the couple’s agonizingly prolonged separation.156 In general, according to Michael Anders, the more dramatic and louder the ending, the faster Puccini’s curtain, and vice versa.157 For act openings, Puccini on the one hand continued to experiment, à la Grétry, with novel mediations between acoustic and visual impressions. In Edgar (Milan, La Scala, 1889) and La bohème, the curtain rises right with the beginning of the music onto pantomimic scenes in mid-action, thus presenting sound and sight as always already fused.158 By contrast, Il tabarro (New York, 1918) commences with explicit silence following the raising of the curtain, which emphasizes the optical dimension’s independence from the music.159 Foiling auditory expectations, this advance curtain also, as Helen Greenwald has argued, pinpoints from the start the importance of silence both for this opera’s portrayal of characters and for dramatic turning points of its plot.160 On the other hand, at times Puccini once more composed out the curtain’s opening movement. In Manon Lescaut (Turin, 1893), for example, he accompanied it with a two-measure crescendoing chromatic scale. Unlike Meyerbeer’s curtainraising tropes, though, this ascending gesture does not lead from an orchestral prelude into the first scene, thus doubling as a transition into a new music-dramatic section. Instead, just over halfway through the brief orchestral introduction, it merely interrupts the gay musical chatter momentarily. The latter immediately resumes (albeit more quietly) with its effusive initial theme, an animated scene now visualizing the public life already evoked by the music. While Wagner, as we have seen, added pantomimes to his musical scene-settings as organically as possible,

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Puccini here deliberately drew attention to the medial passage from sound to audiovision with his musically spotlighted curtain.161 More dramatically evocative is the curtain-rising motif in act 2 of Madama Butterfly (Milan, La Scala, 1904). Its blatantly Wagnerian parallel thirds ascending in the clarinets may surely reflect an opening curtain, but they also effect a shift from the previously busy musical introduction to the somber atmosphere of the second act (example 2.6).162 This curtain gives audiences a reality check, dispelling the illusory musical reverberations of Butterfly’s serene first-act mood to prepare for the sight of her very different existence three years later. These last, explicitly musicalized curtains perhaps best illustrate Puccini’s reported intention to “understand the curtain as music”163—a statement that in turn neatly summarizes the curtain’s nineteenth-century transformation from external technology into full participant in the operatic multimedia. What is more, Puccini seems to suggest that this historical change was fostered by a specific compositional treatment of the curtain: explicit curtain motifs literally rendered the curtain “as music.” Put in more Wagnerian terms, music helped redeem the curtain’s mechanical origins by suggesting itself as the curtain’s essence. Pushing further this congruence of music and curtain, a reviewer of Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande (Paris, Opéra-Comique, 1902) conversely compared this opera’s frequent symphonic interludes in their entirety (rather than just their curtain-accompanying transitional moments) to “a curtain of fine, shifting mist lit by a pale, distant star.”164 Since these interludes were composed—and, in many cases, expanded for the premiere production—to allow for complex scene changes, the notion of a musical curtain here suggested a functional equivalence more than a simple analogy, as in Adorno’s evocation of a “thin curtain, threadbare but densely woven” to describe the painful effect of the opening chord of Mahler’s First Symphony.165 Yet when thus coupled in opera with the raising or lowering of actual curtains, unequivocal musical “curtain passages” could seem to be—or make the curtain—redundant. Similar to the Reclam libretti’s streamlining of curtains, musical mickey-mousing of the curtain ran the risk of deflating its dramatic potential. It threatened to literalize its effect into a single physical movement and thus, ironically, to reaccentuate its essence as extradiegetic technology—as an external theatrical necessity briefly disrupting the musicdramatic flow. The concomitant reduction of the curtain’s expressive potential might account for Puccini’s indicating closing curtains less frequently in his later operas, where he also prescribed “fast” and “slow” openings routinely, implying that these had meanwhile become standard fare. Still, some composers and directors sought to nuance the tempi for curtains or the alignment between musical transitions and related scene changes yet further. That this was at least partly fostered by a desire to elucidate the emotional states of dramatic situations or characters is evident—even contra Wagner—in the production notes for Siegfried Wagner’s 1904 revival of Cosima Wagner’s Bayreuth

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Tannhäuser. As his assistant Theo Raven recorded, the act 1 transformation from the Venusberg to the Wartburg valley no longer occurred suddenly: “just as Tannhäuser’s awareness of his salvation from the goddess’s tentacles and his perceptivity towards his new situation set in only after some time, so correspondingly the scene changes more slowly!”166 That is to say, Siegfried Wagner replaced his father’s idea of a religious conversion—achieved, as we have seen, with an abrupt change in sets and lighting—with a more modern, pseudo-Freudian reading that rendered Tannhäuser’s outer dislocation as symbolic of an inner psychological process. A similar internal reckoning motivates the two-tiered curtain closing act 1 of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (Dresden, 1911). Six measures before the end of the Marschallin’s long orchestral reverie, the curtain begins to descend slowly, then closes fast (after about forty seconds) on the last timed beat of the final chord. This curtain not only pragmatically prevents audiences from clapping during the delicately scored final moments of the act, but also poignantly visualizes the heroine’s melancholic yet futile yearning to halt the inexorable flow of time. Such subtle psychological symbolism was the trademark of Berg, who varied the speeds and uses of curtains with unprecedented creativity and precision. For Wozzeck (Berlin, Staatsoper, 1925), that study of a paranoid pathological degeneration, Berg explicitly desired “diversity . . . in every respect,” including stage design, curtains, and transformations. Although the proscenium curtain was to be used only at the ends of acts, Berg demanded the complete visual and sonic veiling of the stage between each of the opera’s fifteen short scenes with “drop-curtains, gauze screens, blackouts (?) [sic] etc.”167 And he arranged for idiosyncratic speeds and timings of these drops around each dramatic vignette, possibly inspired by the multifarious, subtle transition effects afforded by the still recent medium of cinema.168 Lasting between one second and over a minute, Berg’s veiling mechanisms included instant curtains at the outer edges of scenes; exactly timed curtains during appropriate musical transitions; a slow “lovers’ curtain” at the end of act 1; a silent but exactly timed curtain opening act 3; curtains accompanied by corresponding orchestral glissandi; and a closing multispeed curtain in act 1, scene 4 (example 2.7): falling “initially very fast, then suddenly slowly in order to close very gradually,” this three-tiered curtain echoes the stark musical decrescendo from fortissimo to ppp. What is more, as George Perle has shown, it reflects the progression of the doctor’s mental states during the preceding scene.169 In order to codify this exacting dramaturgy, Berg notated his curtains in the score like dynamic signs or other musical directions. He thus drew the logical consequence from the growing music-dramatic integration of the curtain this chapter has traced. Not only, as Puccini proposed, did this curtain function like—and in close alignment with—music, but it also became part of the music itself, its agogic movements being subsumed into the musical flow and notation to such an extent that its physical manifestation remained secondary. Hence Berg’s vagueness

example 2.7 . Alban Berg, Wozzeck|Oper in 3 Akten (15 Szenen)|op. 7, act 1, scene 4, mm. 645–55: multispeed closing curtain. © Copyright 1926 Universal Edition A. G., Wien/UE 12100, www.universaledition.com.

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regarding the actual gauzes and fabrics, and his instruction that the curtains be directed by the conductor.170 In short, Berg completed the detechnologization of the curtain by dematerializing it: his vision for its movements became symbolically readable and abstract like a musical score. As with the Wagner curtain, this increased suppleness paradoxically required the expansion of materials and updated rigging mechanisms.171 As a means of achieving delicate graduations between obscurity and visibility, though, the curtain was fully absorbed into opera’s multimedia system. B EYO N D T H E I L LU SIO N I S T C U RTA I N

Against this background of heightened medial integration and utmost control over transitions between sound and sight, the curtain emerged as a tool also for artists who became disillusioned with everything epitomized by the Wagnerian notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk—with the objectives of a seamless, technologically flawless multimedia, deceptive scenic realism, audience absorption, and psychologically charged plots. The importance of the curtain not for enhancing but for overcoming unfettered theatrical illusionism was adumbrated in operas that (at least temporarily) broke down the fourth wall. This occurred, for instance, when composers revived an early operatic tradition of addressing the audience in an extraneous prologue performed in front of the curtain. A telling case is Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (Milan, Dal Verme, 1892), since it additionally features a playwithin-a-play. Both during the Prologue and on the diegetic stage-upon-a-stage, characters toy with and step out of the curtain, whose resulting porousness ultimately (and fatally) prevents it from clearly separating stage and “real” life in the drama, thus allowing the possibility of murder on the open (inner-diegetic) stage. Likewise inspired by the unapologetic theatricality of commedia dell’arte was Busoni’s Turandot (Zurich, 1917), whose drama unfolds around various onstage veils while a character himself draws open the curtain for act 1, scene 2: these gestures allude to—and thereby disclose—the role of shrouds in sustaining theatrical make-believe.172 In Paris the same year, Satie followed the introductory “Choral” of his and Cocteau’s one-act ballet Parade with a “Prélude du rideau rouge,” which sounded after the proscenium curtain had lifted onto a second curtain, painted by Picasso to depict allegorical themes of the ballet’s fairground plot, including lush festoons of red curtains. Even before any dancers appeared, the dual curtain thus emphasized the metatheatricality of this surrealist ballet—a piece from which Cocteau hoped “a kind of renewal of the theatre.”173 This retheatricalization of the curtain was pushed furthest by Brecht. Amid a general intellectual turn during the 1920s against Wagner and toward Neue Sachlichkeit (or a sober, matter-of-fact approach to art), the dramatist famously considered the Gesamtkunstwerk’s media fusion “witchcraft” that produced hypnosis or

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sordid intoxications of the kind Freud had classified as ersatz satisfactions—“some kind of palliative” against the difficulties of life.174 Brecht instead sought to reveal opera for what it was: no illusion but artifice, no wizardry but labor, no smooth medial surface but an agglomeration of human actions and technologies. Small wonder that the full-length velvet curtain became a red rag for him. Not only did he wrest it from its music-dramatic fusion, but he also altered its shape and function to serve his overall Verfremdung (or estrangement) of theatrical norms. For his and Weill’s Threepenny Opera (Berlin, 1928), he replaced the proscenium curtain with a “small, not too clean rag, to be opened or closed along steel strings” about two-and-a-half meters high, and to be drawn by the performers themselves.175 As he would explain in his 1951 poem “Die Vorhänge,” . . . Behind [the main curtain (den Großen Vorhang)] Clamp the steel wire and hang The lightly fluttering curtain [Gardine] . . . Depending on the respective play, it can be made From rough linen or from silk Or white or red leather, whatever. . . . And render My curtain mid-length, don’t close off the stage! Sitting back, the spectator Shall perceive the busy preparations that are Cunningly made for him . . . . . . don’t show him too much But show something! And let him observe That you don’t perform magic but Work, friends.176 Ironically, Brecht—rather than Wagner—thus became the only influential dramatist to theorize the use of the theatrical curtain. But he did so to undo its very development, during the long nineteenth century, into an integrated medium this chapter has traced. To achieve this goal, Brecht made a point of the diaphanous Filet curtain whose pointlessness Böhm’s Ring parody had derided. The intentionally malfunctioning “Brecht curtain” exhibited itself as machinery: resisting the twentieth century’s increasingly complex electrical curtain pulls, it self-confidently flaunted its own materiality and mechanism, steel wire and all. Like the dog Toto in Victor Fleming’s classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Brecht also pulled open the previously sacrosanct curtain on the techno-human origin of the theater’s seemingly magical play. Turning against the Baroque theater from which he had borrowed the curtain in the first place, Brecht simultaneously showcased and denied the latter’s ur-theatrical function of veiling the stage, channeling desires, and separating stage and audience. With Brecht, then, we

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have come full circle to the idea suggested in this book’s introduction: ultimately, all of opera’s constituent elements can be regarded as technology. Which of its parts will (and are supposed to) be perceived as artistic media rather than technics is a matter of framing and presentation, a matter that is therefore in part the curtain’s domain. No other aspect of staged opera therefore points toward the ambiguous status and multivalence of stage technologies as revealingly as does the curtain. What is more, the fact that the light-hued Brecht curtain also functioned as a screen for projections of titles, akin to those of silent movies, adds yet another twist to the curtain’s twentieth-century legacy. As screen, the curtain becomes technology in a secondary sense—a supplement to the more recent visual technologies of slide projection or film. Indeed, as William Paul has noted, the movie screen was commonly called the “curtain” through the 1910s.177 Vice versa, some silent movies of the 1920s faded their various filmic sequences in and out of darkness as if separating them by means of a drop scene. Especially when using an iris lens to unfold the picture concentrically from the center of the screen, such fades recalled (or, in fact, perfected) the parting of the Wagner curtain.178 James Whale’s 1931 horror classic Frankenstein even preceded the opening credits with a shot of a theatrical manager stepping in front of a curtain to both advertise the famous novel’s cinematic adaptation and warn audiences of its emotional intensity. In early movie theaters proper (many of which had been converted from, or modeled on, traditional theaters), the curtain meanwhile resurfaced in its more traditional lush materiality and function. By covering the screen before the show, it again enhanced audience expectations, while at the same time seeking to elevate the new filmic medium to the aesthetic (and social) status of performed theater—that is, to the realm of high art. But again, the cinematic curtain also veiled technology as such: it revealed the screen only at the moment when projections seemingly brought it to life—yet another instance of the curtain selling illusionist art as reality.179 In due course, this illusion-enhancing and expectation-mongering curtain inherited from the Baroque picture stage became outdated in cinemas. Over the last decades, even theaters and opera houses have increasingly dispensed with the proscenium curtain, at least for many Regietheater productions (thus betraying the latter’s Brechtian roots).180 One motivation for this development was a trend, in postwar theater, to abandon the proscenium stage in favor of unconventional performance spaces. Cavernous industrial sites, improvisatory studios, theaters in the round, or extended stage areas that included parts of the auditorium simply (and often intentionally) thwarted their veiling by a front curtain.181 Advances in lighting technologies for both stage area and auditorium were also partially responsible. In a darkened theater, bright electric spotlights may expose a previously dark stage (or one veiled by a translucent gauze) more abruptly than even the fastest curtain, while their sudden—and synchronized—blackout can hide the scene more swiftly. At the same time, the use of light as performative frame not only

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diminishes—even more so than the Bayreuth Festspielhaus—the visual barrier between stage and auditorium but also evades the curtain’s inherited lofty aspirations. Not coincidentally did visual artists in the 1960s similarly begin to transcend the pictorial frame, whether by dint of huge, unframed canvases, interactive installations, or a turn to performance art: means to involve the spectator that were quickly recognized (and often denounced) as theatrical.182 In opera proper, the disappearance of the curtain in emphatically interpretive stagings of older works as well as in new pieces may similarly question the boundary between art and life, drawing attention to the fact that the audience is always a cocreator of the spectacle. Much emphasized in recent performance studies, this insight flies in the face of Wagner’s call for a fully immersed and ideally passive spectator. Moreover, eliminating the curtain challenges the idea of the dramatic performance as special event, let alone the annunciation of a higher truth: with the curtain always already raised, performance becomes part of everyday life, an occurrence that may start at any moment or is, indeed, shown to be ongoing. At the same time, some postdramatic plays, installations, and performance-art pieces have tended to liberate the curtain fully from the proscenium (or any preconceived space and manner of operation), at times using it—more than even Berg— as an independent set piece or onstage character.183 As early as 1932, the opening gala of New York’s Radio City Music Hall featured a “Symphony of the Curtain” that displayed for minutes on end nothing but the world’s largest theatrical curtain and the different ways in which its thirteen electrical pulls could disclose parts or all of the stage.184 In light of so much mobility, this successor of the Wagner curtain warranted a show in its own right, offering an enacted prologue on theatricality and its technologies. With the curtain no longer taken for granted, then, added meaning is generated when it does appear—for instance as a conscious allusion to theatrical tradition, artistic idealism, or immersive viewing habits. The curtain might even parody itself. In Richard Jones’s premiere production of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Anna Nicole (London, 2011), a garishly pink curtain with kissy lips displayed sex icons around the royal coat of arms, its central corners declaring “Anna Regina.” This travesty of London’s regal Royal Opera House curtain became a preshow attraction in itself (if not in as scripted a manner as at Radio City Music Hall).185 But more than even Wagner imagined, the pink curtain also provided a commentary on both opera and heroine. Just as the very fact of an opera about Anna Nicole Smith arguably crowns the late Playboy star’s fatal striving toward larger-than-life fame, it also highlights opera’s apparent need for populist idols to rejuvenate its image. And just as Smith artificially enhanced her body, so the shrill curtain, functioning as visual aphrodisiac, parades its own artifice. With its erotically charged pink reminding us once more of Wagner’s Venusberg, what is more, the curtain’s optical prominence also heightens a sense of voyeurism, making audiences

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complicit in the very exhibitionism for which Smith became (in)famous and of which she fell a victim. In a way, then, within an increasingly saturated media culture that requires ever more antics to draw attention, this curtain remediates— or, like Neumann’s Bayreuth curtain, packages—for younger audiences the phenomenon that is twenty-first-century opera. Whether absent or present, then, the curtain functions as technology; and it does so not only for composers or stage directors but also for spectators and scholars. As this chapter has revealed, its movements, placements, timings, and material conditions form a dramaturgical spyglass onto the illusionist dramatic goals pursued onstage. Ultimately, the curtain both frames and narrates operatic ideals at large.

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London, 1855. “Tell me,” writes Wagner to his wife Minna Wagner, “who gave you the disgraceful idea that my Tannhäuser overture contains a stroke of the tam-tam? I assure you that I know nothing about it, and therefore cannot omit it to save my life.”1 Wagner’s sentiment was clear: using a tam-tam would have been unworthy of him and his opera. Insofar as we can believe his later autobiographical recollections, this distaste for the tam-tam (or what was then synonymously called gong—a large, flat metal disk that produces a deep and resonant sound of indeterminate pitch) stretched back to the beginnings of his career. As early as 1836, while planning an overture entitled “Napoléon,” Wagner ran into “the aesthetic dilemma whether I could represent the annihilating stroke of destiny that hit the Emperor in Russia by a thump on the tam-tam.”2 As he explicated with a hint of self-mockery to his second wife, Cosima Wagner, in 1869, he “began to doubt whether this was permissible in music”; and since he could not in good conscience decide on even a single gong stroke, he abandoned the composition altogether. Some years later in Paris, when experiencing a profusion of tam-tam strokes employed “very logically to a terrorizing point” in Berlioz’s 1840 Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Wagner reflected on his earlier quandary. “Music should be forceful,” Cosima Wagner reported him saying; “we have the kettledrum and the trumpet, but the tamtam is barbarism, what is needed is something of that prudent quality the Greeks call ‘sophrosyne’ [moderation], the tam-tam stroke robs music of all ideality.”3 The tam-tam evidently carried a doubly unsavory association for Wagner. On the one hand, it counted among those “special effects” (Effektmittel) that he linked to Paris and the alleged excesses of French composers.4 As we saw in the introduction, Wagner’s bugbear exemplar of such a self-serving “effect without a cause” was 109

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the electric sunrise in Meyerbeer’s Le prophète of 1849—an optical spectacle that, by drawing attention to itself, undermined opera’s ideal media fusion and instead denigrated each of the contributing art forms to mere auxiliary technologies.5 It is easy to detect a similar rationale in Wagner’s quip against the tam-tam. However “logically” utilized, its immoderate amplitude—or so we might elaborate— protruded from its musical context, thus threatening to reduce a composition from the lofty idealism of high art to the earthly reality of acoustics, from music to noise and physically palpable sound vibrations. As such, it was appropriate at most for cheap, crowd-pleasing entertainments like the French Punch and Judy show Wagner ridiculed in 1841 for providing an “excellent pretext for the incessant use of the tam-tam” to aurally depict a character’s beating.6 On the other hand, more than being a bad Parisian habit, the tam-tam’s acoustic blow to “ideality” was also connected to the instrument’s specific resonances: those unrefined overtones of noncivilized society that Wagner (at least according to Cosima Wagner) heard in the tam-tam and that he contrasted to the temperance of Greek culture—the tradition on which he proclaimed to base his own creative endeavor. In other words, a gong stroke exposed for Wagner the raw sound materials of reputedly primitive peoples and, thus, the acoustical and mechanical foundations of Western art music as well. As discussed in chapter 1, such a disclosure of an artwork’s technological condition was anathema to Wagner, dismantling as it did the illusionist and, hence, transformative function he claimed for art as a whole. If this reading of Wagner’s rhetorical tam-tam-phobia might seem hyperbolic, it was borne out by some contemporaries. Carl Maria von Weber, for instance, cited the gong as the capstone of all those vocal, orchestral, and balletic excesses that robbed French opera of naturalness and dramatic causes: his parody was uncannily prophetic of Wagner’s diatribes against Meyerbeer.7 In 1844, the Viennese journal Der Humorist mockingly declared one tam-tam stroke by Berlioz more important than all of Mozart’s works; twelve years later, music writer Eduard Maria Oettinger associated the tam-tam with Paris tout court. And by 1870, an acerbic reckoning with modern music decried the tam-tam as a mindless means to gloss over a lack of musical invention à la Meyerbeer.8 Similarly, some critics detested the crude sound of the idiophone itself, which they occasionally linked to its ostensibly inferior ethnic origin. Composer Gottfried Weber in 1830 considered gongs and cymbals not real musical instruments but “only an apparatus for making mere sound.” A Munich reviewer soon after spoke of “the abhorrently rattling Chinese tam-tam”; and Mendel’s Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon in 1878 laconically remarked that this Asian percussion instrument “has only rather recently entered the orchestra as an effective noise instrument [effektmachendes Lärminstrument], while previously it could be seen only at animal shacks during fairs.”9 Nor was such cynicism exclusive to Austro-German critics. In 1828, a

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short-lived French music journal took the tam-tam as its title, professing to make as much noise as this instrument. And music historian Albert de Lasalle in 1863 described the tam-tam, albeit more admiringly, as “a precious apparatus [engin précieux] in the orchestras”—that is, as sound technology proper.10 Many of these stereotypes smack offensively of nationalism, racism, and colonialism. Although my chapter does not set out to explore or critique such widespread attitudes as such, they must be allowed to surface if we are to fathom the cultural clichés attached to the tam-tam and hence contextualize its early operatic uses. In particular, it is the subtle yet telling links between the gong and technology that this chapter seeks to probe. As Gottfried Weber and de Lasalle implied, the tam-tam’s metallic sound and sheer loudness could evoke the mechanical, its nonperiodic vibration challenging the boundaries between what was perceived as music and noise.11 This timbral property, I will argue, created new challenges as well as opportunities for the audiovisual integration of opera’s various media while leaving the tam-tam itself roaming between orchestra pit, stage decoration, and backstage—between music, prop, and machinery. In the introduction, I explored Wagner’s suggestion that the entire orchestra might be construed as acoustic technology: a device to generate unprecedented decibels and timbres. And nineteenth-century equations of the expanding orchestra with machines were common. The newly standardized body of instruments increasingly appeared as a unified, impersonal force—an object rather than a collaborative conglomeration of individual human performers and their instruments.12 But the product of this machine was to be a homogenous soundscape whose mechanical origins should be hidden. Accordingly, as we shall see, Wagner’s issue with the tam-tam was that its technological essence, no matter how well concealed visually, revealed itself sonically. And yet, as so often with Wagner, his indignation at Minna—or the tam-tam— was more than a little disingenuous. After all, he had not shied away from employing the instrument in his earlier operas. In Rienzi (1842), true to his wish to outdo grand opéra, the tam-tam signals not one but two dramatic climaxes; and its use in Der fliegende Holländer (1843) is even more pronounced. Thereafter, it is true, both Tannhäuser in its original Dresden version of 1845/1860 and Lohengrin (1850) ascetically abstained from the acoustic aphrodisiac. But when revising Tannhäuser for what would become its infamous Paris premiere of 1861, notwithstanding his earlier protestations, Wagner voluntarily added a tam-tam stroke. Though not in the overture, it sounded—more predictably—at the Venusberg’s sudden magical disappearance at the end of act 1, scene 2.13 We might excuse this lone stroke as a mere concession to Parisian tastes: a much simpler yet seemingly significant bow to local traditions than was Wagner’s complex reworking of the preceding Venusberg scenes we witnessed in chapter 1.14 Indeed, the tam-tam duly vanished from Wagner’s final revision of Tannhäuser, the Vienna version of 1875. Likewise,

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we could consider its uses in Rienzi and Holländer a young man’s adoption of thencommon practices that the more mature composer left behind, and that he would later seek to gloss over in order to emphasize his stylistic refinement and originality. But Der Ring des Nibelungen, composed in several phases between 1853 and 1874, belies such attempts at whitewashing Wagner of the tam-tam. The instrument here appears more frequently than in any of his early operas. And this musical embrace of the gong was paralleled throughout later nineteenth-century opera. In a sense, Wagner’s tabooing of the tam-tam precisely while scoring it in the Ring was part and parcel of his larger philosophical effort to shroud the technologies on which his Gesamtkunstwerk depended. In another sense, though, this verbal rejection of the tam-tam reflected a changed musical use that was somewhat akin to the transformation of the curtain from external technology into fully participating medium. By contrast to the curtain, however, the gong’s Wagnerian metamorphosis was countered by an alternative development: some theaters continued to treat the tam-tam as stage technology proper, adding it gratuitously to older works as an all-purpose effect enhancer or acoustic shield. In order to explore this dual vacillation between integrated orchestral medium and audiovisual supplement, this chapter’s first sections attend to some of the instrument’s earliest European uses and their cultural contexts, both in and out of the opera house. Such a turn toward what media scholar Douglas Kahn has dubbed “historiographic listening” will sensitize our ears to the multifarious sonic shades, semantic implications, and practical functions the gong acquired in the theater.15 These, in turn, provide a new, historically fortified base from which to examine both Wagner’s treatment of the tam-tam and wider mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of sound in musical multimedia. The porous acoustic space navigated by the tam-tam offers a unique opportunity to (literally) sound out the liminal spheres between orchestral music, ambient sounds, and stage technologies or, more generally, between sonic and visual effects in opera. At least implicitly, then, this chapter addresses the expansion of orchestral timbres since the late eighteenth century. Long a stepchild of musicologists trading in analyses of harmony and form, this development has recently received renewed academic attention beyond localized studies of individual composers and Adorno’s ambivalent yet groundbreaking chapters on Wagner’s sonority (Klang) and color.16 Tobias Janz, for instance, has argued for the foundational contribution of the orchestra qua medium to musical meaning and structure, while Emily I. Dolan has underlined the very materiality of orchestral practice upon which the nineteenthcentury ideal of “absolute music” rested.17 Correspondingly, organology has also become newly fashionable in the context of the history of science and technology.18 Even the tam-tam itself has garnered a certain amount of scholarly commentary. This is true above all in orchestration treatises or studies of percussion instruments

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and their acoustic properties.19 Moreover, David Charlton’s pioneering work has meticulously explored the various musical and semantic uses of the instrument in the aftermath of the French Revolution, while ethnomusicologist András Varsányi has touched on its European trajectory in his monograph on the fabrication, sounds, and uses of the Javanese gong ageng.20 Historical surveys of the tam-tam’s integration in European art music, however, tend to be brief and to focus on select historical moments, particularly its early migration into French Revolutionary music and its symbolism in Mahler’s works;21 the gong’s broader cultural and theatrical peregrinations have only tangentially entered historiography. Similarly, what we might call the incidental sonic dimension of operatic production has rarely been addressed, let alone considered part of an opera’s aesthetic conception. Representational sound effects such as thunder, wind, and rain, along with their enabling mechanics, are commonplace in operatic histories. But noise— “that constant grating sound generated by the movement between the abstract and empirical”—has tended to be either subsumed into music or filtered out of opera’s media configuration like outdoor traffic or coughing audience members; in R. Murray Schafer’s famously quotidian definition, “noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.”22 More specifically, to adopt words with which Kahn has described the traditional neglect in academia of realities of noise, we might say that seemingly nonaesthetic and not strictly illustrative acoustic events have tended to become lost in a process of abstraction and purification of theatrical sounds; and this process is related to the everyday habit of “sonic reduction” that Nina Sun Eidsheim has recently described as “the tendency to constrain our understanding of sound through previously defined referents.”23 And yet, no operatic production can happen without a whole spectrum of noises on and around the stage. To acknowledge this fact widens opera’s aural sphere from intentional tones to a holistic space between acoustics and music that media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst has conceptualized as “the sonic” (das Sonische).24 The tam-tam is particularly suited to open our ears to the sonorous gray zone of stage technologies because of its border-crossing between aesthetic sound and what was commonly considered noise—the unpleasant “rattling” described above. Potentially the loudest musical instrument known to nineteenth-century listeners, it also moved between various cultural arenas: from curiosity cabinets and upperclass households to the laboratories of natural philosophers, the tam-tam’s novel and distinct sound engendered frequent commentaries and experiments. These allow us paradigmatically to trace the processes by which meanings became attached to specific sounds, and what media historian Lisa Gitelman has called “protocols” developed around new technologies in opera.25 We must attend to all such resonances if we want to understand both Wagner’s voiced rebuff and his musical embrace of this idiophone—if, that is, we want to listen to nineteenthcentury opera and its frequent gong strokes with historically informed ears.

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E XO T IC A L LU R E

Before the 1780s—and, for the majority of the reading public, long thereafter—the tam-tam was known in Europe mostly from ethnographic studies or travelogues. András Varsányi has traced descriptions of Asian gongs in European literature back to the sixteenth century, and as European nations expanded their global trade during the late eighteenth century, testimonies began to proliferate.26 But the use of a wide range of names often renders the exact kind of instrument unclear. Borrowed from Malaysian, the onomatopoetic term gong entered English usage and, thence, other European languages toward the end of the sixteenth century. The term tamtam seems to have joined somewhat later, erroneously adapted from the Malaysian name tammittam for a frame drum. In the eighteenth century, when the instrument made its first appearances in European musical dictionaries, it was frequently related to cymbals, which were more commonly known through the popular Janissary bands that had been introduced to Western music in the late seventeenth century. Other monikers were Chinese gong or beffroi—traditionally the French term for belfry that was also applied to tocsins.27 This lack of terminological specificity was exacerbated by a vagueness of geographic referents, with “Indian” being a common denominator for anything loosely Asian. Thus, in 1732, Johann Gottfried Walther offered as synonyms Gong, Gonggong, or Gomgom for what he described as being “for the Indians a cymbal which one beats with a wooden mallet, whereby, because it is made from bell metal, it produces a bright sound [Laut].”28 Nor did lexical confusion end with the tam-tam’s growing popularity. Until well into the twentieth century, composers frequently used “gong” and “tam-tam” interchangeably to refer to either pitched (bossed) or nonpitched (flat) gongs, of which only the latter are now usually called tam-tams. These are the large, only faintly domed metal disks that today have a diameter of 50–150 cm (20–60 in.) and a slightly bent, shallow rim, are typically suspended from a mount, and produce a “deep and clear” sound of indeterminate pitch and unusually extended, blossoming resonance. By contrast, the term gong now tends to be reserved for those bossed and often smaller gongs that are tuned to defined pitches.29 Following nineteenthcentury conventions (and particularly the English usage of gong as umbrella term), though, I shall use both “gong” and “tam-tam” to denote the nonpitched tam-tam, as opposed to pitched gongs, which I will label as such. When discussing gongs, travelers rarely neglected these instruments’ astonishing volume, with ascriptions of “hellish noise” already found in the earliest references.30 Rather than being depreciative, though, such comments usually expressed awe at the instrument’s amplitude and led to remarks on its uses. In 1797, for instance, Sir George Leonard Staunton, secretary to the first British embassy to the Chinese emperor, reported: “No guns are fired in China by way of signal; but circular rimmed plates of copper, mixed with tin, or zinc, to render it more sonorous,

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are struck with wooden mallets, and emit a noise almost deafening to those who are near to it, and which is heard to a considerable distance. This instrument, which the Chinese call loo, and the Europeans, in China, gong, from the name it bears in other parts of the East, is generally used upon the water.”31 Apart from Staunton’s openness towards the gong, two aspects are interesting. First, the instrument appeared remarkably (and, as we shall see, deceptively) simple in construction, though Staunton—like most commentators—did not indicate a size. Second, he perceived it as a kind of siren, less a musical instrument than a scientific or technical device.32 John Barrow, another member of the British diplomatic expedition to China of 1792–94, in 1804 offered a broader panorama of gong functions. His widely read travelogue mentioned navigation, religious ceremonies, solstices, funerals, and the military as opportunities for the Chinese to sound “the sonorous and deafening gong”: with Chinese porcelain and visual art already fashionable across Europe, both accounts bespeak an impartial fascination with the gong in its native culture.33 It seems to have been Britain, Europe’s leading seafaring nation, where nonvoyaging citizens could experience tam-tams in their (metallic) flesh more easily than elsewhere in the West. Brought home by explorers or merchants among other sensory goods and curiosities, “Chinese gongs” enjoyed a special status as exotic sonic objects that could be demonstrated to great effect. In 1785, the Scottish lawyer and diarist James Boswell obtained a sizeable exemplar from a tradesman with properties in the East Indies and duly entertained the “wondering ears” of “the lord mayor and aldermen of London” with it.34 Not only had most of his distinguished company never heard what Boswell described as a “vibrating bell,” but he also boasted of owning “one of the largest and best that ever was brought to England,” its sound being both louder and more melodious “than that of the great bell of St. Paul’s.”35 Other gongs belonged to Staunton as well as the botanist, explorer, and president of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks, a participant of Captain James Cook’s first voyage and an acquaintance of both Staunton and Boswell.36 Less elite members of British society also stood their chance of encountering gongs. According to a cynical opinion piece on Boswell’s gong stunt, “every East India captain, for the last century, ha[d] been provided” with a gong; and these instruments—though likely of smaller size and dubious sound—found their ways into various homes and public places.37 In 1804, London’s popular Bartholomew Fair featured among fire-eaters, jesters, and conjurers the “inimitable gong.”38 Six years later, a French tourist to the Lake District was astonished to find a gong in a local museum; and by 1815, one Susan Steady bewilderedly recounted her visit to a mansion where “the tremendous roar of what I have been since informed is called a ‘gong’ ” called her hosts to dinner.39 Dinner gongs became more widespread by the 1830s and a European-wide bourgeois custom in the later nineteenth century—one to which even the elderly Wagner fell prey on occasion.40 Yet not

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satisfied with domesticizing the foreign import, the British marine also dabbled in its use as navigational signal to warn of approaching steam boats, appropriating the ancient exotic instrument in the context of Western industrial technologies.41 Unsurprisingly given its evident appeal in Britain, the tam-tam soon made it onto the stage as well. Dramaturgically, this step was likely motivated by precisely the voyaging context in which the British had first encountered the gong. As with curtain indications, however, it is difficult to chart exactly when and where the tam-tam sounded in operas or other theatrical enterprises, whether for the first time or at all. This is partly because of the dearth of reliable source materials already lamented in chapter 2. For some operas (as well as most other shows involving music), no full scores were published. And even if they were, the tamtam was frequently indicated only in manuscript performance materials or orchestral parts of specific theaters, added or omitted—as we shall see—depending on availability and local customs. The terminological imprecision further muddies the waters. If we want to discern the tam-tam’s sound in nineteenth-century opera, then, we must not only listen historiographically but also read contextually. Thus, one of the tam-tam’s earliest theatrical uses may have been alluded to by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, merchant turned lieutenant-governor of Java (and later founder of Singapore). In 1817, he described the sound of gongs in Java as “very superior to that which was admitted in the terrific scenes of the serious ballet representing the death of Captain Cook.”42 He might have referred to either the popular pantomime Omai, or, A Trip Round the World by John O’Keefe with music by William Shield, which premiered at Covent Garden in 1785 and included an ode commemorating Captain Cook’s murder six years previously, or (more likely in view of its title) the “grand serious-pantomimic-ballet” The Death of Captain Cook, an adaptation of a French ballet that opened at Covent Garden four years later and was performed into the nineteenth century. Although the use of a gong has not been verified, both shows included a number of native instruments for local color. And since, as Roger Fiske has argued, British theaters tended to be more adventuresome than mainland European ones regarding instrumentation and its improvisation, a gong may well have been added, whether for the premieres or later.43 This was certainly the case with the lavishly decorated comic opera The Siege of Belgrade about the 1789 Austrian-Turkish conflict, premiered at Drury Lane (London’s other patent theater) on New Year’s Day of 1791. Its pasticcio score by Stephen Storace likewise did not indicate a tam-tam; but a review mentioned “a fatal gong,” heard three times to herald an impending execution at the hands of the Turkish commander.44 By 1806, the tam-tam sounded yet more fittingly at Drury Lane in the “dramatic opera” The Travellers, or Music’s Fascination. Its unlikely plot unabashedly cashed in on the contemporary vogue for exotic travels: act 1 plays in China, whose emperor sends his love-obsessed son on an educational world tour; lo and behold, the journey ends in England, where the prince decides to stay. In line with the spectacular

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sets and costumes for which the production became known, this narrative pretext allowed composer Domenico Corri to infuse his score with all manner of exotic musical referents, proudly identified in the vocal score and first paraded in the overture. Not coincidentally, the latter’s depiction of China commences with three loud gong strikes and a pentatonic melody occasionally punctuated by the gong (figure 3.1). For the first-act scene at the Chinese Court, Corri similarly introduced and interspersed a chorus based on a Chinese hymn with vociferous solo gong strikes.45 True to this apparent desire for ethnographically faithful sounds, the gong is henceforth silent, giving way to a Janissary band and a number of European folk styles rounded off by “Rule, Britannia.” In a sense, then, the gong functioned no differently on London stages around 1800 than it did in the curiosity cabinets of the likes of Lord Boswell. It furnished a putatively authentic acoustic effect to lend credence to the theatrical representation of Eastern (and allegedly less refined) lands— a sound clearly distinct and carefully separated from the Western idiom of the “proper” musical score.46 The tam-tam was a tool for rendering the Other: a technology of cultural colonialism. As such, it could but be noticed. In the theater, though, the tam-tam quickly proved expedient for enhancing wondrous situations beyond oriental settings. As early as 1786, Covent Garden produced a pantomime that sought to update this genre from its traditional Harlequinades to the latest fascination with gothic fiction. Programmatically titled The Enchanted Castle, it brought “upon the Stage somewhat of the Effects which may be produced by Midnight Horror, and Agency supernatural,” complete with such audiovisual effects as “the Whistling of hollow Winds, the Clapping of Doors, Gigantic Forms, and visionary Gleams of Light.”47 And this time, Covent Garden composer Shield definitely “derive[d] considerable effect from the gong.”48 His score features a solo strike for what a group of onstage magicians describes as “the woeful knell” announcing the intrusion of shipwrecked mortals—Harlequin and Colombine—onto their enchanted island; and the instrument was likely used elsewhere as well.49 Here, the gong marked not an exotic ambience strictly speaking, but a more generally Other realm, whether moral, ethnic, or magical—and with it both fascination for and apprehension at anything foreign. Yet if the tam-tam’s still novel sound was self-explanatory in oriental settings, in Shield’s fantastic context it startled the onstage characters as well. And as the characters in turn explained its meaning, they helped inscribe an association of the tam-tam with fatal calamities. This link would soon solidify in French opera. R EVO LU T IO NA RY S OU N D

Despite the early theatrical outings of the tam-tam in 1780s London, its first sounding in Western art music has usually been linked to Napoleonic Paris, where the gong’s ethnic origin proved much less significant for its creative adoption.

figure 3.1 . Domenico Corri, The Travellers, or Music’s Fascination, a “dramatic opera” premiered at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1806. The vocal score (London: HayMarket, [1806]) renders the gong strikes—acoustic signifiers of China—as low octave beats on the tonic, the instrumentation clarified verbally at the overture’s opening. Later strikes are no longer marked. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University.

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figure 3.2 . Tam-tam used when François-Joseph Gossec’s Marche lugubre (1790) was performed in Paris on April 4, 1791, as part of the funeral cortège for Mirabeau. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Building on nineteenth-century commentators, David Charlton has traced its earliest French use to François-Joseph Gossec.50 Well versed in both opera and symphonic music, Gossec started after the 1789 Revolution to write grand commemorative works—some of them to be performed outdoors—and to direct the music corps of the Garde nationale. In this context, he wrote a Marche lugubre to honor the victims of the Nancy Mutiny on September 20, 1790, and this short piece prominently included the tam-tam next to the equally novel but short-lived tuba curva and buccin (two rather loud attempts at reconstructing antique brass instruments). A solo gong repeatedly alternated with brief wind phrases and later joined with them for languishing, accented harmonic suspensions. The march was performed at several further ceremonies throughout the 1790s, most famously at the stately funeral of Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, an influential figure of the Revolution, in 1791.51 A contemporary engraving of this event documents a medium-sized tam-tam suspended from a horizontal pole that is carried by two uniformed members of the music corps as part of the elaborate funeral cortege (figure 3.2): the instrument could hardly have received a more prominent aural and visual introduction to Parisian society.

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Indeed, as Charlton has shown, the Marche lugubre gave rise to a French tradition of sporting the tam-tam in pompous works for public events. Gossec himself reemployed it in a similar (though less popular) Marche funèbre of 1793, which opened with two solo strikes.52 Around this time, Cherubini joined the Garde nationale’s music corps; and, in 1795, both he and Gossec were appointed inspectors of teaching at the newly formed Paris Conservatory alongside Joseph Méhul and Jean-François Le Sueur, in recognition of their efforts at patriotic music. It seems hardly coincidental, therefore, that all four composers now applied the tamtam. In Méhul’s Chant national of 1800 to celebrate Bastille Day, according to Charlton, a single solo strike acoustically symbolizes the death of a young general, with the fatal cannon shot rendered by a preceding beat of the bass drum.53 Cherubini used the tam-tam more extensively—with thirteen mostly sf solo strikes—in his Hymne du Panthéon of 1794 for the transferal of the remains of Jean-Paul Marat (a radical revolutionary who had been assassinated the previous year) and again in the reorchestrated 1797 version of his Marche funèbre sur la mort du Général Hoche for a performance at the Opéra.54 Thus was the gong’s fresh and powerful sonority harnessed jingoistically, a single blossoming strike sufficing either to offset—even replace—entire orchestral phrases or to endow them with a resonant grounding. From this stentorian exposure of the tam-tam in solemn ceremonial music, it was acoustically a small step—if aesthetically a large leap—to the infamous fortissimo solo stroke that opened the “Dies irae” of Cherubini’s C-minor Requiem in 1817. Although this mass was written for a national function as well, it likely marked the first appearance of a tam-tam both in traditional sacred music and in church; as such, it piqued commentators for decades to come.55 Not so Le Sueur’s student Berlioz, who proudly reported having garnished the last judgment’s mention in his juvenile Messe solennelle of 1825 with “a coup de tam-tam so rude that the entire church [Saint-Roch] trembled.”56 That this ostensibly did not go down well with (particularly female) listeners did not deter the composer from intensifying the ploy in his 1837 Grande messe des morts, another government commission. Here, tam-tam and cymbals highlight two fortissimo chords: one to initiate the majestic “Judex ergo” section of the “Tuba mirum,” the other to stress a sudden move to the flat supertonic at the climax of the “Lacrimosa,” right before a repeat of the muchemphasized word “judicandus.” Both strikes, then, once more bolstered the terror of doomsday.57 The apex of grand funerary works with tam-tams came with the opening “Marche funèbre” of Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the July Revolution in 1840. In the outer sections of this extended movement, Berlioz delivered altogether sixteen strikes individually or in pairs—some as part of fortissimo tutti downbeats with cymbal crashes, others offset from these by half a measure, if never entirely alone— until a series of strikes prepares for the final chord. Small wonder that Wagner experienced the tam-tam in this work as both logical and terrifying. Small wonder

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also that the predominant musical association of the tam-tam in early nineteenthcentury France was not with the exotic but with death. True, a 1790 review of Gossec’s Marche lugubre noted the “shrill noise” (bruit aigu) of the “Arabic” instrument that fostered “the saddest feelings” and devotion (Wagner’s charge of “barbarism” is close at hand). But lugubre, funeraire, and terrible were the words most frequently evoked by French writers for the sound of the gong in Western music.58 Unlike in Britain, it seems to have been above all this Revolutionary funereal connection—that is, an already acculturated context—that impelled the tam-tam’s migration into French opera as well. In 1790, as Thomas Betzwieser has shown, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais and Antonio Salieri explicated the political slant of their exotic 1787 rescue opera Tarare by adding a concluding divertissement. This lavish spectacle depicted the title hero’s coronation, following his moral and military victory over the tyrant king, and it featured a series of symbolic marches on aspects of political liberty that ended with a funeral march admonishing its abuse. Although the music has not survived, Beaumarchais’s libretto instructed for “a group of priests of death” to be “preceded by a TAM-TAM or Indian bell suspended and carried by two priests, forming a sort of tocsin”—a touch likely inspired by the fact that Beaumarchais himself owned such an instrument.59 Given the increasingly aggressive use of the bass drum during the preceding numbers, Betzwieser has suggested that an actual tam-tam was indeed used to cap this scene at the revised opera’s premiere at the Paris Opéra in July 1790.60 The divertissement would not only have preceded the first performance of Gossec’s Marche lugubre by three months, but also uncannily anticipated the gong’s appearance in Mirabeau’s funeral cortege of the following year. The tam-tam thus audiovisually signposted Napoleon’s intermingling of the theatrical and political stages. A similar crossover between Revolutionary commemorations and opera occurred at the Théâtre Feydeau in October 1793, in a Roméo et Juliette opera by the young composer Daniel Steibelt. After Juliette’s simulated death, the last act opens in the Capulets’ sepulcher—and for this tomb scene alone, Steibelt scored a beffroi. Notated as c on its own staff with a bass clef but no accidentals (thus clearly indicating a low, nonpitched percussion instrument), it delivers altogether four strokes in the outer sections of a slow ternary instrumental introduction to a lamenting C-minor chorus. Although, as mentioned, beffroi was an ambiguous term assigned by some later composers to bells independently of the gong, in this case it likely indicated a tam-tam. Not only did a scientific observer in 1812 commend the successful opera as an opportunity to experience that instrument,61 but the fact that Gossec’s Marche funèbre premiered at the same theater just over a month later also suggests that a tam-tam must have been available at this venue. Furthermore, the antiphonal use of the beffroi resembles that of the gong in Gossec’s Marche lugubre, with which Steibelt may well have been familiar, given that he had moved to Paris precisely in 1790.62 In the fictional world of opera, then,

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Juliette’s passing was mourned like that of a public hero in 1790s Paris: Steibelt clearly transplanted the sounds of a Revolutionary obsequy to the stage. And this transfer was validated when, in October 1797, both the Opéra and the Théâtre Feydeau were tasked with staging ceremonies to honor the late general Louis-Lazare Hoche. As scenery for the newly commissioned music (including Cherubini’s Marche funèbre), the Feydeau used none other than the act 3 sets of Steibelt’s opera, adorned with military insignia and the tricolor; and its epitaphic tableaux were heralded by ample “coups de tam-tam.”63 The gong thus helped conjure the official atmosphere of the new French Republic and its bombastic state occasions, setting the scene acoustically just as funereal props and national colors did visually. A pivot between political rites and stage spectacles, the tam-tam became an emblem of Revolutionary power and heroism, its novel and astounding volume—just like Napoleon himself—commanding respect and awe. D E AT H A N D T H E U N C A N N Y

It is obvious from the above vignettes that the gong fulfilled very different sociocultural roles in late eighteenth-century London and Paris. Accordingly, it assumed different meanings in each city when migrating into the theater. Once treading the boards, however, the tam-tam quickly outgrew these initial connotations. And as with the curtain, it was particularly in French opera that composers through the midnineteenth century began to adopt the tam-tam for a number of specific (if often overlapping) dramatic situations. Since these uses expanded the gong’s semantic implications and, thereby, the coeval cultural perception of the tam-tam, it is worth discussing a few examples each for what might be called various tam-tam topoi. First, the tam-tam’s mortuary subtext grew beyond actual obsequies to a variety of moments associated with death or mortal fear. In what was likely the gong’s next operatic appearance in the Théâtre Feydeau following Steibelt, it sounded five times in Télémaque, a 1796 tragédie lyrique by Le Sueur. Near the end of act 1, the horrified title hero finds himself stranded on the island of Calypso, where he laments the silence that is interrupted only by “the lugubrious echo . . ., a confused noise of water . . . and the cries of sinister birds.” Right after this verbal evocation of a foreign ambient soundscape, as Charlton has noted, deliberately spaced pianissimo gong strikes enhance a suddenly subdued and chromatically enriched predominant passage during which Télémaque admits the “new terror” that grasps his soul.64 Beyond the tam-tam’s established overtones of death, Le Sueur here employed the instrument also to render the desolate nature that poses this mortal threat. Subtly embedded into the orchestral fabric (only the last strike underlines a loud tutti outburst), the gong’s arcane sound thus functioned diegetically. In what we might dub a hypermedial gesture, Le Sueur both drew attention to and exploited the still unfamiliar resonance of the tam-tam.

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More literally, Le Sueur appropriated—and highlighted—the gong’s lethal association in his “tragédie lyrique-religieuse” La mort d’Adam, which premiered at the Opéra in 1809. Here, a single fortissimo stroke on the fateful exclamation “je meurs” (“I am dying”) to a dominant seventh chord in the full orchestra plus thunder machine marks the precise moment at which the first man breathes his last.65 This isolated engagement of the instrument set a precedent for the use of a single vociferous thump to acoustically annunciate someone’s impending or actual exitus, as would be the case in the finales of Rossini’s Semiramide (premiered in Venice, Teatro La Fenice, in 1823) or Donizetti’s La favorite (Paris, Opéra, 1840). Repeated tam-tam strikes sometimes underscored more elaborate death scenes, such as the orchestral conclusion of the dual execution at the end of Halévy’s La juive (Paris, Opéra, 1835), the march of the condemned Christians to their deaths at the end of Donizetti’s Poliuto (Naples, San Carlo, 1848; revised as Les martyrs at the Opéra, 1840), or during the vestal virgin Emilia’s procession to her live burial in Mercadante’s La vestale (Naples, San Carlo, 1840). So common did the fatal gong stroke become that it provided ample fodder for metatheatrical satire. In 1821, the title character of Ferdinando Paër’s comic opera Le maître de chapelle (Paris, Opéra-Comique, 1821) envisaged the long-awaited Milanese premiere of his opera Cleopatre with a tam-tam to announce the death of Marc Anthony.66 And in a Berlin comedy of 1836, a heartbroken character wryly called for an Allegro furioso et infernale with a “thump on the tam-tam!”67 Thus did the gong’s otherworldly power to capture the enormity of death spread from political commemorations in Napoleonic Paris to all manner of staged demises across Europe. A second, if closely related, context in which the gong became a common operatic accessory was that of evoking archaic peoples—if rarely, as in the early British examples, of specifically Eastern cultures. No matter that the instrument hailed from Asia: after 1804, when Napoleon’s newly established empire lessened restraints on the Opéra’s subject matters, the tam-tam helped establish the couleur locale of various ancient civilizations that—next to the familiar figures of Greco-Roman myth or history—began to populate the stage.68 This became evident in Le Sueur’s Ossian, ou Les bardes of 1804, the first work premiered at the Opéra after Napoleon’s coronation, and the first opera to tap into the contemporary fad for James Macpherson’s pseudo-Gaelic epic of 1760.69 To evoke its legendary Celtic setting, Ossian’s hall of the bards featured among various “mysterious” objects “prophetic harps” and “the Shield of seven voices” (le Bouclier aux sept voix)—two Caledonian ritual instruments prominently featured by Macpherson.70 Rendering the former was easy enough (though Le Sueur demanded an unprecedented twelve harpists).71 But for the Shield, the composer placed a tam-tam in the wings, where it sounded exclusively in connection with an onstage buckler. This was beaten seven times in act 3 while the bellicose bards prophesied death to their oppressors. For each strike, minor or diminished harp arpeggios enhanced the tam-tam’s

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extended resonance and merged both characteristic timbres; in keeping with the growing dramatic tension, the gong was to crescendo from a first feeble sound to the last, spaced-out fortissimo strike.72 That the onstage beating of the Shield was thus to be “imitated” (that is, acoustically rendered) by the offstage gong was explicated in the stage directions, as if to ensure that spectators would relate the visual object to the unusual offstage sound and vice versa. In this sense, the gong behaved like a hidden acoustic amplifier, lending reverberation to the onstage action. The importance of this envoicing was articulated, in another hypermedial ploy, by the chief bard himself when instructing his companions to “beat the terrible buckler, make it ring out the seven voices of death.”73 With the link between Shield and diegetic sound thus established both audiovisually and verbally, the tam-tam could later sound “in the distance” without the buckler being visible for the Caledonians’ bewailing of Ossian’s impending execution.74 Considering both the recent tradition of Revolutionary music and the gong’s novelty at the Opéra, Le Sueur could not have chosen a more fitting instrument to join the harps as sonic prop. Or so at least in theory. In practice, the tam-tam may have fallen short of its warmongering task: instead of a shield, one parody of Ossian enlisted a casserole, whose sound was duly ridiculed as anything but frightening.75 But even if the Opéra’s tam-tam really failed to impress audiences (possibly due to the available instrument, as we shall see), the parody testifies to the attention garnered by its timbre as well as its use as spatial sound effect—that is, as sonic technology. Indeed, the Opéra-Comique (at the former Théâtre Feydeau) promptly rehashed the combination of Ossianic plot and diegetic tam-tam in Méhul’s one-act Uthal of 1806. Three solo strikes of decreasing loudness here announce the war hymn of the bards. Each strike is prolonged with a fermata and followed by a pause, allowing the tam-tam to blossom; and the Caledonians this time describe its “abhorrent sound” as “the voice of war.”76 In both Ossianic operas, then, the contemporary perception of the gong’s timbre as strange and ominous, as well as its new association not merely with death but with ancient war rituals, was fostered by the onstage characters themselves. Yet although both Ossian and, to a lesser extent, Uthal were relatively successful during the empire (the former’s premiere had been ordered by Napoleon himself), neither seems to have popularized the operatic use of the tam-tam outside of Paris.77 This deed was achieved instead by Spontini’s La vestale, premiered as this composer’s debut at the Opéra in 1807. In its act 2 finale, Spontini transferred the tam-tam to a pre-Christian rite in classical Rome. The vestal virgin Julia is condemned to death for having amorously neglected the sacred flame. When the high priest pronounces this “terrible anathema,” the orchestral accompaniment is briefly suspended and a fff solo gong stroke from the wings aurally hammers home his sentence (example 3.1).78 At least for post-Revolutionary French audiences, the tam-tam also—like a timbral leitmotif—alluded to the verdict’s fatal implication.

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As Jacques Bins, comte de Saint-Victor (none other than the librettist of Uthal) observed, “one shudders at this thundering voice of the Pontiff when he belts out the terrible anathema to a ghastly coup of the strepitous bronze, with the timbre of death.”79 Accordingly, the tam-tam sounds again at the musical climax of the ensuing chorus of priests and virgins, the stage direction indicating that, at this strike, “the high priest throws a black veil over Julia’s head,” a symbol of her condemnation and her ensuing social—if not yet physical—demise.80 Here, it was not the remarks of characters that explained the sound of the gong. Rather, the tam-tam itself could be heard as an expository comment on the stage action. An apparent afterthought (the tam-tam was penciled into the performance score), this close conjunction of a few well-placed gong strokes with emblematic visual actions and dramatic peripeties—all in the context of grand ceremonial music—was so viscerally effective that it gave contemporaries “the creeps.”81 And with La vestale’s quick circulation across Europe, it set a precedent for the sparing but carefully calculated use of the tam-tam to reinforce an opera’s dramatic pinnacles per se. This influence is most obvious in scenes directly modeled on Spontini. In 1824, Rodolphe Kreutzer adopted the gong strike in Ipsiboë when a black veil is thrown over the allegedly guilty titular princess.82 In the act 3 finale of La juive, Halévy enlisted three strikes for Cardinal Brogni’s extended anathematization of Rachel, Eléazar, and Léopold. Not surprisingly, Mercadante’s La vestale followed suit; and even Wagner’s first-ever use of the tam-tam (in act 4 of Rienzi) was obviously indebted to La vestale. We can still hear echoes of this tradition in the denunciation of the illicit lovers ending act 2 of Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles (1863), the bloodthirsty Brahman choruses calling for the death of Vasco da Gama in act 4 of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865), the two strikes during Radames’s conviction in act 4 of Verdi’s Aida (1871), or the choral curse in the council chamber scene of his revised Simon Boccanegra, act 2 (1881). In all these situations, the tam-tam sufficed to cast acoustic doom over the outlawed characters, its sound alone portending that their hours were numbered. Itself denounced by many nineteenth-century critics, the thundering gong became a sonic token of social, religious, or political damnation. From this cluster of deadly tam-tam topoi, two further (and intersecting) semantic traditions emerged. On the one hand, one or more loud gong strikes would frequently come to signal a call to arms, even independently of religious settings. This was the case, for example, in the act 1 finale of Rossini’s Ricciardo e Zoraide (Naples, San Carlo, 1818), the act 2 finale of his Le siège de Corinthe (Paris, Opéra, 1826), and the act 3 finale of Berlioz’s Les Troyens (Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 1863).83 On the other hand, the gong could enhance generally foreign atmospheres, whether or not these were bellicose. In the act 1 finale of Norma (Milan, La Scala, 1831), Bellini called his title heroine to her abhorred sacred duties with altogether five loud gong strikes representing, à la Ossian, the “sacred bronzes” of the Druids.84 More aggressively, Spontini himself amplified the tam-tam’s (re)exoticization

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in his next opera, Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête de Mexique (Paris, Opéra, 1809). As in Ossian, the tam-tam is associated with the more archaic people among two warring nations. Yet here, it partakes (incessantly so) in an offstage wind and percussion band complete with tambourines, cymbals, and bass drum. The score leaves no doubt about the purpose of this noisy orchestra’s exaggerated alla turca style, with its constant percussive pulse, parallel minor-mode thirds, augmented seconds, acciaccaturas and all: it is to represent “barbaric music from afar” (Musique barbare dans le lointaine)—the imagined dances and marches of the Aztecs, soon to be conquered (and silenced) by Spain. Regular offstage strikes by tam-tam and bass drum to accented string accompaniment similarly introduce and punctuate a revenge choir of Aztec priests and, later, a sanguinary one by the Mexican population.85 Never exposed by itself, in short, the tam-tam helps establish a loud and unrefined couleur locale within an infamously grandiose score. One could well imagine this use to have fueled Wagner’s view of the instrument as barbarous, and it might have been for more than political reasons that Spontini’s later revisions of the opera significantly reined in these bellicose scenes, including the tam-tam.86 Still, Fernand Cortez enacted the tam-tam’s integration into a specific ensemble, prefiguring—however distastefully—its absorption into the standard European orchestra around the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, composers also expanded the association of the gong with the otherworld we first encountered in London. A telling example is Kreutzer’s La mort d’Abel (Paris, Opéra, 1810). Although clearly related to Le Sueur’s La mort d’Adam, it made the tam-tam herald not Abel’s passing but Cain’s fratricidal decision. During a monologue in which Cain ponders an ominous dream, a solo strike enhances the word “l’Enfer” (hell), marking both the evil that will cause death and the means by which this will be achieved: with the sound of the tam-tam, Cain picks up the metal club delivered to him from Satan.87 As in Le Sueur’s operas, then, the gong’s lugubrious sonority is coupled with a dramatic keyword (what Verdi would later call parola scenica) and an instructive stage action, both of which specify its meaning. But the latter shifted from death toward an even worse threat—a diabolic realm far beyond the uncanny islands of Télémaque and The Enchanted Castle. With the rise of fantastical subjects in the wake of Romanticism, this association of the gong with everything demonic, magic, or destructive would soon proliferate, often eliciting more (and sometimes subtler) tam-tam strikes than in the ritualistic contexts discussed above. This trend became manifest when Rossini first reached for the tam-tam. As with detailed curtain instructions, it was no coincidence that he did so when writing for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, starting with Armida in 1817. French culture had recently been thriving there under the governance of Napoleon’s brother-in-law Gioachino Murat, king of Naples from 1808 until Napoleon’s abdication in 1815. The Neapolitan-trained Spontini’s La vestale in particular enjoyed an exceptionally

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successful run of performances from 1811 on.88 Rossini’s inaugural commission was to open the rebuilt San Carlo; and the traditional, sumptuous subject of the Saracen sorceress Armida lent itself splendidly to demonstrate the theater’s state-of-the-art mechanical and orchestral forces, which were preeminent among Italian theaters. What is more, the plot was adapted by Giovanni Schmid, the Italian translator of La vestale.89 As if to one-up Spontini, Rossini garnished Armida’s tempestuous finale with no fewer than thirty-six loud downbeat gong strikes to send his raging sorceress off into the air, while obliging demons destroy her magical realm.90 Rossini’s tam-tam, in other words, simultaneously trumpeted the effects of a supernatural power and its undoing. At the same time, some contemporaries received it as part of Rossini’s own musical magic, a sign of both his modernity and his dubious predilections: its generous application only furthered his disrepute as the noisiest living composer—even among French critics, who (unlike their Germanic colleagues) thus deflected attention from French opera’s own dalliance with the instrument.91 Henceforth, the tam-tam was free to indicate not just death and doom, but also the waning of black magic. This was the case with the three strokes on powerful orchestral chords that emphasize the triple breaking of the enchanted branch in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, act 4 (Paris, Opéra, 1831), or the departures of the three apparitions during the act 3 witches’ chorus of Verdi’s Macbeth (Florence, Teatro della Pergola, 1847).92 More commonly, the tam-tam would accompany the appearances of occult creatures. In the act 1 finale of Rossini’s Semiramide, a series of loud strikes enhances first the rumblings in the murdered King Nino’s tomb and then the emergence of his ghost. Marschner’s romantic opera Der Vampyr (Leipzig, 1828) acoustically spotlights the vampire’s first entrance with seven vociferous gong strikes plus thunderstorm. And the same combination underscores the climax of a demonic offstage chorus (with Cortez-like banda) in act 3 of Robert le diable, just as the satanic Bertram enters and flames shoot up. More eerily, Meyerbeer’s infamous cortege of deceased nuns contains five ppp strokes (their softness ensured by the instruction barely to touch the instrument), one at the end of every other musical phrase on a crescendoing brass chord that allows for—even requires—the tamtam’s sound to blossom (example 3.2).93 Thus did the gong musically render necromancy, forming a dark acoustic halo around all things satanic. So pronounced was its effect in the widely popular Robert le diable that Berlioz, in his influential orchestration treatise of 1843, hailed Meyerbeer’s “Procession of Nuns” for proving that “exposed pianissimo strokes on the tam-tam, with their gloomy reverberations, are no less alarming” than the “terrifying” tremor caused by loud strokes plus brass chords. As had his colleague Jean-Georges Kastner six years earlier, Berlioz accordingly recommended the tam-tam not just for “scenes of mourning” but also for “the dramatic depiction of extreme horror.”94 Consequentially, Berlioz himself immediately applied quiet strikes to the “Chorus of Shades” in his monodrama Lélio (composed 1831–32). And in La damnation de

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Faust (Paris, Opéra-Comique, 1846), he furthered this nuancing of the tam-tam by instructing two timpanists to perform an eight-measure crescendoing tam-tam roll to a complex polyrhythmic texture of woodwind and strings during Faust’s and Méphistophélès’s final descent into hell, followed by boisterous strikes during the ensuing pandemonium.95 Whether loud or soft, such demonic associations related theatrical tam-tam practices to all those Requiem compositions that relished the gong to stoke fear of the last judgment—which is to say, of hell. To be sure, not all gong-loving apparitions were malign. In Les Troyens, Berlioz dispatched Mercury to Aeneas by striking the hero’s shield to the sounds of a tamtam hidden in it (a riff on Le Sueur’s diegetic ploy). And at the end of Verdi’s Don Carlos (Paris, Opéra, 1867), a tam-tam strike–cum–electric spotlight stresses the sudden appearance of a mysterious monk ex machina.96 Still, the tam-tam served as technology to render intrusions of the netherworld or, vice versa, a character’s transition into the hereafter. Such an acoustic mechanism was particularly opportune because phantasms or abrupt excursions into spirit worlds were difficult to represent visually. Indeed, even popular entertainments that were specialized in optically conjuring magical creatures did not disdain the instrument. By 1800, phantasmagorias by the likes of Paul Philidor and Étienne-Gaspard Robertson regularly enhanced their optical simulations of gruesome specters with the “lugubrious sounds of the tam-tam.”97 As Robertson explained, a monstrous object like a Medusa’s head encroaching on the audience “will produce more effect if [the gong] is violently beaten when this head will have achieved its greatest enlargement.” He warned, however, that “this instrument of resounding and terrible noise” be used sparingly and for the most important situations only, lest its impact wane.98 The tam-tam was to be cultivated as a truly special sound effect: an acoustic taxonomer of the uncanny. C L I M AC T IC G O N G S

Neither Robertson’s warning nor Berlioz’s prescription, though, were much heeded by composers. On the one hand, given that many of our semantic contexts coincided with dramatic climaxes, it was only natural that the tam-tam would eventually boost important turns of events as such. The gong thus became a generic means to pinpoint an action that, however brief, was decisive for the further course of the plot. In the finale of Rossini’s Moïse et Pharaon (Paris, Opéra, 1827), for instance, a single coup graces a musical apex that would have marked the return of the Red Sea onto the persecuting Egyptians after the Israelites’ miraculous escape. Lortzing’s romantic “Zauberoper” Undine (Magdeburg, 1845) reserves a fortissimo strike for the fateful moment in act 3 in which Hugo repudiates the titular princess. Gounod used single strikes in Faust (Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 1859) not just to divulge Méphistophélès’s devilish nature but also to cast doom on Marguerite’s

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ill-fated decision to give in to Faust. And in Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (Weimar, 1877), an isolated fortissimo strike to bass drum and timpani rolls reveals Samson’s betrayal even before the hero himself realizes his ruin.99 In short, the tamtam frequently singled out peripeties whose impact might otherwise be missed. Like an acoustic freeze frame, its deliberate strikes magnified these moments by means of its volume and long reverberation. Similar to the increasingly nuanced curtains we observed in the last chapter, the tam-tam became a tool for composers to communicate dramatic essence to the audience. If the curtain both directed and merged visual and acoustic sense perception at the outer edges of acts, the gong provided a musically embedded “ta-dah” effect in their midst, telling listeners which events to attend to the most—and what significance to attach to them—on the progressively busy stages of (particularly French) nineteenth-century opera. On the other hand, gong strikes began to proliferate in scores also to spice up musical climaxes, particularly representational orchestral passages. For example, the tam-tam frequently amped up operatic storms, supporting the well-worn thunder machine (as at the openings of Bellini’s 1827 Il pirata and Verdi’s Otello of 1887), or in act 2 of Spontini’s Agnes von Hohenstaufen (in the Berlin version of 1837). Furthermore, the gong expediently added both amplitude and gloom to the newly horrific cataclysms cultivated in grand opéra. A trendsetter was Auber’s La muette de Portici (Paris, Opéra, 1828), which generously utilized the gong for the concluding volcanic eruption, its forty fortissimo strikes trumping even Rossini. That this happened less for the instrument’s deathly resonances than to increase a general roar was made clear in the original production book, which allowed the tam-tam to be operated ad libitum along with the thunder machine and the throwing of rocks.100 Beyond acoustically portraying the volcanic event, however, Auber’s tam-tam also inspired awe at this uncontrollable element of nature, whose frequent cultural representations since 1790, as Sarah Hibberd has argued, might have reflected a growing scientific interest in natural disasters and, symbolically, the chaotic experience of the forces of the Revolution.101 The tam-tam was superbly suited to such overwhelming powers not just due to its association, in France, with mortality and the Revolution, but also because of its own difficult-to-control nature: its forceful resonance acoustically epitomized a fateful event. In other words, the gong became a technology of the sublime—an aesthetic category that was associated in early nineteenth-century music criticism above all with French Revolutionary music.102 (Small wonder that Félicien David eagerly deployed the gong for his volcanic Herculanum of 1859.) At the same time, La muette heralded the gong’s metamorphosis into a more generally applicable device to bolster—or spawn—various sounds, whether in the wings or in the pit. As such, the gong stood in for the fatal “great noise” that cut short the Huguenots’ singing at the end of Meyerbeer’s Les huguenots (Paris, Opéra, 1836). And Wagner reached for it in Rienzi to slam the church door shut on

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the anathematized title hero with an appropriate dose of what we might anachronistically dub symbolic reverb.103 Composers, then, sometimes scored the tam-tam precisely for what some critics simultaneously denounced: its lack of musical tone in favor of seemingly unrefined—and unsurpassed—noise. It was this shift toward generic climactic strikes, the multimedial sublime, and acoustic pragmatics that compounded the gong’s ubiquity as theatrical cliché. After all, as we have seen, the tam-tam proffered a stagy sound technology far beyond opera. As early as 1825, the cynical Parisian Dictionnaire théâtral asserted of this modish instrument that “bit by bit the ear has familiarized itself with its cries of hell” and its soul-shattering impact had worn off: at least in boulevard theaters, the instrument was declared passé.104 Instead, it turned into a cultural trope. French and German colloquialisms that emerged after midcentury—“faire tout un tamtam” or “einen Tamtam machen”—denoted not just the loud theatrical coup but any excessive noise, both literally and figuratively, especially unwarranted political activities or journalistic hype:105 the tam-tam rhetorically typified a cultural or sociopolitical “ruckus without a cause.” This enlightens at a deeper level why the mature Wagner of the 1860s detested the instrument as undermining artistic “ideality.” Yet before we return to Wagner and his musical remedies for the tam-tam’s alleged barbarity, we need to address the aurality—“the phenomenal and discursive field of sound”—that contemporaries experienced.106 Pondering how, and what kinds of, instruments gained access to opera houses will tie the gong further to aspects of industrial modernity Wagner was allergic to. S OU N D I N G O B J E C T

However useful my semantic categorizations may be to understand the attraction of, and meanings attributed to, the gong in early nineteenth-century music, they paint an admittedly abstract picture of the gong’s operatic dynamics. Not only have I neglected or given short hermeneutic shrift to many instances of its use, but discussing the tam-tam’s role on the basis of scores alone also captures a semiotically codified ideal that fails to take into account (at least explicitly) the reality of sounds produced in a given performance or theater—as well as those not produced. For in the end, tam-tams had to be available to resound where composers demanded them. And even when they were, they could vary vastly in resonance, as both Boswell’s prideful note and the Ossian parodies disclosed. It is impossible, of course, to reconstruct exactly what gong sounds were emitted—and heard—in nineteenthcentury opera houses. Furthermore, documents detailing the provenance, measurements, or qualities of individual instruments are scarce. Nevertheless, a few contemporary impressions of both the tam-tam as material object and its circulation in early nineteenth-century Europe provide helpful cues for our efforts at “historiographical listening.” Acoustically, such reports approximate a reality check for

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my above readings of composers’ scores; conceptually, as Emily Thompson has argued, the “physical environment”—including the materiality of the sonic object— is as much part of a soundscape as are the ways of “perceiving that environment.”107 The most important indicator of a tam-tam’s sonic potential is its size: the larger the tam-tam, the lower, more complex, and more resonant its sound.108 Yet, as noted, early nineteenth-century contemporaries rarely commented on the sizes of gongs: they may as yet have been unaware of the wide spectrum of dimensions and their impact. Rare insight into the kinds of instruments obtainable, however, is provided in a detailed report by the French attaché of the Grand Duke of Hessen, Count Ludwig von Lichtenberg. Tasked in 1812 with acquiring a tam-tam for performances of La vestale at the Darmstadt Court Theater, Lichtenberg found only three exemplars for sale in Paris. Two were “egregiously bad”; the third, imported by a merchant as part of an “Indian cabinet of rarities,” was judged by Spontini superior to both the one owned by the Opéra and one the composer himself was about to purchase for projected performances of his Olimpie at the Théâtre Italien. Lichtenberg specified its diameter as equivalent to about 44.64 cm (17.57 in.),109 a measurement in line with German acoustician Ernst Chladni’s observation in 1817 that tam-tams could have a span of up to 56.5 cm (22.24 in.).110 Likewise, Varsányi estimates that gongs used in London around 1800 measured about 50 cm (just under 20 in.) and were of thin make, thus producing a rather poor sound.111 By comparison, according to Charlton’s calculation (based on figure 3.2), the tam-tam used for Gossec’s Marche lugubre had a diameter of 68–76 cm (27–30 in.), thus numbering among the larger-sized instruments of its time; still, it would have been just slightly larger than the smallest symphonic gongs manufactured today, which range from 20 in. to the more common 60 and even 80 in.112 No wonder a German traveler to Java in 1846 rhapsodized about the “deep, so full and clear” sounds of what he described as two gongs almost four feet in diameter: these instruments would have been larger by far than any known in European theaters.113 That even the Opéra used a relatively modest specimen around 1812 is corroborated by Lichtenberg’s account (based on information from Spontini) that the gong was usually “held with one hand suspended by the thick gut string run through it (nota bene: in the wings), and beaten with the other hand with might and main by means of the respective mallet”: neither gut string nor single-handed upholding would have been possible with a larger instrument, since Chinese gongs of 20 in. can weigh 5 kg or more. However, Lichtenberg admitted that one ought to be “vigilant not to interrupt the vibrations of the instrument in any way,” and that Spontini had suggested trying to suspend it instead from a post “on a light metal chain” to increase its effect.114 No such care was evident when, a decade later, the Milan-based composer Pietro Lichtenthal explained that “[o]ne takes the instrument in one hand by its rim” to strike it in its middle—a surefire way to dampen its sound. In 1846, even Berlioz ordered that a tam-tam be held by one person on

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its strap to allow two timpanists to execute that long roll in La damnation.115 When early nineteenth-century composers began to explore the resonance of the gong, then, their discoveries were conditioned by the nature of the available gongs. Indeed, as late as 1938 an English writer observed of Berlioz’s double roll that “[n]ot all the gongs in Christendom . . . can make this music impressive.”116 In short, when assessing timbral textures and the oft-prescribed loud dynamics for the gong in nineteenth-century music, we need to take account of the comparatively small sizes of instruments then available, their frequent placement offstage, and playing techniques that impeded the gong’s sonority. Even the size and acoustics of the respective theaters would have made a difference. Perhaps the satirist of Ossian had a point, after all, when likening the Opéra’s gong to a casserole. And we can now appreciate why Le Sueur would have chosen to exhibit onstage an object more visually impressive than the instrument itself. Varsányi has explained this dominance of moderately sized gongs in Europe with the difficulties of transporting larger exemplars due to their fragility and weight.117 After all, until around 1820, all available instruments hailed from Asia; and they were by no means necessarily imported for their musical qualities. Gongs, as noted, had circulated as trading commodities among the British upper class since at least the 1780s, some specimens eventually voyaging from cabinets into museums and theaters.118 Yet on the continent, the instrument was rarer. As the following examples show, the resulting migration of individual gongs between cultural institutions only corroborated the tam-tam’s suspect status as musical instrument. Exactly how Gossec and his Parisian colleagues got their hands on a tam-tam remains unclear. As Charlton has pointed out, the closed circle of French composers scoring it around the turn of the nineteenth century indicates its limited availability, with possibly only a single instrument accessible to both music corps and the emerging Conservatory, likely the instrument used at the Théâtre Feydeau for those political ceremonies and the earliest gong-containing operas we surveyed.119 In any case, the first traceable gongs might have arrived in Paris around 1784, when the Jesuit missionary and writer Joseph Amiot shipped two exemplars from Beijing (Peking) to French acquaintances: one to Louis Joseph d’Albert d’Ailly, Duke of Chaulnes and an experimental chemist, and one to Henri Bertin, an influential minister under the monarchy who was fascinated by all things Chinese.120 Although Amiot’s voluminous 1779 survey of Chinese music did not mention the gong, in a letter to Bertin of 1784 (published two years later) Amiot described the modes of its playing—again with the instrument held up on a cord—and manufacture in detail, hoping to foster its positive reception in France. The tam-tam, he believed, would “work miracles” in opera “to stun or shock the spectators,” and it could aid in the study of acoustics. In other words, Amiot acted as a mediator between Eastern customs and Western science and art. His hope that the gong would be helpful in both operatic and academic contexts proved prophetic.121

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In fact, the very tam-tam Amiot had sent to the Duke of Chaulnes was soon obtained by the Opéra—although it shattered during the early 1800s and was replaced with the instrument formerly owned by Beaumarchais (which is likely the one Spontini described).122 By 1812, among Parisian theaters only the Opéra and the Théâtre Feydeau owned gongs, which likely remained the case until the 1840s, when Berlioz fantasized about combining all Parisian performing forces into one gargantuan orchestra: it would include two tam-tams.123 Further gongs surely existed in Paris, but these were not necessarily within the reach of musicians. For instance, one tam-tam was owned by a physicist (one Monsieur Beyer) otherwise known for his research on lightning rods—though sometime before 1818, he sold it to the Austrian emperor for his music corps.124 And in the 1830s, the sinologist Stanislas Julien donated two Chinese specimens to the physics collection of the Collège de France.125 From the moment the tam-tam made its way to Europe, then, it was considered instrumental in both scientific and musical contexts. The frequent exchange between both became particularly manifest in Milan. Distressed by its lack of a tam-tam, in 1824 the administration of the Teatro alla Scala twice turned to Alessandro Volta’s famous physics collection of the Università di Pavia, which during the French reign had acquired a “tam-tam, or Chinese goung-goung with its mallet” for its section “aerology, distinct in pneumatics, aerostatics and acoustics.”126 This instrument first visited La Scala for the local premiere of Rossini’s Semiramide in April 1824. The second request followed recognition that a tam-tam was “indispensable” for La vestale (which was to open in December) and that the gong ordered from London would not arrive in time. Alas, Pavia’s tam-tam cracked en route to Milan, where it was deemed “not euphonious” and replaced by an instrument of unspecified provenance. (The physics cabinet did not remedy its loss.)127 These early European peregrinations by tam-tams suggest that some natural philosophers considered the gong a potential object of, or tool for, research before even major musical institutions deemed it worthy of acquisition—although it gravitated toward musicians from the 1810s onward. Such migration of instruments between physics labs and orchestras was not uncommon: as historians of science have recently shown, in the nineteenth century the rise (among other factors) of acoustic investigations and an empirical physiology of the senses joined new instruments of visual recording in feeding an increasing “circulation of material objects between science and music.”128 In most instances, these instruments had roots in one of the disciplines before being appropriated by the other. Even such sounding objects as sirens, tuning forks, and metronomes, as Myles W. Jackson has argued, were instruments of scientific standardization in music and of physiological experiments before their integration into twentieth-century composers’ arsenals of sound generation proper.129 By contrast, the tam-tam was not “invented” by either Western musicians or scientists. Wrested from both its native

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cultural context and “skilled players able to bring [it] to life,” the gong presented an objet trouvé for both groups, with its possible sounds and functions therefore explored from scratch.130 In other words, physicists and composers simultaneously investigated (and vied over) the instrument. This unusual circumstance renders the tam-tam’s early appearances in Western art music veritable experiments in acoustics—perhaps compounding the gong’s technological associations. In turn, the exploratory nature of the gong’s early orchestral outings may elucidate, from an aesthetic perspective, a certain hesitancy by opera houses to obtain this novel instrument. As Lichtenberg’s four-month negotiations and La Scala’s tribulations reveal, the gong was initially regarded as a special accessory for individual operas only (particularly La vestale). Conversely, early nineteenth-century composers were likely to include it merely in operas commissioned by institutions that already owned the instrument. For instance, although exactly when and how most opera houses did attain a gong remains obscure, we can safely assume that the Teatro San Carlo in Naples acquired one for its much-acclaimed premiere of La vestale in 1811, and that its procurement incited Rossini to score the instrument in some of his Neapolitan operas. The Royal Theaters in Berlin, too, had access to a gong by this point, perhaps occasioned not just by the local premiere of La vestale that same year, but also by the general fascination of King Friedrich Wilhelm III with French opera and theater.131 Sometime before 1817, Chladni experienced gongs in Dresden and Copenhagen. And by 1821, a critic sanctimoniously bewailed that Munich did not yet own that “noise-making sound instrument of the Parisian Opera,” leaving the local composer Johann Caspar Aiblinger with nothing but a thunder machine to magnify a funerary spectacular: the Bavarian Court Opera in Munich waited until its 1834 premiere of Robert le diable to import its own gong from Paris.132 Two years later, the Vienna Court Opera inventoried two tam-tams, one large and one small, in apparent recognition of their different timbres; yet both instruments were listed as “props” and kept in special custody along with other instruments for stage music, quarantined from the main orchestra.133 Thus, even if employed in opera houses, the tam-tam’s acceptance as a musical instrument proper remained dubious. Until century’s end, lists of specific orchestras’ players or instruments rarely mentioned a tam-tam, expressing and fostering its separation from both “normal” instruments and human agency.134 This ambiguity was evident also in scores, where the tam-tam was rarely granted its own staff; instead, it often appeared on random empty staves or was prescribed by means of words or signs—that is, like stage directions. Nor did the instrument’s gradual proliferation in European theaters mean that every institution performing gong-containing operas owned one: more often than not, the tam-tam part was simply omitted. Such was its fate in the first Darmstadt performances of La vestale in February 1812. Many early Rossini scores used in German theaters likewise show no trace of a gong.135 Alternatively, tam-tam strikes

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could be replaced by other instruments—a practice in which the Frankfurt Theater excelled. For its planned 1823 premiere of Rossini’s Armida, for instance, it rescored the entire tam-tam part for bass drum (itself only a late eighteenth-century addition to Western orchestras). In Le prophète, a snare drum substituted for the lone gong strike. And the breaking of the magic branch in Robert was underscored by “three strong coups in the orchestra.”136 The tam-tam’s soundscape in early nineteenth-century opera was, then, less musically conditioned and less predictable than a mere survey of scores might suggest. T H E S C I E N C E O F FA I R E U N TA M TA M

In addition to aesthetic quandaries about the gong as an operatic instrument, practical reasons also contributed to its fairly slow dissemination. Even when convinced of its usefulness, many theaters struggled to get hold of a decent exemplar. A tam-tam was not only rare and fragile but also, as a result, costly. Comparison of currencies across nineteenth-century Europe can be problematic, but comments on the high expense are legion. In 1805, the Opéra had a special committee approve the purchase of the tam-tam from Beaumarchais’s estate for 2,000 francs.137 Lichtenberg, too, balked at the required 3,500 francs for what would become the Darmstadt gong; but although agreeing that this amount was inflated by 500 francs, Spontini urged Lichtenberg not to let this rare instrument slip by.138 Similarly, the Chinese tam-tam acquired in 1834 by the Bavarian Court Opera cost 2,200 francs, or about 1,042 Gulden (roughly four times the annual salary of the average teacher at the time); this purchase, along with the 600 Gulden paid for the organ also required by Meyerbeer, contributed considerably, or so a reviewer grumbled, to the opera’s exorbitant production cost of 6,000 Gulden. (Nonetheless, the critic went on to proudly describe the instrument.)139 Tam-tams were evidently treated as expensive commodities that bestowed prestige on institutions that could boast their use. Once gongs became more common in Western music, the exacerbated shortage of well-sounding exemplars incentivized the creativity of both merchants and scientists. For one, music publishing houses began concerted dealings in the instrument. In 1836, the German firm Schott placed an advertisement titled “Tam Tam” in no less a journal than the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung: defining it as “an oriental noise instrument [Lärminstrument] manufactured in China,” the firm announced that it had “these days received a direct shipment of this rare instrument and can sell it for 550 Gulden apiece.”140 A few years later, Schott again promoted “Chinese tam-tams of truly authentic kind. To be used in theaters with greatest effect.”141 By the 1860s, the London company Boosey held “Chinese gongs” among its stock of band instruments. And by the early twentieth century, Ricordi in Milan was renting out (albeit pitched) gongs in association with specific operas,

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thus acknowledging their importance for these works’ sonic identities: theaters were no longer simply to omit or replace intended sounds.142 Schott’s emphasis on the “true” origin of their instruments—rather than their size—was partly a product of the gong’s customary identification as Chinese. Yet it also distinguished Schott’s import from recent European attempts at producing gongs. Very little was known about their manufacture when they first entered European stages. The tam-tam’s origins appeared as mysterious as some of the operatic situations to which it was applied; and belief in the impenetrable secret and unsurpassable quality of Chinese gong production persisted into the twentieth century.143 To dispel this myth, Amiot had interviewed a Chinese manufacturer and had related details of the gong’s chemical composition and fabrication procedures in his 1784 letter. In 1827, Belgian musicographer François-Joseph Fétis prominently republished this letter because he held that “it would be useful to conduct experiments that could perhaps also lead us to the discovery of the means of producing good cymbals like those of the East. This would be a veritable conquest: for tam-tams cost up to 3,000 francs, and Turkish cymbals 600.”144 In other words, Fétis sought to foster artisanal knowledge so that Western music could emancipate itself from Asian suppliers and tam-tams would become more widely accessible—a cultural colonization on home turf. Possibly unbeknownst to Fétis, natural scientists had already begun to ascertain the alloy of tam-tams. Their starting point was a report, found both in Amiot’s letter and in Barrow’s travelogue, that Chinese gong metal consisted of “copper, tin and bismuth.”145 Around 1810, leading German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (a specialist in metals and the discoverer of uranium and other elements) refuted the use of bismuth, widely publishing his findings across Europe.146 He was soon supported by Thomas Thomson, a Glasgow professor of chemistry who participated in a concerted British effort to repair a crack in Sir Joseph Banks’s gong. In a fragment thereof, Thomson analyzed around 80 percent copper and 20 percent tin, although he continued to puzzle over this alloy’s unusual gravity.147 (Bismuth, it was now alleged, had been mentioned by Amiot’s informants to dupe Europeans and, thus, preserve the Chinese tam-tam monopoly.148) But merely knowing the constituents of gong metal proved disconcertingly insufficient. Thomson’s supposition that the alloy could easily be forged at a high temperature below red heat was countered both by the failure to fix Sir Joseph’s gong and by experiments on the part of French chemist Jean-Pierre-Joseph Darcet (or d’Arcet).149 An authority in applied industrial chemistry such as the fabrication of cannons, soaps, and bronze monuments, Darcet insisted that gong manufacture required a significantly more complex procedure than simple forging. The metal, he found, had to be hardened in numerous processes before it could be formed with hammers in arduous labor.150 His endeavors seem to have been urged on not just by Thomson’s aloof scholarship but also by the apparent shortcomings of simultaneous

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French forays into gong manufacture. In 1812, Spontini informed Lichtenberg that locally “imitated tam-tams” had to be melted down again “because they did not even remotely have the true sound.” And while the École des arts et métiers in Châlonsen-Champagne may have been selling homemade gongs by 1820 at the latest, it had failed to repair the Opéra’s broken specimen; worse yet, the grand exemplar it had crafted for the Prussian king had embarrassingly shattered.151 Darcet duly shared his findings with the École and other manufacturers, hoping that France would establish the leading European production line for tam-tams and cymbals. And his efforts bore fruit. Large tam-tams made à la Darcet were exhibited at the 1823 industrial fair in Paris, an important event increasingly focused on the display of metals (among textiles and mechanical products).152 Darcet’s method was also widely discussed in scientific publications of the 1820s and was hailed as the solution to the mystery of Chinese tam-tams. Unsurprisingly, other manufacturers followed suit.153 With competition building, the average price dropped drastically. A review of the 1823 fair noted that, thanks to Darcet, gongs were now sold for about one tenth of their former steep price of 3,000–4,000 francs.154 For Napoleon’s obsequies in 1840, the Paris Conservatory purchased a tam-tam of unknown origin for 600 francs, including mallet and mount (the latter possibly a novel support for larger instruments); three years later, the Opéra rented two gongs from an instrument maker who had produced them specifically for Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, with their combined rental price 100 francs for the first year and 50 annually thereafter; and in 1860, Berlin’s new Victoria-Theater obtained a good specimen of “the indispensable tam-tam” from a local music shop for the equivalent of 300 francs.155 True, these sums were still no trifle compared to more common instruments: timpani or double basses could be had for around 400 francs in 1840, and orchestral violins for much less still. It would take until the late nineteenth century for tam-tams to be available at around 50 francs apiece, and for tam-tam– manufacturing firms outside France to gain repute.156 (One of these firms was the Paiste family business, founded in St. Petersburg in the early 1900s, which after several European relocations would emerge as the global leader in symphonic gong manufacture post 1945.157) Yet despite this slow development, and even though tam-tams retained their expensive aura, a significant shift had evidently occurred during the 1820s, when scientific research and artisanal experiments began to afford a more widespread use of gongs in opera. Ironically, the same metallurgical efforts also paved the way for the tam-tam’s cultural omnipresence that some later nineteenth-century critics so deplored. Against this background, we can now surmise that the tam-tam must have challenged midcentury idealists even as a material object. Lichtenberg put his finger on the perplexing disjuncture between costliness and appearance when describing the gong as “so inconspicuous [unscheinbar] an instrument.”158 Arcane and literally tarnished, its optics were nondescript. Additionally, more than any

figure 3.3 . Use of the “brusque sound” of a gong to induce catalepsy in Jean-Martin Charcot’s neurological clinic at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, during the 1870s and 1880s, as rendered by physician Paul Regnard in his Sorcellerie, magnétisme, morphinisme, délire des grandeurs (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1887), 263. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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established orchestral instrument, it openly displayed signs of arduous manufacture in those countless hammered marks that had puzzled early nineteenthcentury scientists.159 Visually, in other words, although the tam-tam could not deny its genesis as a product of fire and hammer, some of the oldest human technologies, its purely metallic essence befitted the machine age. Nor did scientific interest in the gong abate post Darcet. Physicists continued to explore what the mathematician and astronomer Rodolphe Radau in 1869 described as the gong’s delayed “explosion of enormous tones.”160 Medical dictionaries of the 1820s to 1840s listed the tam-tam for its application with the deaf, testifying to both its unusual loudness and its visceral effect.161 And after midcentury, physicians began to study its effects on the nervous system, trying it on sufferers of congenital hypothyroidism (“cretins”) and cataleptic patients as well as for hypnosis, particularly on women (figure 3.3).162 All the more reason, or so Wagner might have inferred, to veil its orchestral use. In a sense, then, the gong was the epitome of vibrant metal: laboriously transmuted by artisans from brittle matter into flexible bronze, it was brought to resonate by the primordial human act of beating that recursively reflected its labored manufacture.163 Nor did its playing seem to require special skills. Like Boswell, Lichtenberg immediately tested the tam-tam’s loudness satisfactorily on his neighbors; in 1855, none other than Liszt struck the gong in the Weimar premiere of Lélio; and as late as the 1890s, the Wiesbaden Court Opera paid its orchestral manager extra for the occasional handling of “glockenspiel and tam-tam-beating [Tamtamschlagen] etc. on stage.”164 Mechanical vestiges thus attached doubly to the instrument. As such, its very essence resisted Wagner’s phantasmagoric idea of veiling his technologies. It did not help that the tam-tam’s scarcity pinpointed the dependence of European musicians on either Asian imports or (particularly French) laboratories. Simultaneously evoking both the ancient and the industrial, the far East and (what Wagner regarded as) the corrupt West, such technological and cultural tinges might all have resonated, like the complex overtones of a gong itself, in Wagner’s rhetorical dismissal of the tam-tam as “barbarism.” WAG N E R’ S G O N G

Although these associations were all well established by the time Wagner embarked on his career, they did not initially impede his use of the tam-tam. As noted, he called for the gong twice in Rienzi, not coincidentally in the final acts that he completed after settling in Paris. In addition to that anathematizing fortissimo stroke (Spontiniesque save its orchestral underpinning), an even louder thump on a sustained minor tutti chord underpins the final—and fatal—collapse of the castle, echoing the noisy cataclysms of Le siège de Corinthe or La muette de Portici.165 Der fliegende Holländer (in both the 1843 and the 1860 versions) rehearsed further

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inherited gong semantics. In act 1, a fortissimo stroke on a diminished chord renders the “terrible crash” (furchtbaren Krach) with which the Dutchman’s spooky ship moors, the gong’s resonance at the same time indicating this character’s unholy fate. In the same dual manner, strikes of various lengths and volumes support the wind machine’s storm and frame the ghostly chorus of deceased sailors in act 3, the concluding pianissimo strike (to bassoons and muted horns) recalling the eerie timbre of Meyerbeer’s “Procession of Nuns.” And a last fortissimo strike with full orchestra highlights Senta’s Fenella-like demise at the end.166 However, Wagner did not synchronize this final strike with his heroine’s actual leap. Instead, as with the rising orchestral scales reflecting the opening curtain in Das Rheingold (discussed in chapter 2), he delayed it by two measures. This allowed the drama to unfold visually before the acoustic exclamation point, while the latter marked not the moment of Senta’s fateful action or her death but rather the effects thereof: the sinking of the Dutchman’s ship and, symbolically, the salvation this indicates. Along with the Dutchman, Der fliegende Holländer’s final strike redeems the tamtam itself from sonic icon of condemnation to herald of deliverance, from tautological dramatic signpost to more nuanced sonic commentary. Despite such potential to gradate or break free from traditional gong topoi, once Wagner began to theorize his Gesamtkunstwerk, the tam-tam seemed no longer opportune at all. Like other alleged offences against civilized norms he or Cosima Wagner associated with “barbarism”—an unbridled yet powerful voice, the “un-German” state of postunification Germany and its princes, beheadings, the uncontainable force of the universe, or vivisection—the gong appeared transgressive, indeed the embodiment of everything acoustically undesirable.167 And this was not just because its ties with French opera and science might disclose the cultural and mechanical roots of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk; or because its sheer loudness could pierce the orchestral surface; or even because its blossoming sound defied the natural tendency of other percussion instruments to decrescendo from the moment of attack—something that made the (unchecked) gong stand out all the more. Rather, the gong’s preestablished intertextual associations could also interfere with the web of semantic meanings Wagner’s leitmotifs were to weave from scratch in each work. From the perspective of communication theory, the gong’s attendant connotations would become a technical interference with the intended signals—one which, more than accidental static, might misguide listeners within a given dramatic context. Even irrespective of these topical overtones, the very nature of the gong’s sound betrayed its materiality sonically (just like its surface did optically) through its exceptionally palpable vibrations and what many contemporaries simply called its noise. In 1855, an anonymous essay on the properties of sounds in Blätter für Musik, Theater und Kunst declared that “[c]ymbals, bass drum and snare drum, tambourine, tam-tam etc. do not really belong among the legitimate musical organs,

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because they produce no measurable tones [Töne] and create more noise than true sound [Klang].”168 This hierarchical division between “proper” tones and their combinations into Klänge on the one hand and inharmonic noises on the other was common in nineteenth-century writing as a way of safeguarding music and its pure pitches amid—and against—the increasing everyday din of urbanization and industrialization. As such, it also implied a social difference, noise being commonly associated with the lower classes, overloaded urban dwellings, and potentially incendiary rebellious energies of pugnacious crowds.169 Hermann Helmholtz, the doyen of later nineteenth-century acousticians, tellingly started his influential 1863 study Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen by drawing a distinction within the realm of “sound” (Schall) between “noises” (Geräusche) and “musical sounds” (musikalische Klänge), of which only the latter—defined by periodic vibration— formed his area of investigation.170 This partition gained relevance also within the musical sphere to separate pitched and nonpitched percussion instruments, the latter being a rather recent but rapidly growing phenomenon in Western music. Even Berlioz could not avoid an evaluative slant when stating in his orchestration treatise that “[t]here are two kinds of percussion: the first kind comprises instruments of fixed and musically recognizable pitch; the second comprises those whose less musical sounds can only be classed as noises designed for special effect or for rhythmic colour. . . . The bass drum, tenor drum, side drum, tambourine, ordinary cymbals, tamtam, triangle and Turkish crescent . . . just make noises of different types.”171 Although obviously not the only instrument of indefinite pitch, the tam-tam was potentially loudest among this already dubious group, its chaotic vibration being part and parcel of its extraordinary resonance.172 Small wonder that it came to epitomize noise per se. This dual noisiness—the loudness and inharmonic sound—must have aggravated Wagner’s gong dilemma. After all, he was already disturbed by the incidental noises inherent in the tone production of traditional orchestral instruments. Helmholtz, too, said of such “whizzing and hissing of the air” in wind instruments or the “rubbing” of a bow on the string that “one typically tries, when listening to music, to ignore these noises by purposely withdrawing attention from them.”173 Yet such intentional “listening away” and the required reliance on each audience member’s own efforts were insufficient for Wagner and his quest for total artistic control. Instead, more than hiding just the visual aspects of instrumental performance, his sunken orchestra pit was to provide also an “acoustic sounding board” (akustische Schallwand) to effect a “transfigured, pure sound, freed from all admixture of the nonmusical noise indispensable for the production of instrumental tone [Klang].”174 In a way, Wagner’s invisible pit provided an enormous orchestral filter not entirely unlike Helmholtz’s experimental resonators in their partial function, in Benjamin Steege’s words, of “shift[ing] leverage away from the nominal sound source toward themselves by effectively muting the generator.”175

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Although Bayreuth’s pit dampened the lower brass and percussion instruments (those placed furthest down) the most,176 the tam-tam’s fundamental problem was that it offered no pure, periodic tone to be distilled: its noise was its sonic essence; its generator could not be muted. An unfettered gong strike thus always betrayed the metallic, mechanical source of its production Wagner sought to conceal. (Precisely in those terms did conductor Hermann Levi lament of the 1878 Munich Ring that “all pianissimo playing” could not compensate for the lack of a “covered orchestra,” since “[t]he tone remains too physical [materiell].”177) This acoustic disclosure thwarted not just the instrument’s own potential to be heard as a musical medium, rather than sound technology. More significantly, it also undermined the orchestra’s intended unity and jeopardized the distinction on which Wagner’s very enterprise was based: the severance of “reality from the ideality” physically signaled by the orchestra pit’s “mystical abyss”—the gulf between the everyday world of the auditorium and the transubstantiated one of the stage.178 Qua noise, the gong partook in what media scholar Frances Dyson has called “the vibrations and waves that disjoin any attempt at unification.”179 Worse than even Meyerbeer’s sunrise, this attack on multimedia smoothness came from within the music, Wagner’s ultimate potion for artistic transfiguration and intermedial glue.180 We have come full circle to Wagner’s quip that the tam-tam destroys music’s ideality. Visual veiling and standard sound absorption in what would become Bayreuth’s hidden pit were, then, insufficient for the tam-tam. Wagner needed more creative ways to absorb it fully into his musical texture. Indeed, more than in Lohengrin, he nuanced its shades in the Ring cycle—his only subsequent work to include the instrument. As with so many Gesamtkunstwerk traits, this is most obvious in Das Rheingold. Wagner purposely resisted the gong at most semantically conventional places, such as the pivotal theft of the gold, the jangle of the smithy (where mechanical noise was, for once, opportune), or the final thunderstorm. For these scenes he employed illustrative figurations and idiosyncratic instrumental combinations that emerge more organically from the orchestral context and—in the last two cases—are more overtly representational as well: what with the eighteen tuned anvils or the hammer blow followed by a timpani roll and semitone grumblings in the lower strings. Instead, Wagner connected the tam-tam with the ring’s dark magic: it appears three times for Alberich’s domination of the Nibelungs, with one additional—and more traditional—strike at Erda’s prediction of the gods’ demise.181 And yet, the tam-tam remained barely noticeable. Erda’s pianissimo coup is embedded into an already dense—if soft—sonic texture, whose main focus is the voice and the strings’ turn from the so-called twilight to the “ring motif ” on an eerie diminished chord (example 3.3). Nor is the gong the only addition at this point: four horns simultaneously sneak in. And lest it still stick out, Wagner had it played “with a large drumstick”—a very soft mallet.182 For Alberich’s witchcraft in scenes 3 and 4, Wagner deflected the gong cliché further by prescribing three rolls

example 3.3 . Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, scene 4, mm. 3501–8: the end of Erda’s gloomy prophecy. © By kind permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. 3501

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with a timpani mallet. The rolls (of 11, 3, and 32 measures respectively) start softly; and even when the longer ones crescendo to forte, they are reined in by the fortissimo of the remaining orchestra as well as the Nibelungs’ screaming or scattering onstage. In short, Wagner masked the gong’s attack by all means possible. Thus acoustically defanged, it became a legitimate orchestral participant. Analogously to Wagner’s treatment of the curtain, we can conceptualize this process as a transmutation of the tam-tam—at least in the ears of Wagner—from mere sonic technology to artistic medium. Siegfried for the most part followed suit with three soft strikes for Mime’s frightened reaction to the forest rumbling in act 1, scene 3 (before Siegfried bursts in to a dissonant fff orchestral eruption including a forte strike) and a single piano beat (this time with contrabass tuba) echoing Wotan’s imperious dismissal of Erda ending act 3, scene 1. More idiosyncratic is the lone soft strike toward the end of the fire music in the transition to act 3, scene 3. As Siegfried makes his way through the magic fire encircling the sleeping Brünnhilde, the gong marks the moment where the glow, “having reached its brightest intensity, begins to fade, gradually dissolving into ever finer clouds, which are lit as though by the red light of dawn”—an environmental turn that corresponds musically to a changed figuration for harps and lower strings amid a continued diminuendo and a gradual descent in pitch.183 Rather than trumpeting a sudden dramatic change, the tam-tam here subtly suggests the cusp of an ongoing atmospheric transition from fire (Wotan’s safety engineering for Brünnhilde) to nature. This transformation entails also Brünnhilde’s metamorphosis from Valkyrie into mortal woman, thus inverting the tam-tam’s traditional association with unearthly incursions. Near the end of Götterdämmerung, the transmutation signaled is even more momentous: a related strike—albeit fortissimo with full orchestra and cymbal rolls—occurs just as the flames have subsided and the remaining cloud of smoke “drifts away” (again to a diminuendo and a beginning drop in register). Here, the destructive blaze makes way not just for clouds and landscapes but also for its antidote water, which cathartically “surg[es] over the conflagration.”184 At the ends of both fire scenes, then, Wagner’s tam-tam signifies not death but a conquered threat; not ruin but the conversion into new forms of life; not technology but the return of the natural order; not an end but a beginning. Thus did Wagner continue the sonic and semantic retooling of the tam-tam he began with Der fliegende Holländer. To be sure, Wagner’s abstinence from well-worn gong semantics did not hold out for all of the Ring. Die Walküre’s two strikes occur at classical peripeties linked to both trouble and noise: metallically appropriate, the first renders the shattering of Siegmund’s sword in act 2 and, with it, Wotan’s supernatural intervention in the duel; the second indicates the offstage collapse of horse Grane in act 3. But even here, the tam-tam is not the only instrument to enter, and it is scored at dynamic levels (f in the first and a rare mf in the second instance) below the rest of the

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orchestra’s sudden fortissimo—enough of a difference to keep its attack concealed. Only at the Ring’s end did Wagner resort to that clichéd tutti fortissimo with equally loud tam-tam to announce the gods’ noisy doom as the blaze reaches Valhalla.185 This crash might corroborate the oft-voiced view that Götterdämmerung, with its mass scenes and rather conventional numbers, returns the Ring from music drama to the realm of grand opéra.186 It certainly heralds the termination of the Ring cycle, occurring just over a minute before the close of its fifteen-plus hours of music. But does Wagner’s last gong strike perhaps also portend the passing of his Gesamtkunstwerk ideal itself—a sonic admission of the ultimate impossibility of hiding all material residues of its production? We will return to this question of failure in the epilogue. But the Ring does raise an interesting point in our sonic context. Given Wagner’s declared philosophical suspicion of the tam-tam and his obvious efforts to envelop or diffuse its sound, why did he employ it in the first place? Why not shy away from it entirely, as he had done in his preceding music dramas? A little-discussed passage on the function of the orchestra near the end of Opera and Drama offers some clues. “To raise the extraordinarily potent speech-organ of the orchestra to such a height that, at every instant, it may plainly manifest to the feelings that which is unspeakable in the dramatic situation,” Wagner explained, the composer “has not to practice selfrestraint; instead, he has to sharpen his inventiveness to the point of discovering the most varied orchestral idioms [Sprachvermögen], according to the necessity felt by him of a pertinent, most definite expression.” For, as long as the orchestra’s ability to speak “is not yet capable of declarations so individual as is required by the infinite variety of the dramatic motives—so long as the statement of the orchestra is too monochrome to answer these motives’ individuality—the orchestra can only sound along [mitertönen] disturbingly, because not completely satisfyingly; and in the complete Drama, like everything that is not entirely adequate, it would therefore divert attention toward itself.” That is to say, Wagner considered an orchestra whose timbre was not sufficiently flexible to fully render a given dramatic situation as a hindrance to, rather than a support of, his Gesamtkunstwerk: an inadequate orchestra would produce unrelated sounds just like those incidental noises of tone-production. Orchestral distraction, however, was exactly what Wagner sought to avoid. Instead, by its everywhere adapting itself with the utmost closeness to the finest shades of individuality in the dramatic motive, the orchestra is irresistibly to guide our whole attention away from itself, as a means of expression, and direct it to the subject expressed—so that precisely the very richest orchestral language is to manifest itself with the artistic purpose of not being noticed, as it were, of not being heard at all: that is, not being heard in its mechanical but only in its organic activity [Wirksamkeit], in which it is one with the Drama.187

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This passage takes us beyond merely unpleasant or disrupting noises: if the orchestra at any time lacks suitable colors to express dramatic meaning, Wagner says, and no matter how pure its sound, it exposes its artificiality and thereby becomes noticeable as technology—in line with what he deplored as Berlioz’s “mechanical” orchestra, the “toneless” piano, or the unfettered gong strike itself.188 Only orchestral music whose timbre was fully woven into the dramatic whole was a legitimate medium for his Gesamtkunstwerk. As with the Wagner curtain, an orchestra could paradoxically aspire to veil its mechanical essence only by increasing its technological sophistication: through unprecedented refinement and unlimited flexibility, it might conceal itself. Adorno has famously analyzed the resulting expansion of the orchestral palette as Wagner’s synthetic Mischklang (mixed sound). Through unconventional doublings or complex, innovative instrumental combinations, Adorno held, Wagner had created a sound that drowns out the characteristic colors of individual instruments to the point that “the final sound gives no clue as to how it was created.”189 (Adorno’s analysis of Wagner’s color could be read as an exemplified exegesis of the above passage from Opera and Drama.) From this perspective, the tam-tam not only turned, in Wagner’s hands, from a hackneyed sound technology into a variable orchestral medium, but it also, conversely, proffered a tool to help his orchestra as a whole transcend its own technological condition. This duality is evident, for instance, in the sustained wind chords that accompany each and every one of Wagner’s isolated gong strikes: the former cover (or alienate) the gong’s extended resonance, while the latter adds unfamiliar color and reverberation to those chords.190 Both tam-tam and traditional instruments thus function as technologies vis-à-vis each other. In so doing, they exemplify in nuce the division of labor within the collaborative effort Wagner demanded of his Gesamtkunstwerk media altogether.191 Once musically tamed, the gong could be harnessed to help dispel the ghosts of materiality from orchestral music. It became a means to overcome the mechanical, a stepping stone—to adopt Adorno’s words—toward “the idea of an electrical continuum of all possible timbres,” in short: a foretaste of the synthesizer.192 Naturally, the tam-tam was only one component of this enhanced orchestral adaptability. Wagner’s generally increased instrumentation, his frequent instrumental doublings, and such novel instruments as the Wagner tuba all worked toward what Adorno has called “sound from which the traces of its production have been removed, sound made absolute.”193 At the same time, the handling of the tam-tam— arguably more than Adorno’s pet peeve, the piccolo flute—epitomizes Wagner’s orchestral goals particularly clearly. It might even (at least partly) anticipate Adorno’s Marxist critique of the inevitable commodity character of the technologized Gesamtkunstwerk. If Adorno claimed that Die Walküre’s magic fire augmented the modest flames of Marschner’s Hans Heiling “into the prototype of future illuminated advertising,” the tam-tam had already been fetishized into precisely the acoustic

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equivalent of such neon signs, which is to say a commercial jingle—whether it announced a spectacle within an opera or outside the theater.194 And it was not least this indexical, sensation-mongering function that Wagner sought to annul by simultaneously expanding and obscuring the tam-tam’s sounds and uses. On an individual organological level, then, Wagner aimed at wresting the gong from its commodification in hypostatized semantics and theatrical pragmatics. This reading remains true even though the gong’s liberation came at the price of its sonic taming, and despite the fact that the latter did not prevent but rather partook in precisely the larger “victory of reification in instrumental practice” that Adorno considered the hallmark of the “magic delusion” (Blendwerk) of Wagner’s phantasmagoric works.195 Wagner’s management of the tam-tam, then, might suggest that he was more aware of the dialectics and pitfalls of advancing common technologies for the sake of their apparent disappearance than Adorno would have us believe. More than the musicalized curtain, the gong remained an ambiguous tool in Wagner’s mature Gesamtkunstwerk: both instrumental medium and mediating technology, both vital timbre and aural supplement. D I V E R SI F Y I N G S O U N D S

Given this persistent equivocality of the tam-tam that Adorno’s critique and Wagner’s own final strike underlined, any attempt at snatching it firmly from the technological remained fraught. Perhaps it was for this reason that Wagner excluded the gong from the more refined and ascetic timbre of his last opera, Parsifal (1882). Beyond Bayreuth, more tellingly, the tam-tam continued to meander between orchestral instruments and stage accessories. On the one hand, not just grandiose historical works in the vein of grand opéra but drames lyriques, post-Wagnerian music dramas, verismo works, and fairy-tale operas routinely employed a gong, composers combining it at lower dynamic levels with various other instruments. On the other hand, some directors conversely treated it as a free-for-all sound technology. In this and the following section, I will trace both trends cursorily into the early twentieth century to unfold a wider perspective on Wagner’s attempted acoustic regime and its unraveling. As with the curtain, Wagner was not the first composer who set out to tame the gong. We have already noted how Le Sueur added subdued strikes to string and woodwind chords in Télémaque; Spontini consciously pursued different tam-tam effects;196 and the brass chords coupled with those barely audible strikes in Meyerbeer’s “Procession of Nuns” covered its resonance no less than did Wagner’s horns. Nor was Wagner’s mf in Die Walküre unprecedented: although Berlioz’s treatise confirmed loud or very soft dynamics as typical at midcentury, both he and Liszt explored the occasional mf.197 A roll, too, had been tried before the Ring, not just by Berlioz but also in Félicien David’s Herculanum. This grand opéra indeed

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furnished a panoply of apt situations—a blasphemer struck by lightning, “subterranean rumblings,” Satan, and the Muette-like cataclysm—to showcase a rare variety of tam-tam sounds, including short (often crescendoing) tremolos; the instruction “laisser vibrer” for both soft and loud strikes; up to eighteen repeated thumps to sustain the gong’s resonance during extended orchestral chords or to underpin a dynamic build-up; a loud attack exposed for a split second before woodwind and strings burst in; and—as in Götterdämmerung—one climactic fortissimo coup with full orchestra.198 David’s cornucopia of tam-tam effects might well have encouraged the Paris Tannhäuser’s strike: after all, Wagner had experienced Herculanum in 1860. Adorno’s premise that “the dimension of color is . . . [Wagner’s] own discovery” was, then, at least partially owed to the disappearance of Napoleonic music and grand opéra from twentieth-century repertories and textbooks.199 In turn, this selective myopia resulted to a certain extent from another instance of Wagnerian phantasmagoria: Wagner’s rhetorical concealment (via condemnation) of his own creative sources. Sure enough, French opera remained a major playground for gong experiments. But by the turn of the twentieth century, composers across Europe were pushing the gong’s sonic envelope by means of ever more inventive playing techniques and the differentiation of gongs themselves. This latter development was boosted by a new wave of exoticism in the wake of the first Expositions Universelles in Paris in 1855 and 1867. While earlier exotic operas had tended to play in generically ancient or mythically distant lands, as we have seen, composers now turned their eyes (and ears) to concrete Eastern locales, and after the first display of Japanese artistry at the 1867 Exposition, these began to include Japan. As early as 1872, the young Saint-Saëns satirized this Japonisme in his one-act La princesse jaune (Paris, Opéra-Comique), which utilized pitched gongs: one in the orchestra and one as part of the stage music alongside bass drum, chime, and tuned little bells. Moreover, the orchestral gong already sounded—horror of Wagner’s horrors—in the overture, if appropriately combined with harp and wind arpeggios to suggest local color.200 Set entirely in Japan, Mascagni’s Iris (Rome, Teatro Costanzi, 1898) similarly employed two small Japanese gongs (next to shamisen) for a play-within-the-opera, distinct from pitched gongs, Japanese bells, and the frequently used “large tam-tam” in the orchestra.201 Puccini famously furthered this ploy in Madama Butterfly (Milan, La Scala, 1904) with Japanese bells and no fewer than twelve pitched “tam-tam giapponesi” providing a full chromatic scale. Generously marked ad libitum so as not to impede the opera’s circulation, these latter gongs underpin short scenes—the gossiping of Cio-Cio-San’s relatives and the sunrise—that emphasize the Otherness of the heroine’s cultural and geographic context. In addition, an orchestral tam-tam (now confidently notated with rhombic note heads) sounds habitually in association with death and doom, while a small and a large tam-tam in the wings drive home the heroine’s condemnation in

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act 1 and the fatal dropping of her knife in the end.202 The introduction of pitched gongs was thus seminal for these operas’ Japanese couleur locale while allowing the tam-tam proper to retain its general musical and semantic functions. Indeed, precisely this separation from the pitched gongs’ scene-setting may have led Mascagni and Puccini to stress the need of a large or low-sounding (“grave”) tam-tam for the orchestra. The newly fashionable Asian and Middle Eastern settings (along with the availability of sufficiently large gongs) also motivated the tam-tam’s passage into the visual limelight. In Massenet’s successful debut opera Le roi de Lahore (Paris, Opéra, 1877), the Indra temple’s “sacred gong” did eventually sound acousmatically, Ossian-like, by means of a tam-tam beaten “tutta forza” in the wings.203 But in his one-act sacred opera Der Thurm zu Babel (1870), Anton Rubinstein envisioned at stage front “a huge tree on which hangs a brazen gong” that is later beaten to silence a brawl.204 And both Busoni and Puccini promoted the gong to chief audiovisual prop in their adaptations of Carlo Gozzi’s originally gong-free Chinesethemed commedia dell’arte play of 1762, Turandot. In act 1 of Busoni’s eponymous opera (Zurich, 1917), Prince Kalaf strikes an onstage tam-tam after seeing a picture of the Chinese princess, and palace guards sound the alarm with further bells and gongs.205 More notoriously, “a most sonorous bronze gong [un gong di sonorissimo bronzo], upheld by two arches,” forms part of the act 1 set of Puccini’s Turandot (posthumously premiered at Milan’s La Scala in 1926).206 This gong serves—in Michele Girardi’s words—as “a crucial symbol in the drama, since to strike it means to begin a game with death”:207 it sets in motion the heartless mechanism of riddles and executions designed by Turandot to dispatch her suitors. Indeed, a sinister pun (“Quando rangola il gong, gongola il boja!” [When the gong clangs, the executioner is happy!]) traded by the Peking populace clarifies that Puccini’s exotic marker also recycles the gong’s inherited mortal overtones.208 Thus emblematizing both the beautiful princess and lethal danger, the onstage gong becomes the focal point toward which Kalaf struggles, his three solo strikes eventually providing the long-awaited dramatic and sonic climax of act 1 and the hinge of the entire opera. Hence the libretto’s emphasis on a plangent exemplar.209 (Unsurprisingly, an additional tam-tam in the pit underpins most of the opera’s ritual scenes as well as pinnacles of all dynamic shades.) Synthesizing several gong topoi into one dramatic gesture and merging this visual action with the acoustic point of audition, Puccini thus ultimately staged the tam-tam itself.210 Liberated from optic concealment, orchestral immersion, or the need to stand in for other sounds, the onstage gong seemed for once to render nothing but itself—a proud, spotlighted, audiovisual token of Chinese culture. Although such theatrical showcasing of the gong proliferated in Asian-themed works (particularly in operettas) on European stages since the late nineteenth century, however, any claim to authenticity remained illusionary. Even if displayed as

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an Asian ritual object, the tam-tam could not shake off the many associations it had accrued in Europe over the last century, in and out of the theater. Worse, Turandot—like other orientalist works—could be seen to enact Wagnerian charges of “barbarism”: the opera’s onstage gong is linked to a Chinese princess unequivocally apostrophized as cruel and in need of taming, just like the tam-tam itself.211 The diegetic, onstage display of unabashed loud strikes might thus only have bolstered composers’ efforts to contrast and differentiate gong sounds in the actual orchestra. Indeed, Massenet, Mascagni, and Puccini all supplied an unprecedented wealth of dynamic and performance instructions from fff to ppppp and from explicit reverberation to its dampening, Massenet occasionally also specifying mallets. Yet around the turn of the twentieth century, nobody arguably expanded the tamtam’s timbre more than did Richard Strauss. Not only in the majority of his operas but also in his early tone poems Macbeth (1888/1891) and Tod und Verklärung (1888–89), the tam-tam with its now-traditional topical implications was integral to the dramatic unfolding of his enormous orchestra’s rich textures. In Macbeth, what is more, Strauss had the instrument rubbed with a triangle mallet during a four-measure build-up that James Hepokoski has associated with the onset of “ever-more-violent ‘death blows.’ ”212 The resulting chilling sound—“a terrible sough” (ein furchtbares Sausen) that emphasized rather than veiled the gong’s metallic essence—would soon migrate back into opera for the dances of the title heroines in both Salome and Elektra (Dresden, 1905 and 1909).213 Strauss’s Macbeth and Tod und Verklärung paradigmatically illustrate a dual expansion of the tam-tam’s role in Western art music. Following earlier forays by Berlioz, Liszt, and others in deploying the tam-tam beyond opera and ceremonial music, the gong was regularly adopted into symphonic works from the late nineteenth century onward, where—as Constantin Floros has argued—it appeared predominantly with funerary, eerie, or metaphysical connotations, above all in the works of Mahler.214 Even in instrumental music, that is, the gong remained beholden to the semantic contexts whose origins this chapter has surveyed. At the same time, novel playing techniques widened the spectrum of gong sounds around (and away from) the symbolic loud coup. In his scandal-mongering ballet Le sacre du printemps (Paris, 1913), for instance, Stravinsky asked for repeated tam-tam glissandi by means of a triangle beater run “quickly over the instrument’s surface, drawing an arc,” while Schoenberg had a gong made to vibrate with a bow in Die glückliche Hand (1910–13; premiered in Vienna in 1924).215 These novel techniques appropriated the tam-tam as a versatile source of sound effects suitable to modernist scores with their frequent emphasis on rhythmic articulation, grinding dissonance, and timbral differentiation—tendencies that promoted all manner of percussion instruments. One apex of this development was reached in Paris in 1926, when George Antheil premiered his programmatically titled Ballet mécanique

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in a revised concert version for two (percussively used) pianos, an amplified player piano, three xylophones, four bass drums, three propellers, electric bells, tam-tam, and siren. Among this futurist ensemble, the gong ironically appeared as one of the more familiar and “natural” orchestral sounds, the surrounding cacophony severing any of its traditional semantics.216 In early twentieth-century music and beyond, then, the tam-tam became a powerful acoustic generator fully living up to de Lasalle’s concept of the “engin précieux.”217 As such, it was not to be missed by avant-garde composers from Varèse to Cage and Henze to Boulez, whether in opera, ballet, or film scores, pieces for full orchestra, smaller ensembles, or percussion groups. The gong was vital for the musical soundscape of modernity. S OU N D T E C H N O L O G Y

Many twentieth-century composers thus consummated in idiosyncratic ways Wagner’s ideal of the sonically integrated tam-tam, even if they no longer required the instrument’s masking. Yet this absorption of the gong into the orchestra was counteracted by theatrical practitioners who simultaneously treated the idiophone as discrete acoustic supplement, thereby perpetuating its ambiguous status between stage technologies and musical media. Since at least the 1830s, some gong-owning theaters used the instrument to simulate church bells, particularly in Meyerbeer’s works. At the Opéra, the composer could avail himself of two large bells for the offstage beffroi in the last acts of Les huguenots. Yet with their enormous size and weight, such bells remained unique to Paris.218 Other theaters had to be creative in rendering low bell sounds; and Meyerbeer’s diaries betray his repeated adjustment of the part.219 With its deep sound and audible thump, the tam-tam offered a popular substitution, in spite of lacking a bell’s interplay of strike note and hum (a complexity not then fully understood). In Frankfurt performances of Der Vampyr, for instance, a gong enacted the clock strike ending the vampire’s midnight menace—a solution befitting the gong’s uncanny associations.220 Even the Opéra itself, as we have seen, rented two differently sized tam-tams to effect the (pitched and higher) offstage bells in Dom Sébastien.221 And in La damnation, Berlioz allowed a tam-tam to replace Marguerite’s death knell.222 By 1869, Mussorgsky composed out this substitution for his ample bell effects in Boris Godunov.223 And for Parsifal’s four-note Grail theme, even a desperate Wagner proclaimed “A kingdom for a tam-tam!”: four pitched gongs eventually strengthened both volume and attack of his so-called bell piano (Glockenklavier), a special contraption of strings and hammers devised at the composer’s behest by the Bayreuth piano manufacturer Eduard Steingräber to simulate sufficiently large bells as to befit the temple of Montsalvat.224 Here, (bossed) gongs became the supplement of a supplement: precisely because of their properties otherwise veiled in Wagner’s orchestra, they could amplify a makeshift instrument to

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suggest sacred sounds. There was perhaps no more material illustration of Wagner’s Mischklang than this composite bell piano, no matter that—just like other Wagnerian technologies—it fell short of its desired effect. As if to prove Adorno, the gadget was continually replaced by new inventions (including one in the late 1880s that utilized enormous metal canisters, which is to say industrial waste) until many twentieth-century orchestras superseded it with actual synthesizers. This trajectory of gradual obsolescence until the electronic era only highlights the gong’s partial function as sound technology in nineteenth-century theaters. Beyond faking bell sounds, the tam-tam was frequently cultivated for its mere noise. As we have seen, La muette de Portici applied it liberally to the volcanic eruption alongside thunder machine and rocks thrown by stagehands, the production book explicitly listing it as optional “accessory.”225 But if this manual took pains to mention that the gong could be omitted (so as to reassure theaters that didn’t yet own one), directors soon upended this approach: they added the instrument gratuitously to previously gong-free moments. Thus it came to underpin all manner of calamities. Trumping the climactic strike of Rossini’s Moïse, for instance, the Vienna Court Opera put in multiple coups for the returning flood in the original (and originally tam-tam-less) Mosé in Egitto.226 The deluge and structural collapse toward the end of Lortzing’s Undine also offered an opportunity to beat the tam-tam, as did the tumultuous music with faraway bell sounds opening act 3 of Rienzi.227 And the instruction “tam-tam off ” (Tamtam aus) in Munich performance materials of Les Troyens for an added gong that implemented the rumblings inside the Trojan horse at the end of act 1 itself likened the tam-tam to an electric effect that could be switched on and off.228 Other productions specifically exploited the tam-tam’s semantic potential. The Opéra inserted yet another strike into Moïse to exalt the sunrise in act 2, which was “to appear as if by magic”; this gong acoustically proclaimed the miracle that Meyerbeer’s electric arc lamp would so spectacularly visualize twenty-two years later.229 More popular was an extra bang in Robert le diable for Bertram’s descent into hell. The Vienna Court Opera went so far as to postpone and re-score the ensuing twelve bell strikes, the better to enjoy the gong’s last judgment.230 Ironically, even Tannhäuser was given the gong treatment. In Munich performances between 1887 and 1892 as well as in Cosima Wagner’s professedly “authentic” Bayreuth premiere of 1891, the Parisian coup was proudly restored—in Bayreuth explicitly as a “signal” for thunder and the sudden transformation.231 Too useful had the gong proven elsewhere as not to be considered an expedient tool even in Wagner’s tam-tam-less scores. Such complementary sonic coups might have unsettled the compositional trend toward a more sparing use of the tam-tam we have observed, expediting instead the loud strike’s trivialization. Yet some composers contributed to the gong’s liberation from the score. In a printed copy of La vestale with autograph additions, Spontini suggested no fewer than four bonus fff strikes in that model act 2 finale.232

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And even Meyerbeer added four strikes for a Brunswick performance of Les huguenots to herald the music accompanying the final scene change.233 Directors meanwhile increasingly strove to execute climactic thumps from specific positions in the wings or behind props to facilitate their association with concrete actions or objects, no matter whether the strikes were added (as in the Munich Tannhäuser, where the gong sounded from the locus of Venus’s disappearance) or part of the orchestral score. In Dresden performances of Robert, the tam-tam’s placement below the stage reinforced its chthonic link, while Munich’s Prophète had this opera’s strike emanate from near a clock, even though it did not represent a bell.234 By transplanting some dramaturgically motivated tam-tam strikes from the pit into an audiovisually enlarged stage space and treating them as diegetic sounds, in other words, theaters spatialized the distinction between music and sound effect. Correlating to the tam-tam’s frequent listing as stage prop, operatic applications of the tam-tam were more fluctuating still than our investigation of both scores and instruments suggested. As much as add-on strikes may have relished the gong’s sonic and semantic resonances, they often served mundanely practical ends. The 1823 Viennese premiere of Semiramide cut the second utterance of Nino’s ghost in the act 1 finale, complete with its four accompanying gong strikes; but one of these was assiduously transplanted to the ensuing choral exclamation of horror, the single stroke at once condensing the omitted passage and glossing over the cut: it amounted to an editor’s tool.235 More commonly, stage directions in scores and production books treated the coup de tamtam as an important sonic signal for singers and stagehands to trigger actions or choreographic formations. This was the case with the group of soldiers launching the act 1 funeral procession in Dom Sébastien, or the Anabaptists throwing their prisoners to the ground in Le prophète; in Don Carlos, the fff strike to the opening of the grille from which the ghostly monk would appear a measure later coincided with a sudden beam of light.236 As this last example illustrates, the gong’s prolonged resonance ensured sufficient leeway for singers and technicians both to react to and still concur with its sound (no matter that the loud coup itself had to be prepared: to achieve maximum volume with a single strike, a tam-tam needs to be silently “warmed up”—made to oscillate—in advance).237 What is more, the tam-tam also covered over the incidental noises inevitably produced by a sudden shift in blocking or scenery, such as the opening of Don Carlos’s sepulcher. Thus, the gong frequently coincided with spectacular events that would involve many stagehands and a good deal of hubbub to pull off. The tam-tam marked the culmination not only of dramaturgical developments but also of the mechanical preparations or technical feats they involved. It was the big bang toward which to labor. In a sense, then, a loud gong strike functioned no differently than the backstage bells (mentioned in chapter 2) that commonly signaled curtains or scene changes in nineteenth-century theaters. And yet, the tam-tam outperformed these acoustic

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communication technologies. Complaints about audible squeaks and shouts during transformations were legion. In 1870, the management of the Vienna Court Opera issued a reprimand concerning such “onstage noise”; and even Bayreuth (as we shall see in chapter 4) was not immune to the intrusion of such anti-illusionist sounds or the imperative orders of machinist Carl Brandt.238 Why, then, not cover these inadvertent clamors with an even louder din, one with appropriate semantic overtones? Sure enough, some late nineteenth-century theater manuals explicitly recommended coordinating scene changes with dramatic or acoustic uproar, and listed the tam-tam among the machinist’s standard tricks.239 The climactic gong stroke thus provided an acoustic curtain—a sonic blind whose timbre did not disrupt the audiovisual immersion but, instead, absorbed surrounding noises. Put differently, the gong offered a means to cover the aural side effects of other mechanical maneuvers, but one that—akin to a locally colored drop—could camouflage itself at least for ears not offended by its material grain. To apply Kahn’s words on noise, the tam-tam’s loud strike became “itself a form of noise reduction.”240 As such, paradoxically, its very use as sonic stage prop (rather than orchestral medium) could epitomize Wagner’s general efforts to veil his stage technologies by means of what I have called their “artification.” Perhaps we might even consider the gong an aural signifier of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself: its palpable sound waves and long reverberation embody the immediacy of perception as well as the emotional and corporeal impact Wagner desired for his works. Moreover, as evocatively captured by Rainer Maria Rilke, the gong’s “effervescent” vibrations transcended the sonic into the spatial, “[a]s if that tone / outstripping us on every side / were space ripening.”241 For all its metallic essence, the gong ultimately transpired to be an instrument of the future. BA N G I N G T H E G O N G

In light of the gong’s versatile applications in the service of theatrical effect and multimedia immersion, it is unsurprising that the loud coup became a popular sonic beacon of anything spectacular (or appetizing) beyond the stage. Dinner gongs were so ubiquitous by the early twentieth century that orchestration manuals warned composers against repeated tam-tam strikes, lest they made their audience’s mouths water.242 And outside bourgeois homes and the opera house, the tam-tam was used from the early nineteenth century on as a sign—which is to say, a communication technology—for the beginning of shows themselves. George Sand memorialized this sensationalistic use in her 1842 novel Consuelo: no less than a specter “struck a kind of gong which gave forth a mournful sound, and a large curtain parted and displayed the theatre” in which an opera was to be performed.243 In Sand’s scene, the tam-tam both commands the curtain and acoustically enhances its unveiling of an exceptional event. At the Arena di Verona, by

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contrast, the gong has come to replace the curtain: because this vast outdoor stage cannot be veiled, spectators have been silenced since its inauguration in 1913 with three tam-tam strokes before the overture.244 Yet there is no more striking a demonstration of this link between tam-tam and curtain than the notorious “Gongman” trailers of the J. Arthur Rank Organization. Between 1935 and 1996, hundreds of popular British films were introduced by a well-oiled athlete hitting a gargantuan gong before a red velvet curtain. More than merging the paradigmatic visual and sonic signifiers of theatricality, however, this trailer also cemented the gong’s own optical shortcoming: the musclemen’s target was an oversized papiermâché mockup whose alleged sound was delivered, Ossian-like, by a common tam-tam played by British percussion authority James Blades.245 In a way, the gong here substituted itself. Blown out of visual proportion and emptied of its semantic associations, it became an emblem of multimedia entertainment per se, a symbol of the superlative ambitions of the film industry at large. From here, not unlike in nineteenth-century opera, the gong set out on two interrelated trajectories, both of which came to the fore in the 1970s. On the one hand, as if to reclaim its musical valence, the tam-tam entered popular music with a vengeance. Some textual references remained metaphorical: British glam rock band T. Rex’s 1971 hit “Get It On” instructed listeners to “bang a gong” in a suggestive love song, while the avant-rock group Henry Cow, in their 1975 song “War,” enigmatically invoked “[m]usicians with gongs” to conjure a prewar arcadia whose primeval musicking was nevertheless implicated in the birth of war.246 Actual musical uses, meanwhile, might have reflected the budding craze for Kung Fu movies (which frequently started with, or otherwise featured, gong strikes) as well as generally growing influences of non-Western cultures. These were audible, for instance, in hit songs with initial gong strikes like “Jungle Boogie” (1973) and “Open Sesame” (1976) by Kool & The Gang.247 When “Godfather of Soul” James Brown banged a gong—solo, loud, and with ample resonance time—on his 1974 album Hell, he could not have chosen a more apt title in view of the gong’s history.248 And insofar as such exposed strikes also evoked the “Gongman,” British rock band Queen lampooned this association in 1975 when ending, rather than starting, their iconic “Bohemian Rhapsody” with a gong strike: their video reveals drummer Roger Taylor’s shining body lunging at a tam-tam before the camera zooms in on the instrument’s oscillating center.249 Providing a dramatic apex in and of itself, the tam-tam’s final activation puts an emphatic audiovisual end to the idiosyncratic song by absorbing all sound and sight into itself. Given the title of the album on which “Bohemian Rhapsody” was featured—A Night at the Opera, inspired by the Marx Brothers’ eponymous 1935 movie—as well as the song’s pervasive operatic influences, this coup may also have captured the tam-tam’s operatic semantics, rounding off Freddie Mercury’s selfdeclared “mock opera” with a fitting flashback to his morbid first solo, an aria-like confession of homicide.250 No other instrumental effect could have provided in one

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fell swoop both concluding gesture and condensed recapitulation. Or did this coup express self-awareness of the entire song’s topsy-turvyness, a clue (or defiance) of its inscrutable meaning? In raising such questions, it ultimately summed up the tamtam’s enigmatic sound and richly ambiguous musical status itself. On the other hand, seemingly contrary to this compositional revival, the gong became the key device and raison d’être of NBC television’s Gong Show. In this intentionally “vulgar, cheap, and irreverent” pseudo–talent show aired daily between 1976 and 1980, the main attraction was whether and how a celebrity jury member would strike a large tam-tam, Beckmesser-like, to end an act after a minimum allotted performance time: “being gonged” became the infamous sign of public humiliation for the contestants on which the show fed.251 In this context, the tam-tam served not only as central stage prop, dramatic tool, and sound technology, but it also became an emblem of artistic failure or social disgrace—an acoustic harbinger of degradation à la Vestale. Nor was its own treatment dignified, its sonic profile once more reduced to the workaday loud bang. In an ironic historical twist Wagner might have cherished, the resonating gong, so contested in nineteenth-century music, morphed into the cruel arbiter of ever more “tasteless” acts,252 a sounding token of what Wagner would surely have called “barbarism.” In (West) Germany, more prosaically, it was not entertainment but the primary state television’s newscast—ARD Tagesschau—that has been heralded several times daily by an acousmatic tam-tam strike since its beginnings in 1952, with only the gong’s electronic simulation changing over time. Announcements at railway stations are frequently marked similarly, while the electroacoustic signal regulating lessons in German schools (the Pausengong) typically consists of three descending gong strikes.253 With such a profusion of gong sounds in daily life, it required perhaps a more decisive gesture to salvage the tam-tam as legitimate musical instrument. Arguably no one did so more vigorously than Stockhausen. Inspired by experiments with live electronics in popular music, and no less cognizant of the “Gongman,”254 Stockhausen placed a five-foot (60 in.) Paiste tam-tam center stage in Mikrophonie I, a 1964 composition for a large tam-tam, two microphones, two filters, and two controllers. For upwards of twenty minutes, two percussionists—one on each side of the tam-tam—produce thirty-six different, onomatopoetically suggested sounds by treating the instrument à la musique concrète with a variety of objects ranging from pieces of rubber, plastic, or glass to a self-made monochord.255 This diversification of “mallets” and techniques dwarfs all prior attempts at eliciting novel resonances from a tam-tam. Moreover, two players move microphones across the instrument’s surface to amplify the various sound events from specified distances. They make audible even the usually unperceivable acoustic microstructures “in the tam-tam itself ”: the title Mikrophonie alludes to both the use of the microphone as active instrument and the microsonic sounds it renders.256 The remaining players meanwhile operate filters and controllers while feeding the

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resulting signals into loudspeakers. In truly Kittlerian fashion, the composer thus separates acoustic from visual input to seamlessly reunite them, with the former in electronically modified form. What the audience hears is a tam-tam triply mediated through unusual materials, microphones, and filters; only at particularly loud moments does the immediate vibration of the tam-tam mix into this soundscape.257 Thus does Stockhausen complicate both Le Sueur’s (or Rank’s) employment of the gong as offstage sound technology and Wagner’s orchestral immersion thereof. Where the former had replaced the gong optically and the latter had hidden it audiovisually, Stockhausen ardently showcases the idiophone and its material treatment, producing a different kind of gong show. But the audible sounds only apparently originate directly from the instrument. Although his devices— cables and all—are visible, the exact nature of sound manipulation in each performance remains unknown even to the performers. Still, all sounds are ultimately tam-tam sounds. It is thus that Stockhausen claimed to investigate and simultaneously reenchant the “mystery” of the tam-tam’s resonance.258 Written at a significant juncture in Stockhausen’s career that saw him turning away from purely electronic music, Mikrophonie I (among other pieces) reintroduced both live human performers and traditional instruments into his compositions— something emphasized by the theatrics of four players acting upon (and around) the one tam-tam.259 It was perhaps to highlight this liveness that Stockhausen’s commentaries all construed the tam-tam as a living organism. He cast it as a body auscultated as with a doctor’s stethoscope, or one to be “excited” so as to utter tones he likened elsewhere to animal sounds (the erotic overtones are hard to miss).260 And resulting from these interactions between a metallic organism, prescribed human actions, and electronic mediations was a soundscape far more diverse than anything Stockhausen had discovered during twelve years of experiments in his electronic music studio.261 In another ironic turn on Wagner’s demechanizing attempts, the archaic tam-tam, amplified and supplemented by electronic technologies, proved more versatile a generator of inharmonic sound spectra than even the most advanced synthesizers. Put differently, Mikrophonie I combined not just electronic and live music, performance art and instrumental music, immediate and mediated sounds, sonic and visual display; it also merged subject and object of sound production. Microphones become mechanical listening devices performing an archaeology of the tam-tam’s vibrations. And, no longer a technological supplement, the tam-tam itself receives these technical prostheses, its ensuing sounds being so novel and unique to each performance as to surprise (and unite) composer, performers, and audience alike.262 Stockhausen thus simultaneously consummated and transcended the efforts of nineteenth-century composers to expand the tam-tam’s timbre that this chapter has examined: he sounded the tam-tam to its own music-dramatic climax. In so doing, he also confirmed the tam-tam as a powerful sound source even in the era

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of electronic media, his compendium of gong sounds itself prefiguring (or inspiring) the emerging spectral music.263 In short, Mikrophonie I reintegrated the operatic uses of the tam-tam as orchestral medium and theatrical technology we have observed. The gong, Stockhausen seemed to say, is always both—and more. From this perspective, it seems hardly coincidental that the gong has remained the only one of the Wagnerian technologies surveyed in this book that has not become associated with Wagner: there is no “Wagner gong.” Its timbre defies the very distinction between (mechanical) production and (aesthetic) product Wagner posited. And it does so not only more audibly than other musical instruments, but also more consistently than other stage technologies. Because of this, the tam-tam affords fresh insights into the realities, materialities, functions, and ambiguities of acoustic stage technologies in the overall conception and realization of nineteenthcentury opera. And, as the next chapter will suggest for steam, it is precisely because of its sonic and sensual multivalence that the tam-tam has continued to be a powerful tool, whether in opera or instrumental music, popular shows, or other forms of human expression.

4

Steam

Santa Barbara, 1945. In what would be his last novel, the exiled Austrian writer Franz Werfel catapults himself 100,000 years forward in time to a distant planet. There, on the “Star of the Unborn,” he encounters the performance of something described to him by an indigenous gentleman as “a total work of art.” The timetraveling narrator is alarmed: “ ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ I interrupted [the gentleman], startled out of my composure, ‘I’ve heard that word before. Moreover, it seems to me I’ve heard the thing itself before. It usually lasts five hours. Steam rises from below along with wonderful music that has no beginning and no end, and the bearded singer in the wolf ’s pelt nervously shifts his long spear from one hand to the other. . . .’ ”1 From the distance of outer space (or wartime California), four signifiers sufficed for Werfel to evoke Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen: excessive length; infinite music; a spear-carrying, primitively clad bass; and ascending steam. This last element may take us by surprise. Although we are accustomed to jokes about long quarters of an hour, breastplates, and winged helmets, I doubt that anyone today would invoke steam as an equally defining marker of the Ring. And yet, the association of Wagner with all manner of vapor—steam, fog, fumes, or haze—was not confined to Werfel. As early as 1878, Friedrich Nietzsche rejected Wagner’s “metaphysical nebulization [Vernebelung] of everything truthful and simple”; ten years later, he notoriously greeted Bizet’s Carmen as taking leave of “the damp North, of all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal.”2 In 1881, journalist Theodor Goering compared the tetralogy’s music to fog through which “terrific talent” shone momentarily. At the turn of the twentieth century, a character in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks spoke of Tristan und Isolde as “perfumed fog” (parfümierter Qualm). During early World War I, recent literature Nobelist Paul von Heyse likened the 162

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effect of this opera to “a musical hash-obfuscation [Haschisch-Benebelung].” And as late as 1963, in view of Wagner’s nationalist mythologization of the past, philosopher Ludwig Marcuse dubbed the composer “the great forefather of generations of German fog-makers [Nebel-Macher].”3 The catalog goes on. To be sure, all these comments take sideswipes at Wagner. The foggy metaphors regularly evoked by critics allude to the well-worn stereotypes that his melodies are endless or formless (hence, nebulous), his harmonic progressions evasive, his orchestral sounds narcotic, or his plots impenetrable and remote: “suffocating mist,” as Eduard Hanslick denigrated the Rheingold poem.4 On a metaphorical level, then, images of meandering fog pervaded the anti-Wagnerian lexicon early on, and not exclusively for the Ring cycle. With the first performances of the latter, however, steam also acquired a very “real” dimension in critical discussions. Hardly a review of the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876 abstained from contemplating the medium of water vapor. After all, not only did Wagner invoke it in his stage directions, but—as we shall see—the Ring premieres in Munich and Bayreuth also made extensive use of actual steam onstage, more so than ever before in opera. Although no more an original invention of Wagner’s than the increasingly nuanced curtains or the orchestral integration of the gong, the generous deployment of water vapor in the Ring cycle effectively introduced the majority of international opera-goers to a novel stage technology. Small wonder that steam became associated with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk for decades to come. In contrast to the curtain, actual steam effects had no direct predecessors in Greek drama, classical theater, or Baroque opera, not even (unlike to the gong) in late eighteenth-century music. True, real water and sprays of scented essences had graced some Renaissance and Baroque spectacles; Handel’s Rinaldo of 1711, for instance, was well frequented by Londoners for its display of waterworks.5 But the clouds and mists evoked in operatic scenarios were usually rendered, as we have seen in chapter 2, via drops, cloud curtains, or gauzes through the mid-nineteenth century (and beyond). Presenting them by means of actual steam presupposed not only a significantly heightened appetite for onstage realism (as discussed in the introduction), but also the application of a decidedly modern technology—one, no less, that seemed diametrically opposed to opera, the most aesthetically and socially elite of multimedia art forms. Steam engines, by contrast, epitomized what British essayist Thomas Carlyle famously dubbed in 1829 “the Age of Machinery”: they were the very motors of the industrialization, urbanization, and overall technologization (along with the alleged debasement) of nineteenth-century society that Wagner and other intellectuals sought to overcome through art.6 The seeming incongruence of opera and steam engines was articulated in 1862 by the French engineer and scientific writer Henri de Parville, who suggested utilizing steam power at the Paris Opéra both for an improved ventilation system and to achieve faster scene changes. In order to placate readers potentially scandalized by this

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“audaciousness,” he hastened to clarify that he was not thinking of placing an engine amid the orchestra, disguised as a tam-tam or ophicleide (that is, two rather large and vociferous metallic instruments, the former itself bordering, as we have seen, on stage technology). Instead, he would house it at a safe distance of several hundred meters from the theater in an “inoffensive,” tent-like building.7 Parville wished to hide the actual engine while employing its invisible energy for the sake of the physical comfort of audiences and the mechanical expediency of stagecraft. Fourteen years later, Wagner and his technicians indeed consigned two locomotive engines to a wooden shed behind the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.8 Yet these were not operated to generate intangible power but, on the contrary, to exploit its visible byproduct: viewed against Parville’s submission, the parading of steam on the Bayreuth stage appears as a bold step indeed. More than any other stage technology, the operatic steam engine pinpoints the deeply ambivalent attitude toward technics among many nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists—a stance epitomized by Wagner’s artistic dependence on, yet practical and theoretical downplaying of, the mechanical. The steam engine was Wagner’s technical appendage incarnate. As such, it symbolized his quest for directorial command à la Venus—his desire to realize with all means possible a Gesamtkunstwerk as envisioned in Tannhäuser. Of all the latter’s media, meanwhile, onstage steam came closest in essence and function to the rosy scent that supernaturally enhanced the Venusberg. If, as chapter 1 has shown, Wagner was lacking Venus’s magic muscle to conjure and meld his various media seamlessly, his efforts—or so he might have thought—could perhaps be propelled by steam power, the most potent of industrial technologies. Indeed, the visually alluring element of steam transcended the painted scenery and practicable structures then commonly used for illusionist stage design. Albeit fortuitously, it even underlined the multisensorial aspect of staged opera. So versatile were its effects that they have outlived all consequent advances in stage and media technology: reason enough to conclude this book’s exploration of nineteenth-century Wagnerian technologies with steam. Taking seriously the frequency and sincerity of contemporary comments on steam (an umbrella term I use interchangeably with vapor to indicate all kinds of visible vapors onstage, regardless of their generation), this chapter looks more closely at what might be called Wagner’s poetics and histrionics of steam. Releasing the fog from the realm of metaphorical Wagner criticism, I seek to pursue its concrete effects in onstage applications prior and (more frequently) subsequent to the 1876 Bayreuth Festival, and above all in the conception and practical realizations of Wagner’s Ring. In order to do so, I will examine relevant moments of this work not as they unfold according to the score (as I did for Tannhäuser’s opening scenes and many curtain effects), but as they took shape historically in their textual, musical, and stage-practical dimensions. In view of these moments, I argue, the availability of water vapor was seminal for the early production and reception

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history of the Ring. Moreover, the amorphous, transitory essence of steam points to a host of fundamental ambivalences in plot, music, and the original staging of this Gesamtkunstwerk itself: steam-like, it hovers between the archaic and the ultramodern, past and future, superhuman myth and human-designed progress, ideas of unspoiled nature and industrial society, realism and idealism, codified work-in-writing and staged work-in-progress. Above all, steam pinpoints essential qualities of what I have called Wagnerian technologies as such, which continually mediate between different sensory realms, between spatial expanse and performative flux, representation and presence, ostentation and transparency, materiality and disembodiment, and—not least—technicity and instantaneous multisensorial effect. As the latest such technology surveyed in this book, steam is also formidably suited to explore how a particular opera became associated with specific elements of its material rendition. Steam exposes us most unequivocally to an element beyond the authorial text(s) that was nevertheless understood in its time to belong to “the work itself,” thus complicating the notion of what defines an opera. Additionally, with its liminal physicality and ephemeral essence, steam can be a useful metaphor for studying more generally the nature and the historicity of operatic production as well as the fundamental role of technologies therein. In the end, onstage steam might even reflect a baseline condition of the experience of modernity itself: one in which transition is a defining state and the present moment is forever fleeting, split between remembrance and anticipation, the vainness of the bygone and the utopian potential of the future. VA P O R S O N T H E PAG E

Admittedly, opera before Wagner was not quite as dry and fumeless as my introduction may suggest. Apart from those real waters and scents occasionally featured on Baroque stages, libretti mention vapors intermittently from the later eighteenth century on. This was often in conjunction with dark mythological or occult Romantic scenarios that either took place directly in the underworld (such as act 2 of Gluck’s 1762 Orfeo) or conjured up supernatural figures from there. To signify their otherworldliness, these specters would appear as nebulous shapes (for instance in the famous Wolf ’s Glen scene of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz of 1821) or be accompanied by rising fumes, often with additional thunder and flames (as was the case with the evil spirits in act 4 of Gluck’s Armide of 1777, the witch’s pantomimic apparition in act 3 of Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s 1798 Die Geisterinsel, and the disappearance of the chief vampire in act 1 of Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr of 1828). In short, printed stage directions evoked fumes primarily for gloomy special effects that—like the ominous tam-tam—marked either a location or a character as spooky.

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This is not to say that misty otherworldly incursions could not carry celestial flavors. In his 1804 Ossian, ou Les bardes, Jean-François Le Sueur and his librettists envisioned a dream scene in which the title hero finds himself in a fantastical aerial palace among heroes “seated on thrones of vapors,” with clouds facilitating ever more fantastic scenarios.9 More prosaically, fogs occasionally stood in for the clouds that, as chapter 2 has shown, were increasingly prescribed to (un)veil a longer set or parts thereof. In the first choral number of his incidental music for August von Kotzebue’s “Festspiel” König Stephan, Beethoven in 1811 even composed out (with a gradual ascension of pitches and dynamics, followed by a sudden tutti outburst) a rapid dispersion of such fogs in the background, an optical elucidation the choir programmatically associates with a movement toward national liberation and enlightenment.10 But only over the following decades did librettists and composers more frequently evoke clouds and fogs for nuanced atmospheric or nature settings, beyond opera’s (often symbolic) obligatory thunderstorms or sunrises.11 In particular, alongside its much-discussed historical detail, characteristic weather scenarios enhanced the heightened spectacular appeal of grand opéra, not coincidentally at a time when accelerated communication technologies made weather reports a regular topic of news media.12 Heralded by the abating storm giving way to sunshine at the end of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829), this trend was typified above all by the fogs that dissipate at the end of act 3 of Meyerbeer’s Le prophète (1849) to allow for that (in)famous electric sunrise—precisely the moment Wagner so detested as empty technical effect.13 It might seem ironic, then, that dissolving clouds and mists all but permeate Wagner’s works. Chapter 1 has already shown how the Venusberg scenes in Tannhäuser (1845) evoke both descending scents and parting mists for the (un)veiling of the magic visions and—in the later Paris version—of the background pantomimes. But nowhere did weather and lighting effects assume a more significant dramatic role than in the Ring. In fact, if Tristan und Isolde (1865) famously plays on the dialectics of darkness and light, the visual imagery of the Ring is seminally concerned with different shades of brightness, haziness, and visibility. Over the course of four evenings we experience myriad clouds, one rainbow, four carefully choreographed sunrises, and no fewer than five thunderstorms. (This inventory helps explain why Siegfried Wagner, as mentioned in chapter 1, retrospectively edited some such weather effects into Tannhäuser’s aboveground scenes to foster this opera’s music-dramatic appeal.) For its quasi-natural subsurface habitats, Das Rheingold also calls for the four tints of light most common in mid-nineteenthcentury theaters, thus outshining even the detailed color dramaturgy of Tannhäuser’s Venusberg grotto: “greenish twilight” for the bed of the Rhine, with a “magical golden light” emanating from the Rhinegold; a “dark red flare” for Nibelheim’s smithy; and a “bluish light” for Erda’s “rocky fissure.”14 As Hanslick astutely observed, the element of light and color here “usurps for itself an unheard-of self-

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sufficiency,” to the extent that the Ring “could as little have been composed before the invention of electric light as without the harp or bass tuba.”15 In other words, Wagner’s Viennese detractor suspected modern technology to have inspired a central aspect of the Ring’s music-dramatic conception. The same dependence on recent mechanical inventions might be claimed for vapors, which Wagner summoned onstage more eagerly—and in a greater variety of dramatic contexts—than any previous composer. Most abundantly, he conjured them in many of his settings, especially the chthonic world of Nibelheim in scene 3 of Das Rheingold. In line with the operatic tradition of infernal nether regions, sulfurous fumes here fill both cave and stage; as Loge remarks upon arrival: “Nibelheim’s here: / through leaden mists / what fiery sparks are flashing there!”16 With this depiction, Wagner fused the Scandinavian tradition of the Nibelung myth— according to which the Nibelungs were dwarfs rather than Frankish kings—with the general association, in German mythology, of dwarfs with sulfurous cavernous dwellings. In so doing, he also visualized a common etymological explanation of the name “Nibelung,” namely “son of the fog [or] the misty underworld.”17 In fact, Wagner’s first prose draft of 1848 begins with the following definition: “Out of the womb of night and death a race emerged which dwells in Nibelheim (Nebelheim [Home of Mist]), that is, in gloomy subterranean chasms and caves: they are called Nibelungs.”18 A contemporary critic clearly had a point when dubbing Wagner’s Nibelungen Nebeljungen—“fog boys.”19 Nibelheim, then, is a classically steamy place. Yet Wagner suggested gaseous effects also for the portrayal of aboveground nature, albeit not in the form of hellish sulfurous vapors but rather of pure evaporating waters. Das Rheingold’s opening shows the waves of the Rhine dissolving downward “into an increasingly fine mist-like spray” above the riverbed; on the mountain summit of scene 2, fog gives way to the first of the four sunrises; and during the final act of Götterdämmerung, “mists rise upwards from the Rhine.”20 Wagner, in short, dampened much of the Ring—and Das Rheingold in particular. He thus captured the gray, humid ambience of Teutonic lands and the fogs of Northern legend—ones that also permeated the fantastical Germanic realms of Goethe’s Faust so beloved of Wagner, and that diverged from the usual settings for operas based on Greco-Roman mythology or the recent history that provided more common operatic subject matter.21 At the same time, Wagner evoked the haze of the unknown, distant past: the ethereal, indefinable substance symbolizing the divine since time immemorial, and the mists of the “world’s beginning”—of pure, innocent nature—he sought to depict in Das Rheingold.22 Here, the mystic and the misty fuse. According to hygrometric hermeneutics, steam in the Ring signifies realms Nordic, natural, and uncorrupted. It reveals much about the Ring’s dramatic trajectory that these elemental vapors of Das Rheingold, with its purely mythical creatures, gradually give way to the smoke of god- and man-made fires. During the tetralogy’s subsequent operas,

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natural mists are largely supplanted by what Greek mythology described as humanity’s first technology: namely, the fire that the Titan Prometheus famously stole together with technical wisdom—“for there was no way for anyone to possess or make use of it without fire”—from the gods for the sake of humans. But this theft entailed severe castigation of both Prometheus and mankind.23 In light of such implications as well as Wagner’s own dubious opinions on technics, it seems consequential that the Ring’s artificial fumes chiefly appear in association with forced labor, painful manufacture, or a punishing restoration of order—and that they prove (at least materially) destructive in the end. Like his fogs (no less than his curtain and gong uses), to be sure, Wagner’s fires germinated at least partly in operatic conventions. Isolated fire effects—lightning, boiling cauldrons, flames of hell—had been integral to theatrical make-believe since the Renaissance. And large-scale blazes held pride of place among the ever more lavish denouements designed since the late eighteenth century to overwhelm spectators both dramatically and audiovisually, with particularly French stages competing for technical finesse and overall spectacle. One inspiration was the reallife eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1822, which prompted a veritable fashion for volcanic events (whether picturesque or tragic) in all manner of media including serious opera. The dazzling staging of Giovanni Pacini’s L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (Naples, San Carlo, 1825) at Milan’s La Scala in 1827 served as a model for producing the volcanic denouement of Auber’s La muette de Portici at the Paris Opéra the following year; as stage director Louis Jacques Solomé’s production book proudly advertised, La muette’s “final coup de théâtre . . . is a new effect for [theaters in] the provinces and can, if well executed, contribute to their abundant proceeds.”24 La muette in turn inspired fiery emissions of lava in works such as Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa (Paris, Opéra-Comique, 1831) and Félicien David’s Herculanum (Paris, Opéra, 1859), which all stoked awe at the sublime forces of nature (often boosted by the gong, as chapter 3 has shown). Other operatic firestorms originated in arson or combat. The finale of Cherubini’s “Comédie-héroïque” Lodoïska (Paris, Théâtre Feydeau, 1791), for instance, featured a castle collapsing in fire (albeit with the lovers jumping to safety). This scenario expanded into fatal infernos of crumbling palaces at the ends of both Wagner’s Rienzi (Dresden, 1842) and Meyerbeer’s Le prophète (Paris, Opéra, 1849), while Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe (Paris, Opéra, 1826) concluded with the conflagration of an entire city. As Meyerbeer freely admitted in private, the “wonderful blaze” ending Le prophète counteracted the floundering musical interest of the opera’s concluding act and alone managed “to maintain enthusiasm through the end”: Wagner’s charge of an effect without music-dramatic cause is not far off.25 When Wagner himself incorporated fire scenes, then, he availed himself of a key pretext for multimedia wonders. Yet, although clearly related to these blazing operatic finales, the Ring’s fires are dramatically more integrated and elementally less bounded. When first seen in Das

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Rheingold’s underground smithy, the “fiery sparks” Loge describes originate from quasi-industrial manufacture, presenting fire in its mythic ur-form as “tool of tools.”26 And the famously grand magic fire concluding Die Walküre also functions as technology: despite its visual affinity to burning denouements, this closing fire is neither catastrophic nor temporary, but instead intentionally—and consolingly— conjured by Wotan to protect the outcast Brünnhilde during her supernatural sleep on a rock. Granted, Wotan depends on the dubious demigod Loge to light the fire. Like Wagner, that is, the godhead requires others to implement his desired technologies. But the flames themselves provide his daughter’s otherwise defenseless body with a shielding appendage, mitigating her punishment. As such, their sole purpose is their continual presence. Thus they return in the following operas as part of the setting of this Valkyrie Rock: its sorcerous blaze transcends the operatic final flourish to become a frequent onstage presence. The most pyromaniac of composers in his time, Wagner promoted fire from localized effect or final—and fatal— spectacle to more benign atmospheric signifier much like nature’s clouds and fogs. His magic fire enchanted an inherited technology, turning it into a quasi-natural element. In Siegfried’s Tod of 1848 (the drama that formed the nucleus of the Ring libretti and was to evolve into Götterdämmerung), Wagner had originally assimilated steam and fire even further through their kinship as what John Durham Peters has recently theorized as “elemental media.”27 During Brünnhilde’s immolation in Siegfried’s funeral pyre, the couple were to ascend heavenwards, Holländer-like, in a “blindingly bright light” that radiated from “a dark bank of clouds (virtually the vapors of the doused [erstickten] wood fire).”28 Not smoke but steam—strictly speaking an impossibility—emerged from the fire to waft toward the gods, erasing and thereby redeeming the traces of technology and its ill-fated societal repercussions. Wagner’s revision of this scenario into a wholesale conflagration of both earthly and heavenly structures while denying any textual or visual glorification was owed (as is commonly argued) to his changing worldview after encountering Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy in 1854, as well as to dramaturgical dissatisfaction with the original ending.29 In addition, however, the new denouement might also have been motivated by the enticing prospect of surpassing—even the theatrical necessity to outperform—the already extravagant spread of mechanical effects during the Ring’s prior fifteen-plus hours in an all-out final coup.30 For Götterdämmerung, Wagner therefore designed an ending that, inherently, also trumped grand opéra: he blew up the genre’s conflagrant finales into a cosmic apocalypse. Although steamless, this ending deliberately stages the annihilation of technics after its (temporary) victory. Water floods the earthly blaze. And by returning the cursed technology of power— Alberich’s ring, another appendage forged by fire—to the Rhine, innocent nature is revived: thus Wagner allegorically enacted the redemption of a society corrupted by artifice (whether of contracts or technologies). It was just such a liberation that, as

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this book’s introduction has shown, he had hoped to achieve through his Gesamtkunstwerk at large. On a metaphorical level, then, the fogs and smokes of the Ring can be seen as related—indeed, kindred—symbols of nature and technology, those fundamental aspects of human existence whose seeming opposition Wagner had wanted to overcome by envisioning an idealized Nature. However, just like fire was needed to restore the Ring’s natural order, so—as we shall see—the staging even of nature’s triumph ultimately (and especially) depended on technology, and the most modern at that. Beyond these poetic and dramatic functions of steam and smoke, the Ring’s vapors also served practical ends. As we have seen in chapter 2, Wagner’s libretti— above all Das Rheingold—called for a large number of scene changes without interrupting the orchestral music. Throughout his career he sought to render such transformations in ever-closer audiovisual alignment, as animated representations of the changing settings rather than a single static drop. To this end, I have argued, Wagner began to evoke “rising mists” to veil some of the Ring’s scene changes. From the perspective of theater technology, in fact, it seems hardly accidental that vapors of different kinds literally provide the connective tissue of the four consecutive scenes of Das Rheingold, since its three transformations occur between vertically related landscapes, just as mists usually float upwards. Always in alliance with murkiness, these vapors lend themselves efficiently to masking both ends of the transformations: the trips to and from Nibelheim are accompanied by sulfurous mists gradually swelling into a “completely black cloud,” while the dark waters of the Rhine at the end of scene 1 evaporate quite naturally into mists and clouds, which in turn are dispelled by that sunrise to reveal Valhalla. Nowhere is Wagner’s dual emphasis on open transformations and on vapor as a visual marker of his mythic realms more obvious than in this first transformation, from the Rhine to Valhalla—the only one in all of Wagner whose change of locale is neither observed nor retraced by one of the characters. Instead, it establishes steam itself as a main agent in the Ring. In the two Nibelheim transformations, by contrast, vapor’s efficacy to obscure the scene changes is amplified by a third function Wagner assigned to it: to conceal not scenery but characters; or rather, to feign a change in their corporeality— bodily transmutations Das Rheingold likewise stipulates with rare gusto.31 Wotan and Loge set out for the underworld when the gods are deprived of Freia’s rejuvenating apples. “Is the mist playing tricks? / Does a dream delude me?” Loge gleefully asks, referring to Wagner’s stage direction: “A pale mist, growing gradually denser, fills the stage, so that the gods acquire an increasingly wan and aged appearance.” Although their realm is not naturally misty, the gods’ temporarily “old and grey, grizzled and grim” appearance by means of haze makes for easier transitions to and from the sulfurous chasm. Similar optical trickery applies to Alberich’s metamorphoses in Nibelheim; like their theatrical forbears in puppet theater, popular

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magical shows, and Zauberoper, they are intended to dazzle both onstage and offstage observers. When made invisible by the Tarnhelm, Alberich—true to his hex (“Night and mist, / like to none!”)—morphs into a “column of fog.”32 Practically speaking, Wagner could not have made a trapdoor whisk Alberich fully away until the end of his argument with Mime, lest his voice be muffled along with his body.33 But far from simply bowing to stage necessities, Wagner’s steamy pillar again tapped mythic imagination. In contrast to the Tarnkappe (or invisibility cloak) referred to in the Nibelungenlied, dwarf sagas frequently invoke Nebelkappen—caps that make their wearers imperceptible by swathing them in mists.34 By depicting this effect literally, Wagner achieved locally what his different vapors were to attain more globally: the veiling of theatrical machinations and their imperfections in a way that both looked natural and preserved the scenic illusion. The mists of the stage directions thus amount to a malleable Tarnhelm for the stage itself. Unlike Alberich, alas, Wagner could not invoke a spell to realize these transformations, nor did he know exactly how to craft his Nebelkappe in the first place. At some point during the Ring’s conception, he even seems to have renounced all practical considerations, seeing no possibility of ever realizing this ambitious project onstage.35 The fact that he allegedly had the completed Ring libretto evaluated by staging specialists to vouch for its performability only confirms the unusual demands it would pose in production. Indeed, the renowned theater director Eduard Devrient privately wondered in 1853: “How to perform [Das Rheingold]? It requires the most extraordinary theatrical machinery.”36 When, decades later, it finally came to be staged, forging the scenic Tarnhelm was left to the ingenuity of an accomplished theater technologist—the Loge to Wagner’s Wotan. M U SIC A L M I S T S

In principle, representing vapor onstage was no novelty. Wagner probably originally imagined translucent gauzes such as those he had commended in 1852 for Tannhäuser’s Venusberg scenes. Along with cloud curtains (as chapter 2 has shown), such gauzes evoked fogs in a number of mid-nineteenth-century operas. The 1849 production book for Le prophète, for instance, specifies for the beginning of act 3 that a “gauze curtain” ought to be lowered in front of the backdrop, “letting the city of Münster appear as through a fog.”37 More unusual—and challenging in practice—was the extent to which Wagner weaved his minutely foggy stage directions into his music. His orchestral interludes and other ambient nature scenes particularly struck contemporary listeners, who insistently remarked upon their extraordinarily graphic, illustrative, or realist qualities. One brief example shall suffice to demonstrate this close acoustic-scenic integration. For the first Rheingold transformation, immediately following Alberich’s theft of the gold, Wagner takes fifty-six measures (amounting to about two minutes) to

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transport us from the bottom of the Rhine—a low timpani and brass pedal—to “an open space on a mountain height” with a view of the gods’ new castle (example 4.1).38 The stage directions for this voyage come in three parts. First (starting in m. 712) Wagner calls for the rocky ledges to disappear and for the “black surging” to sink downwards “for some time,” such that the viewer gets the impression of rising through the waters. Accordingly, the agitated string motif that had earlier (from m. 540) enlaced the Rhinemaiden’s invocation of the Rhinegold (sometimes called the “Nature in motion motif,” now in the minor) wafts upward three octaves, supported by rising wind. Presumably having reached water level, Wagner then sends the motif back downward on the dominant minor-ninth chord of the Rhinemaidens’ woe, thinning its texture until it is echoed only in the celli’s low grumbling. As the so-called Renunciation lament sounds and the tempo slows, the string motif literally “gets lost” in soft tremolos (gänzlich sich verlierend, m. 746): we must be ashore. At this point (m. 749), in fact, Wagner indicates that “the waves have gradually turned into clouds which disperse into fine mist” as the atmosphere lightens up. True to their origin in water, these clouds are musically rendered through the modified head (the septuplet figure) of the “Nature in motion motif,” which arpeggiates upward through two octaves a total of three times, each time framed by the “Ring motif.” Explicitly labeled in Wagner’s draft score as “mists dispersing,” its heavenward move and gradual dissipation is reinforced by the shift from violins to flutes (no need to emphasize the implication of high wind here) and then to harps, those sure signifiers of celestial regions.39 Indeed, beginning with the harp statement, Wagner issues the third part of his stage directions (m. 759): “As the mist disappears upwards in delicate little clouds,” our mountain space becomes visible in the dawn. The “Ring motif ” this time follows twice, as if to seal the mists’ vanishing while preparing harmonically and motivically for the appearance of Valhalla in scene 2. We have arrived at the gods’ new dwelling. As is clear even from this cursory description, Wagner employed all musical means available to effect a vivid and continuous sonic “depiction” of the gradual transformation of natural locations, the materiality of their various elements (water, clouds, vapors), and the attendant atmospheric and light variations: he created the aural equivalent of a seamless optical (which is to say, protofilmic) transition. And since the Ring libretto enacts—among other dramas—Wagner’s perceived dualism of nature and technology (as symbolized by vapor and fire), he portrayed his fires with similar musical specificity and expansiveness as his nature scenes. This acoustic exhibition likewise expanded contemporary customs. Those cataclysmic conflagrations that extravagantly ended grand opéra finales usually flashed up as brief audiovisual images of horror that could be quickly concealed with one of those fast curtains we observed in chapter 2. In Le siège de Corinthe, for instance, the final blaze takes just over a minute and a half to spread across the “entire stage” in 124 measures of fast, chromatic, and arpeggiated eighth notes in

example 4.1 . Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, transition into scene 2, mm. 712–68. © By kind permission of SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. [Sehr schnell]

b 9 n˙ . &b b 8

WOGLINDE

712

b & b b 98

˙.

Weh!

WELLGUNDE

Weh!

b ˙. & b b 98

FLOSSHILDE

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√

(Die Flut fällt mit ihnen nach der Tiefe hinab.)

Œ.

∑

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∑

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∑

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714

(Aus dem untersten Grunde hört man Alberichs gellendes Hohngelächter.) vc

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(In dichtester Finsternis verschwinden die Riffe, die ganze Bühne ist von der Höhe bis zur Tiefe von schwarzem Gewoge erfüllt, vc 3

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716

vc

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b ˙. ˙˙ .. hn

˙˙ .. ˙.

œœ .. œ.

das eine Zeitlang immer nach abwärts zu sinken scheint.)

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œœœœ œœœœ œ œ nœ œœœœœœ

&

œœ .. œ. (continued)

173

example 4.1 . (continued)

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va

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722

&

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174

example 4.1 . (continued)

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example 4.1 . (continued) welches, als eine immer heller dämmernde Beleuchtung dahintertritt, zu feinerem Nebel sich abklärt.)

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12 œ & 8 œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ . œ π œœ œœ œ œ #˙ j vn, fl

3

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(Als der Nebel, in zarten Wölkchen, sich gänzlich in der Höhe verliert, wird, im Tagesgrauen, eine

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(continued)

177

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example 4.1 . (continued) freie Gegend auf Bergeshöhen sichtbar. — Wotan und neben ihm Fricka, beide schlafend, liegen zur Seite auf blumigem Grunde.) 760

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bw bw

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the strings, with a healthy dose of brass chords, piccolo, and cymbal crashes (albeit no gong strikes) sprinkled into the generically calamitous fortissimo mix.40 The denouement of La muette de Portici unreels even more rapidly, with sixty-four measures of chromatically rising and descending scales, accelerating harmonic alternations between tonic and dominant, and—finally—high violin figurations, all (as we have seen in chapter 3) to ample tam-tam and cymbal strikes. Of similar loudness and duration (at forty-four measures), if less graphic, is the musical conflagration of Le prophète. By contrast, the magic fire ending Die Walküre takes roughly twice as long to encircle Brünnhilde’s rock, and it enjoys an elaborate but softer musical rendition. Its “bright flickering flames” (Flackerlohe) are initiated by the chromatic trills and ascending scales that already marked the appearance of Loge—fire personified— in Das Rheingold, and then rendered in fifty-eight measures of relatively quiet yet agitatedly oscillating figurations plus the dotted, harmonically stagnant motif that Hans von Wolzogen dubbed the “Motive of the Fire-magic” in divided violins, wind, two piccolo flutes, glockenspiel, and no fewer than six harps, plus the occasional triangle, cymbal, and timpani sounds.41 Richard Strauss heard this as an apt evocation of fire’s visual behavior, marveling that “[a] better musical description of the seething flames flickering in a thousand tints cannot be imagined.”42 But, diverging from the silent steam, Wagner also captured the sonic nature of a crack-

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ling and blustering fire. What is more, he acoustically rendered the fire’s continual presence by what Adorno considered the epitome of musical phantasmagoria: without harmonic development or significant changes in orchestration or figurations, the fire music’s constant flickering conceals its essential stasis.43 And despite being aurally joined by a series of prominent leitmotifs, at the end only fire remains, peacefully claiming the stage. No sudden collapse, no tragic deaths, no final chorus accompany—and thus help feign or fade—this blaze: instead, a very gradual decrescendo eventually necessitates the curtain. This unprecedentedly extended exposure of pure, noninjurious fire (a cause without immediate effect, if we will) and its sole concluding presence onstage quasi naturalizes fire as environmental medium. Henceforth, as mentioned, it can reappear in the Ring not as threatening dramatic interference but as an integral part of the scenery of Brünnhilde’s rocky dwellings. In Siegfried, act 3, the title hero takes nearly three minutes (or fifty-four measures) to cross this fire, as it again dominates both music and stage. Although adopting (and adapting) the same agitated and circular motifs, though, this time the music does not portray stationary flames. Instead, it performs Siegfried’s voyage through the flames: it swells in pitch, dynamics, and texture to a glowing climax after which it calms down—again interspersed with other relevant leitmotifs—as Siegfried (and, with him, the audience) approaches Brünnhilde on the other side. In so doing, the music implies that the fire both represents and masks the actual scene change. This function was explicated in Wagner’s published libretto, according to which clouds of smoke were to waft from upstage to the front to suggest Siegfried’s progressive immersion in, and penetration of, the fire—just as the first Rheingold transformation prescribed first sinking waters and then rising mist to simulate upward motion. Similarly to this Rheingold passage, too, Siegfried’s fire transformation ends with ascending harp arpeggios representing “fine clouds” that dissolve upwards “into a delicate veil of rose-colored mist” to be scattered by another sunrise.44 Beyond recalling Brünnhilde’s godly descent, these sonic and (inferred) optic parallels strengthen the drama’s implication of kinship between smoke and fog. When the fire next appears, in Götterdämmerung, during Siegfried’s second crossing of about two minutes (or sixty-two measures) in act 2, we observe it from Brünnhilde’s viewpoint inside of it and at a distance. Consequently, the focus shifts from the fire itself to its diegetic meaning—its promise of Siegfried’s return—and Brünnhilde’s anticipation thereof. Still, in the musical background the fire flickers via the sonic elements that have by now gained leitmotivic status. Their recognition value makes them appropriate also, in act 3, to illustrate— albeit intermittently—first the kindling of Siegfried’s funeral pyre (with those chromatic trills and scales) and then, more emphatically, the Valkyrie’s own immolation. Yet, qua leitmotif, these figurations negate any essential difference between god- and manmade fires; between magic, industrial, or mortuary flames; between

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engineering, protective, purifying, or destructive blazes. Irrespective of source or purpose, it is fire’s basic, constantly vacillating essence and audiovisual effect that Wagner’s music captures. Wagner’s lavish acoustic depictions of both nature and fire scenes are, then, decidedly descriptive. Rather than just buying time for practical scene changes or, on the contrary, underscoring brief visual pyrotechnics, they become crucial for the audience’s experience of his mythic time and space. It was therefore paramount for Wagner that they be rendered visually. Yet as we saw in chapter 2, simply using decorative drop scenes could not suffice: a flat and immobile image of one and the same location or fixed atmospheric state would have jarred with—and thus undermined—his dynamic aural illustration. Instead, Wagner firmly believed that, in Patrick Carnegy’s words, “the stage picture should mirror the music.” As the composer had explained in “The Art-Work of the Future” of 1849, “Without addressing the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree.” Moreover, the spectator had to be “distinctly led to comprehension of the artwork by everything that meets the eye.”45 The staging of those foggy transformations and spreading fires was therefore to be animated and vibrant wherever the music continued. This explains why Wagner’s open scene changes (along with such indulgences as rainbow bridges, swimming mermaids, and singing dragons) posed such a challenge for nineteenth-century stagecraft. S T E A M O N STAG E

In light of these extensive stage-practical exigencies, it is not surprising that Wagner dreamed up his own purpose-built theater specifically for the Ring cycle. And when the latter’s staging there finally became feasible in the 1870s (more than two decades after Wagner’s first prose draft), he hired as mechanical and stage director the most famous German theater technician of his day, Carl Brandt. Chief machinist of the Darmstadt Court Theater and doyen of the modernization of stage technology in German-language theaters, Brandt was renowned for quick transformations and spectacular fire effects. Small wonder that Wagner gave him carte blanche both to design cutting-edge machinery for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and to solve the individual staging problems of its Ring production.46 Regarding the fogs, Brandt took Wagner’s desire for vapor literally. Suitably aided by a railway mechanic, he installed two used locomotive boilers in the machine house behind the Festspielhaus, which delivered water vapor to a repository in the substage. From there, steam could be distributed, regulated, and released through a grid of pipes and adjustable slots horizontally and vertically across the stage floor, as well as through two movable split tubes below or above the stage.47 This elaborate steam technology was proudly detailed in one of the laudatory press releases Wagner’s assistant Heinrich Porges dutifully submitted to numerous journals in order both

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to fuel curiosity in advance of the first festival and to document its preparation’s progress. Although few periodicals published these reports, they were made into a regular special feature in, among others, the influential Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and may well have spurred some critics to pay special attention to steam.48 As with the other Wagnerian technologies we have explored, Bayreuth was not the first theater to employ this medium. Yet although its precise origins remain as hazy as steam itself, water vapor’s initial theatrical appearances were decidedly more recent (and ambiguous) than those of nuanced curtains and gongs. One Ring reviewer suggested that vapor already graced some productions of the Meiningen Court Theater, which had heralded a renewed appetite among German-language stages for the careful mise-en-scène of repertory plays.49 Directed by Duke Georg II since 1869, the Meiningen company achieved sensational successes with their unprecedented level of historically informed and meticulously prepared spectacular realism onstage, an approach popularized through European tours of “model performances” beginning in 1874. Cosima and Richard Wagner had personal ties to the company and attended a Berlin guest performance in 1875, together with the Ring’s costume designer Emil Doepler; moreover, the Ring’s sets were executed (albeit after designs by Viennese landscape painter Josef Hoffmann) by the same studio that worked for the Meiningen company. Even if Wagner was thus clearly aware of, and influenced by, the Meiningen aesthetics and practices, though, whether they included steam remains uncertain.50 More assuredly, steam must occasionally have appeared in mid-nineteenthcentury French opera. True, a list of works featuring fire effects performed at the Paris Opéra in the late 1830s details expenditures not for steam technology but for fireworks (with La muette consuming tenfold the average amount of chemicals).51 Nor do surviving administrative documents or inventories of the Opéra’s stage machineries mention a steam boiler. But the original 1849 production book for Le prophète recommended the use of “ample vapor,” next to Bengal light and fiery backdrops, for the final conflagration—a formulation that barely allows for the usual equation of vapors with gauzes, as in the case of the same opera’s third-act fogs.52 In 1874, moreover, the retired scene painter Jean-Pierre Moynet, who had been active at various Parisian theaters as well as the Opéra-Comique, explicitly described the transformation in an opéra féerie of a demonic into a magical grotto by means of steam, which emanated from the substage and competed onstage with “silvered lines” (presumably gauzes or threads) descending from the flies to depict a “combat between water and fire.”53 All this suggests that steam was known as a means to simulate fire particularly in more popular midcentury Parisian theaters as well as in those—possibly like the Meiningen company—that followed the French emphasis on realist visual display. Nevertheless, judging from many journalists’ reports, both the complexity of Bayreuth’s steam apparatus and the sheer volume of vapors wafting from its two

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locomotive boilers seem to have been entirely unprecedented. Especially foreign critics marveled at the steam production as a “new invention,” and they tended to consider it the most innovative element of Wagner’s stage, often making it the centerpiece of their accounts of the Festspielhaus machinery or the productions themselves. Over the following decades, several pundits claimed outright that steam on the opera stage had first been used in Bayreuth.54 German reviewers were perhaps somewhat less steam obsessed in 1876 because they had experienced an (albeit more modestly) foggy stage at least once before: at the Munich premieres of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in 1869–70. At the request of Wagner’s patron Ludwig II, the machinery of Munich’s Court Theater had been specifically updated for these productions by none other than Brandt. It was he, too, who was called in at the last minute to rescue the Munich Rheingold when, notoriously, Hans Richter refused to conduct the premiere on the grounds of embarrassing shortcomings in the staging (a production Wagner had resisted from the start). Most documents concerning Brandt’s remodeling of the Munich theater are unfortunately lost, as are those detailing the contemporary machinery of the Darmstadt Court Theater, where he might have experimented with steam prior to Munich. But with reviewers commenting on Munich’s steaming stage in tones similar to those later sounded by Bayreuth reporters, we can safely assume that steam technology was also specifically installed by Brandt for the sake of the Ring.55 In both Munich and Bayreuth, steam was puffed most relentlessly onstage during Rheingold’s Nibelheim transformations. The score of the Munich stage manager, for instance, elucidates that steam—operated by two technicians—was emitted for five measures at Loge’s disappearance into the “sulfurous chasm” at the end of scene 2; after Wotan’s subsequent descent, more steam wafted “from the front groove across the entire stage” (figure 4.1). There it formed a semiopaque, nebulous mass that the Viennese critic (and later Brahms biographer) Max Kalbeck fittingly dubbed, for Bayreuth, “mysterious mists of transition” (mysteriöse Verwandlungsnebel).56 Behind it, various gauzes and scrims (some of them openworked and two specifically labeled Nebelwolken-Schleier) were lowered on a darkened stage in Munich, while Bayreuth slowly moved into place gauzes and more elaborate drop scenes depicting clouds, riffs, rocks, and other appropriate facets of nature, so as to veil the actual set change completely.57 In its constantly transitory and fluctuating state, steam would have animated these shrouding cloths and inhabited the stage front, upholding the theatrical illusion and enlivening the scene in the absence of characters. Steam, in other words, substituted for the physicality and liveness of singing bodies. Being commonly associated in the nineteenth century with accelerated transport (or locomotion), what is more, steam indicated the very fact of journeying between scenes.58 The transformation was thus no longer between two static tableaux that would each be vivified through characters. Now, in correspondence with the music, it became one single, con-

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stantly moving and slowly changing image. Hence Wagner’s comment on the transition to Nibelheim, recorded during the Bayreuth rehearsals: “not ‘tableaux vivants’—but a ‘picture of life’ shall unfold everywhere before us.”59 His emphasis, then, was not on the succession of realistic scenes (that is, on the form or manner of presentation) but on the life presented throughout (the substance). And how better to express this evolving life than through the insubstantial matter evoked in myths and religions as both the seat and the organ—or medium—of life eternal? Beyond thus contributing to the scenic picture due to its vivid mobility, steam was also the only “real” ingredient of the make-believe transition: an element representing nothing but itself. This was important, not only in support of Wagner’s desired stage realism, but also for his ultimate educational goal: as I discussed in the introduction, he aimed to lead humanity into renewed harmony with the natural world through the latter’s ideal representation. In contrast to painted drops, moving gauzes, built scenery, or the imitation of sunshine through technical light, vapor provided an “animated and uncorrupted natural element” to be harnessed for the most complex work of art.60 Steam thus came closest to the suggestion, made in 1892 by actor Ottmar Flüggen, to stage the Ring in open nature for utmost realism.61 Further, it both fostered and epitomized the impression Wagner desired for his entire staging. The more natural its execution, he had argued in 1849, the better its realization of the “optic and acoustic understanding of the artwork” so that the audience “lives and breathes now only in the artwork, which seems to it like life itself, and on the stage, which seems to it the universe.”62 That Wagner had accomplished this objective in Bayreuth was propagated tirelessly in Porges’s laudatory rehearsal reports: “the spectator never entertains the thought that he is confronted with a machinery guided by technical devices . . . [The scenery] gives the impression that the onlooker sees in front of him the real nature.”63 Steam, then, helped veil and at the same time render natural the complex mechanical stage transformations. It was, quite plainly, a transparent medium: one that not only conceptually leveraged its air of being unsubstantial, natural, and immediate, but also practically provided a barely visible material.64 (Perhaps it was in view of these steam transformations that Martin Böhm’s Ring satire, discussed in chapter 2, ridiculed Wagner’s curtains as see-through.) For once, a contributing medium was ready to mask the artificiality of other devices without simultaneously needing to disguise its own technicality: at least theoretically, onstage steam always already appeared as a medium. It was the Wagnerian technology par excellence. Appropriately, the profusion of steam during the Rheingold transformations incited abundant commentary and most frequently among Bayreuth’s many stage feats garnered the epithet of being pioneering. Yet the crafting of what George Bernard Shaw would later aptly christen a “steam curtain” did not suffice for Brandt: he ran his locomotive engines to accomplish Alberich’s corporeal transformations as well.65 A jet of steam implemented quite literally the “column of fog”

figure 4.1 . Interleaved stage manager’s score for productions of Das Rheingold at the Munich Court Theater showing Wotan’s descent into Nibelheim via sulfurous fumes at the end of scene 2. The oldest instruction (at the top of the right page in ink Sütterlin underlined in red pencil, with corresponding markers in the score) refers to the world premiere on September 29, 1869, when the transformation was shrouded in steam from the entire front groove. Erasures and directions concerning steam valves (red pencil at the top of p. 106) and gauzes reflect changing practices through 1928. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (St. th. 887-10).

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prescribed for Alberich’s invisible self; and the use of different valves in the floor, operated by one technician on each side of the stage, indicated his movement across Nibelheim’s chasm while the singer (once done with his singing) was safely removed from sight via trapdoor. The same trapdoor-and-steam combination also masked—that is, enabled—the process of Alberich’s animal metamorphoses.66 Further removed from its unadulterated appearance, steam found additional employment in Bayreuth for Wagner’s copious fire scenes, where red illuminated vapors stood in for their cousin smoke. One of the oldest theatrical effects, the onstage representation of smoke and fire had traditionally been accomplished through all manner of real flames: theater manuals since the Renaissance abound in proposing diverse resins and chemicals to produce particular sizes and shades of flames while stressing the vital importance of caution regarding these perilous effects.67 Around the turn of the nineteenth century, such practices found a new application in popular optical shows such as Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s fabled phantasmagorias, where incenses were sometimes burned to project images onto smoke instead of scrims or to let specters appear out of “light and undulating vapor.”68 Conversely, to achieve a more realistic illusion of their beloved large-scale blazes, nineteenth-century theater practitioners additionally (or chiefly) recommended painted gauzes or drops of firescapes and smoke, such as the ones used to simulate the crumbling edifices in La muette or to support the Bengal flames and steam for the denouement of Le prophète.69 In short, there was no shortage of theatrical means by which to feign smoky fires. At issue in the Ring, though, was the unprecedented scale, vibrancy, and duration of pyrotechnics required. According to both stage directions and music, as we have seen, Die Walküre’s concluding fire gradually and completely enfolds the dormant Valkyrie, rather than just flashing in the background. As such, it could not have been suggested by flat and static drops alone. At the 1870 Munich premiere, the fire was therefore presented as realistically as were the fogs: an actual circle of ethyl alcohol ignited to engulf the stage. Alas, the resulting heat and fire hazard terrified some spectators.70 For the wooden Festspielhaus, this solution could have been detrimental indeed. Lest Wagner’s short-lived idea of 1850 to destroy his special theater and burn his score after three performances of his Nibelung project be realized inadvertently, Brandt had to look for a safer alternative. Moreover, as Siegfried Wagner’s assistant Theo Raven would later note, “The magic fire can only be symbolized, rather than represented with our weak scenic means.”71 To the disappointment of some critics, Brandt found the solution in steam.72 Otherwise so desirable, one-to-one realism had its limits when becoming dangerous. But natural vapors, the latest gadget in German opera, proffered a harmless yet versatile substitute to simulate the ancient technology of fire. For the first time in the Ring, steam thus came to represent something other than itself—a switch emphasized by the fact that it needed colored electric light or red gauzes (other stage technologies) to complete its disguise.73

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figure 4.2 . Bayreuth’s steaming dragon, as re-created for Angelo Neumann’s 1881 production of the Ring cycle in Berlin’s Victoria-Theater. The doorbell panel reads “Fafner. Please ring loudly,” while the accompanying skit ridicules Fafner’s obvious artifice: “He can breathe steam and fire / and scream notes through the speaking tube” (Er kann Dampf und Feuer speien / Und durch’s Sprachrohr Noten schreien). In Alexander Moszkowski, Schultze und Müller im Ring des Nibelungen. Humoristische Skizzen (Berlin: A. Hofmann, [1881]), 66. Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Highlighting steam’s toggle between visible natural medium and technological aid, Siegfried paraded in miniature the entire gamut of Bayreuth’s vapors. Most logically, they ascended during the sword-forging scene of act 1 whenever the hero plunged his red-hot steel into the water: their release through those moveable slots furnished both the acoustic realization of and the optical equivalent to the “loud hissing” indicated in the libretto.74 Although depicting a natural process (literally, the vaporization of water through heat), steam here simultaneously signaled what was, as Lutz Koepnick has argued, an essentially modern, industrial method of steel production.75 Less convincing to critics seemed once more its nonliteral use—not only in the repeat of Brünnhilde’s magic fire but also in the attempt to enhance whatever semblance of “reality” the fire-breathing dragon could muster. This ill-starred creature indeed boasted its very own steam valve. Much to the delight of caricaturists, though, the vapors did not meld with the beast’s already grotesque appearance; instead, they evoked inappropriate everyday objects as divergent as a homey pipe or locomotive smokestacks (figures 4.2–4.3).76 And yet they came in handy. Analogous to Alberich’s impossible metamorphoses was the

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figure 4.3 . A later satirical view of Siegfried’s dragon, likely referring to Angelo Neumann’s production as presented in London in 1882. Again the megaphone is visible, while steam puffs from an industrial funnel. In Ernst Kreowski and Eduard Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur (Berlin: Behr, 1907), 129. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

dragon’s generously exhaling steam to shroud its battle with Siegfried, that embarrassment of many later opera directors. In all, once discovered as a Tarnhelm for staging the Ring, steam did more than just represent fogs. At least in Bayreuth, it became the default subterfuge with which to effect, simulate, or cover up some of Wagner’s extreme demands on stage technology. Appropriately, the 1876 production notes of Wagner’s assistant Anton Seidl ended with the word “steam.”77 Vapors were the salt in the soup of Wagner’s mythic illusion, the oil in the machine of his staged Gesamtkunstwerk. In terms of his larger music-dramatic agenda, steam appeared as the key Wagnerian technology with which to accomplish the seamless multimedia integration Venus had magically achieved in Wagner’s Venusberg vision—an all-purpose medium that would render this theatrical artifice, like her grotto, as nature. F UM E S I N A RT A N D L I F E

Apart from such practical uses, the rendition of vapors through actual steam seems art-historically to be a logical step in an era that aimed to represent everything as naturally as possible. In Romantic landscape painting, mists had long played a significant role in the depiction of all those sunrises, cloudscapes, and

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moonlit scenes so beloved by the likes of Caspar David Friedrich. Moreover, the ideal of fleeting substance also influenced the ways in which these topics were captured on the canvas. “He seems to paint with tinted steam,” John Constable said in 1836 about the “evanescent” and “airy” brush strokes of his colleague William Turner. That is, Constable highlighted the extent to which the materiality of paint and its physical treatment became part of the process of pictorial representation, even of the artwork itself.78 Both this material focus and the cloudiness of Romantic landscapes—their blurring of forms and perspectives for the sake of atmospheric illusion and “expanded” representation—resonated with Wagner’s contemporaneous ideal of “the most living work of most perfected art.”79 In “The Art-Work,” as we have seen in chapter 1, he had in fact sought to collaborate with landscape painters in particular. Rather than being constrained to re-create nature on mere flat pieces of canvas, Wagner had promised, these artists would be accorded the vast three-dimensional expanse of the stage, with its “artistic practice of every known device of optics,” its “use of all the art of lighting,” as well as the availability of “living, no longer counterfeited” human bodies.80 In other words, he had advertised his idea of the staged Gesamtkunstwerk by placing a premium on the variety and genuineness of participating media. Wagner, then, must have been thrilled to add steam to the Gesamtkunstwerk mix. This was not only the most authentic element garnishing his stage space—no mere artistic re-creation but part of nature itself. Rather, with its vapory, unbounded, and constantly changing shapes that had so challenged perspectival landscape painters, steam also had the unique potential of mediating between the by-then usual two- and three-dimensional theatrical contrivances, painted flats and practicable scenery.81 As a moving substance, it even helped integrate the motion and corporeality of the singing actors with the stasis of sets and props. Thus it typified the very mediality of a medium, both in the pre-nineteenth-century sense of an “intervening substance” and in the Kittlerian sense (discussed in the introduction) of providing “interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other.”82 Indeed, it was the perfect embodiment of Wagner’s ideal that the singer be enclosed by scenic landscape and music “as with an atmospheric ring of Art and Nature.”83 While forming part of the stage picture, steam—like music—was time dependent and fleeting in its existence; like Wagner’s acoustic medium, it could be both clearly mimetic and highly symbolic. With steam, in short, Wagner seemed to have found the visual, theatrical equivalent of his “disembodied music sounding from the ‘mystic abyss’ ” in Bayreuth—music he had compared, not coincidentally, to the omniscient vapors of the Delphi oracle in its ability to turn “the perceived scenic image into the most realistic representation of life itself.”84 And some early Bayreuth reporters picked up on precisely this “Wagnerian” quality of steam. As Yale’s Gustave Stoeckel wryly commented, scene 4 of Das Rheingold appeared to have been the least well executed of the cycle’s preliminary evening,

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since “[c]louds, mists and vapors could no longer be employed to heighten the illusion.”85 Through its very presence, steam helped transmute the mixed-media and plurimaterial theatrical simulation into hyperreality: it was the (dry) icing on the cake of naturalist stage design in the service of the “united work of all the arts.”86 Or thus it seemed in theory. In practice, Bayreuth’s use of steam was not without its ironies. For one thing, the real-life associations of steam interfered with Wagner’s high-flung artistic ideals. Even Wagner’s own writings mentioned steam frequently in its industrial context, as a token of the very deprivation he thought modern technology had brought upon the social and human conditions of life. In 1849, for instance, he called on the healing power of Nature “against the allparalyzing pressure of a civilization which disowns man; against the arrogance of a culture which employs the human mind as naught but steam-power for its machinery.” And in “The Art-Work,” he likened music that was bereft of dramatic purpose to “the breath of all-enlivening breezes replaced by sickening fumes from the machine.”87 Once again, he pitted industrial exhaust against nature’s fogs and winds. In line with this coupling of natural mists and artistic redemption, Wagner in 1873 talked of his emerging Festspielhaus as “Zukunftsmusik [having] . . . exchanged its cloudy shape for the solid masonry of ‘Bayreuth.’ Here the fog has thus found a resting-place where to take a very real form.”88 And as we have seen in the introduction, he had specifically intended to perform this transmutation— that is, to build his theater and mount the Ring cycle—“far away from the fumes and industrial stench of our urban civilization.”89 Only thus (if at all) did he deem himself able to find an interested, uncorrupted audience that would gather specifically for the sake of his art. Otherwise, or so we may expand on the first chapter’s allegorical reading of the Venusberg, the Gesamtkunstwerk’s precious perfumes would be lost among the reek of technology-driven metropolises. It was, then, flying in the face of his own anti-industrial biases that Wagner in 1876 employed discarded traction engines to feign untouched mythic nature: machinery rendered residual by the ever-faster development of technics was to deliver a substance onstage that amounted to nothing less than the most visible waste of industrialization. By the 1870s, steam had long since become an ambivalent token of modernity and its accelerated experience of time, of technological progress, heightened productivity as well as the latter’s effects on the environment. As evinced in the title of Turner’s famous late canvas Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway of 1844, steam occupied an intermediary place (one both material and symbolic) between ur-elements of nature and the latest exploits of manmade engineering, between sensually palpable facts of earthly life and artificial phenomena such as the unprecedented speed of a steam train—or the animation of an open set change. Exemplified by the railway, these Janus-faced connotations of steam, along with its ephemeral qualities, cast their spell on a cross-section of artists, most notably the impressionist painters.

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It is not least for this reason that, at the first Bayreuth Festival, steam came to emblematize the high-tech, decidedly machinic facilities of the Festspielhaus, which some visitors also detected in other features. Hanslick, for instance, compared the deep orchestra pit to the “engine room of a steam ship,” while more than one critic noted the factory-like outer appearance of the theater—an unadorned brick-and-timber building whose high stage house, without the mediation of surrounding foyers, awkwardly towered over the auditorium, thereby signaling on the outside the very dominance of stage technology Wagner so eagerly strove to conceal on the inside.90 And, of course, the mere idea of holding a festival in a remote location like Bayreuth depended on steam power in the first place to provide access for—and thus procure—spectators. Such associations rendered steam particularly apt for creating Nibelheim, that locus of streamlined metalwork and brute noise. In 1877, Wagner himself made such an industrial connection while taking a steamer to London on a misty day. “This is Alberich’s dream come true,” Cosima Wagner reported him as saying: “Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.”91 The pervasive presence and (mostly) mundane origins of steam in modern-day life dispelled its mythic overtones even for Wagner. What remained was the bitter taste of a bleak, inhumane, and deeply alienating world. Nowhere was this link between Wagner’s vapors and mechanized production more obvious than in an 1881 guest performance of Angelo Neumann’s Leipzig Ring in Berlin’s Victoria-Theater—a house otherwise known for spectacular stagings of popular and fairy-tale extravaganzas as well as machine plays. Although its machinery had been designed as recently as 1859–61 by none other than Brandt, it did not possess a steam apparatus (a fact that indicates yet again the latter’s novelty on German stages). Since fire regulations there also prohibited the use of a locomotive boiler, steam was delivered to the stage straight from a neighboring spirits factory.92 The ethereal triumphed doubly; and capitalism, the engine of industrialization that had already helped finance the Bayreuth enterprise, intervened once more to save Wagner’s utopian work. In another irony, Bayreuth’s employment of steam, albeit conceived as a theatrical Tarnhelm to facilitate a realist staging, in actual fact created new problems. This can be gleaned from those countless festival reports that keenly discussed the new “prop,” given its profusion in Bayreuth. Most commentators admired the idea of a “steam curtain,” and some, like Stoeckel, recognized steam’s potential for enhancing the general “mythic” atmosphere.93 But as the above dragon cartoons reveal, it was not necessarily successful when used in lieu of fire or other special stage effects. As with so many features of the illusion-greedy Bayreuth production—giants and all—the puffs of steam from the beast’s snout simply could not rival the imagination Wagner had hoped to silence. Instead, our caricaturists suggest that they misdirected the mind’s eye toward more familiar yet less appropriate objects from the everyday

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world, including that industrial funnel. Worse, the amount of steam produced was often not sufficient to veil the transformations. In addition, technicians had yet to learn how to handle this frustratingly evanescent element. On the one hand, it tended to hover near the floor, thwarting optical fusion with the drop scenes. On the other hand, it invaded both pit and auditorium, damaging instruments and reminding spectators of the smell of the laundry room.94 Worst of all was the noise. Hardly anyone failed to mention the “coarse material whizzing and hissing [Zischen und Rauschen]” that accompanied each cloud of steam.95 And while some critics thought it a fitting addition to Nibelheim’s anvils (the New York Times even described it as part of the composition itself), most considered it an unpleasant disturbance of the orchestral and visual “painting,” an untimely reminder indeed of the railway station where their Bayreuth experience had begun.96 Unlike those expedient loud tam-tam strikes, the fizzling of steam valves could not be limited to climactic moments, nor was its mechanical essence masked by Wagner’s surrounding orchestration. Instead, it directly evoked paradigmatic sounds of industrialized society—ones that, I have argued in chapter 3, Wagner was bound to abhor. More than all the technical mishaps at Bayreuth’s opening run (curtains rising too early or props accidentally dropping), the steam technology’s noise exposed as a mirage Wagner’s theatrical phantasmagoria—the obfuscation of the mechanical process of theatrical staging by means of the emblem of industrial fabrication.97 Intended as an ophthalmic remedy to at once perfect the optical illusion and make its artificiality invisible, steam, alas, affected not just the eyes. Its hissing rendered its own high-tech origins audible; its odor divulged the machinery behind the staging on the olfactory level. Vapors thus infringed on the individual arts’ purity, their onstage division of labor, and the spatial separation yet empathic identification between stage and audience.98 Granted, steam was not the only stage effect to cause such violation: the powders traditionally burned for fire scenes frequently offended spectators’ noses, and even conventional candles or gas lights (on and off stage) could leave a smelly haze.99 But these side effects concurred with the depicted scene or were at least generic to theatrical performance. By contrast, the insistent sensuality of steam catapulted audiences far outside the carefully simulated virtual realm of myth and into the practicalities of modern life. Paradoxically, Wagner’s idea of the spectator “breathing in” the artwork like “life itself ” turned in on itself: it led audiences back to precisely the daily grind he had hoped to transport them away from and into a larger vision of cosmic Life. The salt in Wagner’s illusionist soup spoiled its delicate texture; the mundane oil of his idealistically hidden Gesamtkunstwerk machinery leaked onto the stage. In short, steam revealed that both the operation and effects of such a complex multimedia endeavor would always escape the total control Wagner had envisaged, and that even the latest stage technology could not avoid being uncovered as such. Barely realized, the stage’s supposedly theurgic Tarnhelm already carried the curse of betrayal.

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Even without its sensory excesses, though, one may doubt whether, in 1876, steam could ever have been stripped its everyday associations. The misty shrouding of public places, for example, had obvious predecessors in religious rituals (which were otherwise evoked by the already common rhetoric of Bayreuth as a “temple” of art to which audiences made their pilgrimage). Yet such potential resonances of steam with art-religion went unnoticed by contemporary commentators, just as with the latently sacred gestures of the Bayreuth curtain. It was instead steam’s technological and modernist tie that invited commentary, particularly from hostile contemporaries who eagerly exploited the newfound link between industrial modernity and what they perceived to be the noise of Wagner’s music. Associating the nineteenth century’s enlarged orchestra with machines—and specifically the roaring of steam trains—was no novelty, as Jean-Jacques Grandville’s notorious caricatures of Berlioz and his 1843 depiction of a fictitious, fully mechanical “Concert à la vapeur (Steam Concert)” illustrate: human agency is admitted only by the hand turning the steam tap and, thus, setting in motion humanoid sound devices (figure 4.4).100 Along similar lines, one Bayreuth cartoon presented Wagner’s orchestra as entirely drowned in steam and clouds, save brass bells and percussion struck by gigantic mallets: visually and sonically most reminiscent of the puffing and hammering of industrial machines, these vociferous instruments produced the acoustic clouds that were Wagner’s music.101 But after the first festival, other cartoons (all published in notoriously Wagner-skeptical Vienna) went further. One cast a locomotive as the driving engine of the “Steam Orchestra for Handling Wagner’s Scores” that powered all groups of now entirely mechanical instruments (figure 4.5). This orchestra was not only clamorous but also out-and-out dehumanized and robotic, a mere gadget producing mechanized fare. The graphic artist and inventor Karl Klič carried this charge to a different extreme when likening the entire Bayreuth enterprise to a “Musical-Art Steam Engine” (figure 4.6). Although obviously inspired by Grandville’s “Concert à la vapeur” (both caricatures share the central manometer extending into a mechanical handcum-baton as well as that grotesquely grinning drum kit), Klič focused less on the industrialized instruments than on their operators and product. The boiler is fired by the piano manufacturer Ludwig Bösendorfer (who had supplied grand pianos for rehearsals in the Festspielhaus), while his friend—and Wagner’s father-in-law—Liszt at the keyboard sets in motion the huge percussive automaton producing hot air in the shape of Wagner, or the contented composer in a state of haze: a sight uncannily resonant with W. H. Auden’s nifty 1940 invocation of Wagner as “[t]he genius of the loud Steam Age.”102 The metaphor of steam here unfolded its full anti-Wagnerian potential. It allowed his music to be denounced as formless and elusive, or as noisy, inhuman, and artificially produced. Worse, the Bayreuth Festival owed its functioning solely to the actions and investments of others, particularly the celebrity magnet Liszt. Yet even this performing “publicity agent” (as Liszt came to view himself post

figure 4.4 . “Steam Concert,” in [Jean-Jacques] Grandville, Un autre monde (Paris: Fournier, 1844), plate opposite p. 17. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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figure 4.5 . “Steam Orchestra for Handling Wagner’s Scores” (Dampforchester zur Bewältigung Wagnerscher Partituren), caricature from Kikeriki (1876) in Paul Lindau, Nüchterne Briefe aus Bayreuth. Vergeblicher Versuch im Jahre 1876, Zeit und Geister Richard Wagners zu bannen (Breslau, 1876), ed. Helmut Kotschenreuther (Berlin: Arsenal, 1989), 30.

figure 4.6 . Karl Klič, “The Bayreuth Music Steam Engine” (Die Bayreuther Tonkunstdampfmaschine), in Humoristische Blätter [Vienna] (August 20, 1876); reproduced in Herbert Barth, Richard Wagner und Bayreuth in Karikatur und Anekdote (Bayreuth: Edition Musica, 1970), 13. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University.

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festum), just like the technician Bösendorfer, averts his gaze from the emerging product while the manometer threateningly points toward what would be, on a clock, the eleventh hour.103 In other words, Klič rendered the festival’s human operators as factory workers: men whose purposeless fate (expressed by their empty, anguished eyes) Wagner had decried almost three decades earlier in his call to revolutionize both society and art.104 The caricature thus exposed Wagner’s staged Gesamtkunstwerk as utterly dependent on—indeed, identical with—industrial technology: it was an artifact of modern engineering. In view of Wagner’s lofty idealism, no judgment could have been more annihilating. Klič, meanwhile, may have hoped that the festival would—like a music box—quickly run out, and the whole Wagner chimera would evaporate as swiftly as steam. S T E A M I N G WAG N E R

Given all these technical shortcomings, extramythical associations, and antiWagnerian resonances, the fate not just of Bayreuth but of onstage steam itself might have seemed questionable. In retrospect, even the composer found himself disillusioned with the entire Ring production and—as I will discuss in the epilogue—declared that he would do “everything differently” next time.105 That this disappointment pertained also to the “steam transformation” of Nibelheim is evident from his lament to Carl Brandt’s son Fritz in 1878. According to Cosima Wagner, the composer voiced his wish that there had been a vertically ascending backdrop showing mining shafts and the occasional fire—that is to say, a less blurry representation of nature and a more concrete motion of scenery, presumably in exact alignment with the musical depiction.106 Nor was he the only one to regret the nonspecificity of the Rheingold transformations, whose moves (according to musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar) were partly “jerky and forced” (ruckweis und gewaltsam).107 Following the Berlin guest production a few years later, Cosima Wagner herself bemoaned the use of those factory vapors for the first Rheingold transition, albeit for different reasons. She understood that steam had been deemed necessary “to drown out the sounds of the scene changing”: vapors were summoned as both visual and acoustic curtain, both nebulous mass and white noise of sorts—a drawn-out relative of those climactic tam-tam strokes that, as we have seen, often facilitated operatic coups. As such, steam might similarly have drawn attention to the scenic changes as important moments of the action. Nonetheless, Cosima Wagner considered a reliance on the valves’ noise “an embarrassing absurdity.” And this was hardly surprising in view of most critics’ industrial associations as well as the delicate scoring of the relevant musical passage (discussed above) that was threatened to be covered along with the machinery’s clunking.108 Still, Bayreuth’s plentiful vapors made a deep impression on the first visitors and left a lasting mark on the history of operatic production. That much was clear

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already in 1878, when the first complete Ring cycle was mounted outside Bayreuth and Munich. This premiere occurred in Leipzig under the direction of Angelo Neumann, who—as we saw in chapter 2—was adamant about staging the Ring as faithfully as possible. Not only did he commission sets from the same studio that had furnished them for the composer, but spectators were also reportedly “rather surprised to find that steam, having become famous through Bayreuth, was used here” as well.109 When Wagner released the Ring (or its component operas) for ordinary theaters, then, the presence and handling of vapor became a benchmark to detect how “authentic” and “ingenious” a production was. Although less steam was generally available and its effects tended to be much less spectacular than in Bayreuth, the notion spread that “the Nibelungs” could not exist without their vapors. And these now invaded not the Bayreuth auditorium but theaters across Europe. They became part of the popular idea of the work itself, without ever explicitly having been commended by “the Master,” and without appearing in any of the copious circulating depictions of the Nibelung myth or, specifically, Wagner’s drama. Onstage steam had no written authorial credentials; unlike the Venusberg transformations, it came without a user’s manual. Against the backdrop of Wagner’s exceeding care to lay down his artistic ideas in black and white, steam’s attachment to the Ring might have appeared as erratic as its own essence. Wagner, however, was fully cognizant of the nontextual dissemination of certain visual, practical, and technical ideas: this was precisely one result he had expected from Bayreuth. After all, he had envisioned his Ring premiere to perfect the kind of “model performance” that he had craved for his works since the late 1850s and started to develop under the sponsorship of King Ludwig II in Munich with Der fliegende Holländer in 1864 and the Tristan premiere the following year (before his exile from Munich cut these efforts short). As mentioned, the 1876 Ring had of course not turned out to be the ideal Mustervorstellung and, hence, true “completion” of his scores Wagner had coveted so intensely. But it was still the only complete and authorized realization of all four operas—their “most correct” performance, as Wagner affirmed in 1881.110 This live, concrete manifestation surpassed all written codifications in validity: it was the Work Incarnate. As such, it was—and was to be—emulated by other theaters. It formed the cornerstone for a new line of production, the practical equivalent of an oral tradition. And as we shall see in the epilogue, the composer sanctioned this function. Rather than having to concede free directorial reign for stagings beyond his immediate control, he now argued, tellingly, that the imperfections of his Bayreuth incarnation concerned “only—comparatively—minute details.” Accordingly, he preferred that it be copied “as closely as possible.”111 Instead of publishing select directives (as in the cases of Holländer and Tannhäuser) or a full-fledged production book of a kind that “had never been attempted before” (as suggested in May 1876 by his assistant director and ballet master Richard Fricke), Wagner in the end commended his

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Work Incarnate to directors.112 He thus anticipated what scholars have recently been emphasizing: that opera’s ultimate destiny lies in production, and that words—even designs, graphs, and stage-technical directions—can therefore only do so much in capturing (let alone stipulating) the performative state. Instead of commonly available communication media, Wagner preferred the unmediated performance to record his productions. Once again, he rejected the idea of technical supplements (now in the sense of mnemonic aids) in favor of presenting the “real,” whole thing. The Bayreuth production, though, lived for only three cycles; its intended “corrected” revival within a year or two became financially unfeasible. Emulators of Wagner’s model therefore had to rely on memory, designs, and reports. These, in fact, were the sources from which Neumann in 1878 assembled his much-acclaimed Leipzig Ring. Yet it was he who implemented an alternative to Bayreuth and its remembrance as well, a different performative means of demonstrating Wagner’s directorial will. His tool was a touring production, and one that re-created more than imitated the Bayreuth “original.” After successfully running his Leipzig staging by Wagner in Berlin in May 1881 (with those vapors from the neighboring distillery), Neumann—as we have seen in chapter 2—bought all the portable material components of the 1876 Ring, sets, curtain, and all. With his performers having been trained or approved of by Wagner, Neumann set out for London in April 1882, and then on a ten-month tour that premiered the Ring in twenty-five cities in continental Europe. It was this tour, above all, that established the viability of the cycle in common opera houses. Like its refined lighting technology and sunken pit, Bayreuth’s traction engines and steam grid could not travel, of course, and Neumann considered the lack of steam systems in ordinary theaters a chief drawback of his tour. But, undismayed, his entourage included valves, pipes, and an expert steam engineer, with boilers rented—or steam “borrowed”—on location. So important was steam to Neumann’s venture that its nonappearance, when a boiler broke down, would disrupt the performance.113 Small wonder that the tour popularized onstage steam, its effects (and side effects) once more proving a favored topic in the press.114 Henceforth, the use of vapors in the Ring became well-nigh ubiquitous. By 1888 the Belgian Wagner specialist Maurice Kufferath (editor of Le guide musical) reported that the innovative “Wagnerian procedure” of fogging open transformations with a combination of gauzes and steam had meanwhile been taken over “in all Austro-German and English theaters” as well as in Brussels. Paris followed with a vaporous magic fire for its first Walküre in 1893, and that same year, the French architect Georges Moynet recommended this application for large-scale fire scenes in general, given that steam “represents with perfect verity the fumes of conflagrations.”115 As far afield as Chicago, German-born architect Dankmar Adler expressly included “steam curtain” machinery in the state-of-the-art Auditorium Theater,

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which opened in 1889, so that Wagner’s music dramas could be properly performed.116 This is not to say that every theater used steam for Wagner productions by century’s end. Just as it had been slow in obtaining a tam-tam, Frankfurt’s municipal opera house in 1882 could offer nothing but a good old curtain to veil the Rheingold transformations.117 The same happened more notoriously in the 1877–79 production in Vienna, that locus of anti-steam caricatures. And at the 1889 Rheingold premiere in New York, the Metropolitan Opera even interpolated an intermission after scene 2, as did—complete with curtain calls—Milan’s La Scala in 1903 “for absolute theatrical necessity.”118 Wherever steam did not appear in a Ring performance, however, critics tended to complain. In Bayreuth itself, as mentioned in chapter 2, Wagner in 1882 famously realized Parsifal’s level, above-ground, daylight, and fog-free transformations using Wandeldekorationen (or moving canvases) of unprecedented length in opera—a horizontal elaboration of the vertical procedure he had dreamed up in 1878 for Rheingold’s Nibelheim journeys. But he personally ordered the release of steam for Kundry’s mysterious Erda-like appearance from below in Klingsor’s castle in act 2 (an effect for which one of Bayreuth’s steam boilers along with pipes, pumps, and valves was arduously refurbished).119 Under Cosima Wagner’s direction, steam reappeared for the first Bayreuth remake of the Ring in 1896, if perhaps more modestly than in 1876. True to Wagner’s postpremiere ideas (and possibly also accommodating the negative industrial associations of steam), she banned vapors from the first Rheingold transformation, which featured a moving canvas behind which the Valhalla scene was prepared, with various veils and gauzes suggesting the fogs. But copious amounts of steam remained essential for accomplishing the paling of the gods, both Nibelheim journeys (again complementing moving gauzes and painted canvases), and Alberich’s metamorphoses.120 For Bayreuth’s early twentiethcentury productions, Raven minutely detailed the exact valves, volumes, and wafting directions, along with supporting lights employed (figure 4.7). Regarding the magic fire, steam meanwhile collaborated—as in Paris—with real darting flames and flashes of various sizes to effect the simulation; and it was joined for the final conflagration by further scrims and gauzes feigning smoke and flames.121 These procedures were squarely in line with turn-of-the-twentieth-century stagings elsewhere, which tended to use steam for Nibelheim and the fire scenes (in addition to real or artificial flames) more than for the first Rheingold transition. Rather than celebrating its own essence, steam became above all a safe yet effective substitute for smoke, with instructions for its handling being continually finetuned—a process akin to the ever more detailed dramaturgy of curtains we have observed in chapter 2.122 Indeed, some production books reveal efforts to exactly time the visual development of steam and flames by the beat; particularly for the localized, smaller-scale applications in Nibelheim, this was facilitated by ongoing experiments of Brandt’s successors with less noisy valves, various chemical vapors,

figure 4.7 . Theo Raven’s production score for Das Rheingold documenting the 1914 Bayreuth staging and how it differed from earlier revivals of Cosima Wagner’s 1896 production. This page provides instructions for the transformation, illuminated by red and green lights, to Nibelheim via precisely choreographed jets of steam and a “wall of steam” (Dampfwand) across the “entire stage.” Behind the vapors a gauze (Nebelschleier) was lowered before painted canvases on grates were raised depicting dark clouds and rocky crevices. (I am indebted to Bettina Bodammer and Petra Dischinger for deciphering the shorthand.) Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne (M 890).

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and moveable fog machines.123 As such, Wagnerian vapors endured into the 1940s. On the one hand, its transparent and multisensory nature turned steam into the paradigmatic technological supplement for Ring productions. Aided by its chameleon-like, animated, and self-veiling appearance, it was the epitome of a Wagnerian technology that paraded as artistic or natural medium to expedite nineteenthcentury opera’s seamlessly illusionist façade. On the other hand, ascending steam quickly entered the common pictorial arsenal of the Ring as visible participating medium. The most fleeting element of Wagner’s scenery thus spawned a consistent (and constantly refined) staging practice across Europe and beyond. Together with its attendant gadgets and enabling machineries, steam—even more than the Wagner curtain—became part of the popular concept of the tetralogy itself. WAG N E R- D A M PF O N T H E L O O SE

Along with the general notion of Wagner as wholesale operatic reformer and theatrical innovator (an idea propagated, as mentioned, by the composer and his followers), the above glimpse of nineteenth-century production routines helps explain why, by the turn of the twentieth century, Nietzsche, Mann, and so many others closely associated Wagner with steam. And this link seems to have endured even as vapor began to invade non-Wagnerian opera as well. Thus, since at least the 1860s, some composers besides and beyond Wagner expressly prescribed fogs in their scores for the veiling of scene changes, as otherworldly signifier, or as ethereal medium for the apparition of visions. Mists and clouds (un)veil the Venusberg-like pantomimes and transformations in act 4 of Berlioz’s Les Troyens (Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 1863) and reveal the concluding celestial vision of Karl Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (Vienna, 1875). Boito’s Mefistofele (in its 1876 version) begins with a “Prologue in Heaven” rendered as fog; and in act 3 of Hänsel und Gretel (Weimar, 1893), Humperdinck—as with his curtain instructions, ever the faithful Wagner disciple—expressly requested gauzes, or Nebelschleier, to effect the early-morning revelation not of Valhalla but of the witch’s gingerbread house.124 The kinship of all these scenes with Wagner’s foggy scenarios is obvious. Granted, these composers did not usually specify the use of steam as such (neither, of course, had Wagner). Judging from late nineteenth-century treatises and performance materials, however, we can safely assume that steam nevertheless began to enhance certain staged moments, including in some suitable earlier operas. In the 1883–84 season, for instance, a fairy-tale spectacle for children mounted at Brandt’s former domain, the Darmstadt Court Theater, featured a steaming dragon.125 Around the same time, steam—along with those gratuitous climactic tam-tam strokes—garnished the end of Lortzing’s Undine at the Munich Court Opera, where it helped effect both the fateful deluge and the subsequent scenic transformation from the castle into the water-spirit’s underwater palace:

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fittingly, this was something of the first Rheingold transition in reverse.126 By the same token, vapors quickly came to enhance non-Wagnerian stage fires as well. Reinhard Hallwachs, the director of the contested Munich premieres of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, apparently applied the novel device immediately to the final cataclysm of Le prophète, as did Raven sometime later.127 Similarly, the destruction of Troy ending act 2 (or Part I) of Les Troyens was effected in an 1895 Munich production with steam engulfing the dying women first from below the back of the stage and then from the wings and downstage.128 And in 1893, Georges Moynet reported the use of water vapors to simulate “the fumes of conflagrations” not only in Die Walküre but also (among other fiery operas) for the Götterdämmerung-like final immolation in Ernest Reyer’s Nibelung opera Sigurd, which had premiered in Brussels in 1884.129 Perhaps no post-Wagnerian composer indulged both large-scale blazes and hazes more passionately, though, than Franz Schreker. Next to acousmatic sounds, combustions form a recurring trope of his operatic oeuvre, which tends to play on the imagery of flames as both key dramatic ingredient and erotic or psychological symbol. Arson of architectural structures or bedeviled musical automatons repeatedly occurs as a purifying action (or dramaturgical technology) that magically, emotionally, or pragmatically relieves protagonists of their guilt or other mental burdens. As in Götterdämmerung, that is, the ancient technē of fire ultimately redeems a corrupt psyche, instrument, or society by restoring them to their (assumed) naturally harmonious state. Fogs meanwhile frequently invoke not wholesome nature but the sultry, scented, and erotically charged atmosphere of Venusberg-like settings. In the original 1913 version of Schreker’s two-act opera Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, for example, “thick clouds, suffused with heavy scents, flow onstage and veil the firmament” at the beginning of a mass tumult that will lead to the final conflagration. For the 1913 Viennese premiere, stage director Joseph Gregor reportedly concocted this finale with a “splendid steam scene” (famosen Dampfszene).130 Yet Julius Korngold, Hanslick’s successor as doyen of Viennese critics, perceived this as a doubtful elevation of “machinist and lighting technician” to protagonists that did not improve the opera; as another reviewer explained, the latter’s “unparalleled abstruseness” led “away from all reality to the purest, most absolute symbol.”131 The steamy redemptive combustion might only have furthered—and visually typified—this dubious journey into idealist symbolism. Almost two decades later, commentators levied similar charges not against a new opera but against steam itself, after none other than Werfel had asked for the Viennese stage to be swathed in blue-tinted mists. That this occurred during the central auto-da-fé finale of his adaptation of Verdi’s then little-known Don Carlos (1867–86) was not appreciated. As Korngold once more commented, audiences had been misled from the robust world of Italian opera into a “fantastical nowhere with mysterious Wagnerian vapors [Wagner-Dämpfen].”132 Given the by-then

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frequent use of steam in all manner of operas, confusion seems to have stemmed above all from the way in which it wafted in Verdi. While alluding to the smoky stakes and, once more, pragmatically veiling a stage-practically difficult scene, steam at the same time abandoned the earthly sights (along with all characters) to visualize only the heavenward journey of the victims’ souls that was merely suggested by Verdi’s acousmatic Voice from Above; it even denoted the celestial bliss presumably awaiting them. Vapor thus literally transcended its common fiery function and, with it, the stage realism usually associated with Verdi. Instead, its blue hues insinuated a redemption that was mystic and otherworldly—in a word, Wagnerian. Like nuanced curtains and climactic gong strikes, steam was called upon to enhance the music-dramatic appeal of older works, just as Werfel had emphasized Wagnerian traits elsewhere in his adaptation. But for contemporaries, abundant nonrepresentational steam effects still conjured Wagner. Even at so different a musical event as the gala opening of Radio City Music Hall, a New York reviewer in 1932 observed “clouds of Wagnerian steam.”133 Vapors here served to demonstrate the new stage’s technological prowess, no less than did the hall’s complex curtain. In European opera, however, the link between steam and Wagner was becoming problematic. As we have seen in chapter 2, the aesthetic tide had begun to turn against both wholesale theatrical illusionism and Wagner’s works themselves—a trend otherwise ironically fostered precisely by Werfel’s programmatic promotion of Verdi. And yet, these last examples show that steam gradually eluded Wagner to find its way onto twentieth-century expressionist (or glamorous) stages. During the late era of gas lighting, as I have shown, steam was discovered as a volatile but versatile means to enhance theatrical illusion. But after the introduction of electric stage lighting in the late 1880s and the concomitant waning of realist zeal, steam survived when more concrete visual Wagnerian signifiers—breastplates and wolf ’s pelt— were long gone. Unlike such material tokens of illusionist realism, steam lent itself to being employed both as a (mostly) mimetic means of representation and as abstract presence. It was therefore as useful on colorfully lit, sparsely populated, and symbolically decorated scenes as it had been on dark, naturally hued, and realistically clad stages. Exactly this ambiguous state—the ability to oscillate between illusion and abstraction—made steam amenable also to early twentieth-century directors who were gradually freeing themselves from the shackles of illusionism. After World War II, Werfel would therefore not have had to time-travel 100,000 years to reencounter a foggy Gesamtkunstwerk. To be sure, Wagner’s grandson Wieland Wagner gradually banned steam from his “decluttered” postwar Bayreuth stage, along with anything else that smacked of either the nineteenth century or conventional theatrical naturalism, while projections increasingly replaced steam’s concealing function and open transformations.134 But when, in the 1970s, it became fashionable to stage the Ring as a parable of modern society grappling with the

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figure 4.8 . The steaming hydroelectric dam in Patrice Chéreau’s centennial production of Das Rheingold, scene 1 (Bayreuth, 1976), with set design by Richard Peduzzi, here in a performance from 1977. Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth—Zustiftung Wolfgang Wagner.

effects of industrialization and capitalism, steam returned with a vengeance. In 1973, Joachim Herz cast Leipzig’s Nibelheim as a steaming “industry-scape” and Mime’s refuge as what he called a “rotten machine park.”135 More notoriously, Patrice Chéreau’s centennial Ring in Bayreuth was pervaded by four kinds of artificial vapors: chemically and electrically produced ones as well as dry ice and water vapor proper. Oscillating between the effluvium of despoiled nature in Das Rheingold’s water-power dam (figure 4.8), factory fumes in Siegfried (figure 4.9), and spectacular smokescapes for the Valkyrie Rock, vapors became the dominant visual marker of Chéreau’s “allegory of the modern world”; so important were they, indeed, that he personally took care of fanning the ever-ephemeral fogs to their proper place.136 In addition to adopting Brandt’s use of steam for compelling visual spectacle and realist illusion, Chéreau employed it for precisely the association that had been so disturbing a century earlier: its self-referential evocation of technology-driven modernity and industrial trash. Nor did he leave it at this suggestion. His stage openly displayed the machinery both behind and driven by the generation of steam:

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figure 4.9 . Mime’s industrial (and proto-steampunk) smithy in Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 Bayreuth production of Siegfried, act 1, here in 1979 (set design: Richard Peduzzi). Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth—Zustiftung Wolfgang Wagner.

a large cogwheel, icon of the “steam age,” forms part of the set. And Das Rheingold’s opening scene played on a “hydroelectric plant on the Rhine River”—the very facility Martin Heidegger had paradigmatically described, in his influential 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” as the epitome of modern technology’s “monstrousness.” Unlike earlier manufacturing devices, Heidegger argued, this technology turned nature into a mere supplier of industrial power, a mechanical appendage twice removed.137 Although a seemingly “authentic” medium, Wagner’s steam was used by Chéreau to undo the composer’s theatrical illusionism as well as his attempt to overcome nineteenth-century industrial, capitalist, urbanized society. Even for the thunderstorm at the end of Das Rheingold, where the vapors might have seemed natural, Chéreau made sure to disclose their artificiality: his Donner releases them from an old trunk—the proverbial theatrical bag of tricks (Trickkiste). All told, Bayreuth’s centennial production plainly exposed Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as a product of the same technological era it had sought to transcend. From here, directors increasingly explored the suggestive power of steam both to simulate the literal (foggy nature, steaming smokestacks) and to adumbrate the

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figure 4.10 . Vera Nemirova’s cosmically misty unit set for the Ring (Opernhaus Frankfurt, 2010-12; set design: Jens Kilian), here with red, pink, and blue illumination for Siegfried. Photograph by kind permission of Monika Rittershaus ([email protected]).

figural—the intangible, timeless, uncanny, unknown. To name but three examples, this was the case in Götz Friedrich’s famous “time tunnel” (developed at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1984–85 and adapted for London in 1991), no less than in Nikolaus Lehnhoff ’s science-fiction vision of the Valkyrie Rock as a spaceship landing station (Munich, 1987) or Vera Nemirova’s neo-Wielandesque abstract cosmic unit set of flexible concentric circles (Frankfurt, 2010–12, figure 4.10). Finally, shorn of any concrete anchors, steam turned to the aniconic. It became a fixed feature of lighting design, a supplement that allowed pure light to become visible and, hence, material. This combination facilitated, for instance, the so-called light curtain or light pillars popularized by scenographer Josef Svoboda during the 1960s.138 As such, steam began to produce special effects more commonly known to later twentieth-century spectators from rock concerts and dance floors. Today it would be hard to find a Ring that makes do without its rising fogs, whether it be a conceptually “faithful” rendition like Robert Lepage’s 2010–12 Metropolitan Opera production or directorially more enterprising ones. In one way, steam has simply retained its theatrical usefulness. Besides camouflaging transformations or preternatural appearances, it can be employed as an onstage magnifier for all kinds of visual effects—ones suitable, like the loud gong strike, to enhance any number of operas or theatrical performances more generally. In another way, its significations have been changing radically over time. And this unfolding of vapor’s

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suggestive potential provides a snapshot of the evolution of different meanings that have been drawn from Wagner’s complex work throughout the history of its staging. For, just like steam, the tetralogy is suspended between multiple extremes, pulled in seemingly opposite directions. The elemental E-flat–major arpeggios of the opening are produced by a most complex orchestra; archaizing poetic and dramatic gestures are carried by the “music of the future”; the Otherness of preindustrial myth is rendered by modern, industry-derived technology; the mysterious, remote realms of the gods are pervaded by allusions to familiar capitalist society. The list could continue. Perhaps, then, steam became such an important marker of the Ring not because it was here used more amply than ever before in opera, but because it captured these ambivalences while at the same time embodying their productive coexistence within each individual emanation of Wagner’s work. S T E A M I N G A N D S TAG I N G I N M O D E R N I T Y

The overdetermined, multisensorial, cross-epochal potential of steam’s onstage physiognomy was perhaps first recognized not by Brandt, nor by Wagner, but by the latter’s trusted nemesis Hanslick. Vapors, he held, “constitute a major force in Wagner’s new dramatic arsenal. As a formless, fantastic, sensually fascinating element, rising steam has a special affinity with Wagner’s musical principles. . . . From here it is only one step to the artful employment of certain smells and odors on stage—psychology recognizes them, indeed, as particularly stimulating and exciting.”139 While likely poking fun at steam’s unintended side effects, Hanslick presaged a future of haptic and olfactory multimedia art that was indeed to come—albeit not before symbolist plays beginning in the 1890s and, above all, the rise of so-called postdramatic theater and experiential performance art since the 1960s.140 Yet perfumes aside, we rarely encounter any fumeless productions today, not just of opera but of any kind of live show, no matter how and to what ends these mists are deployed. Paradigmatically metamorphic, Wagner’s vapor transcended the Ring’s mythic realms to become both a facilitator of different multimedia effects and a lynchpin of changing directorial styles. It has been serving as immaterial essence and material substance, veiling curtain and animated representation, disembodied cipher and incarnated presence, hidden technology and perceptible medium. These various functions also unfurled the inherent plurivalence of steam itself. As we have seen, steam emerged as the most “real” element of stagecraft, outstripping in authenticity even a singer: where it strove to be nothing but itself, it did not even need costuming (in its case, tinted light). At the same time, it was this nudeness—its undisguised appearance—that made steam stand out. Similar to real-life relics in collages, it partly challenged the distinction between presentation and representation, thus provoking those everyday associations that unwittingly disrupted the make-believe of the first Ring’s simulation.141 Perhaps this was one

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reason why steam’s ability to stand in for fire and smoke (albeit with the assistance of various light technologies) initially found wider appropriation onstage than did its raw appearance as fog. Conversely, by means of its industrial associations, steam’s undisguised presence was later consciously exploited to reveal the very means of its own technical production (along with the society that learned to take advantage of it). And the more steam vanished, in the twentieth century, from large parts of daily life as a visible means of transport and power generation, the more it could be employed—and enjoyed—in performance as sheer visual stimulation and lighting aid. Steam has, in other words, increasingly been summoned like the clouds, birds, or angels Leonardo da Vinci commended to sixteenthcentury painters to fill the background around their characters: it provides both a cipher of expansive (if not necessarily sacred) space and a medium that permeates this spatial emptiness, literally mediating between the various representational elements and unifying their heterogeneous materialities onstage.142 In so doing, steam ultimately visualizes the invisible: it draws attention to the intangible, uncontrollable presence of something or someone—to presence as such. And this presence includes that of the audience itself. With their unavoidably multifold sensory impressions—their olfactory and tactile perceptibility—steam (or dry ice) effects can never fully be captured in photographic or video recordings. More than even the palpable vibration of a loud gong strike, steam emphasizes both the live act of performance and its corporeal and visceral experience. Onstage steam, in short, is the most adaptable Wagnerian technology this book has surveyed. It comes closest to functioning not merely like an artistic medium but like a wholesale living character and real element of nature onstage. Its fleeting and shape-shifting essence thus makes it a paradigm of liveness per se. Just as the curtain signals theatricality, so onstage steam embodies the multisensorial nature of the staged multimedia that nineteenth-century composers increasingly strove to realize. After all, its key asset (to adopt words by philosopher Martin Seel) is that it does “not only produce presence but present presence”; and this is what Seel defines as the essential quality not of steam but of artistic production (Inszenierung).143 By partaking in this dual aspect of present-ation characteristic of stagings, then, steam offers a compelling metaphor for the nature and history of operatic production. Like the steam engine, for instance, attempts to inscribe specific modes of staging and their enabling technologies into a music-theatrical work date back to the long nineteenth century. From this perspective, as the epilogue will explore, the whole Bayreuth enterprise can be viewed—more favorably so than in Klič’s caricature—as a centrally operated machine for the authentic production of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet like steam itself, even the most carefully controlled stagings are both contingent and transient. Only certain material elements (such as costumes, sets, props, and machinery) can be created, managed, preserved, and reused more or less

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identically, like a locomotive boiler. Other ingredients remain incorporeal, temporary, and elusive (gestures, lighting, or the manner in which specific technologies are applied), even when the cast stays identical. Exhausting themselves like steam, these ephemeral ingredients have to be newly engendered in each performative moment. This is one reason why even Wagner, in his own theater, failed to completely regulate the production of his magnum opus, let alone to establish a steamtight performance tradition. Although coming closest to realizing both the rosy scents of the Venusberg’s Gesamtkunstwerk vision and the latter’s overall medial integration, steam—ironically—also signals the limitations inherent in Wagner’s desire to morph into a Venus-like total director. In fact, steam may indicate the contradictions of Wagner’s artistic utopia in toto. On the one hand, vapor was the most genuine element onstage—an essence standing in for Wagner’s idea to overcome (what he perceived to be) the artifice of both grand opéra and technocratic industrial society through a refocusing on uncorrupted nature. As such, the fairly new and decidedly high-tech effect of steam came to supplant or supplement the well-worn technology of theatrical flames: it synthesized both natural fogs and visually similar artificial fumes into a single vaporous medium. On the other hand, just as fires gradually outdo mists in the Ring libretto, so the mechanical source of steam betrayed itself. Thus it shattered the idea that technology might be both veiled as and redeemed through nature. The fact that steam was henceforth considered more apt for the representation of technologies proper is suggestive of the entire technical grounding of staged opera—and, by implication, of the failure of the revolutionary social utopia of Wagner’s envisioned multimedia. To put all this differently, steam highlights the fundamental and multifaceted role of technology in staged opera. Expanding on Seel’s concept, it is technology that—again like a steam engine—produces opera in the first place; however, it also presents it in the form of what are perceived to be its multiple sensorial media. Perhaps more than even curtain and gong, steam practically demonstrates the fluidity of Wagnerian technologies between hidden, merely auxiliary technics (literally, the engine behind the media surface) on the one hand and perceptible, artistically expressive media on the other. The fact that raw onstage water vapor could be seen as just that or as a token of industrial modernity (among many other things) reveals most blatantly how my conceptual separation between technologies and media depends on application and perception more than on inherent qualities. Once more it was a caricaturist who captured this duality. In 1882, the satirical weekly Berliner Wespen depicted a pseudo-medieval Lohengrin traveling by “steam swan” (figure 4.11). Moving toward real nature (white clouds) and looking ordinary in front, this swan is driven by gloomy smokestacks at its rear, (black) fumes again betraying its artifice. The automobile bird is both medium and technology: disguised as nature, the steam engine that both de Parville and Brandt had carefully

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figure 4.11 . “Steam Swan,” caricature in Berliner Wespen (1882), reproduced in Ernst Kreowski and Eduard Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur (Berlin: Behr, 1907), 126. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

hidden in a separate machine house has boldly taken center stage, where it literally mediates between different mythological and ontological times and spaces. The caricature thus ultimately stresses not only the utter dependence of staged opera—and particularly of Wagner’s demanding audiovisual fancies—on technologies, but also the continually forward motion of these stage machineries themselves. Precisely by being a product of what was (then) the most advanced feat of engineering, steam alludes to the transience of technical innovation and, therefore, the quick ageing of even the most up-to-date hardware. As in everyday life, or so this caricature seems to suggest, stage technologies would rapidly replace themselves to achieve the prescribed stage effects more realistically. But even if upgraded technologies produce the same visual effect (a swan moving, or steam ascending), the latter’s meanings and perceptions inevitably vary over time, along with the changing aesthetics of stagings and their larger, constantly evolving cultural, social, and—yes—technological contexts. As the most recent and most industrially rooted stage technology discussed in this book, onstage steam underlines one such context particularly well. I am thinking of the interconnectedness of the operatic field and its mise-en-scène with other forms of cultural expression. These include not only the popular theatrical

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extravagances and opéras féeries from which operatic steam likely hailed but also a wide range of twentieth-century performance art and multimedia. Most immediately, steam (like those opening curtain effects we observed in chapter 2) migrated into early silent films, providing another link in the much discussed chain of influences between opera and cinema. In Fritz Lang’s acclaimed silent film Die Nibelungen of 1924, for instance, steam effects enhance both nature and fire scenes as well as (lo and behold) the dragon’s snout—perhaps unsurprisingly so, given the film’s Wagnerian forebear. Yet in the same director’s Metropolis of three years later, vapors also animated the depiction of grotesquely anthropomorphic machinery, futuristic industry, and urban modernity of a kind Wagner both alluded to in Nibelheim and dreaded in real life. The film thus foreshadowed Chéreau’s socially critical approach to Wagner’s Ring of fifty years later. Less concretely, the revived use of steam in opera houses since at least the 1970s seems to mirror developments in the performing arts as well as what we might call the “performatization” of the visual arts more broadly: it reflects their complex shifts from representation to presence, from performed script to nonnarrative (or “postdramatic”) theater, from framed paintings or cordoned-off sculptures to interactive and intermedial installations, from works to events, from detached art to integrated life.144 The way in which steam symbolizes these shifts is nowhere more evident than in the “steam art” that likewise appeared during that era. An emblematic example is Robert Morris’s Steam of 1967, which consists of billowing water vapor being released from various outlets underneath a square of stones in a park at Western Washington University, Bellingham.145 Like the Bayreuth Festival, this work is site specific. With representation and presence collapsed into a single vaporous cloud, its shape remains forever contingent. The gaseous here mediates not just meaning and event, form and content, mimesis and aniconism: it straddles— and thereby blurs the traditional conceptual distinctions between—high and low, tradition and avant-garde, art and nature, space and time. The most innovative ingredient of Wagner’s audiovisual Gesamtkunstwerk has become the main dish—a conceptual work in and of itself. Small wonder that art critic Michael Fried chose Morris as bête noire for his notorious attack on what he denounced as “literalist art” and its “objecthood.” What is more, for such art Fried identified the effects of presence as the core of its antithetical opposition to “real” (pictorial) art; he objected to its need to be experienced and, thus, its dependence on duration: in a word, its theatricality.146 There could have been no more fitting medium with which to render this performative turn in the (formerly) visual arts than steam. Small wonder also that steam likewise conquered a variety of popular entertainments. As early as 1934, fog effects both stunned and concerned spectators at New York’s Cotton Club in Harlem, known for its lavish revues: a fog machine using liquid nitrogen had been obtained specifically to meteorologically enhance Harold Arlen’s song “Ill Wind,” performed by jazz star Adelaide Hall.147 Since the 1970s,

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when portable fog machines became more widely available commercially, dry ice and smoke effects have regularly been garnishing rock concerts and band performances, as well as enchanting the laser-beam world of discos and nightclubs. The 1984 Academy Awards even recognized German chemist Günther Schaidt “for the development of an improved, non-toxic fluid for creating fog and smoke for motion picture production”; not coincidentally, Schaidt had first tested his artificial fog at the Hamburg Opera in 1973.148 Meanwhile, the subcultural sci-fi and lifestyle aesthetics of steampunk began in the late 1980s to revel not in steam itself but in the technological gadgets of its production: across contemporary performative and digital media, steampunk has been fetishizing with self-conscious anachronism and nostalgic irreverence the cogs and wheels, goggles and pistons, brasses and leathers commonly associated with the steam age. No less than Chéreau’s 1976 Ring, it shores up—even reinvents—the very machines of the industrial era that nineteenth-century opera had tried to obscure and transcend.149 Even the anticapitalist gist of steam has been further explored in such recent art projects as Mika Tajima’s sculpture-cum-installation Meridian (Gold), a hot tub of evaporating vapors that floated on New York’s East River during the summer of 2016. While the fluctuating shades of its “techni-color clouds” depended on the market price of gold, the simulated spa promised full-body artistic immersion—the quintessence of Wagner’s hoped-for site-specific and totally immersive multisensorial experience.150 The tension between hypermediacy and transparency, visible hardware and immersive software that had both marred and challenged the Gesamtkunstwerk continues to mark contemporary culture. No Wagnerian technology, then, is more mimetic, yet no stage element more performative, than steam. The different uses of and responses to onstage steam, as well as its association with Wagner’s artistic vision, might therefore help us recontextualize the theatricality of avant-garde art as well as the antitheatrical forces pervading modernist aesthetics and early postwar stagings. This correspondence pertains even to the contemporaneous vanishing of the proscenium curtain in some Regietheater productions. Within a general tendency to dematerialize art and release it from its accustomed spaces, steam has functioned over the last decades as an alternative means to denote the presence of art as such, substituting for a curtain in less literal ways than did Bayreuth’s “steam curtain.”151 In other words, following the analogy with Leonardo’s clouds and angels, there is no more apt a metaphor than steam to highlight the fact that multimedia events in modern Western culture have taken over both the place and the function of sacred rituals. And this transfer was manifested—and exploited—in the unprecedented artistic pilgrimages Wagner initiated to his Bayreuth “temple.” (Perhaps it is to conjure this divine connection that rock stars and, more recently, football teams like to adorn their stage or stadium entrances with foggy substances.)

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Steam thus links multiple modern and modernist impulses. Even if, for the purposes of this book, I merely refer to these with art historian T. J. Clark “in a free and easy way,” alluding to such abstract features as “the turning from past to future, the acceptance of risk, the omnipresence of change, the malleability of time and space” in the wake of industrialization, urbanization, the Great Revolutions, and other major forces of radical change in the social, cultural, and political spheres, some of these links are rather obvious. Indeed, Clark himself has elsewhere characterized modernism as being “about steam . . . about change and power and contingency, in other words, but also control, compression, and captivity.”152 The possibility of steam’s artistic use was brought about by industrial modernity, of which it has since become a token. It arose at a time of increasing innovation in stage technology for the sake of ever-greater illusionism. And it attached specifically to Wagner’s works in the wake of many composers’ growing desire to integrate aspects of production into their operas. More recently, onstage steam has come to signal both what has long been identified as a “crisis of representation” among the arts and the attendant inclination toward what Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht has dubbed “presence culture”—two trends that have been variously associated with a break in modernism since the 1960s, with “late modernism” or postmodernism.153 Beyond these clear affinities, steam may also capture something essential to our modern sensibilities themselves—a core spirit, as it were, that transcends the changing phases of modernity, however conceived. As early as 1863, Charles Baudelaire defined modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”154 Marshall Berman, over a century later, summarized the “experience of modernity” as being “part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ ”155 More recently, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described our current age of globalization, disembodied labor, and virtual communication in terms of “the quality of liquids or gases.” In his analysis, an “epoch of weighty and ever more cumbersome machines” (he calls this “heavy” or “solid” modernity) has since the mid-twentieth century gradually been giving way to “fluid” or “liquid” modernity: “the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase. In ‘liquid’ modernity, it is the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule.”156 With the growing speed of technical innovation and the concomitant constantly accelerating experience of time (that is, with a skyrocketing sense of ephemerality), we have moved from the era of industrial “hardware”—usually called the “age of steam”—to that of digital software, new media, dematerialization, and abstraction.157 In our time, steam no longer reigns partly by its physical power (that is, as technology), but solely by inhabiting (as medium) the defining qualities of the digital age: instantaneousness; dissolution; the abandonment of form, time, and stability; and so on.

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This transformation indeed matches the transitions in the performing arts since the 1960s I have just described and that the epilogue will reframe more broadly from a contemporary perspective of digital media and the recent material turn. Furthermore, it encapsulates the changes in the use of onstage steam we have observed, with vapor being liberated from the burden of “solid” representation and transformed into a free-floating visual and associative signifier: one whose potential had already been present during “solid modernity,” but whose origins in that era may now at best be evident from a historicizing distance. With time unhinged from space, materiality is no longer decisive. It is the effect that counts. Hence, perhaps, the revived appeal of vapor and the enduring attraction of live performance in the age of technical reproducibility and disembodied virtual media. In an ironic twist, the most transient Wagnerian technology of the nineteenth-century operatic stage has proven historically to be its most durable one.

Epilogue Wagnerian Failure

Berlin, 2015. The Komische Oper premieres My Square Lady, an experimental “opera exploration” (Opernerkundung) cocreated with the internationally applauded performance collective Gob Squad and the neuro-robotic science laboratory of Berlin’s Beuth Hochschule für Technik. Loosely inspired by Frederick Loewe’s 1956 hit musical My Fair Lady (itself an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion), the show questions whether the latest robotic technologies can be made to feel and behave like humans: hence its subtitle, Of Men and Machines. The latter are represented not through technologically enhanced stage design but by a humanoid robot called Myon and addressed as male—a white, one-camera-eyed android the size of a six-year-old (figure E.1). That “he” is the evening’s chief attraction is clear from his prominent depiction on posters and the program cover. Unlike robots in industrial contexts, we are informed, Myon is not preprogrammed to perform specific tasks. Instead, the idea is to have him react spontaneously to the occurrences onstage. What, the Gob Squad performers initially ask, can such a freewheeling robot bring to the production of opera? (Not much, employees of the Komische Oper insist, from singers to technicians, the seamstress, and box-office staff.) Vice versa, might experiencing opera—an art form Gob Squad, following Alexander Kluge, consider the paradigmatic “powerhouse of emotions”—help Myon gain emotional intelligence and, thus, become more human?1 An android, then, is this production’s modern-day Eliza Doolittle, a supposed half-being in need of educational improvement; and his real-life Professor Higgins—a mathematician rather than linguist—encourages Myon’s onstage learning process through interaction with singers and performers. Throughout the evening, the musicians discuss the essence of human nature; vie for Myon’s affection with 215

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figure E.1 . Robot Myon arrives on his conchate throne in front of a red velvet curtain in the Gob Squad production of My Square Lady (Komische Oper Berlin, 2015). Courtesy of REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke.

songs, gestures, or costumes (some of opera’s basic media); attempt to coach him in singing and conducting as a means to access his emotions; and enact their own deaths to demonstrate the key to humanness. Myon’s responses to all this are fickle: emotions seem incapable of reaching—and thus anthropomorphizing— technology. And so is death. Untouched by the staged demise of everyone around him, Myon defiantly remains alone. Even when a trap door makes him, too, disappear, he continues to project data to onstage screens. On the face of it, My Square Lady could not be further from Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. First, there is no coherent story, no musical unity, no illusionist set. Myon’s educational project simply merges an eclectic array of operatic and other hits with apparently extemporaneous conversations and clumsily rehearsed dialogues. Worse, the stage is bare, with stagehands delivering stock props as needed and the stage manager sometimes calling for singers through loudspeakers. In this setup, the proscenium curtain is out of commission: there is nothing to veil. On the contrary, undoing opera’s black box—its assemblage of human and nonhuman agents—lies at the core of this show. And this exposure helps bring into focus the central question of whether technologies can be animated by emotions, humanity’s motivating life force. In opera, Gob Squad suggest, they can—but only via all those usually invisible men and women who manage opera’s machines (or institu-

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tional cogs), not by any intrinsic technological advancement of these gadgets themselves. My Square Lady thus portrays opera as a decidedly low-tech and collaborative hybrid genre driven by (and in turn catalyzing) human feelings: not just those of a central creator, but of the various contributors to its onstage realization as well. This is a far cry indeed from Wagner’s Venus-like desire for total control of both production and reception, and from his implicit treatment of his collaborators as mechanical appendages of his authorial self. Second, My Square Lady places Wagner’s abhorred technology center stage, making it a visible protagonist instead of an invisible aid. Accordingly, steam shrouds Myon’s Erda-like appearance (to a timpani roll rather than gong strike, alas) from a trap door. And when he is allowed a repeat entrance on a golden conchate throne, the allusion to Baroque opera’s proverbial deus ex machina turned machine-god is emphasized not only by a hailing chorus but also by a red velvet curtain forming the backdrop (see again figure E.1). Divested of their illusionist context, Wagnerian technologies here function as generic referents of theatricality or ciphers of dramatic significance. In this case, they facilitate not a transition between aural and visual media or a transformation of different scenic realms. Instead, they signal the elevation of a new gadget from subsidiary supplement to dramatic lynchpin. It is not least in this dismantling of the traditional “closed diegetic cosmos” and its multimedia coherence that this example of what Jelena Novak calls “postopera” betrays its roots in postdramatic theater and performance art since the late 1960s.2 There, as we have seen, curtain, gong, and steam were all uncoupled from their immersive theatrical uses and employed for their own expressive values, while proliferating in all manner of popular media as well. In fact, it seems only natural that the multisensorial technologies utilized by nineteenth-century composers to gloss over opera’s medial interstices could stand as independent artistic media in a postwar avant-garde that was moving away from medium specificity towards ever more intermedial enterprises, and that sought to emphasize the materialities and conditions of performance per se.3 A third anti-Wagnerian link to postdramatic theater, even more radical for an opera house, is My Square Lady’s embrace of contingency. Each performance takes its unique course, subject to Myon’s behavior. It depends, for instance, on whether his joints overheat, or which memorized activities the robot resorts to (if any) in response to specific situations. Failure, in fact, stands as the production’s empowering concept. For the scientists, the pressures of live performance revealed the shortcomings of their previous, laboratory-only tests. Gob Squad meanwhile generally like to pursue “gigantic, oversized tasks that in a way are foredoomed,” because this introduces an “incalculable” risk that guarantees for them a precious, unrepeatable presence of each performance. (Only the musicians, or so the production’s dramaturge suggested, had problems with the potential of public failure, trained as they were to perform a preexisting work perfectly.)4 Unlike other Gob

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Squad shows, though, My Square Lady does not open the performance to audience participation or occurrences outside the theater. Ironically in view of the operatic pursuits traced in this book, it is instead precisely the attempted promotion of technology to an entirely “natural” medium—or anthropomorphic participant— that generates more than the usual performative unpredictability. My Square Lady thus challenges common assumptions about the desirability of perfection in both mechanical and music-theatrical performance. Put differently, it uncovers the efforts commonly involved in refining technologies and techniques, exertions otherwise resulting in the perceived disappearance from audience consciousness (Adorno’s phantasmagoria) of both human labor and all those machines sustaining theatrical illusions—or our lives. And yet, the experience of capricious machinery (if usually unintended) is not all that foreign to opera-goers. As this book has shown, after all, new technologies have been central to the realization of nineteenth-century composers’ ever more intricate imaginings of multimedia representation. But the incorporation of certain technical procedures into the common notion of a specific operatic work was unstable and disintegrated quickly. For one thing, it was contingent on the wide availability of the relevant technologies. My three case studies have shown that such dissemination could take decades and vary widely between opera houses. This was the case even though the increased appetite for special effects and audiovisual immersion, epitomized by the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, stimulated the upgrading of many a stage across Europe. (As a cynical observer noted, by century’s end Bayreuth had therefore lost some of its raison d’être, since meanwhile “all larger stages have become more or less exhibition sites for machines and electrical engineering.”5) What is more, novel devices could be operated differently or achieve divergent effects depending on the size, sightlines, décor, and acoustics of the relevant theaters, the surrounding mechanical gear, local traditions, and individual tastes. Small wonder that critics focused on the presence (or absence) of innovative technologies and their effects. And small wonder that Wagner, as we have seen in the introduction, was frustrated that this interest in Bayreuth’s functioning seemed to overshadow that in the artistic ideal of his staged totality.6 His rhetorical desire to purge the intended Gesamtkunstwerk of the mechanical was thwarted by the very technological arms race his operas stimulated in practice. For another thing, even the most advanced technologies tended to fall short of composers’ visions and audience expectations, even under the uniquely favorable conditions of Bayreuth. Among my case studies, this disappointment was particularly evident regarding tinny tam-tams or the hissing and uncontrollable wafting of steam. Not unlike Myon’s illusionary education in My Square Lady, Wagner’s Ring in particular posed impossible tasks for even the most cutting-edge stages. And at least in private, the composer admitted the ensuing failure of his production. In the exhausted aftermath of the inaugural 1876 festival, Cosima Wagner

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described him as utterly depressed, even coquettishly suicidal; a few years later he confessed to King Ludwig II (albeit with the hopes of garnering more support for Parsifal) that the “tremendous effort involved in introducing my Nibelung work to the world in the most stylish way possible” had ultimately led to nothing but “the birth of an ordinary child of the theatre.”7 The issue was not just the blatant malfunctioning of some parts of the machinery, such as the auditorium’s unintended total darkness during the Ring’s first run because of a failure to regulate the gas lighting, or the notoriously deformed dragon whose neck had gone missing.8 To be sure, such obvious shortcomings gave license to the development of new technological and directorial solutions elsewhere. The stringent demands of Wagner, the great catalyst of stage technologies, accelerated his (and their) own obsolescence. But more importantly, and notwithstanding all public protestations to the contrary, the composer was disappointed by the achievements of machinist Carl Brandt.9 The latter had not accomplished the total illusion Wagner had hoped for: his “ideal was not met.”10 As I have argued, Wagner had tried to advance his technologies to such a degree as to make them appear “natural”—what I have described as their transformation from technics into artistic media. Yet even as such they would always remain in the realm of artifice rather than animated life: technology cannot overcome itself.11 Along with steam, that is, Bayreuth’s technologies did not fully conceal themselves by means of their “artification.” Just as Myon, the android, would not behave like a sentient person, so Brandt’s contraptions could never be taken for the nature they were supposed to evoke. The gap between bodies and machines remained. With technē as his sole prosthetic wand, then, Wagner’s attempt at outstaging Venus’s directorial magic was doomed to fail. And this failure, along with the short stagetechnological life cycle we have observed, only heralded the eventual ageing, by the early twentieth century, of illusionist theater and its scenic realism as such.12 If, as I have suggested in chapter 1, Wagner was aware of this technological fallacy already from his own fictional Venusberg calamity, it was not until after the Bayreuth experience three decades later that he came close to throwing in the realist-illusionist towel. Apart from the Festspielhaus building, the composer admitted to his patrons, he would have “to start from scratch” to create something “entirely different” in the next Ring production; as he conceded to Cosima Wagner, “costumes, scenery, everything must be done anew.”13 By 1878, when pondering the staging of Parsifal, he was so disgusted by “the thought of all those costumes and grease paint” (or so Cosima Wagner reported) that “having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theater!”14 In other words, Wagner toyed with the idea of circumventing all optical challenges with an acousmatic concert performance that would leave scenery and action entirely to the audience’s inner eye. This, of course, was precisely the imagination he had originally wanted to silence (or control) by making everything perceptible. In desperation, Wagner

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now presaged the advent of electronic acoustic recording technologies whose novel listening conditions Adorno would hail, by the mid-twentieth century, as a solution to a perceived directorial impasse between clichéd historical stagings and purportedly libertarian modernizing aesthetics.15 Yet Wagner’s fits of exasperation did not ultimately cut through to the illusionist core of his undertaking. Although he never specified exactly how he would alter his Ring production, and financial debts prevented him from ever mounting the tetralogy again, he went on to realize Parsifal in Bayreuth with mostly the same mechanical means and technical assistants he had used for the Ring. As Patrick Carnegy has argued, the composer may have opened to a more atmospheric rendition rather than insisting on “the depiction of every leaf on every tree.”16 But the basic technological conundrum remained. Moreover, when faced with requests for—or reports on—Ring productions elsewhere that departed from his vision, he was aghast: by 1878, as we have seen in chapter 4, he explicitly urged directors to abide as closely as possible by his “scenic arrangements in Bayreuth,” whose defects he now considered relatively minor.17 Faithfulness to his rendition, however imperfect, was still safer than any challenge to his techno-realistic approach. Beside the issue of the availability and efficacy of certain stage technologies, however, this insistence on both conceptual and material “accuracy” of production raised a second technology-related question—namely, that of preservation. For how, in the era before recording, could Wagner ensure that his audiovisual directives and their realizations became widely known and generally followed? In search of some preliminary answers, the following section briefly explores the quest of storage media raised in the introduction and chapter 4. My concluding thoughts will then return to Wagnerian technologies proper. Revisiting the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle in the context of today’s mediascape, I will contemplate an embrace of opera’s mixed mediality as an alternative to the striving for ever more illusionist technologies on contemporary stages. R E C O R D I N G T R A N SI E N C E

Let us, then, return one last time to the theoretical beginnings of Wagner’s Ring project. In 1850, when the composer first articulated his idea of a special festival devoted to its premiere, he imagined three consecutive free performances in a makeshift theater that would be demolished thereafter and “the whole affair would be over and done with.” According to a different formulation of this early, radically presentist vision, the work would end with the conflagration not just of Valhalla but of his score as well:18 Wagner pictured an all-consuming artistic “happening” for the sake of political education, an anticipation of activist performance art of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from Fluxus to Christoph Schlingensief. At the same time, because the necessary political condition (the longed-for revolu-

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tion) had not yet arisen, he later admitted to having conceived of his Nibelung drama entirely for his “inner gratification,” without regard for contemporary theaters and their “existing means of representation [Darstellungsmittel].”19 For all his theoretical insistence on the complete—and completely controlled—sensual presentation of his Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner briefly considered permanent immateriality or the immediate disappearance of his stage work as extreme solutions to the defects of mid-nineteenth-century German culture and politics. Yet once his composition progressed and the Festspielhaus began to materialize with the help of a royal patron whose very support already undermined Wagner’s revolutionary agenda, economic and practical considerations were paramount: given the exorbitant investment of resources and time, it would have been unfeasible to let their fruits wither after only one festival. Quite to the contrary, Wagner now desired fixity for his production’s ephemeral features as well. In 1872, for instance, he pondered having an assistant “note down everything I say” in rehearsal “so that a tradition goes down in writing.”20 Along the way, though, he seems to have realized that such a retranslation (or reverse remediation) of his multimedia work into the written word would remain fragmentary, lacking as it did precisely the sensorial dimension and its temporal expanse he was so concerned with. In other words, rather than a codification in symbolic media, he sought preservation by means of a “real,” nonsymbolic “discourse network” or Aufschreibesystem, a move that substantiates Friedrich Kittler’s parenthetic claim that “Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was a singular assault on writing, that is, on text and score simultaneously.”21 And so, on the eve of the electronic era, Wagner entrusted the storage and transmission of his ideas to live performers and the compound medium of staged opera itself. It was in this context that, by 1877, Wagner renewed his efforts of the mid-1860s to establish a music school “for the education of singers, musicians and conductors for the correct performance of music-dramatic works of truly German style”— which is to say, an authentic Wagner-training institute. Thus, he held, he could bestow “a real permanence” (eine wirkliche Dauer) on his festival.22 And when a lack of funds once more (as in Munich a decade earlier) thwarted this plan, it dawned on him during Parsifal rehearsals that the festival itself offered the best Wagnerian education. “Regular performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth I regard as a school for the artists taking part,” he declared in May 1882: like robot Myon, his singers would be trained in performance. And to afford larger groups of talented musicians, directors, and designers this schooling, he initiated a scholarship program to support their attendance at the festival.23 This, he reasoned, would benefit also the anticipated “model performances” (Musteraufführungen) of his older works that he hoped to mount in Bayreuth pre- or post-Parsifal.24 The festival thus simultaneously offered immersive performances and pedagogical instructions; as a contemporary critic noted, it was both an artistic event and a documentation of its “making of.”25 From a Kittlerian perspective, we might see the Bayreuth

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Festspielhaus as a device for the quasi-mechanized reproduction of his authentic performances, a family-run industry for the copyrighted manufacture of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In short, Bayreuth was intended not just as an archive of musical interpretations and theatrical ideas, but as an audiovisual recording machine avant la lettre—one that turned even singers into reproductive technologies.26 While this machine would start regular operation only with Parsifal, Wagner and his entrepreneurial “alter ego,”27 the cunning singer-turned-impresario Angelo Neumann, conceived of a financially viable alternative for the Ring as well. As we have seen in chapters 2 and 4, Wagner authorized a touring production that reassembled all of Bayreuth’s mobile ingredients with composer-approved singers. As for the conductor, Wagner insisted on Anton Seidl. One of Bayreuth’s musical assistants of 1876 who had also taken notes on the uses of curtains, steam, and other stage technologies, Seidl served as an externalized memory of Wagner’s musical as well as directorial intentions, a stand-in for the composer himself. The claim to authenticity of this re-created production thus rested on partly material, partly human elements. And the remaining differences between the original Bayreuth production and the touring hybrid were veiled rhetorically (as was Wagner’s wont) by his blessing of the enterprise as the tetralogy’s only “correct” rendition. Neumann, as noted in chapter 2, in turn marketed this attention-mongering cachet by asking permission to baptize his company “Wagner Theater,” evoking the Festspielhaus itself.28 Wagner and Neumann did not invent the idea of touring an authenticated performance of a difficult new composition, any more than the composer invented his stage technologies proper. In 1869, the American impresario Maurice Strakosch had sent Rossini’s posthumous Petite messe solennelle across Europe along with the composer’s favorite singers; and this much-discussed venture motivated Verdi to take his Messa da requiem and its original soloists to several European capitals in 1875.29 As for theatrical stagings, the groundbreaking Italian premiere production of Lohengrin was transported from Bologna’s Teatro Comunale to Florence just weeks after its opening in 1871; and the Meiningen Theater had begun to bring the most fabled of its pioneering historicist stagings to several European cities in 1874.30 But with the tetralogy and its heightened appetite for stage effects, Wagner once more upped the ante. His mobile Gesamtkunstwerk required no fewer than twelve railway cars—twice the length of a usual train at the time—to accommodate its sets, props, instruments, and a personnel of between 136 and 150, including that steam engineer.31 Between September 1882 and June 1883, following earlier performances in Berlin and London, this assembly performed twenty-nine cycles (as well as concerts and individual renditions of Die Walküre) in twenty-five cities across Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, with further performances in Russia in 1889. Unsurprisingly, just like Wagner’s enhanced technologies, this tour was widely covered in the press and left its mark on the operatic world. Starting in the late 1880s, for instance, the Ricordi company

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sent Verdi’s final operas to several European cities with their original casts, while Mascagni, Puccini, and other younger composers would regularly travel to personally oversee local premieres. The “Wagner Theater,” then, pushed touring opera to a new level across Europe as a device for the controlled propagation of cuttingedge multimedia performance in all its aspects. If the Bayreuth Festspielhaus functioned as a stationary machine with recording and playback functions, the touring production was its itinerant amplifier, designed to extend both reach and shelf life of Bayreuth’s inaugural staging. However, even more than the expanded stage technologies we examined, this amplifier was prone to malfunction. Although it popularized the use of steam, familiarized audiences with the Ring, and helped convince some managers that this gargantuan work could be produced successfully on smaller stages as well, the “Wagner Theater” failed as a whole to re-create anything like the impression audiences gained at the first Bayreuth Festival, sunken pit and all. Critics regularly pointed out the imbalance of the reduced orchestra (necessitated by the smaller average size of pits), the inevitable adjustments of the décor to local conditions, and the lack of Bayreuth’s refined lighting.32 What is more, this already compromised storage medium collapsed all too soon. According to witnesses of later performances, the sets visibly suffered from the strains of constant transportation, gauzes had holes, and costumes became threadbare.33 The orchestra’s precision also declined due to exhaustion. Worse, some of the original singers quit the tour early, while others got hoarse; Neumann’s celebrated Brünnhilde, Hedwig Reicher-Kindermann, even died on tour. There could have been no more apt token of the gradual demise of the re-created production and its nimbus of “correctness.” Under duress, neither bodies nor fabrics proved to be durable prostheses of the Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged: the fully realistic medium was subject to the transience of all earthly matter. This second, mediated failure of Bayreuth’s Ring production throws new light on an oft-posed question: whether Wagner, had he lived some decades or more later, would have embraced electronic audiovisual media as a means of overcoming the limitations of his bodily technologies of storage and production. Could the new cinematic medium have afforded him a more complete tool to document and disseminate his works in their multimedia manifestation—including the effects of those ever more advanced stage technologies considered in this book? Might he eventually have placed (minutely programmed) robots onstage? Or, as has frequently been suggested, would Wagner have turned wholesale to film—or, nowadays, digital media?34 From a purely technical standpoint—and postulating sufficient financial means—sound film would, of course, have offered him both near-complete fixity of and quasi-total directorial control over the final audiovisual product (excepting the notoriously uncontrollable spectator and her viewing conditions). It would also have minimized the chances of accidental human or technical failure during

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a performance. Moreover, film enabled new visual feats while veiling the technologies of their production more successfully than opera: it asked only for the temporary acceptance of its projected images as reality. Indeed, as an Italian literary critic observed already in 1908, “Wagner died too early: he missed out on this utmost instrument of evocation.”35 In the terms of media scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, film appeared as a transparent or immediate medium—one whose own technicity vanished behind its alluring silver screen—at least in comparison to older forms of multimedia. In turn, it emphasized the latter’s hypermediacy, their logic that “acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible.”36 Not coincidentally did Adorno cite elements in Wagner’s music dramas that were “suggestive of film” as proof of the Gesamtkunstwerk’s phantasmagoric nature.37 Film can obviously transcend its own technicality no more than can any other technical medium. But the ever-increasing mediatization of Western society and its entertainment industries has been accompanied by a decreasing visibility of the mechanical apparatuses driving these media. Television screens have become thin like framed paintings, digital storage media smaller than those pens of old. And smooth digital surfaces surround us everywhere, affording seemingly limitless access to, and interactive engagement with, virtual worlds. If “the history of optical media is a history of disappearance” of their technical conditioning,38 we truly live in a Wagnerian age. Nonetheless, some recent developments may give this counterfactual reasoning pause. For one, the accelerated development of new media has itself revealed that electronic—even digital—storage modalities may ultimately be less long-lasting than our time-honored symbolic Aufschreibesysteme. Although the former’s synthetic materials may be more resilient, their decoding depends on apparatuses that have been superseding one another quickly. And even when appropriate machines have endured, their format might have changed, rendering the medium illegible nonetheless. In this chain of constant remediation and renewal, even cinema has been deemed threatened by digital media, much like some early twentieth-century commentators feared that film might supplant opera (or some of today’s observers worry that the globally successful HD broadcasts are sounding the death knell for live operatic performances).39 More important, perhaps, is a recent surge of fascination with older, ostensibly obsolescent media. Vinyl, for instance, has experienced an astonishing comeback. Collectors and some DJs believe it produces a warmer and richer sound than digital media. Others enjoy the tangibility and physical participation it affords, while teenagers embrace turntables as stylishly retro.40 Yet I would argue that the resurgence of analog media is more than a matter of lifestyle aesthetics. As our lives move increasingly online, there seems to be a concomitantly growing desire for reassurance of the materiality of our world, along with our own corporeality. And many satisfy this need by reaching to grainy, tactile older media—ones that

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reveal precisely those cogs and wheels made redundant in digital devices.41 Related are attempts to render the proliferating virtual worlds more “real,” to touch and experience them in the flesh: what with all those cuddly emoticon toys and rubber Minecraft axes, not to mention the Nintendo video game theme park that is rumored, at the time of writing this epilogue, to be growing up alongside the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida.42 It is no coincidence, then, that the humanities, too, have been experiencing a material turn, and that a recent branch of media studies devotes itself to a “media archaeology” that is “less about temporal antecedence than about the technoepistemological configurations underlying the discursive surface (literally, the monitors and interfaces) of mass media.”43 It is such configurations that Curtain, Gong, Steam has traced regarding the desired smooth multimedia integration of nineteenth-century opera. Something of a material bend is noticeable in the performing arts as well. As mentioned in chapter 4, the performative turn witnessed since the 1960s put an unprecedented premium on ephemerality and gave rise to so-called performance art, happenings, or what theater scholar Richard Schechner dubbed “actuals.”44 Rather than being performances of something (mostly of preexisting texts), these were unique events that celebrated their own immediate disappearance as the quintessence of authentic, pure, or auratic art. As such, they also radically limited their means. A billowing cloud of steam could become a work in and of itself, as we have seen, though more often it was the artist’s body that provided the primary medium of a performance piece. These minimal materials, of course, could not be stored. Performance art was thus radically presentist, just like Wagner’s earliest ideas for his festival-cum-conflagration. It seems therefore ironic that some proponents of performance art have recently become concerned with the preservation of their pieces. A telling case in point is the legendary pioneer of performance art Marina Abramović. Even though many of her performances are famously captured in photographs or videos, she roundly declares these recordings insufficient. Not only were they often made in haste, she argues, but they intrinsically lack the durational aspect, experience of presence, and spontaneous flow of energy of the live event.45 Abramović thus acknowledges the ontological gap between the presence of living bodies on the one hand and technical media on the other—precisely the gap Wagner had hoped to plaster over onstage. But her answer is not to improve (recording) technologies to veil this gap. Instead, under the label “reperformance,” she has been advocating a radically low-tech solution, most publicly in her controversial 2010 show “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In addition to the documentation of past performances via image, word, and video footage, a number of young performers restaged some of her iconic works, just as she had redone earlier pieces by herself and others in a 2005 Guggenheim performance marathon. To ensure the future integrity of her pieces (and foster her legacy), to be sure, Abramović does resort to language as

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well: in a manner evoking Wagner’s (imagined) unprecedentedly detailed production book, she hopes “to leave as many instructions as possible to describe how the work should be performed, shown, and seen.”46 But her aim is ultimately to transcend symbolic representation and audiovisual documentation. To this end, she purchased an abandoned theater in upstate New York to house a “Marina Abramović Foundation for Preservation of Performance Art.” There she plans to train artists in the “Abramović Method” to present and preserve past works in their “intellectual and spiritual legacy”: the parallel to Wagner’s Festspielhaus and his anticipated “Stylschule” could not be more obvious.47 Furthermore, until the foundation’s financing is secure, it has begun to operate through workshops in different venues—another touring venture standing in, like Neumann’s “Wagner Theater,” for the ultimate, site-specific temple.48 Even in the era of cyber performance and digital art, Abramović suggests that the only way to preserve performances is in their own medium. Wagner, then, might not necessarily have chosen electronic recording technologies over his corporeal Bayreuth training ground. On the contrary: for all their propensity to failure, his human-based, real-life efforts may, after all, seem rather current—or currently fashionable. So where does this ambivalence concerning electronic media and their potential preservation (or substitution) of performance leave us regarding the use of state-of-the-art technologies in contemporary productions themselves, particularly of operas from the long nineteenth century that revel in complex audiovisual representations? And how do present-day stage machineries advance or challenge the achievability and desirability of a completely immersive illusionist theater? In the final sections, I want to propose some preliminary answers by returning to the starting point of this book, the Metropolitan Opera’s latest Ring cycle. REPERFORMING TECHNOLOGIES

The 2010–12 production of the Ring by Canadian director Robert Lepage offers a rich case study of Wagner’s dual technological legacy—his yearning for innovative (and transparent) media as well as his wish to conserve his directorial vision.49 Likely the most blatant promotion of mechanical wonders in recent operatic history, the Met’s official sales pitch indeed simultaneously harped on the theme of authenticity. As we have seen in the introduction, Lepage and the Met aspired to a conceptually faithful production whose purported closeness to Wagner’s illusionist vision was enabled by the introduction of novel, distinctly twenty-first-century technologies. In turn, these gadgets were intended to make the enterprise amenable to a younger audience raised on digital media. The production’s claim to authenticity, in other words, rested not on its machineries themselves (which were not attempted re-creations of nineteenth-century hardware) but on their achievement of the utmost visual realism: “limited by 19th century technology,” the Met’s

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story goes, “Wagner was frustrated in his attempt to realize his cosmic vision. The quest to produce a perfect Ring remains opera’s greatest challenge.”50 To meet this challenge, Lepage unambiguously sided with cinematic media, sporting ample video projections and occasional mimed flashbacks while taking literally Wagner’s stage directions: “It’s the movie that Wagner wanted to do before the movie existed.”51 And to dispel any doubts about the epochal accomplishment of the “most ambitious production the Met has ever mounted,” it was followed by a “making of ” documentary with the unequivocal title Wagner’s Dream.52 Just like the perennial quest for the theurgic ring in the tetralogy’s fictional world, the Met’s pursuit of staged perfection became an epic in and of itself. At first glance, Lepage did bring operatic technologies to a new level—and quite literally so. Where Wagner carefully exiled his industrial steam engines outside the theater, Lepage placed hardware in the limelight. His signature feature is a 45-ton kinetic unit set consisting of twenty-four aluminum-covered fiberglass planks that rotate or fold around a central axis. Supported by two 26-foot towers in the wings that are powered by a hydraulic system, this axis can move up and down vertically, allowing the planks to see-saw a full 360 degrees around it (figure E.2). (Just like the Munich Court Theater in 1869 for its premieres of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the Met’s stage required refurbishment to accommodate this technology.) At times, the software-controlled planks are set up identically to form a stable wall or a habitat above, in front of, or below them. More often, they are individually calibrated to suggest rugged mountains or forests, the Rhine or Siegfried’s boat, their movements occasionally animating a setting or collectively enacting scenic transformations. All the while, colorful projections enhance the machinery’s geometric suggestions of Wagner’s natural settings, thus completing its presentation (or concealment) as medium. At the beginning, for example, the undulating planks eventually raise to reveal the Rhinemaidens fully suspended in midair against blue water projections, free to splash about, cast shadows, or exhale interactive digital bubbles triggered by their voices and body heat (figure E.3). Lepage also astutely choreographed the first Rheingold transition in exact alignment with the music and stage directions discussed in chapter 4. For Wagner’s “sinking waters,” rapidly falling pebbles are projected before the planks lift and turn over onto themselves, the nixies literally sinking into the depths; with the “Renunciation motif,” these river-bed-projections give way to blue waves; and once ashore, the planks form a wall on which Wagner’s “little clouds” appear digitally. Not even steam is needed to veil or enliven this seamless transition: a technical feat indeed. Sure enough, Lepage’s stage-filling apparatus was quickly nicknamed “the machine” and became the focus of audience and press attention.53 The idea to populate the stage with one enormous machine has its radical appeal. We might, for instance, consider that machine a technical supplement not to realize the Ring but to enrich Wagner’s theoretical concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

figure E.2 . The “machine” in operation: models of Carl Fillion’s unit set for the different habitats of the Ring in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010–12), here (reading by line from top left) “Waves,” “Fricka,” “Giants,” “Staircase” (for the Nibelheim transformations), “Rainbow,” “Hunding’s House,” “Brünnhilde’s Horse,” “Walküre Cavalcade,” “Brünnhilde’s Fire,” and “Forest.” Images courtesy of Carl Fillion / Ex Machina.

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figure E.3 . The Rhinemaidens splash about and exhale interactive digital bubbles in scene 1 of Das Rheingold in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010). photo©Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

As discussed in chapter 1, Wagner had called on the collaboration of the three “humanistic arts” (dance, music, and poetry) as well as those “made from natural stuffs”—architecture, sculpture, and landscape painting. Yet sculpture ultimately remained a stepchild of his thought, charged with an unnatural “petrifaction” and a mechanically reproducible “fixity” that lacked original creative powers. Wagner’s “redemption” for sculpture lay therefore in its dissolution into real life: its animation as temporal dance as well as its absorption into architecture.54 Its contribution to the Gesamtkunstwerk was thus doubly mediated. But with the abstract, sculptural qualities of his machine, Lepage seems to recover a place for sculpture proper in Wagner’s work. At the same time, he stirs it into a kind of primordial dance—a ballet mécanique that (similar to Tannhäuser’s opening pantomime) generates this music drama in the first place.55 In view of Wagner’s phobia of exposing theatrical machinations, it is a bold step indeed to present the missing art form as precisely the part of his theater Wagner was most intent on hiding: hardware technology. (Not coincidentally is Lepage’s Quebec-based production company proudly called Ex Machina.) Lepage’s kinetic machine also raises interesting hermeneutic questions, even if these remain largely unexplored in the production itself. The fact, for example,

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that the different habitats of Wagner’s cosmos emerge from the same set and fold into one other like the sides of a Rubik’s cube emphasizes the interdependence of Wagner’s worlds, suggesting that they are but simulations in the first place. Twisting and turning, the machine seems to show that it is merely a matter of perspective who dominates and who is dominated; that even Wotan is only a puppet in the machine’s grand theater. After all, rather than the characters traversing Lepage’s space, it is the machine that moves them along, continually creating and re-creating their environs. It thus becomes a character in its own right, one who participates in—even generates—every scene. With its sudden, uncanny moves that are only emphasized by its eerie creaks, moreover, the machine is capable of undermining, interrupting, or propelling the action at will, of turning heaven into hell. This is technological determinism enacted—a far cry from Wagner’s naturebound idealism: Kittler’s provocative claim that “[technical m]edia determine our situation” could have found no more compelling illustration.56 Each scene thus presents a temporary state within a vast trajectory of transmutations of which we glimpse only a few configurations: Lepage implies an endless metamorphosis that reinforces the Ring’s inherent dramatic cyclicity. However, the machine’s transformative sway points to a presence behind it—the invisible brain (or software) steering its planks. Ironically in view of his desired faithfulness, Lepage thereby draws attention to the fact that the master narrator of this Ring is not the composer and his music but the director and his technology. Accordingly, in its ur-state of straight gray planks, his machine is visible before the first notes sound: no curtain conceals its commanding presence. Like the Ring’s fires, this technology has morphed from a means to achieve special effects to an omnipresent—quasigeological—medium in itself. A seemingly independent species among the Ring’s different races, it purports to bring redemption to the gods (or operatic production) while ultimately staging their downfall. This reading resonates with the portrayal of technical progress in such science-fiction blockbusters as Blade Runner, The Matrix, or Avatar—an analogy fostered by the influence of sci-fi aesthetics on Lepage’s design, such as Wotan’s laser-beam appearances or the LED-enhanced ring.57 Despite being foregrounded in a way that would have been anathema to Wagner, then, Lepage’s gadget might concur with the composer’s overall technophobic weltanschauung. Yet the Met production ultimately fails to pursue such critical potential. After the machine’s literally moving beginnings in Das Rheingold, its operations gradually stagnate until the planks form a mere backdrop for the chorus scenes of Götterdämmerung. Although Lepage introduces the latest 3D technology to create spatial illusions by adjusting projections to the planks’ movements,58 the result tends to evoke pictorial—which is to say, flat—realism; some scenes recall Josef Hoffmann’s original Bayreuth sketches no less than did the Met’s previous production, Otto Schenk’s intentionally pseudo-Romantic staging of 1986–88. The

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figure E.4 . Alberich has morphed into a skeletal dinosaur—Wagner’s “giant serpent”—by means of temporary darkness, steam, projections, and another twist of the “machine,” in scene 3 of Das Rheingold in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010). photo©Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

costumes allude even more to 1876, notwithstanding their modernizing touches, what with the Rheinemaidens’ fin tails or Wotan’s “high-definition” bronze breastplate and spear.59 This literalism is perhaps most evident regarding Lepage’s perplexingly hardware animals. Alberich morphs into that (however digitally enhanced) skeletal dinosaur (figure E.4) and, later, a rubber toad according to the same trapdoor-and-steam trickery that had already piqued early Bayreuth audiences, while Siegfried’s lindworm is a blow-up puppet tamely dangling from the planks. These beasts fared no better in performance than did Wagner’s notoriously ill-fated dragon: they caused laughter. More than these conceptual and optical affinities to Wagner’s staging, however, I would argue that the most authentic aspect of Lepage’s production is the overall failure of its illusionist agenda. This collapse stemmed not only from mechanical glitches uncannily similar to those that hampered the opening nights of 1876, with singers slipping, stagehands accidentally emerging, or the machine refusing to produce the rainbow bridge that had equally disappointed critics of the inaugural Bayreuth Festival. (Indeed, in another analogy to 1876, the run-up to the Met’s Rheingold premiere was strewn with speculations about the details and functioning—or

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otherwise—of the machine, as well as the production’s daunting costs.) More significant are the implicit, unwitting revelations of the staging’s artifice. The machine’s constant squeaks betray—like Wagner’s noisy steam—the mechanical source of production; the scenery is either projected onto singers along with the machine or erased around them by spotlights; old-fashioned ropes and body harnesses glitter traitorously beneath digital imagery; and from the majority of seats in the vast auditorium, Lepage’s machine appears not to fit into the Met’s proscenium frame, frequently leaving wings, props, and exits visible. In addition, singers are all too often dwarfed or confined by the planks, and thus forced into the old operatic downstage paralysis Wagner so abhorred.60 Lepage seems to have choreographed his machine more than his singers. Figuratively speaking, technē has crushed phusis; new gadgetry undoes the balanced collaboration between opera’s different media. Tellingly of this inverted hierarchy between bodies and technologies, when the planks proved too heavy to accomplish particularly swift software-generated movements, Lepage made stagehands operate them manually: humans became implements of the machine. Like Myon, then, this production ultimately proves that even the latest technical inventions cannot bridge the gap between artificially simulated scenescapes and sweating human bodies, between an intended hyperreality and the practicalities of staged opera, between man and machine. Lepage fell prey to the very impossibility of perfecting technologies into animated nature that Wagner had experienced in Bayreuth, and Myon would enact in Berlin. H Y P E R M E D IA L O P E R A

I do not want to suggest, though, that all would be well if only Lepage had managed to sustain his theatrical illusion. On the contrary, his production gives pause to wonder about the premises and promises of any attempt at realizing a nineteenth-century illusionist ideal with twenty-first-century technologies. The very idea that we have now reached a stage of technical expertise that would allow us to fully accomplish Wagner’s vision is undone not only by the elusiveness of the latter by also by the ever-faster advance of technology itself. The post-Wagnerian era was replete with inventions that claimed to significantly enhance onstage realism. But history quickly revealed their contingency. For the Swiss theatrical revolutionary Adolphe Appia, replacing static footlights with movable electric lamps and overhead illumination seemed key to permit atmospheric naturalism, while Brandt’s student Karl Lautenschläger hailed his revolving stage as the solution for quick, open transformations.61 The constant advancement of ever more illusionist stage technologies became manifest even within Lepage’s cycle. For it was not until Siegfried’s forest scenes that he unleashed those 3D projections designed to outdo even cinema, with its need of 3D glasses—material technological supplements for the spectators themselves—to achieve spatial immersion. So why stop there?

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Around the time Lepage unveiled his Rheingold, the MIT-based composer Tod Machover premiered a science-fiction opera, Death and the Powers, about a businessman-cum-inventor who seeks to defy death by entering into a virtual existence. To suggest his continuing presence after he leaves his body, Machover and the MIT Media Lab devised “a robotic, animatronic stage—the first of its kind—that gradually ‘comes alive’ as the opera’s main character”: sensors attached to the backstage singer transform his movements and breathing into computergenerated animations of stage props and sets that stand in for the invisible protagonist.62 Lepage is obviously not alone in searching for novel ways to enliven the stage, nor is My Square Lady the only recent operatic production to address man’s relationship to robots, those epitomes of futuristic technologies.63 But how might these productions’ messages and means transfer back to the staging of older operas? To wit, could Machover’s robotic stage afford a more “realistic” rendition of Das Rheingold’s metamorphosing habitats than did Lepage’s machine? Such questions reveal that illusionist stage technologies pursue a moving target. Media transparency can only be constituted relative to the conventions and experiences of a given audience, and these change rapidly with the availability of new technologies in everyday life. As we get used to ever more lifelike simulations (whether in the theater or on our ubiquitous screens), previously satisfying—that is, seemingly transparent—media will begin to show their materiality and technological conditioning: media can appear “immediate” only until being superseded by more transparent ones. The absolute veiling of technologies in favor of smooth, transparent media that both Wagner and Lepage desired is, in other words, a chimera. “Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience,” Bolter and Grusin have argued, “the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium. Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy.”64 It is thus that even the most advanced media technologies quickly become opaque—a constant obsolescence hauntingly captured in Lepage’s idea to present Das Rheingold’s lindworm as a dinosaur skeleton. If, then, Wagner’s own stage technologies fell short of his ideal, and if new mechanical attempts to perfect onstage illusionism age so quickly, what grounds does this leave for the pursuit of literalism, such as that evinced in the Met’s credos to realize Wagner’s stage directions faithfully? Once again, the recent discourse on reperformance may throw this endeavor into sharper relief, underlining the historicity and the contingency of the effects that specific theatrical moments cause over time, even if executed identically. For example, many reperformances in Abramović’s MoMA retrospective elicited markedly different responses than did the original pieces only a few decades prior. In Imponderabilia, Abramović and her then partner Ulay stood naked in the entrance to a museum in Bologna in 1977, triggering irritation and protests among visitors who had to squeeze between them to enter; the police eventually ended the performance. In 2010, young performers turned the

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confrontational piece into live visual art monitored by security guards—a mere curiosity that could be observed, experienced, or altogether avoided (an alternative door was provided). Under these circumstances, the sanitized reperformance lacked spontaneity, provocation, the thrill of the unpredictable, along with the crucial moral challenge to the original spectators: would they intervene, complain, leave?65 At most, the reperformance might have helped spectators imagine what the scenario could have looked like thirty-three years prior; but its extreme visceral effect had vanished.66 Similarly, as has often been noted, a historically informed effort at re-creating Bayreuth’s 1876 production would offer an educational historical approximation, but it would surely not appeal to us in the same ways that the original production did to its first audiences—as innovative or unprecedentedly immediate. Even Lepage’s technologically updated reenactment may seem rather unremarkable for audiences accustomed to the fast-moving virtual realities of 3D movies or video games—or Lepage’s own lavish Cirque du Soleil shows, designed for acrobats in purpose-built Las Vegas theaters.67 This rupture between opera and always novel illusionist media is not new. As early as 1926, none other than Schoenberg diagnosed that opera was no longer in a position to rival the realism offered by cinema: “Film has spoiled the eye of the spectator: we see not only truth and reality; but that illusiveness [Schein] which was previously reserved for the stages (and which wanted to be nothing but illusion) also presents itself in a fantastical manner as reality.” Opera, the composer surmised, would therefore “likely have to turn away from realism, or find another solution appropriate” to the genre.68 By analogy, we might ask whether unified operatic illusionism and quickly ageing “transparent” remediations are goals worth pursuing onstage in our world of digital virtual realities. As my exegesis of Lepage’s Ring cycle has suggested, a promising approach to canonic operas’ technological appetite may rest not in striving for alleged media transparency but in a self-conscious embrace of opera’s hypermedial features. In the case of the Met’s Ring, this was its focus on the machine and its sculptural qualities: investigating the possibilities of animated technologies, after all, cuts to the core of the motivations for, and challenges of, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. The resulting emphasis on opera’s essential reliance on interactions between the bodily and the mechanical might appear particularly appealing today, with the current cultural veering between ubiquitous virtuality and that reemerging fascination with the material and corporeal aspects of our lives, cultures, and histories. Put differently, the old, analog hybrid genre of opera may offer a superbly timely medium for twenty-firstcentury Western societies suffused with digital interfaces, cyborg fantasies, and discourses about the posthuman. The recent upswing of independent opera companies, experimental music theater, and site-specific performances in Europe and the United States confounds this picture.69 I will illuminate this proposition with a brief look at one final Wagner production.

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In 2007–9, the Catalan directors’ collective La Fura dels Baus mounted the Ring cycle in Valencia’s ultramodern Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia. Stage director Carlus Padrissa consciously mixed the collective’s signature elements of street theater and acrobatics with “imagery for a young, 21st-century audience familiar with the visual language of the Star Wars and Harry Potter films”: the product was hailed as a “Ring for the 21st century.”70 La Fura dels Baus’s stage sets consist primarily of twelve large, variously configured moveable panels that show high-definition videos of elemental nature scenes, cosmic visions, and luminous blazes along with space-age fantasies of apocalyptic scenarios, stem cell labs, or blood clots. The ambiences thus evoked are both in line with Wagner’s essential directives and decidedly current: they simultaneously illustrate and interpret the drama. Clad more unequivocally than at the Met in grotesquely overdetermined costumes that amalgamate technological panache, digital aesthetics, archaic body paint, and Wagnerian staples, the singers smoothly emerge from between or behind these panels. Moreover, they roam the entire three-dimensional stage space by means of technologies visibly operated by stagehands in black: fish tanks for the Rhinemaidens, throne-like seats on cranes for the gods and Valkyries (figure E.5), a scooter for Loge, oversized robotic frames for the giants, a laboratory desk for Mime, a futurist amphibian boat for Siegfried, or a space capsule for Gutrune. The characters’ bodies are thus shown as in need of technical appendages (whether these are breastplates, spears, or those cumbersome means of transportation). Furthermore, man has become the object of mechanical reproduction: La Fura dels Baus’s Nibelheim is a genome lab in which Alberich clones gold-clad Nibelungs on the assembly line. The ring’s magic, then, rests on the power to manipulate—even create— human slaves: technology reigns supreme. But far from being limited to the most advanced inventions, this power indiscriminately involves a multiplicity of technics from the digital to the manual. By the same token, instead of striving for unified immediacy, the production revels in its heterogeneous hypermediacy. It is media archaeology enacted. However, the Valencia Ring does not merely pit humans and technologies against one another. Instead, it explicitly stages the interaction of technē and phusis that hampered Lepage’s Ring. The technologized costumes (adorned as they are with cables, lamps, or other futurist gadgets), the fluidity of the projections, and the easy mobility of the screens all facilitate the singers’ integration into the hightech sets. The videos themselves sometimes let anthropomorphic shapes emerge from a torrent of digital imagery: simulated flames may momentarily take the form of miniature bodies; a giant silhouette digitally evokes Wotan during Brünnhilde’s and Waltraute’s duet in Götterdämmerung, act 1. At other times, projections require the singers to finish their effects. The Nibelheim trip, for instance, has Wotan and Loge standing on a raised platform, their backs to the audience, against a dizzying video collage that zooms ever faster from outer space onto the Earth’s surface and

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figure E.5 . Robotic giants and gods in mechanical cranes argue over the embodied Nibelung hoard in La Fura dels Baus’s Das Rheingold, scene 4 (directed by Carlus Padrissa; Valencia, 2007), as captured in the video direction by Tiziano Mancini. Berlin: C Major, 2009 (screenshot).

into a cleft, where the travelers visibly experience the atmospheric transformation before landing in Alberich’s lab. This nosedive into the underworld—just like Siegfried’s later voyages and Wotan’s visit with Erda—depends on a careful alignment of bodies with media simulations. More surprisingly, some of Wagner’s most notorious stage-technological challenges are rendered not as virtual realities but through gymnasts and old-fashioned props. The clones representing Nibelheim’s gold later enact the hoard concealing Freia; a train of carts, peopled by Nibelungs, evokes the lindworm; Siegfried’s dragon consists of a compartmentalized metal formation while acrobats suggest its snakelike twists; and the magic fire spreads via stagehands with torches. Most remarkably, Valhalla is (per)formed as a cylindrical body sculpture forged by human muscularity and interpersonal connection, supported only by those ropes Wagner hated to see (figure E.6); at the cycle’s end, it gradually disintegrates into atomized bodies limply floating in space. Not only is sculpture thus given a literally vivid place in the Gesamtkunstwerk, but the entwinement of society with technology is also emphatically dramatized. So symbiotically are bodies and technologies employed that it is sometimes difficult (at least in the DVD rendition) to ascertain, on the often-dark stage with its symbolically colored accent lighting, whether ani-

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figure E.6 . The gods move towards Valhalla, an acrobatic body sculpture suspended in midair between rainbow projections on side panels, in La Fura dels Baus’s Das Rheingold, scene 4 (directed by Carlus Padrissa; Valencia, 2007). Video director: Tiziano Mancini; Berlin: C Major, 2009 (screenshot).

mated patterns are projected, created by moving objects, enacted, or evoked by a combination of the above (such as the dangling wrecker’s ball studded with bodies that is the fate of Valhalla’s fallen heroes). Anonymous, identically dressed, and acrobatically trained masses of bodies not only merge with simulated optical effects but become their material. They are both technologies and media surfaces. Wagner’s attempt at theatrically naturalizing—or “artifying”—technologies through their increased sophistication and their outward appearance as smooth media is, then, doubly upended. On the one hand, as mentioned, La Fura dels Baus frequently counteracts the immersive possibilities of video projections with willfully traditional machines or human acts: technological progress, they intimate, does not supplant these older media. On the other hand, rather than leading to a higher form of wholesome nature, the production’s pervasive technologies render mankind itself as artificial, morbid, machinic: the interchangeability between men and machines rests less upon the latter’s lifelike, natural façade than on the former’s evident permeation by technologies. It is thus that La Fura dels Baus declaredly conveys “the suicidal degradation of nature by technological man.”71 Their final conflagration kills even those technologized bodies, and analog machineries disappear: as in My Square Lady, the digital panels alone remain animated. With this

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finale to its mingling of archaic and cutting-edge technologies, the production engages the social-revolutionary origins of Wagner’s theories—his belief in the crushing dominance of both the machinic and of civilization over true Art and Nature. As such, it might be considered more visionary and more authentic than Lepage’s literal harnessing of his machine. Ironically in view of the Valencia Ring’s heavy use of technologies, the production in the end unfolds a critical view onto its own means and their social ramifications. Without resorting to androids, postdramatic theater, or science-fiction plots, in short, La Fura dels Baus offers a new spin on Wagner’s theatrical vision that simultaneously assesses relationships between humans and technology in the Anthropocene. Despite this distrustful view of technological progress, however, La Fura dels Baus’s Ring also demonstrates that opera (or human development) can never be untethered from technologies without relinquishing its essence. Why, then, not adopt a playful approach to opera’s various machineries and materialities? One that, even if not necessarily as explicitly as in My Square Lady, lets them stand as what they are without trying to negate, excuse, or conceal them as artistic media? Technē is surely as necessary today as it has always been in staging opera. However, electronic devices have meanwhile enabled the audiovisual recording of productions, and digital multimedia have long surpassed opera in affording the most immersive experiences. The role of technology onstage is therefore changing. Preservationist desires or technical flashiness alone can no longer provide staged opera’s saving grace. But, as I hope Curtain, Gong, Steam has shown, they offer an important material anchor for opera studies: one that grounds staged opera in mechanical practices, provides a new vantage point from which to trace the history of operatic production, and opens opera to dialogues with hitherto sidelined areas of human, scholarly, and artistic developments. The question of Wagnerian technologies is both historical and contemporary. It reveals, ultimately, a new facet of the ever-changing involvement of both opera and humanity with technics.

notes

I N T R O D U C T IO N

1. Quotation in Park, “Ring Transformed,” 54. 2. Park, “Ring Transformed,” 56. 3. Thus the production’s musical consultant Georges Nicholson in Eisenhardt and Froemke, Wagner’s Dream, chapter 3; similarly Peter Gelb in Tommasini, “Met,” C5. 4. Gelb, “Theatrical Nuance”; on his assurances against Regietheater, Steichen, “Metropolitan Opera,” 26. 5. Taruskin, Text, 90. On the term “HIP” and its critiques, see Butt, Playing, esp. ix, 3–50. 6. See Lepage’s statements in Park, “Ring Transformed,” 57. 7. Thus particularly della Seta, “ ‘O cieli azzurri,’ ” 49–50. For a different critique of the opposition of aural and visual levels in opera, see Levin, Unsettling, 33–34. 8. Among the now sizeable body of literature, see esp. Abbate, “Music”; Duncan, “Operatic Scandal”; and Risi, “Opera.” 9. Paradigmatic examples include the pioneering volume by Radice, ed., Opera; Merlin, ed., Opéra; Gordon, ed., “Opera”; and Ridout, “Opera.” (Further studies regarding the specific technologies discussed in this book will be mentioned in the relevant chapters.) An exceptionally broad historical discussion is Baker’s magisterial From the Score; a pathbreaking consideration of opera’s relation to new media is Dombois and Klein’s Richard Wagner; see also Koepnick, “Wagner.” For a recent call to study opera’s technicity more broadly, see Sterne, “Afterword.” 10. Cited in Di Lernia, “La visita,” 160 (“macchina per la musica”). 11. On this distinction, see Aristotle, Physics, esp. 194a12–22 and 199a8–19. The concept of technē as a “bringing-forth” or revealing is also the basis of Heidegger’s seminal 1993 “Question.” 12. Lacoue-Labarthe, Typographie, 255. On this reading of Aristotle, see also Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 95–97. 239

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13. OED, “Technology,” definition 4. For more on the emergence of the concept of technology and its elevation of the “mechanical arts,” see Marx, “Technology,” esp. 573–74; on “technics” as an ambiguous concept encompassing both technologies and techniques, De Souza, Music, 2. 14. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 3–4. See Heidegger, “Question,” e.g., 311. On the classbased origin of the hierarchical division between theoretical science and practical technology, see Lee, “Homo faber,” 21. 15. On this tendency in earlier media studies, see Lister et al., New Media, esp. 78, 319–28. 16. One salient example is the destruction of documents relating to the 1869 refurbishment of the Munich Court Theater for Wagner’s Ring. That this happened in the digital era of the early 2000s to make—physical—space for newer sources at D-Mhsa might be another ironic twist of this same technological disinterest. 17. Latour, Aramis, viii. 18. Ernst, Digital Memory, 72–73. 19. On “blackboxing,” see Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 183–85 and 304. 20. Levin, Unsettling Opera, esp. 1–13. 21. On the difference in speeds of developments between culture and technology, see Mitchell and Hansen, “Introduction,” xiv; and Stiegler, Technics 1:15. 22. Brendel, Geschichte, 574. 23. On the historiographical background of this narrative and more recent attempts at its refutation, see my “Heilige Trias.” 24. Trippett, Wagner’s Melodies, has recently similarly emphasized the material basis of Wagner’s works, albeit regarding his formation of melodies. 25. Raymond, Itinerary, 174; citation amended from OED, “opera,” definition 1.a. For a similar contemporary observation, see Savage, “Staging,” 371. 26. See, for instance, the anonymous seventeenth-century treatise Il corago, edited by Fabbri and Pompilio, as well as Nicola Sabbattini’s groundbreaking Pratica di fabricar scene e machine ne’ teatri (Ravenna, 1637) and the relevant extracts of architectural treatises by Sebastiano Serlio and Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, all translated and edited in Hewitt, Renaissance Stage. 27. Guccini, “Directing,” 144. On differences in the roles of technology between Baroque and nineteenth-century opera, see also Carnegy, Wagner, 17–18; and Dolan and Tresch, “Sublime Invasion,” 6. 28. An argument made both in Fabbri and Pompilio, Il corago, 23–24, and by Michelangelo Buonarroti, “La rappresentazione del Rapimento di Cefalo” (1600), in Solerti, ed., Gli albori 3:11–28, here 27–28. For more context, see Ossi, “Dalle macchine,” 15–16, 33; and Guccini, “Directing.” There were, of course, exceptions to the subordination of music (and composers) to the overall conception of stage spectacle, as evinced in Marco da Gagliano’s remarkable preface to his Dafne performed in Mantua in 1608, in Solerti, Gli albori 2:67–73. 29. Ossi, “Dalle macchine,” 16. Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 137, has argued even more explicitly that the “visible play with machines” overshadowed the plot of courtly performances. 30. On this link, see Ossi, “Dalle macchine,” 29; Lazardzig, “Techniken,” 85; and Cuillé, “Marvelous Machines,” 66–67. French theaters had quickly adopted the Italian focus on

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machines, particularly under the aegis of Torelli, the seventeenth century’s foremost stage technician (and the first engineer entirely devoted to the theater); see Bjurström, Giacomo Torelli. 31. Lazardzig, Theatermaschine, 21. On the general fascination with machines, see Bredekamp, Lure; and Metz, Ursprünge, 86–91. 32. John Hayward, The Letters of Saint Evremond (London, 1930), as republished in Weiss, Opera, 58; on Saint-Évremond see Weiss, Opera, 51–52. 33. On this development, see Bonds, “Idealism,” esp. 389–405. 34. Bredekamp, Lure, esp. 81–107, here 96; also Metz, Ursprünge, esp. 65–66, 86–102. On the influence of the Cartesian dualism on perceptions of technology, see Lee, “Homo faber,” 15–18; on its relation to early modern opera, Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 34–61. For a more complex view of automata in the late eighteenth century, see Voskuhl, Androids, esp. 1–36. 35. On the chief characteristics of eighteenth-century opera seria, see Strohm, Dramma, 1–29. 36. Recent arguments for the survival of the merveilleux in eighteenth-century French opera include Lazardzig, “Techniken,” 84–85, and Cuillé, “Marvelous Machines.” Similarly, Tresch, “Prophet,” has drawn attention to the continuing link between scientific positivism and the theatrical fantastical in early nineteenth-century French discourse. 37. Goehr, Imaginary Museum, esp. 101–15. 38. On nineteenth-century changes in operatic culture as relating to the work concept, economic considerations, the emergence of a repertory, and copyright, see Guccini, “Directing,” 144–51; Walter, “Die Oper,” 230–51; also Parker, Remaking, 7–8, and Till, “Operatic Work,” 236–39. 39. Crary, Techniques, 14. For a survey of nineteenth-century visual entertainments and reproduction methods, see Hick, Geschichte; and Kittler, Optical Media, 118–45. On the emphasis on visualizing the past in opera, see Williams, “Spectacle,” 58–75. 40. See Ziegler, “Webers Probenarbeit”; and Bomberger, “Neues Schauspielhaus,” 160– 69. For more context on Weber’s concern with stage-practical details, see Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, esp. 205–9. 41. For a survey of Véron’s regime and its new visual standards, see Lacombe, “ ‘Machine,’ ” 26–42; and Williams, “Spectacle,” esp. 60; also Wilberg, “The mise en scène,” 1–14. On the “Comité de mises en scène,” see also Allevy, La mise en scène, esp. 59. 42. Lacombe, “ ‘Machine,’ ” 21. On protocinematic shock effects and modernity in grand opéra, see Gerhard, Urbanization, 197–202. 43. Gossett, Divas, 454–61, surveys the rise and functions of production books. In several recent essays, Arnold Jacobshagen has challenged the idea that livrets were generally intended for posterity or associated with the work-character of productions; see his “Staging” and “Analyzing.” 44. Jacobshagen, “Oper,” 182–83. See particularly Meyerbeer’s letter to his publisher Louis Brandus of August 21, 1849, Briefwechsel 5:59. 45. On precursors of both concept and term in German discourse, see esp. Finger, Gesamtkunstwerk, 10–61; for French roots, Brzoska, Idee, esp. 162–213. 46. See Finger, Gesamtkunstwerk; Smith, Total Work; Koss, Modernism; Finger and Follett, eds., Aesthetics; Imhoof, ed., Total Work; and Brown, Quest, for a restrictive reappraisal of the term. For a recent overview, Millington, “All in It Together.”

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47. Kunstwerk, 150, 162; PW 1:183 (here misleadingly translated as “common Artwork”), 196. 48. Kunstwerk, 46; PW 1:73 (emphases original). On Wagner’s focus on Sinnlichkeit and its material underpinnings, see also Trippett, Wagner’s Melodies, esp. 280–88 and 330–60. 49. Kunstwerk, 162, 169; PW 1:196, 204–5; see also SD 3:157, PW 1:73. 50. ML, 235; MLE, 222. 51. Primo ottocento contracts for Italian operas usually obliged composers to conduct the first three performances. Verdi was notorious for his endless rehearsals and strict demands on singers, and gradually extended his say into other areas of production. On various aspects of his growing directorial control, see Petrobelli and Della Seta, eds., Realizzazione; Guccini, “Directing,” 145–51; Syer, “Production,” 542–43; Jesurum, Personaggio muto, esp. 7–18; and the relevant essays in Latham and Parker, eds., Verdi, 11–46. 52. Wagner, “Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama’ ” (1872), SD 9:307; PW 5:303 (adapted; emphasis in original). 53. On Brandt, see Kaiser, Bühnenmeister, and Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 26–52; on the Festspielhaus’s innovations in the context of European theaters, Izenour, Theater Design, 75–82; on its revolutionary darkness—which might be construed as a generic Wagnerian technology—Elcott, Artificial Darkness, 47–59. 54. Some commentators have therefore labeled Wagner the first modern Regisseur, or director, in opera; for instance Carnegy, Wagner, 3–6; also Levin, Unsettling Opera, 14. 55. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 116; also “World-Breath”; and Gramophone, 23. 56. Salter, Entangled, xxxv–xxxvi, 1–4; Packer and Jordan, Multimedia, xviii. 57. Smith, Total Work, esp. 3–4. For similar instances of Wagner’s absorption into modern media discourses, see Joe, “Why Wagner?,” 2–3; and Koepnik, “Wagner.” 58. Elcott, Artificial Darkness, 51. 59. For a more detailed critique of Kittler’s take on Wagner, see Klein, “Wagners Medientechnologie”; and my “Kittler’s Wagner”; on Wagner’s self-branding, Vazsonyi, Richard Wagner, esp. 86–88. 60. Vorwort, 275–76; PW 3:276–77. 61. Versuch, 82; Search, 74. On Adorno’s recourse to the phantasmagoria and its implications, see Gunning, “Illusions”; on earlier associations between Wagner and phantasmagoria, Crary, Suspensions, 254; on the technological conditions of phantasmagoric illusions, Elcott, “Phantasmagoric Dispositif,” 46–49, 54–57. 62. Tresch, “Prophet,” 33. An illustration of the apparatus is in Bergman, Lighting, 278. 63. OD, SD 3:301, 305; PW 2:95, 99 (adapted; emphasis in original). On Wagner’s notion of effect, see Bauer, “Genese,” 151–57. 64. Wagner, “Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth 1882,” SD 10:305; translation adapted from PW 6:310. See also “Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876,” SD 10:110–12, PW 6:102–9; and CWT 2:704 (March 3, 1881), CWD 2:634. On the technical vicissitudes of the moving canvas, see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 155–57; Carnegy, Wagner, 111– 13; and Bauer, Geschichte 1:149. 65. For a brief survey of these connections, see Dolan and Tresch, “Sublime Invasion,” 17–21; and König, “Ideology,” esp. 9. 66. “Kunst und Revolution,” SD 3:19, 25, 31; PW1: 41–42, 48, 55–56. On the relationship between man, art, and nature, see the opening sections of Kunstwerk, 42–46, PW 1:69–73;

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and “Kunst und Klima” (1850), SD 3:207–21, esp. 214; PW 1:249–65, esp. 258–59. On the artistic goal of “ideal naturalness,” also “Das Bühnenweihfestspiel . . . 1882,” SD 10:303–4; PW 6:308. A similar recourse to art (poiesis) as savior from technological ills was envisioned by Heidegger in “Question,” 339–41. 67. Kunstwerk, 58; PW 1:85 (adjusted). 68. Kunstwerk, 152; PW 1:186 (adjusted). 69. Letter to Franz Liszt of January 30, 1852, SB 4:270. 70. On this irony, see also Smith, Total Work, 3–4; on Wagner’s ambivalent attitudes toward technology, with further references, Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 11–14, and Merlin, “Technique,” 2073–74. Cosima Wagner noted the composer’s resistance to electricity in CWT 2:915 (March 25, 1882), CWD 2:830, and frequently reported on Wagner’s invention of compound words around the term machine for ironic or negative effect. 71. McLuhan, Understanding Media, e.g., 65–67. McLuhan made no distinction between media and technology. For more on this conflation, see Lister et al., New Media, 83–85. The most elaborate recent revaluation of technology as “prosthesis” comes from Stiegler, whose multivolume Technics and Time builds on Derrida’s theories of exteriorization. A survey of compensatory approaches is in Hansen, “New Media,” 173–80. 72. Kittler, Optical Media, 29, expanding on McLuhan. 73. Kittler, Gramophone, 1; Galloway, Interface Effect, vii. 74. Wagner, “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth” (1873), SD 9:336, PW 5:333 (adjusted); Vorwort, 275, PW 3:276 (adjusted, emphasis added). On contemporary notions of grand opéra’s orchestra as machinery, see also Newark, “Metaphors,” 29–33; and Dolan and Tresch, “Invasion,” 12–17. 75. Wagner, “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth,” SD 9:336; translation adapted from PW 5:333; on the idiosyncratic term Herd, see Smith, Total Work, 36. 76. See Carnegy, Wagner, esp. xi–xii and 76–84; also Spotts, Bayreuth, 57–58. On Wagner’s indifference toward the visual arts, Vergo, Music, 19–20; for Wagner’s views on painting more generally, Kröplin, Richard Wagner: Musik 2:837–945. 77. Letter of December 15, 1871 from Carl Brandt to his wife, cited in Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 13. 78. See, for instance, Aufführung, 149, PW 3:194–95; and Vorwort, 275, PW 3:276. There was a long tradition of associating machinists and stage designers; see Savage, “Staging,” 365. 79. Thus, for instance, in Wagner’s letter to Ludwig II of October 1, 1874, Wagner and Ludwig II, Briefwechsel 3:40; and “Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876,” SD 10:110–12, PW 6:103–5. 80. Mittheilung, 258; PW 1:299–300 (modified). 81. Ludwig Rellstab, review of Rienzi in Vossische Zeitung (October 28, 1847), in Kirchmeyer, Situationsgeschichte IV/3:306. See also Mungen, “Wagner,” 129–43; and my “Rienzi.” 82. ML, 245; translation adapted from MLE, 233. Ambivalence toward Rienzi was perpetuated by Cosima Wagner, who expelled it from Bayreuth while crafting a new edition to increase profits. 83. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 19. On remediation, see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation; and Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” 129–33. 84. Sterne, Audible Past, 8. For Kittler, see his Gramophone and, for a critical survey, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz’s “Translators’ Introduction” to the same

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volume, xx–xxxiii. According to Wagner, even musical notation was “insufficient”; see Trippett, Wagner’s Melodies, 256–75. 85. Wagner’s efforts to defeat temporality, transience, oblivion, and (ultimately) death resonate particularly with what Stiegler has conceptualized as “epiphylogenetic” or “technological memory,” Technics 1:177; 2:4. 86. CWT 2:1098 (January 23, 1883), CWD 2:996. 87. On the notions of “immediate transparency” and “hypermediacy”—of media as either receding into the background or drawing attention to their own mediacy—see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, esp. 21–50. C HA P T E R 1

1. Cosima Wagner (signed “A. R.”), “Stimmen über Bayreuth. Aus dem Festspieljahre 1891,” draft for the Bayreuther Blätter, published in Mack, Cosima, 268. On the debate about the 1891 programming of Tannhäuser, see Spotts, Bayreuth, 94, 101, 107–10; and Hilmes, Cosima Wagner, 203, 211. Wagner himself had already considered producing Tannhäuser in Bayreuth; CWT 2:1016, 1107 (October 6, 1882 and February 5, 1883), CWD 2:923, 1005. 2. Mittheilung, 284, also 319–22; PW 1:314–15, 365–67; see also “Zukunftsmusik” (1860), SD 7:132–36, PW 3:340–44. 3. Mittheilung, 271–72, also 294–95; PW 1:314–15. 4. Mittheilung, 279; PW 1:323. 5. Wagner, Wagner Theater, 56–57. For paradigmatic further parallels, see Ashman, “ ‘Tannhäuser,’ ” 10; Mayer, Richard Wagner. Mitwelt, 61; and Mayer, Richard Wagner, 103. On all of Wagner’s early romantic heroes as symbolic of the composer, see Borchmeyer, Theater, 187–89; for a reading of Wagner’s early plots in light of his artistic and political agendas, Treadwell, Interpreting Wagner, 21–23. 6. See Borchmeyer and Kohler, Wagner Parodien, 294; and Rehding, Music, 95–105. On the different versions, see Deathridge et al., eds., Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis, 287–95. 7. All references to Wagner’s versions are based on SW 5/1–3: Tannhäuser . . . (1845; mit Varianten bis 1860), and 6/1–3: Tannhäuser . . . (1861–1875; mit Varianten). Previously, for instance, the designation “große romantische Oper” had graced some Marschner operas and, with further adjectives, Weber’s Euryanthe (1823) and Spontini’s Agnes von Hohenstaufen (1829). 8. CWT 1:1083 (November 6, 1877), 2:1098 (January 23, 1883); CWD 1:993–94, 2:996. Further documentation is gathered in Jost, ed., Dokumente, 330–35. 9. This amounts to 250 and 347 measures respectively in the French version, or 224 and 321 measures in the final German version. 10. Aufführung, 148; PW 3:194 (amended). 11. ML, 644; MLE, 629. 12. On the ballet pantomime, which (like the opening of Tannhäuser) also frequently featured supernatural creatures, see Smith, Ballet, esp. 19–72. 13. Decree of April 25, 1897, cited in Wild, Dictionnaire, 308. All references to the stage directions are translated from the relevant versions in Wagner, Tannhäuser . . . Textbuch, here 8. For a complete survey of the various text variants, see Jost, ed., Dokumente, 360–524. 14. On this function and placement, see Jahrmärker, Comprendre, esp. 226–27.

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15. Accordingly, in his first prose draft of 1842, Wagner titled the dance “Feier der Liebe”; Jost, ed., Dokumente, 339. 16. See the entry “Nebelbild, 3” in Grimm and Grimm, Wörterbuch 13 (1889), col. 479; Hick, Geschichte, 166–77; and Heard, Phantasmagoria, 197–200. Further references are in Mungen, “BilderMusik,” 212–13; and Leonhardt, Piktoral-Dramaturgie, 83–89. 17. Kunstwerk, 75; translation adapted from PW 1:103. 18. See, for instance, Kunstwerk, 105 et al.; PW 1: 135–36. On Wagner’s relationship with Greek drama and thought, see Foster, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, esp. 1–29. Amos suggested that the Nebelbilder might envision Wagner himself as Zeus; “Tanz/Traum,” 410–11. 19. Kunstwerk, 67–68; PW 1:95–96. I am indebted to David Trippett for this observation; on the potential relationship between this imagery and widely circulating depictions of Antonio Canova’s neoclassical sculpture Three Graces, see his “Defending Wagner’s Italy,” 387–88. 20. Aufführung, 148; PW 3:194 (amended). On Wagner’s instructions for, and stagings of, Tannhäuser, also Carnegy, Wagner, 34–45. 21. Kunstwerk, 72; PW 1:100. On the seminal (if not unproblematic) role of gesture in Wagner’s theories, see—critically—Puchner, Stage Fright, 40–48; and Smart, Mimomania, 171–204. 22. OD, SD 4:192; PW 2:337 (amended). 23. Strohm, “Tannhäuser,” 564 (“Geräuschfelder”). On the medieval notion of the Venusberg as “mons horrisonus,” see Weigel, Sagenkreis, 54. 24. The musical extracts discussed here are identical in all versions unless otherwise noted. Translations of the stage directions are adapted from the translation by Rodney Blumer in John, ed., Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser, 62. 25. On Wagner’s use of the clarinet in A and its often erotic connotations, see Voss, Studien, 149–50. Wagner would similarly employ two clarinets for the silent but wishful exchange between Siegmund and Sieglinde in act 1 of Die Walküre as well as for Siegfried’s approaching the sleeping Brünnhilde in act 3 of Siegfried. 26. This is true even of the Paris version, where Venus’s pleading is supported by wind chords and high string arpeggios. 27. OD, SD 4:192; PW 2:337. 28. Kunstwerk, 152; PW 1:186 (amended). 29. The directions are cited according to Marschner, Hans Heiling . . . [fs], ed. Gustav F. Kogel, 4 (“Unterirdische, [weitgewölbte] Höhle, [welche die Eingänge zu mehreren Seitenhöhlen zeigt,] von röthlich trübem Licht erhellt. An den zackigen Wänden klettern Zwerge”). The details in square brackets are not included in Hans Heiling . . . Vollständiger Klavierauszug vom Komponisten, 3, reproduced in example 2.2. On this opera’s similarities with, and likely influence on, Tannhäuser, see also Kröplin, Richard Wagner: Musik 1: 489–90. 30. On the painterly directions of the Venusberg setting, see also Kröplin, Richard Wagner: Musik 2:730–39. Examples of visual artists inspired by the Venusberg include Eugène Delacroix (1861), Henri Fontin-Latour (1864 and 1876), Aubrey Beardsley (1895), and John Collier (1901). 31. Kunstwerk, 152–53; PW 1:186–87 (amended). On Wagner’s utopian Gesamtkunstwerk ideal and the role of landscape painting therein, see also Koss, Modernism, esp. 16–20.

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Notes to pages 36–38

32. Kunstwerk, 153; PW 1:187. 33. OD, SD 4:2; PW 2:120, 119. On Wagner’s desire to represent everything visibly or “to the senses,” see also Kunstwerk, e.g., 152, PW 1:185; and Mittheilung, 232–33, PW 1:271–73. 34. Wagner, “Über die Bestimmung der Oper” (1871), SD 9:141; translation adapted from PW 5:142. 35. On the pervasive role of odor in creating theatrical atmospheres, see Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 116–18; and Di Benedetto, Provocation, 93–112. On the romantic legacies of Wagner’s “ros’ge Duft,” Kröplin, Richard Wagner: Musik 2:740. 36. Kunstwerk, 157; PW 1:191. 37. On the perception of Wagner’s music as narcotic or akin to an “opium jag,” see e.g., Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 248, translation Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, 153; Karl Frenzel, “Die Bayreuther Festspiele,” Nationalzeitung (1876), reproduced in GroßmannVendrey, Bayreuth 1:213; and [Quidde], Ketzereien, 15. For later examples, see chapter 4. 38. OD, SD 4:229n15; PW 2:370n (emphasis in original). On this and the following statement, see also Mittheilung, 344; PW 1:391. 39. Kunstwerk, 151–52; PW 1:185 (adapted). 40. See, for instance, Wagner’s letter to Ernst Benedikt Kietz (September 6, 1842), SB 2:153; and Dreyfus, Wagner, 77. 41. The pertinent association of Venusberg and mons veneris has been frequently noted. More to the point, Wagner repeatedly employed the metaphor of the womb when reflecting on the emergence of his Gesamtkunstwerk; see “Kunst und Klima,” SD 3:220, PW 1:265; and OD, SD 4:229, PW 2:376. The Venusberg, then, represented life-giving earth and life-giving art simultaneously. On the common association of grottos with wombs of the Earth, see also Bredekamp, “Erde,” esp. 12–18. 42. Wagner, “Tannhäuser. I. [Vorbemerkung.],” SD 16:186. 43. See Wagner, Tannhäuser, SW 6/1:335. (Voss includes this stage direction also for the 1845–60 version in Wagner, Tannhäuser . . . Textbuch, 62; yet it is missing in these earlier versions according to both the vocal score and SW 5/1:122.) 44. For Wagner’s ideal of a “correct” performance, see esp. “Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule” (1865), SD 8:128–29, PW 4:176; and his letters to Angelo Neumann, esp. of June 21 and September 23, 1878, in Neumann, Erinnerungen, 77 and 85 (Neumann, Recollections, 74, 83, replaces “correct” with the less specific “perfect” or “satisfactory”). See also CWT 2:518 (April 8, 1880), CWD 2:463. 45. Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of September 30, 1860, SB 12:265. On his satisfaction with the Paris décors, see also his letter to Lorenz von Düfflipp of May 17, 1867, SB 19:144. 46. For a fresh look along these lines at the Paris Tannhäuser fiasco, see Fauser, “Cette musique,” 228–55. 47. Continuation of the letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of September 30, 1860; SB 12:265. 48. Mittheilung, 344, PW 1:391 (adjusted); Vorwort, 273, PW 3:274–75. See also his letters to Ernst Benedikt Kietz of September 14, 1850, SB 3:404–5 (SL, 216–17), and Hans von Bülow of December 17, 1861, SB 13:333; and “Bericht an Seine Majestät,” SD 8:130–32, PW 4:177–79.

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49. Letter to Franz Liszt of January 30, 1852, SB 4:270. The Venusberg was commonly associated in German mythology with the Hörselberg near Eisenach, which Wagner saw on his journey from Paris to Dresden in 1842; ML, 231, MLE, 219. In 1876, the “Green Hill” was located outside the small town of Bayreuth, with only a dirt road leading up to the theater; to this day it is visible from the train station. 50. On Venus having taken refuge from Christian medieval society, see Wagner, “Tannhäuser. I. [Vorbemerkung.],” SD 16:186; and Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 216–49. 51. Thus the opening stage description in all versions; translation adapted from the one by Rodney Blumer in John, ed., Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser, 61. 52. On the “mystischen Abgrund,” Wagner, “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth,” SD 9:337–38; PW 5:334. 53. On the smell of water vapors used onstage, see chapter 4. 54. CWT 1:578 (September 30, 1872), CWD 1:539. 55. On the successive integration of media at the opening of Das Rheingold, see chapter 2. 56. The Dresden production plans had already mentioned “fantastic flowers, crystals, and corals” as decorations of the cave; Steinbeck, Richard Wagners Tannhäuser-Szenarium, 84. Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the Venus grotto as an “artificial paradise” is explored in Mayer, Richard Wagner, 82–92. On the vegetation indicating artificiality and on the general theatricality of the Venusberg scenes, see also Amos, “Tanz/Traum,” 401, 407, 410. 57. On this erotic implication, see Daub, Tristan’s Shadow, 1–26; and chapter 2. 58. Bredekamp, Lure, 49; also “Erde,” esp. 22–26; “Grotte, 3” in Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 9 (1935), col. 596; and, for a longer perspective on artistic associations with grottos, Greisenegger-Georgila, “Grotten.” Caves and grottos are also the oldest places in human history where paintings—that is, conscious artistic expressions—were created and preserved. 59. See “Grotte, 1” in Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 9, col. 595. Accordingly, Marschner called the opening setting in Hans Heiling a cave. 60. In 1875–78 King Ludwig II of Bavaria literally highlighted this technological link: he had a life-size Venus grotto built at his Linderhof Palace, complete with waterfall, lake, and mirror to simulate its endless extension, a heating system, and optionally red or blue-tinted electric illumination. Outstaging the theater, this grotto truly transmuted Wagner’s vision into artificial nature. See Petzet and Petzet, Richard Wagner-Bühne, 140–46; and Schlim, Ludwig II., 97–112. 61. The photograph is published, among others, in CWD 1:[plate 3 after page 512]. 62. Undated letter of late June 1864 to his milliner Bertha Goldwag, in Kusche, Richard Wagner, 59; translation adapted from SL, 620. See also Spitzer and Liebling, Richard Wagner, 25; and Wagner to Judith Gautier of December 18, 1877, in Briefe Wagners an Judith Gautier, 170 (date and translation in SL, 879). For more context on Wagner’s liking for the rose color (and its inadequate translation as “pink”), see Dreyfus, Wagner, 135–50; and Millington, Sorcerer, 148–58. On luxurious cloths as creative stimulants, see e.g., Wagner’s letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of February 22, 1859, SB 10:331; on their erotic implications, CWT 1:596 (November 11, 1872), CWD 1:556. On the aesthetic resonances of pink in his works, see Kröplin, Richard Wagner: Musik 2:730–46. The official reason for Wagner’s donning expensive clothes was his facial erysipelas infection (Gesichtsrose), mentioned in countless letters

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of the 1830s to 1850s—another psychological link to everything rosy that was not lost on the composer; see his letter to Liszt of December 12, 1855 (SB 7:315); and Dreyfus, Wagner, 141, 148. 63. See Dreyfus, Wagner, 136–47; and Köhler, Richard Wagner, 453–56. 64. CWT 2:571–72 (July 17, 1880), CWD 2:513 (adapted). 65. On Wagner’s obsession with rose oils and scents, see particularly his letters to his supplier Julius Cyriax, published in Eichner and Houghton, “Rose Oil,” esp. 27–30, 40–49; and his letters to Judith Gautier; also Dreyfus, Wagner, 145–52. 66. Letter to Gautier of December 18, 1877, in Briefe Wagners an Judith Gautier, 171 (date and translation in SL, 879). 67. On the Penzing boudoir, see Köhler, Richard Wagner, 455; and Dreyfus, Wagner, 140–41 (tellingly, Dreyfus, 147, talks about Wagner’s private rooms as “personal grottos”). Heinrich Döll’s design for the Munich Venusberg is in Petzet and Petzet, Richard Wagner-Bühne, 113; on the “rose garlands” decorating Venus’s rosa dress as well as her couch, see the decoration plan and costume descriptions reproduced in Mack, Bayreuther Inszenierungsstil, 107–8. 68. Letter to Gautier of October 1877, Briefe Wagners an Judith Gautier, 148 (see also 159–60 and 168); translation Blumer in John, ed., Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser, 61. On Wagner’s ordering of rose garlands, see Kusche, Richard Wagner, 72, 74, 83. 69. Letter to Minna Wagner of July 28, 1853, SB 5:383; CWT 2:1099 (January 24, 1883), CWD 2:997. 70. “Morgenständchen eines neudeutschen Komponisten,” cited in Kreowski and Fuchs, Richard Wagner, 98–101. On the gendered coding of the allegedly “lower” senses of smell and touch in nineteenth-century thought, see Classen, “Introduction,” 3. 71. See Ball, Bright Earth, esp. 16, 139–40; for a survey of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury theories of color (from which pink is notably absent), see Crone, History of Color. 72. This musical eroticism was spelled out most boldly in Charles Baudelaire’s famous 1861 essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris,” in Painter, 111–46, esp. 126 and 137; and Hanslick, Opernleben, 195. Dreyfus, Wagner, esp. 77–92, has comprehensively discussed contemporary perceptions of Wagner’s music as erotic and feminine. 73. On early nineteenth-century European dandies and female dress codes, see Black and Garland, History of Fashion, 176–79, 184–89, 195; on the use of pink stockings in nineteenth-century French brothels, Ringdal, Love for Sale, 246–47. 74. Another apt caricature was Grötz’s “Frou-Frou Wagner,” Der Floh (June 24, 1887), published in Kusche, Richard Wagner, 15. 75. The productions discussed here, on the basis of their video renditions as listed in Works Cited, are by Wolfgang Wagner, Bayreuth, 1985; Werner Herzog, Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 1998; and Nikolaus Lehnhoff, Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, 2008. In Götz Friedrich’s notorious 1972 Bayreuth staging, the entire opera was set on a slanted theater floor. 76. Versuch, 88; Search, 82. 77. On this notion of technology as appendage, see this book’s introduction. 78. See Aufführung (PW 3:169–205); and, on the genesis of the Dresden sets, their circulation via manuscript production books, and their influence on later nineteenth-century productions, esp. ML, 231 and 321 (MLE, 219 and 308); Petzet and Petzet, Richard WagnerBühne, 110–32; and Steinbeck, Inszenierungsformen. The production materials are published

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in Steinbeck, Richard Wagners Tannhäuser-Szenarium. On early nineteenth-century German practices of notating stagings, see Langer, Regisseur, 155–77. 79. Cosima Wagner had mentioned the Dresden designs already in her projected plan for the 1889 festival (D-BHna, “Festspielpläne,” Hs 35/V-2), and commissioned her sets, based on the Dresden models, from the Brückner studio, which had also provided the sets for the 1876 Ring and subsequent Bayreuth productions; the studio would be inundated with requests from other theaters following each Bayreuth production; see Bauer, Richard Wagner. Die Bühnenwerke, 64; and Kern, “Soeben gesehen,” 174–80. 80. For examples of nineteenth-century set designs of the Venusberg, see Steinbeck, Richard Wagners Tannhäuser-Szenarium, 85 (Dresden, 1845); Petzet and Petzet, Richard Wagner-Bühne, 131 (Munich, 1867); Greisenegger-Georgila, Theater, 32–33 (Vienna, 1875 and 1890); and, for further discussion, Greisenegger-Georgila, “Grotten,” 327–30. Later examples are in D-KNth, e.g., Inv. 18667. The Paris designs were destroyed, though the model set of the 1873 Brussels production (F-Pbmo, Maq 253) was fashioned after them and notably resembles the Munich sketch. 81. Cosima Wagner’s idea of the ballet as a veritable “bacchanal,” and her invitation as choreographers of Virginia Zucchi in 1891 and the celebrated modernist dancer Isadora Duncan in 1904, were her most innovative (and, hence, controversial) decisions; see Spotts, Bayreuth, 107–9; and Bauer, Geschichte 1:242–43, 341–42. Detailed notes on the 1904 choreography are in D-KNth, M 928 (interleaved vocal score by Theo Raven). 82. ML, 321, MLE, 308; Aufführung, 149, PW 3:195. For more on these gauzes, see chapter 2. 83. Aufführung, 150–51; PW 3:197 (adjusted). 84. CWT 1:949 (November 20 and 16, 1875), 2:1107 (February 5, 1883); CWD 1:876, 2:1005. 85. Cosima Wagner to Charles Nuitter, the French translator and collaborator for the 1861 Paris production, on November 29, 1889; Wagner et al., Correspondance, 161. For her copious requests of scenic details, see also 151–65. 86. On Cosima and Siegfried Wagner’s dramaturgical interventions, partly discussed in chapters 2–4, see esp. D-KNth, M 928. The production became a popular success. 87. Wagner, Tannhäuser . . . Textbuch, 21. On his ambivalent attitudes towards technology, see my discussion in the introduction. 88. Wagner, “Zukunftsmusik,” SD 7:130; PW 3:338. On both the perceived dearth of melody noted in early Wagner reviews and Wagner’s concept of “endless melody,” see Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, esp. 242–57. 89. Johann Christian Lobe, “Briefe über Richard Wagner an einen jungen Komponisten,” Fliegende Blätter für Musik 1 (1855), 450; cited in Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose, 246. 90. SW 5/1:153; SW 6/1:476. 91. Nietzsche, “Der Fall Wagner,” in Richard Wagner, 100, 103; translation from Basic Writings, 623, 626. 92. Nietzsche, “Der Fall Wagner,” in Richard Wagner, 100, 103, 105; translation Basic Writings, 623, 626, 628 (amended). 93. Nietzsche, “Der Fall Wagner,” in Richard Wagner, 97; translation Basic Writings, 620–21 (modified).

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Notes to pages 50–55

94. Nietzsche, Human, part 2, no. 159:249. This reference, though, was not to Venus but to the grotto of the Homeric nymph Calypso. Nietzsche later explicitly commented on Tannhäuser’s discontent with Venus; “Aus dem Nachlass der 80er Jahre,” Werke 3:623. 95. Nietzsche, “Der Fall Wagner,” in Richard Wagner, 105, 92; translation Basic Writings, 628, 616. 96. On this common trend among early Wagnerians, see my Verdi, 144–46. 97. Wagner, “Beethoven,” SD 9:68–79, PW 5:67–79. See Magee, Philosophy, esp. 391. 98. In Wagner’s words, “The whole past now [in act 2] lies behind [Tannhäuser] like a distant and dull dream”; Aufführung, 153, PW 3:199 (modified). 99. Photographs of the 1882 sets for Klingsor’s magic garden and the 1891 Venusberg are in Mack, Bayreuther Inszenierungsstil, figures 45, 97–98; for designs of the magic garden, see Petzet and Petzet, Richard Wagner-Bühne, figures 672–77. The link was fostered in Cosima Wagner’s notes to the Brückner studio on the use of steam and bluish gauzes for the appearance of Kundry in act 2, which she related to “Venusberg Tannhäuser”; D-BHna, Hs 32/IIb, no. 4. On the connection between Klingsor’s castle and the Venusberg, see also Borchmeyer, Theater, 192; on Klingsor as theater director, Gess, “ ‘Geistersehen,’ ” 105–9; on the common design of grottos as magic gardens in late nineteenth-century theaters, GreiseneggerGeorgila, Theater, 31–33. 100. CWT 2:79 (April 5, 1878), CWD 2:58. 101. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 67. On the “castration complex” as being at the core of Parsifal, see Ward, “Parsifal.” C HA P T E R 2

1. Kalisch, Tannhäuser oder Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg. Komisches Intermezzo (1858), reproduced in Borchmeyer and Kohler, eds., Wagner Parodien, 9–19, here 11; on Kalisch, who founded Berlin’s famous satirical weekly Kladderadatsch, and whose parody was premiered in 1856, see 295; and Schneider, Die parodierten Musikdramen, 58–63. 2. Der schwere Wagner [Martin Böhm], Ring, 1 (“Mit durchaus neuen Decorationen, Maschinerien und Schlaglichtern, nebst einem Vorhang von Filet, der die 4 Tagewerke geschickt auseinanderhält”) and 16 (“Es fällt ein sogenannter Filet-Vorhang, gleichsam als Zwischen-Gardine; man sieht also, während hinten verwandelt wird, Alles durch”). Böhm had founded the Berlin Parodie-Theater in 1889. 3. Gisbert [Paul Pniower], Ring, 21 (“Vorhang fällt vor Entsetzen, sprachlos”); 43 (“Der Vorhang fällt mit Würde und Anstand, um den etwa anwesenden Wagner-Deutschinnen den Anblick eines schlafenden Frauenzimmers zu entziehen”); 67 (“Der Vorhang fällt in der That vorsichtigerweise nach und nach”); 93 (“Der Vorhang fällt durchaus sprachlos”). The pun in the title leaves open whether it was the entire cycle or the Nibelung’s ring “that never succeeded.” On this parody, see Schneider, Die parodierten Musikdramen, 221–30; and Stauss and Borchmeyer, “ ‘. . .Tat und Wort,’ ” 48–49. 4. Austen, Mansfield Park, chapter 18, 123. On the curtain standing in for theater, see e.g, Brandstetter, “Lever de Rideau,” 33; and B[arnes], “Curtain.” 5. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 124. 6. Few records survive documenting the actual fabrics, colors, and technologies employed at various theaters over time. However, illustrations of Italian theaters since the

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eighteenth century predominantly show red curtains, and in 1852, the Vienna Burgtheater ordered both a red curtain and a “figurative” one; A-Whh, Generalintendanz 48: Burgtheater 1852, no. 1903, fol. 1r. In England, the plush crimson curtain seems to have been popularized by the British actor and manager Henry Irving in the late nineteenth century. See B[arnes], “Curtain”; and, on previously dominating green curtains, Hartnoll, ed., Oxford Companion, 198. 7. The most comprehensive study of the genesis and purpose of the theatrical curtain is Radke-Stegh’s Theatervorhang, which ends, however, with the Baroque. For more recent conceptual reflections, see Brandstetter, “Lever de Rideau” and “Vorhang.” On the operatic curtain, see Morché’s brief “Kommentar.” 8. Taïeb, L’ouverture, 69–106; Greenwald, “Dramatic Exposition,” 1–16, and “Operatic Images,” 943–44; Anders, “Musical and Dramatic Structure,” esp. 84–91; Dombois, “Auge.” 9. On the earliest uses of curtains in antiquity, see Brockett et al., Making the Scene, esp. 20–22. 10. See Kiefer, “Curtains,” 151–86; and Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 201–29. 11. On the influence of opera, see Devrient, Geschichte 1:240–41; and Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 280–85. The following brief survey is based on Radke-Stegh as well as Bachler, Gemalte Theatervorhänge, 13–32. Following Deleuze in The Fold, the richly pleated theatrical curtain could be considered a cipher of the general Baroque penchant for veiling. 12. Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, Architectura Recreationis (Augsburg, 1640), translated in Hewitt, Renaissance Stage, 189. 13. The famous incident was reported by Pliny the Elder in book 35 of his Natural History, section 66:308–11. On this anecdote and its relation to the gaze and the veil, see Lacan, Seminar, 111–12. 14. On this development, see Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 274–85; and Bachler, Theatervorhänge. 15. See Furttenbach, Architectura, in Hewitt, Renaissance Stage, 190; also Nicola Sabbattini, Pratica di fabricar scene e machine ne’ teatri (Ravenna, 1637), in Hewitt, Renaissance Stage, 90–91; and Ossi, “Dalle macchine,” 23. 16. See Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 137. 17. See Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 303, 309–10, 322. Furttenbach, Architectura, in Hewitt, Renaissance Stage, 190, mentions that “the play is continued and the other acts revealed in their turn,” which suggests that the curtain was lowered at their ends (or between acts); yet this was not common practice in Germanic theaters until the eighteenth century. On the increasing emphasis on illusion, see also my discussion in this book’s introduction. Unless talking about the Wagner curtain, I use the terms opening and raising the curtain synonymously, irrespective of the often obscure actual curtain technology used in individual theaters. 18. L. S., “Aufziehen des Vorhanges (Technik),” in Blum et al., eds., Allgemeines TheaterLexikon 1:171. 19. [Ritorni], Consigli, 55. 20. On this derivation, see Grüner, Kunst, 36; also Düringer and Barthels, TheaterLexikon, col. 93, who mention that some French theaters, by contrast, would leave the curtain open at the end of the performance. See also Jordan, “Curtain,” 722; and Langer, “Nur eine ‘Gewohnheit’?,” 243. British theaters seem to have regularly lowered curtains between

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acts since at least the late eighteenth century; see e.g., Donohue, “Kemble’s Production,” 66–67. 21. There is no consensus on when exactly act-closing curtains were introduced in Paris. According to de Lasalle, Treizes salles, 102–3, the idea dated back to Gluck. Pougin’s Dictionnaire, 377, and other scholars based on it date the practice to the premiere of Auber’s Le philtre in 1831. Bapst’s Essai, 384–86, mentions an exceptional curtain in La muette before act 5 yet gives a date of 1829, which correlates with the premiere of Guillaume Tell. Both operas indeed featured interior curtains. See also Wilberg, “The mise en scène,” 186–87. 22. See Meyerbeer’s rehearsal notes of April 1849, Briefwechsel 4:481; Diaries 2:348. The performance materials in F-Pbmo (A. 566a, I:192; A. 566a, II:6; and A. 566c, I:86–87) prove that the curtain was lowered, contrary to the indication in Palianti’s Mise, reproduced in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 155. On the reduction of scenes, see JoinDiéterle, Les décors, 190–93, which is partly based on Bapst, Essai, 384–86. 23. Contant and de Filippi, Parallèle, 155; Pougin, Dictionnaire, 653. Although Taccani, Sulla forma, 57, mostly focused, as in the Baroque era, on the opening curtain behind which each scene was prepared, this circumstance in itself suggested that Italian practice was also to lower the curtain between acts. Countless reports in early nineteenth-century journals confirm this use for English stages as well. 24. Karl Philipp Moritz, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik (Tübingen, 1962), 210, cited and translated in Kemp, “Shelter,” 13. 25. On functions of the pictorial frame, see Marin, “Frame”; and Marin, On Representation, 352–72. 26. Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, col. 1137. 27. On the tradition of musical entr’actes in spoken plays in France, see Stevens, “Transpositions”; on Germanic theaters, Langer, “Nur eine ‘Gewohnheit’?”; Münzmay, “ ‘Glöckner von Notre-Dame’ ”; and Kramer, Theater. 28. Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, cols. 1138–39. On backstage curtain signals, see also Moynet, French Theatrical Production, 142; and Rousseau, Code, 70. Curtain instructions were therefore often indicated with bell signs in scores used by prompters and stage directors. 29. See once more Meyerbeer’s rehearsal notes of April 1849, Briefwechsel 4:481; Diaries 2:348. 30. Thus according to the memoires of Édouard-Marie-Ernest Deldevez, chief conductor of the Opéra from 1873 to 1877; cited in Dubruque, “Du chef de scène,” 74. Meiser, Das königlich neue Hof- und Nationaltheater-Gebäude, 18, mentions the by-then (1840) common procedure whereby the proscenium curtain was “simply moved by hand” through a curved rim. For a similar procedure, see Glixon and Glixon, Inventing, 250. 31. In addition to Meiser, Das königlich neue Hof- und Nationaltheater-Gebäude, a rare exception is the comment by Viennese dramatist and editor Adolf Bäuerle that until around 1800 curtains were often raised by “two or three fellows” jumping with the curtain’s rope from the flies (cited in Krzeszowiak, “Theatertechnik,” 100). This procedure would explain why proscenium curtains would be raised only for the beginnings of shows and with a standard speed. 32. For this and the following discussion, see Taïeb, L’ouverture, esp. 69–71. 33. Grétry, Le magnifique, CCG 31:19–20.

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34. Sedaine’s instruction according to Grétry’s Mémoires, cited in Alfred Wotquenne, “Commentaire critique,” in Grétry, Le magnifique, CCG 31:xx, translation from Deane, “French Operatic Overture,” 72; also CCG 31:vii and 1. On this overture, see also Pendle, “L’opéra-comique,” 99. 35. Taïeb, L’ouverture, 78n14 (on Amphitryon) and 79–80. On operatic sunrises as allegories of the king, see also Kappeler, “Attraction,” 66–68; on the following, Grétry, Amphitryon, CCG 33:13–15; and Anacréon chez Polycrate, CCG 7:23. 36. Taïeb calls such interpolated transitions “conduits” and lists further examples, primarily from tragic operas; L’ouverture, 101. 37. Gluck, Alceste = Alkestis, 13. On this opera’s unusual opening and its influence, see Taïeb, L’ouverture, 76–77. On the importance of raising the curtain before the entrance of actors in seventeenth-century French theater, see Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 302 and 308 (she talks of several minutes or “some time”). 38. Grétry, Richard Cœur-de-lion, CCG 1:3 and 9. 39. Examples are Grétry’s comedy L’amant jaloux, ou Les fausses apparences (Versailles, 1778), where the curtain is raised during the overture’s closing measures before a typical domestic scene with spoken dialogue: CCG 21:18; and Le Sueur’s La caverne (Paris, OpéraComique, 1893), 18. 40. Grétry, Le jugement de Midas, CCG 17:1; and Guillaume Tell, CCG 24:1–18. On the former unusual overture, see in more detail Charlton, Grétry, 158–59; on the latter, Taïeb, L’ouverture, 102–4. Possibly in reference to the former work, Dalayrac’s comic opera Azémia, ou Les sauvages (Paris, Comédie-Italien, 1787) featured a pantomime of “savages” in its lengthy overture, including militaristic music for a sunrise and a series of exotic dances; Dalayrac, Azémia, 1–12; and Taïeb, “L’ouverture.” 41. Meyerbeer, Il crociato in Egitto, ERO 18:10. 42. Genette, Paratexts, 2. 43. Galloway, Interface Effect, vii. 44. Schilling’s Encyclopädie 5:327–28, for instance, mentioned the operatic overtures by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the same laudatory breath as their symphonies and string quartets, but resisted the noisy overtures by Rossini and other more recent composers. Such an attitude was not exclusive to the German realm, as evinced in the above-quoted Italian theater manual of 1825 or in Berlioz, Memoirs, 186. On the status of overtures in Italy, Greenwald, “Dramatic Exposition,” 3–6; on France, Taïeb, L’ouverture, 19–66. 45. See Temperley, “Overture.” On the importance of opera overtures for orchestral concerts of the early nineteenth century, see Weber, Great Transformation, 7, 144–45, 173–74, 206, 245; and Taïeb, L’ouverture, 301–75 and 423–32. 46. Weber notated this curtain in his autograph score; see Weber, Der Freischütz. Nachbildung, 25. On the genesis of the autograph as well as various original libretti (none of which include the curtain direction), see Weber, Der Freischütz . . . Kritische Textbuch-Edition, esp. 192–93. An early example of a delayed curtain is in Stephen Storace’s pasticcio score for his comic opera The Siege of Belgrade (London, Drury Lane, 1791), here 8, where the curtain rises amid Mozart’s orchestrated Turkish March introducing the opening chorus. 47. Thus according to Hans Heiling [vs], 3. The fs, 69, specifies an opening curtain also after the overture, halfway through a chromatically rising eight-measure lead into the first act’s choral introduction.

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Notes to pages 67–73

48. Grétry, Denys le tyran, CCG 28:3. 49. Le Sueur, Ossian, ERO 37:7. 50. Thus according to Halévy, La juive, ERO 36/1:8. The original version with overture, as preserved in the autograph as well as contemporary vocal scores, does not indicate a curtain; see La juive . . ., edited by Leich-Galland; and Halévy, La juive, vs by Müller; on the different editions, see Karl Leich-Galland’s “Preface” in the latter vs, xxii–xxiii. On the thenrecent introduction of the organ, see Schuster, Kirchliche Szene, 838–46. 51. See Meyerbeer, Les huguenots: The Manuscript Facsimile, 18; and Le prophète, GMW I/14/1:90. On Meyerbeer’s replacement of the completed overture for Le prophète, see the commentary in his Briefwechsel 4:626–27. 52. In Mosè, the curtain raises after three brief orchestral flourishes that give way to a subtler musical introduction; in Zelmira, it opens after a buildup to a tonic cadence in m. 32, followed by twenty-four measures of new material before the entrance of the chorus: Mosè in Egitto, GREC 24/1:1; Zelmira, GREC 33/1:9. Rossini’s one-act farsa Adina of 1826, however, does not indicate an opening curtain despite lacking an overture. On the French influence on Neapolitan operatic life at the time, see chapter 3 in this book. 53. Thus—among Donizetti’s operas currently available in critical editions—in Maria Stuarda (1834) and Il campanello (1836), composed (like Rossini’s above-mentioned curtainspecifying operas) for Naples. The indication in Maria Stuarda was perhaps added because the first act continues with an unusually long instrumental introduction. 54. Even more closely related to the Rossini examples is the lamenting choir behind the curtain in the introduction of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (Weimar, 1877). Verdi, too, adopted the device for act 3 of the revised Simon Boccanegra (Milan, 1881). 55. See his note of January 10, 1859, on a meeting with the painter Jules Chéret, who deemed such a “diorama-décor” unfeasible; Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel 7:392; Diaries 4:113. 56. Berlioz, Lélio, NBE 7, esp. 2, 62–63, 149. 57. On the term, coined by film historian Christian Metz, see Jütte, History, 186–87. 58. See Classen, “Art,” esp. 191–93. 59. Kane, Sound, 105. 60. On the gaze, see Lacan, Seminar, 67–119. 61. Derrida, Truth, 61. 62. For an argument on the importance of a “pleasant” decoration of the curtain, see Blum et al., eds., Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon, 346; that this could be distracting was insinuated by Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, 1121. 63. On the rise of entr’actes and their relation to practicable scenery, see Nuitter, Nouvel Opéra, 68. For both—unusual—entr’actes in Le magnifique, by contrast, Grétry had clarified that they were to be played “without the curtain being lowered”; CCG 31:92 and 171. 64. Thus according to GMW I/10 (Robert) and I/14 (Le prophète), as well as Les huguenots, ERO 20. This opera’s Manuscript Facsimile is inconclusive regarding the opening curtains for acts 2–4, due to revisions and cuts. In Le prophète, apart from act 2 (linked to the first act by an open transformation), act 3 is the only one without a curtain indication— something the published orchestral score duly rectified; ERO 21:213. Meyerbeer’s last grand opéra, L’Africaine (1865; ERO 24), has less detailed curtain cues, likely because the score was left incomplete and premiered posthumously.

Notes to pages 74–76

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65. See Meyerbeer’s rehearsal notes for Le prophète of April 1849 regarding the opening curtain of act 4 as well as open transformations, in Briefwechsel 4:481, Diaries 2:348. 66. Donizetti, Dom Sébastien 2:759. 67. Verdi, Don Carlos 2:435 and 595. Verdi specified opening curtains also for act 3 of the 1884 Italian Don Carlo, the Prologue and acts 1 and 3 of Simon Boccanegra in its 1881 revision, and the first three acts of Otello (1887). The indication “Scena 1” in m. 21 of the extremely short instrumental introduction of Il trovatore also functions like a curtain indication. 68. For a description of this practice, see [Ritorni], Consigli, 62; Devrient, Geschichte 1:239–40; and Gossett, Divas, 471–72, who cites act 2 of Norma as an example. On precursors of this practice in German spoken drama, see Jordan, “Curtain,” 716. By 1929, Kranich listed the procedure as “now old school”; Bühnentechnik 1:258. 69. See Pougin, Dictionnaire, 728; Robert, Le grand Robert, 1347; and Cortelazzo and Zolli, eds., Nuovo etimologico, 1672. Early nineteenth-century German usage, vice versa, applied the functional terms Vorhang and Gardine interchangeably also to painted drops. 70. Recent literature has tended to attribute the introduction of “Zwischenvorhänge” in German theaters to Eduard Devrient around 1859; thus Kabel, “Vorhang”; and Kosch, ed., Deutsches Theater-Lexikon 5:2831. Yet contemporary theater manuals mention it already for the 1830s, and it was known in German spoken theater well before then; see Kindermann, Theatergeschichte 5:262, 520; and Jordan, “Curtain,” 716, 720–22. For early uses of “actdrops” on London stages, see e.g., Donohue, “Kemble’s Production,” 66–67. 71. See Pougin, Dictionnaire, 654, also 337; and Allevy, Mise en scène, 182; on the possible confusion of audiences also Langer, Regisseur, 103. 72. Contemporary reviews frequently detail variously painted drop scenes; see, for instance, a report on the 1818 refurbishment of London’s main opera house, [Anon.], “Covent Garden,” 253, which also testifies to the then-interchangeable terminology of “act drop,” “curtain,” and “drop scene.” 73. Lewald, “ ‘In die Scene setzen,’ ” 294–95. 74. Louis Catel, “Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Schauspielhäuser,” cited in Kindermann, Theatergeschichte 5:262; [Anon.], “Théâtre de la porte Saint-Martin,” 3 (thanks to Annelies Andries for this reference); Prölß, Katechismus, 315. For similar critique, see Bapst, Essai, 550; and Becq de Fouquières, L’art, 176–79. A more nuanced discussion of various options for transformations (including darkness) is in Prölß, Das Herzoglich Meiningen’sche Hoftheater, 25–26. 75. See Radke-Stegh, Theatervorhang, 137. 76. Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, col. 1121; also Blum et al., eds., Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon 3:82. Verdi, Rigoletto, WGV 17:65; also Gossett, Divas, 599n91. 77. See Rossini, Guillaume Tell, GREC 39/1:530 (and the critical report, 141). 78. Meyerbeer, Robert le diable, ERO 19/2:525; accordingly, GMW assigns this longer conclusion of the duet to the appendix. See also the description by the Opéra’s director, Véron, in Véron, L’opéra, 107–8; and Wilberg, “Mise en scène,” 296. The production notes, however, simply mention an act curtain for the transformation; Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 198. 79. See F-Pan AJ 13/223: “Machines et décors”; and Pougin, Dictionnaire, 655 (also 155– 56); and Kufferath, “Richard Wagner,” esp. 150–51. For a backstage description of such a scene change by means of clouds, see Moynet, French Theatrical Production, 153. On

256

Notes to pages 76–79

individual, movable clouds on Renaissance stages to veil parts of scene changes, see RadkeStegh, Theatervorhang, 137. 80. Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel 2:150 (entry of October 28, 1831), Diaries 1:420. Gauzes had been used on French stages since the early eighteenth century; see Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, 42. Painted transparencies in popular shows around 1800 are noted, for instance, in Robertson, Mémoires, 325; and McCalman, “Magic,” 183, 190; for a more comprehensive history, see Verwiebe, Lichtspiele. 81. Rossini, Armida, GREC 22/2:1225; Marschner, Der Vampyr 2:528; Meyerbeer, Robert le diable, GMW I/10/3:1245. (Kogel’s full score has a similar closing curtain also for Hans Heiling, 288.) 82. Thus according to the critical editions of these works as well as Les huguenots, ERO 20/2:890 (The Manuscript Facsimile, 981, indicates the final curtain one measure later). These two closing options often blurred; act 1 of Paër’s Agnese (1809), for instance, indicates the curtain in the seventh full measure after the final choral chord, which is five measures before the end, at the return to the tonic; Agnese, 169. 83. Rossini, Ermione, GREC 27/2:836–87. Similarly, the final curtain of Il turco in Italia (1814) comes down while Selim, Zaida, and the others “turn towards the marina to embark”; GREC 13/2:917. 84. Production book for Le siège de Corinthe, in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 205 (on this ending, see also Gerhard, Urbanization, 79). For La muette, the stage designer Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri specified that stones were to be thrown from the flies “until the moment when the curtain is lowered”; Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 59. For more on these cataclysms, see chapter 4 in this volume. A similar case can be made for the curtain cutting off the erupting battle at the end of Le siège’s act 2. 85. Rossini, Mosè in Egitto, GREC 24/1:379; production book in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 176. All this was to be accomplished during the final nine instrumental measures. 86. Rossini, La gazza ladra, GREC 21/1:598. Similar is the first-act curtain in La donna del lago (1819), GREC 29/1:544. Almost identical instructions can be found in many production books, for instance for act 3 of Donizetti’s Les martyrs (Paris, 1840), in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 88. 87. Quote from the mise for Donizetti’s La favorite (1840), in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 79. For similar formulations, see, in the same volume, the mises for Le prophète, act 2 (159), and the end of Verdi’s 1857 Le trouvère (260). 88. Beethoven, Musik zu Egmont, 52, 64, 84, 101. On this and other entr’actes, see also Langer, “Nur eine ‘Gewohnheit’?,” 249–50. 89. Among the mises-en-scène reprinted by Cohen, such fast (“vivement”) curtains are indicated for Fra Diavolo (act 2); Dom Sébastien, acts 3 and 5; La juive, acts 1, 4, and 5; Le prophète, acts 3 through 5; Le trouvère, acts 1 and 3; and Les vêpres siciliennes, acts 4 and 5. 90. Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, col. 1137. 91. See the performance score for Le prophète in F-Pbmo, A. 566c, I:492–93, where the closing curtain for act 3 was indicated over time at 14 1/2, 11, and 8 measures from the end (Meyerbeer’s direction was seven). 92. Derrida, Truth, 9. On conceptions of the theatrical frame, see also Aronson, “AvantGarde Scenography,” 21–38.

Notes to pages 80–86

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93. On contemporary practices of curtain calls and their technical conditions, see Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, cols. 575–76. 94. Kittler, Optical Media, 172. For more on his views of media technology, see Kittler, Optical Media, 29–46, and my introduction to this volume; on the relation (and necessary severing) between sight and sound in film, also Chion, Audio-Vision, esp. 3–24. 95. Meyerbeer had thus specified curtains for the beginning of act 4 and the end of act 5 in Le prophète, GMW I/14/3:853 and 1333. 96. Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer, SW 4/4:10, mm. 27–28 (version 1842–1880); although this musical passage had already succeeded the first thematic statement (mm. 9–10), it was there played less emphatically in the strings, and to decrescendo dynamics. This was only the second opening curtain Wagner specified, following that for act 4 of Rienzi. 97. Wagner, Lohengrin, SW 7/3:18. 98. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Musik zu Ein Sommernachtstraum, 199. Wagner had experienced a performance of Shakespeare’s play with Mendelssohn’s music in Berlin in 1843; ML, 277, MLE, 264. A similar—albeit diegetic—sound effect, as noted, would precede act 3 of Le prophète. 99. On related acousmatic effects in cinema, their intention to maintain suspense, and their reliance on a stable visual frame, see Chion, Audio-Vision, 66–73. 100. Versuch, 94–95; Search, 89. 101. Wagner expressed this later view most concisely in his “Beethoven” essay (1870), SD 9:61–116, esp. 66–81; PW 5:57–127, esp. 65–81; see also chapter 1 in this volume. In Tristan’s acts 1 and 3, the curtain also opens (albeit with a bit more time) before diegetic music. 102. On this opening curtain, see also Dombois, “Auge,” 104–5, who argues that the scales would have coincided with the curtain’s actual rising, given the necessary time to set it in motion. But Bayreuth’s curtain was unusually fast moving, and it seems unlikely that Wagner would have allowed for such leeway, rather than expect the curtain to rise as indicated (and be prepared prior to this moment). The production notes by Wagner’s assistant Anton Seidl (who directed a swimming wagon in 1876 and, thus, was backstage at the curtain’s opening) link the curtain to the oboes bringing the two-measure Rhine motif ascending over a tenth—something they do (twice) in mm. 97–100, (thrice) in mm. 111–16, and again in mm. 127–28 (starting one measure after the curtain cue). Even in the last case, though, the curtain would have begun to move before the entry of the scales. US-NNC, box 3, folder 10, fol. 3r. 103. Letter to Liszt of February 11, 1853, SB 5:189; translation SL, 281. Among the copious literature on this opening, see most recently Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies, 4–7. 104. Tappert, “Bühnen-Festspiel,” 271. 105. Porges, Wagner, 7–8. 106. Similar, though less marked, is the opening of Lohengrin, act 2. The gloomy motif and tremolos for the opening curtain of Siegfried’s act 2, by contrast, are part of the nocturnal scenic illustration proper, as is the case with act 2 of Götterdämmerung. 107. Wagner, Götterdämmerung, SW13/1:5; translation Spencer, 280. The libretto indicated only “düsteres Schweigen”; SD 6:177. 108. Examples of the former pattern are Tannhäuser, acts 2 and 3, Lohengrin, act 1, and Die Meistersinger, act 3; of the latter, Tannhäuser, act 1, Lohengrin, act 2, and Götterdämmerung, act 2.

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Notes to pages 88–92

109. Wagner, Rienzi, SW 3/4:81–82. Tellingly, the speed indication was lacking in Wagner’s first prose draft and composition sketch, which he completed prior to his arrival in Paris; see Strohm, Dokumente, 199. 110. Wagner, Lohengrin, SW 7/3:200. On Wagner’s pains to represent the (dis)appearance of Lohengrin realistically, see Carnegy, Wagner, 42. 111. Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer, SW 4/4:164. By contrast, the fast curtain at the end of the Götterdämmerung Prologue seems to be the product of practical considerations. 112. On the erotics of these final moments of Walküre, act 1, see esp. Dreyfus, Wagner, 95–99 and 228–31. For a summary of the discourse about the motif first heard at Freia’s appearance in Das Rheingold (where it has been associated with either love or flight) and its modified reappearance here, see Watkins, Metaphors, 38–39. 113. Wagner, Tannhäuser . . . Textbuch, 7–9, 67–68, and 17; SW 5/1:151. In the 1875 version, Wagner normalized the direction to “Die Szene verwandelt sich schnell”; SW 6/1:473. 114. Aufführung, 149; translation adapted from PW 3:195. The Venusberg’s reappearance in act 3, scene 3, where Wagner called for mists and a pink, glowing shimmer, was originally carried out similarly to the act 1 visions. For more (though not always congruent) details of the Dresden procedures, see Steinbeck, Richard Wagners Tannhäuser-Szenarium, 34–37; on the Dresden production of Gluck’s Armide as inspiration for these partially veiled transformations, Syer, Wagner’s Visions, 127. 115. Wagner, Götterdämmerung, SW 13/1:305; translation Spencer, 300. Neither Siegfried’s Tod nor the Götterdämmerung libretto specify this location of the carpet. On the use of such carpets, or arras, in Renaissance theaters, see Kiefer, “Curtains,” 169–77. In his 1865 designs for Wagner’s Festspielhaus (then still envisioned for Munich), Gottfried Semper suggested a “Nebeltuch” be hung behind the first proscenium to let the entire stage appear in various “colorful or gray disguises”; Wagner and Ludwig II, Briefwechsel 1:83. 116. Translation adapted from Spencer, 344. This transformation was already conceived in Wagner’s 1848 draft, Siegfried’s Tod, SD 2:222. Again, the wording in the score slightly differs; SW 13/3:170–72. Wagner similarly invoked clouds (albeit of smoke) to shroud the transition to the Valkyrie Rock in Siegfried, act 3. On these transformations, see chapter 4 in this volume. 117. On these moving canvases and their nineteenth-century predecessors, Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 154–65; and Huhtamo, Illusions. A reproduction of the moving canvas for Parsifal is in Petzet and Petzet, Richard Wagner-Bühne, figure 685; for its technical design, Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 158–59. 118. CWT 2:186 (September 29, 1878), CWD 2:159. For more on these transformations, see chapter 4 of this book. 119. On Wagner’s dismay, see “Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth 1882,” SD 10:305, PW 6:310; also “Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876,” SD 10:110–12, PW 6:102–9; and CWT 2:704 (March 3, 1881), CWD 2:634; and the introduction to this volume. On the technical vicissitudes of the moving canvas, Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 155–57; and Carnegy, Wagner, 111–13. 120. Mehlin, Fachsprache, 36, also cited in Dombois, “Auge,” 94. For illustrations of the seven standardized curtains under DIN norms, see the anonymous DIN 56 920–23, “Theatertechnik,” 4. On Bayreuth’s curtain, see esp. Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 150–52; on the various traditions feeding into its design, Dombois, “Auge,” 95; for a short description,

Notes to pages 92–95

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Baker, “Richard Wagner,” 267. Pougin, Dictionnaire, 654, claimed that Wagner had adopted this curtain from puppet theater, but contemporary illustrations show either a vertical curtain or—less frequently—one pulled to the sides with festoons atop; see Rehm, Buch der Marionetten, 209, 211, 235; and Günzel, Alte deutsche Puppenspiele, 379, 411, 413, 424, and figures 6, 11–13, 17–18. 121. Lavignac, Music Dramas, 496–97. For a less positive account, see Hoxar, “Der neue Vorhang,” 204–5; Hoxar agreed, though, that the “old” vertical curtain was no longer adequate, not least because it could not be timed with sufficient precision. 122. On its framing like a manteau d’harlequin, see the architect of the Festspielhaus, Brückwald, “Beschreibung,” 21; for praise of its soft frame and atmospheric multivalence, Polgar, “Zeichen,” 43–44. See also Dombois, “Auge,” 95. 123. On the various conflicting reports, see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 152; and Dombois, “Auge,” 98–99; as well as Stoeckel, “Wagner Festival,” 266. Illustrations showing horizontal stripes for 1876 and vertical ones for 1882 are in Habel, Festspielhaus, 470–71. Given Neumann’s use of the original curtain for his 1882–83 tour of the Ring, discussed below, it is unlikely that the same curtain was in operation for the premiere of Parsifal in 1882, when a painted drop was used in addition to a Wagner curtain; see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 152. 124. See, for instance, Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 279; Kalbeck, Bühnenfestspiel, 22; Pohl, Richard Wagner, 268; and Jullien, Richard Wagner, 276; also Bauer, Geschichte 1:96. Ironically, Bayreuth could separate stage and auditorium hermetically since it featured a fireproof iron curtain of a sort that became compulsory for European theaters only after the Vienna Ringtheater fire of 1882; Wyss, “Ragnarök of Illusion,” 71. 125. Thus Isidor Kastan, “Das Facit der Bayreuther Festspiele,” Berliner Tageblatt (1876), reproduced in Großmann-Vendrey, Bayreuth 1:216; also Saint-Saëns in Barth et al., Wagner, 235. 126. Adolphe Appia, “Der Saal des Prinzregenten-Theaters. Eine technische Betrachtung,” Die Gesellschaft 3 (1902): 201, cited in Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 151–52. On the golden border, see Stoeckel, “Wagner Festival,” 266. 127. This was observed by La Mara, Bühnenfestspiel, 45; similarly Pohl, Richard Wagner, 269; and Prüfer, Werk von Bayreuth, 75. 128. Stoeckel, “Wagner Festival,” 266. 129. Porges, Wagner, 8n. On the association with an iris lens, see also Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 151; and Dombois, “Auge,” 96–97. 130. Dombois, “Auge,” 96–97. 131. Galloway, Interface Effect, 25. 132. Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 228; translation in Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, 138. 133. Kalbeck, Bühnenfestspiel, 22. 134. Kunstwerk, 152; PW 1:185; see also OD, SD 4:2, PW 2:119–20; and chapter 1 of this volume. 135. On the notion of the Bayreuth curtain as an eyelid or eye itself, see Dombois, “Auge,” 96–98. On the objectification of whoever is being gazed at, Lacan, Seminar, e.g., 106. 136. See CWT 2:907 (March 9, 1882), CWD 2:822; according to Cosima Wagner, the request embarrassed the composer. The entire décor was shipped to Leipzig four days later; see the invoice in D-BHna, ASF 12/II, no. 345. It is unclear whether the curtain was ever returned; the sets and costumes went with Neumann to his new position in Prague.

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Notes to pages 95–98

137. Wagner to Neumann (October 16, 1881), in Neumann, Erinnerungen, 198; translation SL, 917. See also CWT 2:879 (January 25, 1882), CWD 2:796. On the efficacy of this measure, see Josef Grünstein in Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (no. 575, December 8, 1882), quoted in Juhász, Ring, 75. For more on authenticity as a marketing factor of Neumann’s “original” Bayreuth production, see—with further references—my “Authentizität.” 138. The Berlin director Max Grube noted the limited use of the Wagner curtain outside Bayreuth in “Vorhang,” 1880–81. The Munich Court Theater used one by the 1880s, as indicated repeatedly in the stage manager’s score for Götterdämmerung in D-Mbs, St.th. 957–7. According to the anonymous 1906 report “Das neue Stadttheater,” 137, a “Richard Wagner curtain” was donated to the new Barmen theater that year; and D-KNth hosts sketches for one in Zurich (see Dombois, “Auge,” 105n76). In Bayreuth itself, the 1882 curtain was used through the postwar era; Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 152. By contrast, Bayreuth’s steam effects circulated more quickly and widely across Europe, as I will discuss in chapter 4. 139. Lynn Russell, commentary in Ebert-Schifferer, ed., Deceptions, 129. See also Eberlein, “Curtain,” 65. 140. On this tradition, see Eberlein, “Curtain,” 65–70. 141. CWT 2:506 (March 18, 1880), CWD 2:453. 142. Ebert-Schifferer, “Window,” 33; also Ebert-Schifferer, Deceptions, 123–37. 143. On bed curtains, see the entry “Vorhang, 1” in Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 26 (1951), col. 1163; OED, “curtain, 1.a,” too, lists the bed curtain as the earliest use of the term in English. 144. On the link between “the erotic and the total work of art,” see Daub, Tristan’s Shadow, 1–26, here 2. 145. Kemp, “Shelter,” esp. 16. 146. See Grube, “Vorhang,” 1880. Fast curtains are prescribed, for instance, in the second acts of Verdi’s Il trovatore, Don Carlos (in the 1884 version), and Otello (1887), as well as for the ends of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890), Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892), and the first act of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893). 147. The curtain in Esclarmonde is specified in the autograph score in F-Pn, A-750, 1: fol. 43. 148. Carré and Carbonne, Madame Butterfly, 35. 149. Humperdinck, Hänsel und Gretel, 28 (similar exclamation points were used by Zemlinsky at the end of Eine florentinische Tragödie and by Schreker in several instances); Strauss, Guntram, 18. Similarly, Massenet indicated for the act 2 meditation of Thaïs that “les rideaux se ferment”; Thaïs, 271. 150. See Starcke, Inscenirung. His collection included scenarios (under the relevant German titles) for Lucrezia Borgia, La juive, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Robert le diable, Norma, Rigoletto, and Ernst II. von Coburg-Gotha’s Sancta Chiara. On Starcke, see Langer, Regisseur, 250–52. 151. Lavignac, Music Dramas, 162, 176. In both instances, Wagner had not specified a speed. Similarly, production books would enhance Wagner’s curtain directions. The Munich Götterdämmerung of 1878, for example, closed with a slow curtain, as did the 1908 Bayreuth production; intercalated vocal score in D-Mbs, St.th. 957–6, 2:357; and Theo Raven’s Bayreuth production book in D-KNth, M 893:340.

Notes to pages 98–102

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152. These instructions were for a fast opening and slow closure for act 1, very fast curtains for act 2, and slow curtains for the last act. See the stage plan in Mack, Bayreuther Inszenierungsstil, plates 107–8. 153. Verdi, La Traviata. . . . Vollständiges Opernbuch, 31, 70. Many such directions circulate to this day, as evinced in Hafki, Operntexte. On the Reclam series, see Langer, Regisseur, 231–32; on the general inclusion of more visual details in libretti (which until the late nineteenth century contained only the vocal texts and no stage directions), also Ibscher, Theaterateliers, esp. 17. 154. See Thorau, Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit, esp. 175–82. 155. See, for instance, Puccini’s letter to Giulio Ricordi of March 30, 1896, regarding the curtain at the end of act 2 of La bohème, in Puccini, Carteggi pucciniani, 144; and the remarks by Luigi Ricci, who listed the curtain among Puccini’s operatic “decalogue,” in Puccini, 13–14; translation in Dunstan, “Performance Practices,” 5–6. Puccini’s curtains have been discussed most thoroughly in Greenwald, “Dramatic Exposition,” 1–16 (focusing on opening curtains), and Anders, “Musical and Dramatic Structure,” esp. 84–91 (discussing closing curtains). 156. Ricci, Puccini, 14, translation in Dunstan, “Performance Practices,” 6; Puccini, La bohème, 317–18. A slow curtain also graces the happier departure of the couple at the end of La fanciulla del West (1910). 157. Anders, “Musical and Dramatic Structure,” 84–91. On the timing of Puccini’s closing curtains, also Atlas, “Mimì’s Death,” 60–64. 158. See Greenwald, “Dramatic Exposition,” 8–9. 159. On this curtain, see also Campana and Morris, “Puccini’s Things,” 134–35. 160. Greenwald, “Dramatic Exposition,” 8–9. 161. This holds even though the chromatic scale is not exclusively associated with the curtain: it later rounds off the opening chorus and links to the offstage horn signaling the arrival of Manon’s coach; Puccini, Manon Lescaut, 7 and 60. 162. Examples in Wagner are in Siegfried, act 3 (just before the awakening of Brünnhilde) and Tannhäuser, act 1 (for the awakening of Tannhäuser; see example 1.1). 163. This quote (“Il sipario inteso come musica”), reported by Ricci, Puccini, 13, is cited in Greenwald, “Dramatic Exposition,” xiv. 164. André Hallays, review of the premiere in Revue de Paris (May 15, 1902), translated in Morris, Reading, 88. Similar to Wagner for Parsifal, Debussy was forced to extend many of the interludes to allow for the scene changes behind the curtain; see Grayson, “Interludes.” 165. Adorno, Mahler, 4. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss curtain effects in instrumental music; on Hugo Riemann’s concept of a musical curtain as introductory material (often chords) preceding a composition’s first eight-measure period, see Gleim, “Individualisierungsprozesse,” 19–37. 166. Production book by Theo Raven, Bayreuth, 1904; D-KNth, M 928, intercalated folio opposite p. 22 (“wie bei Tannhäuser das volle Bewußtsein seiner Errettung aus den Sphynxarmen der Göttin, die Aufnahmefähigkeit der neuen Situation erst nach einer gewissen Zeit sich einstellt, so verwandelt sich auch die Scene ganz entsprechend langsamer!”). 167. Alban Berg, “The Preparation and Staging of Wozzeck” (1930), translated in Perle, Operas of Alban Berg, 205.

262

Notes to pages 102–110

168. For a cinematic reading of Wozzeck, see Morris, Reading, 115–16. Berg’s interest in film further manifested in the silent movie during Lulu’s act 2 interlude. 169. Act 1, scene 4 shows the initially hasty doctor slowing down to a “matter-offactness” as he finally attends to Wozzeck’s complaints; see Perle, Operas of Alban Berg, 90–91, who also comments on the mathematical proportions of curtain durations. Berg notated curtains with similar astuteness for his unfinished Lulu. 170. Berg, “Preparation,” in Perle, Operas of Alban Berg, 205–6. 171. On new rigging systems for drops, scenery, and curtains, see Baker, From the Score, 255. 172. Further allusions to the curtain occur in Turandot’s unveiling as well as that of the Buddha statue in the last scene; Busoni, Turandot, 27, 144, 147. 173. Cocteau in an unpublished letter to Valentine Gross (September 5, 1916), cited in Reynolds, “Parade,” 141. The “Prélude” was likely inspired by Picasso; Reynolds, “Parade,” 142 and 154–58. 174. Brecht, “Anmerkungen zur Oper ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,’ ” in his Werke 24:83; translation adapted from Willet, Brecht, 41. 175. Brecht, “Aufbau der ‘Dreigroschenopern’-Bühne,” Werke 24:70; on the height, see Weill, Aufstieg, 3. 176. Brecht, Schriften zum Theater, 260. 177. Paul, When Movies, 228. 178. Thus in Robert Wiene’s 1920 classic Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (which is also subdivided into acts) and many a James Bond movie. On the relationship between filmic cuts and curtains, Peters, “ ‘It’s Time,’ ” 87. 179. See Diekmann, “Hinter dem Vorhang,” 69–74; also Paul, When Movies, 224–29, 237–38, and, on the cinematic curtain’s disappearance around 1960, 286–87, 290. 180. On the frequent lack of proscenium curtains in Regietheater productions, see Brandstetter and Peters, “Ouvertüre,” 11; and Morché, “Kommentar.” On the Brechtian influence on Regietheater, see Aronson, “Avant-Garde Scenography,” 33; and Calico, Brecht, 140–63. 181. On this expansion of theatrical spaces, see Kostelanetz, Theatre, 24. 182. See, most notoriously, Fried, “Art.” On “transgressive” frames in postwar art, Beyer, Rahmenbestimmungen, 28–29. 183. On this development, see Brandstetter, “Lever de Rideau,” 27–29. 184. See Atkinson, “Music Hall’s Opening”; and [Anon.], “Radio Music Hall.” 185. Turnage, Anna Nicole, director Richard Jones (Opus Arte DVD, 2011); video director Francesca Kemp reveled in zooming in on both curtain and bemused spectators. Like Bayreuth’s first curtain, moreover, its pink descendent was also part of the production’s transfer to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013. C HA P T E R 3

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Letter to Minna Wagner (May 4, 1855), SB 7:139. ML, 143–44; MLE, 134. CWT 1:126–27 (12 July 1869), CWD 1:124 (modified). ML, 143; MLE, 134. OD, SD 3:301; PW 2:95.

Notes to pages 110–114

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6. Wagner, “Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris” (1841), SD 1:124 (mistranslated as “big drum” in PW 7:56). 7. Weber, Hinterlassene Schriften 1:74–75. 8. “Er ist nicht mehr” (fictitious Parisian report signed “Didask.”), 467–68; Oettinger, “Meister Johann Strauß,” 398; “Hie Welf,” signed “Von einem Unbefangenen,” 203. 9. P., “ ‘Robert der Teufel,’ ” 198; Weber, Theory 1:7; Mendel and Reissmann, Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon 10:91. 10. [Editorial], “Au public,” 1; de Lasalle, “Le tam-tam,” 111. Similarly Gevaert, Nouveau traité, 335 (“engin sonore”). 11. On this common nineteenth-century understanding of noise as “a sound other than music and speech,” see Wittje, Age, 207; on Helmholtz’s explanation of this distinction by means of periodic versus nonperiodic sound waves, see below. 12. See Spitzer, “Metaphors,” 247–48; and, more nuanced, van Rij, Other Worlds, 10, 97–98. 13. Wagner, Tannhäuser, SW 6/1:472. 14. Conversely, Berlioz eliminated the culminating stroke of Benvenuto Cellini (Paris, Opéra, 1838) for the Weimar premiere of its 1852 revision. 15. Kahn, Noise, 2. 16. Versuch, 59–81; Search, 51–73. 17. Janz, Klangdramaturgie, 10–16 (for more on the long marginalization of timbre, 25–47); Dolan, Orchestral Revolution, 4–7. See also Jost, Instrumentation; on Wagner in particular, Voss, Studien. 18. A summary of this development is in Bijsterveld and Peters, “Composing Claims.” For different recent engagements, see Bates, “Social Life”; Tresch and Dolan, “Organology”; and De Souza, Music. 19. Examples are Blades, Percussion, 92–100 and 382–84; Rossing, Science; and Chaigne et al., “Nonlinear Vibrations,” 403–9. 20. See Charlton, esp. in “Orchestration,” 251–60, and “New Sounds,” 39–41. The longest—if not always accurate—survey is in Varsányi, Gong, 385–429. 21. On Mahler, see Floros, Gustav Mahler, II, esp. 311–17; and Floros, Of Empire, 239–44. 22. Kahn, Noise, 25; Schafer, Soundscape, 4. Preelectric musical sound effects have been sidelined even in studies such as Leonard’s Theatre Sound. 23. Kahn, Noise, 25; Eidsheim, Sensing, 2. 24. Ernst, “Zum Begriff,” 2; also Digital Memory, esp. 68–69, 173–74; and Im Medium, 11–18. 25. Gitelman, Always Already New, 7. 26. On this and the following synopsis, see Varsányi, Gong, 385–405; on the etymology, 266–91. 27. On the interchangeability of “tam-tam” and “beffroi,” see Castil-Blaze, De l’opéra 1:369; Gathy, Conversations-Lexikon, 456; and Varsányi, Gong, 393–94. 28. Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, 286. Neither Marin Mersenne nor Athanasius Kircher mentioned gongs; see Varsányi, Gong, 388. On the origins of cymbals and their earliest uses in Western art music, e.g., Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook, 119–20. 29. Campbell et al., Musical Instruments, 220; similarly Sevsay, Cambridge Guide, 143– 44. The Paiste firm, however, promotes gong as the umbrella term for (nonpitched) “flat

264

Notes to pages 114–117

gongs” and (pitched) “bossed gongs”; see “The Anatomy of a Gong” at http://www.paistegongs.com/support.php. 30. Varsányi, Gong, 387. 31. Staunton, Authentic Account, 15. 32. On the early history of the recently invented siren, see Jackson, “From Scientific Instruments,” 205–6. 33. Barrow, Travels, passim, here 219. On the eighteenth-century European fashion for Chinese art and the contrasting lack of knowledge about Chinese music, see Clarke, “Encounter,” 543–47. 34. Q., “Mr. Urban.” On Boswell’s acquisition of the tam-tam through Charles Foulis, director of the Sun Fire Insurance Company, see Boswell, 306n6, 394. On the sensory nature of many British imports (including coffee, tea, tobacco, or silk), see Classen, “Introduction,” 10–12. 35. Thus his report in St James’s Chronicle (June 11–14, 1785), reproduced in Boswell, 306n6; see also 289. 36. On Staunton’s gong, see [Anon.], “Appendix,” 635; on Banks’s exemplar, Thomson, “Analysis,” 208. 37. Q., “Mr. Urban.” 38. [Anon.], “Jester,” 111. 39. Simond, Journal, 349; Steady, “To the Editor,” 456. 40. This was after he obtained a large tam-tam (not coincidentally) from London’s Oriental Warehouse for Parsifal’s Grail bells: CWT 2:960 (June 14, 1882), CWD 2:871. For negotiations between Edward Dannreuther and Farmer & Roger’s established oriental import firm over this instrument (found insufficient and later returned), see D-Bhna, AFS 12/II, no. 362. For more on its use in Parsifal, see the penultimate section of this chapter. 41. [Anon.], “Capt. Smith’s Signal.” Aldini, Saggio, 84–85 and 187, reported similar uses in Italy. 42. Raffles, History 1:470–71; cited also in Varsányi, Gong, 416. 43. Fiske, English Theatre Music, 284. No gong is indicated in the vocal score of Shield, Omai, or, A Trip Round the World, nor in the libretto of [Jean-François Arnould-Mussot], Death of Captain Cook (for which I have been unable to access a score). Varsányi, Gong, 416–20, has associated Raffles’s remark with Omai, although it does not depict the homicide. On both works, see Fiske, English Theatre Music, 469–73; Worrall, Harlequin Empire, 139–45; and Burden, “Killing.” 44. [Anon.], “Siege of Belgrade,” 720. See Storace, The Siege of Belgrade; and Fiske, English Theatre Music, 508–11. 45. Corri, The Travellers, 2, 20. An appreciative mention of the gong is in [Anon.], “Account,” 7. On the Chinese hymn (taken from Amiot), see Day-O’Connell, Pentatonicism, 57. 46. Indeed, as composer Thomas Busby explained in 1806, “The Gong is never introduced, except to give a national cast to the music in which it is employed, or to awaken surprise, and rouse the attention of the auditors.” Complete Dictionary, entry “Gong,” n.p. This entry was lacking in the original 1801 edition of the popular book. 47. Preface in Andrews, Songs, iv. 48. Review in The Herald, cited with cynical commentary in [Anon.], “Enchanted Castle,” 15.

Notes to pages 117–121

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49. Shield, Pantomime, 6–7. According to [Anon.], “Enchanted Castle,” the gong drowned out the music. 50. For this and the following statements, see Charlton, “Orchestration,” 251, and “New Sounds,” 39–41; also Macdonald, “François-Joseph Gossec,” 144–51; Brook et al., “Gossec”; Fend, “Cherubini”; and McClellan and Trezise, “Revolution,” 111–14. 51. The full title reads Marche lugubre pour les honneurs funéraires qui doivent être rendus au Champ de la Fédération le 20 septembre 1790 aux mânes des citoyens morts à l’affaire de Nancy; in Pierre, Hymnes, 841. For early comments on this work’s introduction of the tam-tam, see Pierre, Hymnes, 842–43; also Varsányi, Gong, 398–99. A full score is in Pierre, Musique exécutée, 47–50. 52. The unpublished march was premiered at the Théâtre Feydeau on November 20, 1793; see Pierre, Hymnes, 843, 846–47; a piano reduction with instrument indications is in Pierre, Musique des fètes, 551–52. This and the following gong-containing French compositions through 1810 I discuss are listed in Charlton, “New Sounds,” 43. 53. Charlton, “Orchestration,” 254. 54. See Charlton, “Orchestration,” 252–53. Piano reductions with instrument indications are in Pierre, Musique des fètes, 367–86 and (albeit of the earlier, gong-less version of the Marche) 332–45; for the instrumental introduction of the latter, see Marches pour la pompe funèbre du Général Hoche. This edition by Spada apparently follows the more amply orchestrated Berlin autograph (D-B Mus.ms.autogr. Cherubini, L. 323) and includes altogether nine tam-tam strikes, some replacing the bass drum indicated in Pierre’s score. On this version, see the relevant entry in https://opac.rism.info/metaopac/start.do?View=rism; on the Marche also Schemann, Cherubini, 611–17. As late as 1820, Cherubini furthered the tam-tam’s quasi-antiphonal use that Gossec had initiated in his Marche funèbre (1820). 55. The Requiem was written for the 1817 anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, and premiered at St Denis in Paris; see Fend, “Cherubini.” A paradigmatic critique of the “horrible tam-tam stroke” is in GW., “Messe de Requiem,” 62–63n. 56. Berlioz, Correspondance générale I, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris, 1972), 95–96, cited in Kohrs, “Berlioz’ ‘coup rude de tam-tam,’ ” 127. Berlioz later destroyed this work. 57. The work was intended to commemorate the victims of the July Revolution. In his 1853 revision, Berlioz even demanded four tam-tams. Grande messe des morts, NBE 9:44, 94; and, on the revision, 152–53, 177. 58. Review in Journal de la Municipalité (September 23, 1790), cited in Pierre, Hymnes, 841–42. For descriptions of the tam-tam as lugubre or terrible see e.g., Castil-Blaze, De l’opéra 1:369; Z., “Le tam-tam,” 1; La Fage, Histoire 1:212. 59. Beaumarchais, Œuvres, 595; translated in Betzwieser, “Exoticism,” 102. That Beaumarchais owned a gong at least by the time of his death in 1799 is evident from the report in F-Pbmo, AD 9, fol. 21v (I am grateful to Annelies Andries for this reference). 60. Betzwieser, “Exoticism,” 102. 61. Chevallier, Le conservateur, 488–89. Thus also Gevaert, Nouveau traité, 335; and Varsányi, Gong, 394. Though more skeptical about a tam-tam in Steibelt, Charlton mentions one in a 1792 autograph score of an unperformed opera Soliman et Eronime by Honoré Langlé; “Orchestration,” 252, 256–59. Examples of operas utilizing both beffroi and tam-tam are Spontini’s Olimpie (1826 version) and Meyerbeer’s Les huguenots.

266

Notes to pages 121–124

62. Steibelt’s march-like introduction starts with a somber unison of the lower brass and bassoons, against which the solo beffroi is set in measure two. This and the following strike also usher in the (albeit longer and more lyrical) opening antecedent and consequent phrases. Steibelt, Roméo et Juliette, 261–71. 63. Contemporary reports cited in D’Oria, “Lo spettacolo,” 146–47. 64. Le Sueur, Télémaque dans l’isle de Calypso, 134–35. See also Charlton, “Orchestration,” 253–54. 65. Le Sueur, [Mort d’]Adam, 383; also Charlton, “Orchestration,” 254. Le Sueur’s operas all had a protracted genesis, which makes it difficult to conjecture about influences on or by other works. 66. Paër, Le maître de chapelle, 64–65. The satirical account of the fictional opera was clearly a stab at Rossini, whose recent popularity significantly affected Paër’s career. 67. Angely, “Von Sieben die Hässlichste!,” 337. 68. On this shift, see Mongrédien, French Music, 73–75. 69. Ossian was originally intended for the Théâtre Feydeau, its genesis dating back to the mid-1790s; see Mongrédien, Jean-François Le Sueur 2:519–39. Seemingly independently of Le Sueur, the music director of the Berlin Nationaltheater, Bernhard Anselm Weber, premiered an Ossianic topic with his monodrama Sulmalle in 1802. An 1810 manuscript score shows a single fff tam-tam strike in act 2 for the “sound of terror” of Fingal’s shield: Weber, Sulmalle, D-B, Mus.ms. 22616/2, 207 (digitized). Yet it remains doubtful whether this indication dates back to 1802 and whether a tam-tam was actually used; an 1815 review signed “v.G.” lamented that the sound of the shield was merely rendered by low orchestral notes and that a “fitting tone” had not yet been produced; “Sulmalle,” 120 (I am grateful to Katherine Hambridge for these references). 70. Le Sueur, Ossian, ERO 37:261. Both instruments are mentioned prominently in Macpherson’s Temora, esp. 11n and Book 7:117–33. By contrast, the opera’s plot itself had no model in Macpherson. See also Charlton, “Ossian,” 44. 71. In the end, eight harps (instead of the usual two) were employed at the premiere for the two harp parts, and their compensation still proved problematic. See F-Pan, AJ 13/90, folder 446, esp. a letter of June 27, 1804. 72. Le Sueur, Ossian, ERO 37:309–16. The tam-tam strikes are prescribed both verbally and via quarter note E-flats (the local tonic) in bass clef in whichever system had space; the appended harp parts, 546, additionally indicate them verbally. Original manuscript score with autograph changes, F-Pbmo, A. 395 a, II:308. That this indication was important for the intended effect is suggested by the fact that a manuscript score with autograph additions in D-B, Mus.ms. 12880, also included it. 73. Le Sueur, Ossian, ERO 37:306, 309–10 (stage direction). 74. Le Sueur, Ossian, ERO 37:471–73 (six strikes decrescendoing from poco f to ppp). 75. Daudet and Daudet, Bombarde, 19. 76. Méhul, Uthal, ERO 40:110. The score offers no indication as to the placement of the tam-tam. Méhul likely conceived of this opera before the premiere of Ossian, but may still have been influenced by the latter; see Jahrmärker, Ossian, 156–58. 77. On the reception of Ossian and Uthal, see Jahrmärker, Ossian, 89, 159. 78. Spontini, La vestale, ERO 42:320; on the placement in the wings, see the report by Count Ludwig von Lichtenberg of December 15, 1812 in D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 46r (cited below).

Notes to pages 127–131

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79. Bins, Réflexions, 38 (emphasis in original). Once again, however, a spoof of the opera by its very own librettist, Étienne de Jouy, had a character belittle the sound of the tam-tam as that of “the coppersmith next door.” Jouy, La marchande, 30 (I am indebted to Annelies Andries for these references). 80. Spontini, La vestale, ERO 42:338 (and 340 for the stage direction, owing to lacking space in the score prior to the end of the chorus). 81. De Clary et Aldringen, Souvenirs, 357 (“pèle [sic] le dos”; reference courtesy of Annelies Andries). The tam-tam did not appear in the autograph score and was penciled into F-Pbmo, A. 412.c., III:282 and 322. See also the manuscript part for the tam-tam in F-Pbmo, mat. 19 [278 (364); and Charlton, “New Sounds,” 43n9. 82. Thus according to the libretto, St-Yon, Ipsiboé, 31. 83. Rossini, Ricciardo e Zoraide, ERO 10/1:266; Rossini, Le siège de Corinthe, ERO 14:389 (also 399); Berlioz, Les Troyens, NBE 2/2:439–40. 84. Bellini, Norma, 257–58, 260. 85. Spontini, Fernand Cortez (Paris, [1809]), 2: act 2, scene 8, 448–49; act 3, scene 2, 510–16 and 530–42. On the couleur locale of this score more generally, see Andries, “Modernizing Spectacle.” 86. For Wagner’s appreciation of Fernand Cortez (and Spontini in general), see “Erinnerungen an Spontini,” SD 5:esp. 88 and 92, PW 3:127 and 131; and ML, 294, MLE, 281. In the 1817 version, the tam-tam appears in only one number, a Mexican chorus with “danses barbares” (act 1, scene 2); Spontini, Fernand Cortez, ERO 43:73–74 and 77–84. On the different versions, see Gerhard, “Fernand Cortez,” 93–111. 87. Thus according to the recording conducted by Guy van Waas and the included libretto, Kreutzer, La mort d’Abel, 128; see also Charlton, “Orchestration,” 254. On the complicated relationship between this opera and Le Sueur’s Adam, Mongrédien, Jean-François Le Sueur 2:683–84. 88. Greeted—politically appropriately—as a successful fusion of Neapolitan and Napoleonic opera, La vestale received a rare twenty-four performances during its first season and was revived frequently; Ajello and Marinelli, Il Teatro 2:139, 145, 148, 159 and passim. See also Jacobshagen, “Spontini,” 85–100. 89. On the rebuilt Teatro San Carlo, see Cantone, “Il teatro,” esp. 75–76; on the preeminence of its orchestra in Italy, Cesare Corsi, “Napoli, Teatro di San Carlo, 1806–1840,” in Piperno, “Le orchestre,” 210; also Spada, “Giovanni Schmid,” 465–90. 90. Rossini, Armida, GREC 22/2:1200, 1204, 1208, 1212, 1215–25. 91. On the link between Rossini, the tam-tam, and charges of noise, see Z., “Le tam-tam,” 1. 92. Meyerbeer, Robert le diable, GMW I/10/3:1020. This use seems to have been suggested by Halévy; Meyerbeer, Diaries 1:420 (November 8, 1831). Verdi, Macbeth, WGV 10/1: 425, 428, 432. 93. Rossini, Semiramide, GREC 34/2:731–33, 774–75; Marschner, Der Vampyr 1:94; Meyerbeer, Robert le diable, GMW I/10/2:768–77. 94. Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 286; see also Woodward, “Jean-Georges Kastner’s Traité,” 281. On Berlioz’s earlier discussion of the innovations of orchestration and timbre in Robert le diable, see Maehder, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert,” 82–88. 95. Berlioz, Lélio, NBE 7:9, 18; La damnation, NBE 8a:416–18, 419–20, 435–36. A related situation is the ultimate judgment in Halévy’s Le juif errant (Paris, Opéra, 1852).

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Notes to pages 131–134

96. Berlioz, Les Troyens, NBE 2/2:589; [Ricordi], Disposizione, 54. 97. Review of Robertson’s phantasmagoria in de Compiègne, Manuel, 253; on Philidor’s shows, Chevallier, Le conservateur, 290–91. See also Robertson, Fantasmagorie, 6. Also eerily employed was the recently invented glass harmonica. 98. Robertson, Mémoires 1:357; also Warner, Phantasmagoria, 148. 99. Rossini, Moïse, ERO 15:532; Lortzing, Undine, 354; Gounod, Faust, 234; Saint-Saëns, Samson et Dalila, 341. A more obvious example is the tam-tam added, in the original 1838 version of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, to the sudden orchestral explosion when the statue is revealed; NBE 1c:1172. As late as 2013, the Disney movie Oz the Great and Powerful rehashed this effect for the moment when a con artist’s hot-air balloon touches down in a magical world: thus, the gong indicates, the Wizard of Oz would be born. 100. [Louis Jacques] Solomé, Indications générales et observations pour la mise en scène de La muette de Portici . . ., reproduced in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 59, 66. 101. Hibberd, “Cherubini,” esp. 296–303. 102. See Mathew, Political Beethoven, 108; for more on contemporary conceptions of the musical sublime, 102–35. 103. Rossini, Guillaume Tell, GREC 39/3:1448; Meyerbeer, Les huguenots, ERO 20/2:849; Wagner, Rienzi, SW 3/4:201. 104. [Harel], Dictionnaire théâtral, 285. 105. See e.g., Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 905; and Robert, Le grand Robert 6:997. 106. This definition is Dyson’s, in Sounding, 6. 107. Thompson, Soundscape, 1. 108. For more on the tam-tam’s resonance, see Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook, 127; and Rossing, Science, 96–98. 109. However, Lichtenberg added that the rim was 15 cm or 5.9 in. (6 Zoll) deep—an impossible specification for a flat gong. D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fols. 23–24 (Lichtenberg to the Grand Duke of September 20, 2012: “ausgemacht schlecht”) and fols. 36–37 (October 28, 1812); also fol. 37 (evaluation by Spontini of October 24, 1812). In his first letter, Lichtenberg measured the tam-tam by its circumference as 58.5 Zoll; conversion according to Döring, Handbuch, 165. 110. Chladni, Neue Beyträge, 72; however, Chladni talked of a rim of roughly 6–7 cm (2.36–2.76 in.). Conversion from feet and Zoll according to Döring, Handbuch. 111. Varsányi, Gong, 420; this estimate matches the size of the largest (albeit bossed) gong imported from Java by Sir Thomas Raffles in 1816 and donated to the British Museum in 1859; see http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx, for instance the gongs with the inventory numbers As1939,04.38 and As1939,04.113. 112. Charlton, “New Sounds,” 42; for modern sizes, see e.g., http://www.paistegongs. com/gong.php?fid=1. 113. Selberg, Reise, 115–16. According to Döring’s Handbuch, four feet would amount to 100–150 cm (40–60 in.); unsurprisingly, these gongs were hung on a mount. 114. D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 46r (report of December 15, 1812): “Der Tam-tam wird hier in der großen Oper, an der, durch denselben gezogenen dicken Darm-Saite mit der einen Hand schwebend gehalten (NB zwischen den Coulissen), und mit der anderen, vermittels des dazu gehörigen Klippels, mit aller Gewalt geschlagen; wobey Man vorzüglich darauf

Notes to pages 135–136

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sieht, die Schwingungen des Instruments auf keine Weise zu unterbrechen. __ Herr Spontini schlägt vor, ihn statt dessen, an einen Posten, und, statt der Darm-Saite, an einer leichten metallenen Kette, frey aufzuhängen; indem Er glaubt, daß man auf diese Art noch stärkeren Effect erhalten würde.” 115. Lichtenthal, Dizionario 2:237; Berlioz, La damnation, NBE 8a:416. 116. J. H. Elliot, Berlioz (London, 1938), 184, cited in Tanner, “Timpani,” 227. Similarly, Sachs in his Handbuch, 32, complained that the “bad, tinny” dinner gongs or the “soulless, unmusical” ones used in then-contemporary orchestras gave no idea of the enchanting “roundness and volume, a purity and clarity of sound” of real tam-tams. 117. Varsányi, Gong, 405. Indeed, Lichtenberg immediately had a special sheath made to deliver the tam-tam. 118. On the typical circulation of imported commodities between commerce and science in the late eighteenth century, see Schaffer et al., “Introduction,” xxiii. 119. Charlton, “New Sounds,” 43. 120. Amiot, letter to Bertin of October 2, 1784, in his Mémoires 11:523; republished with slight changes in Amiot, “Extrait,” 366. 121. Amiot, Mémoires 11:523 (similarly in “Extrait,” 366). On Amiot and his interest in Chinese music, see Lam, “Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot’s Writings.” On the role of “gobetweens” in late eighteenth-century conversions between non-Western practices and Western science, Schaffer et al., “Introduction.” 122. La Fage, Histoire, 211. The first instrument was acquired by the Opéra after the Duke’s death in 1892; on the 1805 purchase via Beaumarchais’s son-in-law, see F-Pbmo, AD 9, fol. 21v. 123. See Lichtenberg’s letter of September 20, 1812, D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 23r. On Berlioz’s imagined orchestral experiment, see Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 328– 35 (yet by 1853, as noted, he demanded four tam-tams for his revised Grande messe des morts). 124. [Jérôme-Joseph] Momigny, entry “Tam-tam ou tem-tem,” in Framery et al., Encyclopédie 2:512n1. 125. La Fage, Histoire, 211. 126. “Inventario delle machine del Gabinetto fisico . . . dal 1o luglio dell’anno 1818 in avanti,” reproduced in Bellodi and Falomo, Gli strumenti, 367, 369 no. 265. The instrument was not listed in the previous 1794 inventory. According to Patrizia Contardini, curator of the Museo per la Storia dell’Università, no further information on its provenance is available (email to the author, May 14, 2015). A similar scientific interest in the tam-tam is betrayed by its inclusion in the 1812 Conservateur de la vue by the optician and engineer Chevallier, discussed above. 127. Letter to the Consiglio di Governo, Camillo Renati, December 21, 1824, I-Mt, Spettacoli pubblici, cartella 1/8, no. 289. On the gong’s earlier use and its crack, see the three relevant letters in I-Mas, fondo Spettacoli pubblici—Gestione governativa, busta 16, no. 2551. Semiramide premiered at La Scala on April 19, 1824, with a stellar run of thirty-two performances; Tintori, Cronologia, 20. This, however, was not the first use of a tam-tam in Milan, possibly not even at La Scala. In 1809, an astronomical show in Milan was followed by “the famous Chinese tam-tam”; [Anon.], “Spettacolo uranografico.” 128. Hui et al., “Music,” 3. See also Hankins and Silverman, Instruments, esp. 5, 9–10; and, on the rise of sensory physiology, Jütte, “Senses.”

270

Notes to pages 136–139

129. Jackson, “From Scientific Instruments.” 130. Clarke, “Encounter,” 543, according to whom Chinese instruments remained “enigmatic items” in the West. Davies and Lockhart have recently commented more generally on such shared nineteenth-century concerns between science and music in “Fantasies,” 3–6. 131. Spontini mentions a Berlin gong in his letter of September 19, 1812; D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 25. Indeed, a score of La vestale from the Königliche Schauspiele Berlin with early performance annotations includes the tam-tam strikes; D-B, N.Mus.384. On the frequent opera and theater visits, particularly in Paris, of Friedrich Wilhelm III (Spontini’s later patron), see his diaries in D-Bga, BPH, Rep. 49, König Friedrich Wilhelm III., F Nr. 25. However, no evidence survives in D-Bga of the purchase of a tam-tam. 132. Chladni, Neue Beyträge, 72; [Anon.], “Rodrigo und Zimene,” 416n (“dies lärmenmachende Schallinstrument der Pariser Oper”); [Anon.], “Kurier,” [3]. Unsurprisingly, both Paris and London were prime trade locations for tam-tams. 133. A-Whh, Generalintendanz der Hoftheater SR 55/II, Konvolut 3, fols. 193, 197–98 (“als Requisit in besonderer Verwahrung gehaltene Instrumente”). Previous inventories do not list tam-tams. See also Pachovsky, “Orchester,” 83–84. 134. See e.g., the list of the Opéra’s orchestra personnel for the premiere of Guillaume Tell compiled in Bartlet, “Rossini,” 137–41; as well as the lists and tables in Piperno, “Le orchestre,” and Harwood, “Verdi’s Reform,” 108–34. Maehder, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert,” 100, therefore discusses the gong among “added instruments.” 135. Examples are Berlin manuscript scores of Armida and Ricciardo e Zoraide (D-B, Mus.ms.19027 and Mus.ms.19030, Mus.ms.19030/1); or an 1825 Weimar score of Semiramide, D-WRdn 164 (digitized at http://www.oper-um-1800.uni-koeln.de/einzeldarstellung_scan .php?id_werke=583&id_scan=324&herkunft=). 136. D-F, Armida: Mus Hs Opern 477, (1) and (4, gran cassa); Le prophète: Mus Hs Opern 366 (5/4a: “Tambour Militaire. (dans les coulisses)”); Robert le diable: Mus Hs Opern 367 (2): Inspektionsbuch (used since 1832), 165 (“auf die drey starken Schläge im Orchester”). For performance dates and contexts of these materials, see Didion and Schlichte, Thematischer Katalog. 137. Report in F-Pbmo, AD 9, fol. 21v. 138. Lichtenberg eventually purchased the gong for 3,400 francs; see his correspondence of September 20, October 28, and December 2, 1812, in D-DSs, D 12, 30/42, fols. 23v, 36r, and 39r. 139. [Anon.], “Kurier,” [3]. Conversion of francs into Gulden at Munich value according to Roback, Vollständiges Handbuch, 75 and 183; average salaries in Bavaria around 1835 according to SG., “Löhne und Preise im Königreich Bayern im 19. Jhdt.,” https://www.press glas-korrespondenz.de/aktuelles/pdf/pk-2011–3w-klose-preise-1800–1900.pdf, 162. 140. [Anon.], “Intelligenz-Blatt,” col. 4 (the ad is dated December 15, 1836). On Schott’s pioneering trading in, and manufacturing of, orchestral instruments in general, see Woltjer, “Schott,” esp. 90–95. 141. Thus in the German libretto of Ambroise Thomas’s 1717 oder: Der Pariser Perrüquier, [iii]. No information on these tam-tams has survived in the Schott archives (email by Monika Motzko-Dollmann to the author, June 12, 2014). 142. See the entries in Boosey’s “Band Instrument Stock Account” book E82.22, in the Boosey & Hawkes Archive, Horniman Museum, A227/115, 8 (for 1868) and 52 (for 1870);

Notes to pages 139–142

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and Ricordi’s copialettere in I-Mr, for instance 1921–22, 10:384 (letter of March 28, 1922, regarding the gongs for Mascagni’s Iris; I am indebted to Gavin Dixon and Christy Thomas, respectively, for these data). 143. See e.g., Mendel and Reissmann, Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon 10:91; Gevaert, Nouveau traité, 335; and H[anslick], “Musik-Instrumente,” 358. As late as 1992, Blades, Percussion, 98, considered Paiste gongs as “lacking certain traditional Eastern features,” despite their otherwise “superb tone and attractive appearance.” 144. [Fétis], “Note du rédacteur” to Amiot’s “Extrait,” 367. 145. Amiot, Mémoires 11:523–54, and “Extrait,” 366; Barrow, Travels, 314. 146. Klaproth, for example, “Analyse”; English as “Analysis”; German in his Chemische Abhandlungen, 93–95. 147. Thomson, “Analysis.” 148. See e.g., Z., “Le tam-tam,” 1. 149. Thomson and d’Arcet, “De l’instrument,” 46n1. 150. On this and the following allegations, see [Darcet], “Observations.” Details of his procedure, however, were known earlier; see e.g., P., “Bronze.” 151. Lichtenberg, letter of December 2, 1812, D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 39v (“weil sie auch nicht entfernt den wahren Ton gehabt”). Report by Châteauneuf, Recherches, 86–87; [Darcet], “Observations,” 332. The school exists today as the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers. 152. [Anon.], “Frankreich,” 1318. On these industrial fairs, see Tresch, Romantic Machine, 168–71. 153. In 1826, one Robert Reisser in Vienna patented the production of metal for “Turkish cymbals, Chinese bells (tam-tam), various cutting devices, etc.,” which was released for public use in 1833; [Anon.], “Kunst und Industrie.” See also a widely published report on the Parisian industrial fair, [Anon.], “Neuestes der Polytechnik.” 154. [Anon.], “Frankreich,” 1318. According to Châteauneuf, Recherches, 87, the École in Châlons sold their tam-tams for 50 francs, down from 500 for Chinese gongs. 155. Gétreau, “Musiques,” 76; contract signed by [Charles François] Darche on November 1, 1843, in F-Pan, AJ/13/221 (subfolder “Instruments. Luthiers. Darche et autres”); and D-Bga, I. HA Rep. 100, 1204, fol. 11 (conversion of 80 Reichsthaler according to Döring, Handbuch, 123). 156. F-Pan, AJ/37/81 (Consérvatoire), no. 10:14; Pierre, Facteurs, 420. This was also the sum paid by the Paris Instrument Museum in 1880 for a Japanese tam-tam; Gétreau, Aux origines, 670. 157. Blades, Percussion, 97–98; http://www.paiste.com/e/about_history.php?menuid=29. 158. Lichtenberg, letter to the Grand Duke of December 2, 1812, D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fols. 39v and 44r. 159. For confusion over the hammered marks in what was believed to be a cast instrument, see e.g., Chladni, Neue Beyträge, 73, and Reid, Treatise, 411. 160. Radau, Lehre, 273. 161. See Hooper, Lexicon Medicum, 400; and the entry “Sourd-muet” signed “I. . .d.” 162. Snell, “Reise-Erinnerungen,” 205; Wildermuth, “Recherches,” 463–64. For gong uses in treating catalepsy in Jean-Martin Charcot’s neurological clinic at the Salpêtrière Hospital, see Bourneville and Regnard, Iconographie, 176–80; and Regnard, Sorcellerie, 261–67.

272

Notes to pages 142–148

163. This passage is loosely inspired by chapter 4, “A Life of Metal,” in Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, 52–61, without necessarily sharing her premises. 164. Lichtenberg, letter of December 2, 1812, D-DSs, D 12, 30/42, fol. 44r; Tanner, “Timpani,” 228n9; letter to the ministry of March 11, 1899, in D-Bga, I. HA Rep. 89, no. 20172, fol. 153. 165. Wagner, Rienzi, SW 3/3:73, 4:201. 166. Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer, SW 4/1:80; 2:178, 205–6, 258. On the tam-tam in Holländer, see also Voss, Studien, 226–27; and Floros, Gustav Mahler, II, 313. 167. These references come from Wagner’s letter to Minna Wagner (March 17, 1844), SB 2:379; his letter to Ludwig II (February 3, 1874), Wagner and Ludwig II, Briefwechsel 3:33–34; and CWT 2:74 (March 30, 1878), 426 (October 14, 1879), 474 (January 11, 1880); CWD 2:53, 380, 423. Richard (or Cosima) Wagner was not alone in associating the tam-tam and barbarism; see e.g., Krigar, “Alberti,” 290; and a note in Daily Telegraph (February 25, 1882), cited in Xit., “Addition,” 203. On the binary of barbarism and civilization—or, in German idealist thinking, Kultur—since Greek antiquity, see Boletsi, Barbarism, esp. 57–107. 168. [Anon.], “Analogie,” 121. On noise as “a material aspect of sound,” see Novak, “Noise,” 125; also Chion, Sound, 103–4. On all listening as “vibrational practice,” Eidsheim, Sensing. 169. For further references on the social distinction of noise, see Novak, “Noise,” 130–31; also Goldsmith, Discord, 107–9. On the (often contextual) dialectics between “notes” and noise in the history of Western music, Chion, Sound, 62–71. 170. Helmholtz, Lehre, 14–15. On the impact of this distinction on nineteenth-century aesthetics, see Novak, “Noise,” 127. 171. Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 265. 172. On the tam-tam’s chaotic vibration patterns, see Rossing, Science, 97. 173. Helmholtz, Lehre, 116; translation adapted from On the Sensations, 67. 174. Vorwort, 276; PW 3:277 (modified). 175. Steege, Helmholtz, 65. 176. On this intentionally uneven dampening of orchestral instruments in Bayreuth, see Maehder, “Klangfarbenkomposition,” 149–51; on the realities of the Bayreuth sound in Wagner’s time, Mösch, Weihe, 141–52. 177. Levi, letter to Anton Seidl (June 13, 1878), US-NNC, Box 1/39, fol. 1v. 178. Wagner, “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth,” SD 9:337, PW5:335. 179. Dyson, Sounding, 188. 180. On the role of music, see esp. Kunstwerk, 156–57, PW 1:191; and chapter 1 of this volume. 181. Wagner, Das Rheingold, SW 10/2:237–38, 289–92, 350. 182. This was in contrast to the frequent mention of wooden mallets covered with leather, e.g., by Lichtenberg, letter of September 20, 1812, D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 23v. By 1944, Forsyth, Orchestration, 38–39, considered drumsticks the norm. On the tam-tam’s uses in Rheingold, see also Varsányi, Gong, 411; on the effects of different mallets, Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook, 127–28. 183. Wagner, Siegfried, SW 12/3:175; translation Spencer, 264. 184. Wagner, Siegfried, SW 12/3:284; translation Spencer, 350. 185. Wagner, Die Walküre, SW 11/2:293, 3:65; Götterdämmerung, SW 13/3:284, 303 (rather than being veiled, the tam-tam’s effect was in this last instance even furthered by a twomeasure cymbal roll).

Notes to pages 148–152

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186. On this point, see e.g., Levin, “Mise-en-Scène,” 226–27. 187. OD, SD 4:223–24, PW 2:370–71 (modified; emphases original). 188. OD, SD 3:283 and 4:5, PW 2:76 and 122. 189. Versuch 71; translation Search 63. For a more analytical discussion of Mischklang, see Janz, Klangdramaturgie, 107–17. 190. On Wagner’s general composing-out of reverberation effects, see Janz, Klangdramaturgie, 112; on the importance of the valve-horn in particular as orchestral “cement,” Versuch, 74–75, Search, 66–67. 191. Kunstwerk, 150, PW 1:183–84. 192. Versuch, 76, Search, 67. On the notion of Wagner’s orchestra as an amplifier, see Kittler, “World-Breath,” 224; on the synthesizer, also Klein, “Wagners Medientechnologie,” 414. 193. Versuch, 79, Search, 71. 194. Versuch, 86–87, Search, 79–80. 195. Versuch, 79, 82, Search, 71, 74. 196. Letter by Spontini of October 27, 1812, D-DSsa, D12, 30/42, fol. 38. 197. Berlioz prescribed mf for Mercury’s onstage strike in Les Troyens and the concluding one in La damnation; Liszt included a whole series of mf strikes (plus bass drum) in his first symphonic poem, Werke I/I: Symphonische Dichtungen. 1. Was man auf dem Berge hört [1848–56], 49–51. 198. Other than this last coup, the tam-tam is usually set several dynamic levels below the rest of the orchestra, and at least one below those of bass drum or cymbals. David, Herculanum, 263, 267, 270–72, 438, 582, 598, 600–604. 199. Versuch, 68, Search, 60. Wagner requested tickets for a performance on January 11, 1860; see his letter of this date to an unknown Parisian recipient, SB 12:39. 200. Saint-Saëns, La princesse jaune, 15–16, 30–31; for more on this opera, see Gilcher, “La princesse jaune”; on the first operatic use of tuned gongs, also Varsányi, Gong, 413–14. 201. Mascagni, Iris, 1 and passim. 202. Puccini, Madama Butterfly, 136, 139, 143, 147 (“tam-tam grave” in the wings), 479. 203. Massenet, Le roi de Lahore, autograph score, F-Pbmo, A. 630 (A1): 78–80 (digitized at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b85390035/f247.image); Massenet had originally intended for the first tam-tam strike to come from the orchestra. Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (Vienna, 1875) employs the tam-tam similarly in act 2. 204. Rubinstein, The Tower of Babel, 3, 71. The opera was premiered in German (albeit in a concert version) in Königsberg (Kaliningrad) in 1870, and was widely translated. 205. Busoni, Turandot, 21, 24. 206. Puccini, Tutti i libretti di Puccini, 506. 207. Girardi, Puccini, 455. See Puccini, Turandot, 139. 208. Puccini, Turandot, 36–37. 209. On these three strikes as the climax of a gradual orchestral crescendo, see Horst, Turandot, 63; on the visual and dramaturgical tension between the gong to the right and the Executioner’s house to the left of the stage, as well as the emphasis on this polarity in the unpublished production notes, Ashbrook and Powers, Puccini’s Turandot, 146. 210. The notion of a “point of audition” is Chion’s, in Audio-Vision, 89–92.

274

Notes to pages 153–154

211. Similar claims could be made of the gong strikes in Léhar’s Das Land des Lächelns (Berlin, 1929) and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 Broadway hit The King and I. On racist stereotyping in Chinese-themed operettas and musicals around 1900, see Saffle, “Eastern Fantasies.” 212. Hepokoski, “Structure,” 81. 213. Thus Strauss’s description of the effect in Elektra, 367; see also Salome, 203. On the tam-tam in Strauss’s tone poems, see Floros, Gustav Mahler, II, 315–16; a further single tamtam strike occurs in Eine Alpensinfonie. 214. Floros, Gustav Mahler, II, esp. 311–17, and Of Empire, 239–44. Except for the RückertLieder, all of Mahler’s works include the instrument; Huber, Pauke, 91. Countless other uses (such as the single stroke toward the end of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony) are owed to the same tradition. 215. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, 101, 103, 105, 112 (in the “Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One” and its lead-up); Schoenberg, Die glückliche Hand, 7. For further examples of innovative twentieth-century uses, see Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook, 127–28; and Schwörer-Kohl, “Gong,” col. 1531. 216. On the 1926 instrumentation, see Whitesitt et al., “Antheil.” The 1952–53 version is scored for four pianos, two xylophones, timpani, tenor and bass drums, small and large electric bells, those airplane propellers, glockenspiel, and—as “normal percussion”—gong, woodblock, cymbal, military drum, and tambourine; Antheil, Ballet mécanique. 217. De Lasalle, “Le tam-tam,” 111. 218. See Gevaert, Nouveau traité, 326; on the weight, Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook, 65. In the score, Meyerbeer urged not to have the bells sound an octave higher than notated “because the effect would be missed”; Les huguenots, ERO 20/2:757. The production book allowed more leeway; Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 162. 219. Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel 2:150 (October 19, 1831), 497 (January) and 504 (February 14, 1836), 3:96 (March 13, 1838), 3:248 (April 1840), 3:430 and 442 (March 4 and May 24, 1843), 6:620 (December 8, 1855); Diaries 1:418, 471–73, 510; 2:23, 72, 77; 3:340. 220. D-F, Oper 333 (1): Der Vamypr: production book (n.d.; given the long lack of a tamtam in Frankfurt, this note probably refers not to the 1832 local premiere but to a new production of 1859). An early example is the French critic Castil-Blaze’s adaptation of Der Freischütz as Robin des Bois (Paris, Théâtre Odéon, 1824), where the distant midnight strike at the beginning of the Wolf ’s Glen scene of act 2 was rendered by a tam-tam; see Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 213. 221. F-Pan, AJ/13/221, contract of November 1, 1843. The production book mentions two tam-tam strikes heard from inside the cathedral in act 3 (Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 65); these coincide with the two pitched bell strikes at the end of the recognition duet, in Donizetti, Dom Sébastien 2:581–82. 222. Thus in the printed parts, according to Hugh Macdonald in Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 275. Elsewhere, Berlioz suggested octave doublings on the piano to imitate bells; Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 275. In the score, however, Berlioz indicated four alternative pitches to facilitate finding a suitable bell; La damnation, NBE 8a:411. 223. Thus in the Prologue, scene 2, as well as acts 1 and 4; Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov, 67–76, 168–72, 793–94; also Peinkofer and Tannigel, Handbook, 66. Glazunov employed the

Notes to pages 154–156

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tam-tam (plus double-bass pizzicato) yet more emphatically to evoke church bells in his 1889 orchestration of “In the Monastery,” the first movement of Borodin’s Petite Suite for piano; Borodin, Petite Suite, 3–4 and 8–10. 224. Telegram to Eduard Dannreuther (July 12, 1882), in Wagner, Richard Wagner an seine Künstler, 305 (emphasis in original). Wagner seems originally to have experimented with a large tam-tam and scheduled special tam-tam rehearsals; see the invoice of August 28, 1882, in D-BHna, ASF 13/II, 449. For a different sound combination involving gongs and bombardons, see Solvay, “Correspondance,” 125; for brief surveys over solutions to Wagner’s bell problem, Forsyth, Orchestration, 54–55; and Mösch, Weihe, 98–99. For more information, see http://www.steingraeber.de/english/bayreuth_liszt_wagner/parsifal_bells_659.html; for acoustic demonstrations, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUfo1szjPIc&feature=youtu .be. 225. Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 59, 66. 226. Rossini, Nuovo Mosé [ms fs], A-Wn, OA.209/4. For the finale of the 1824 Italian premiere, the Berlin Opera adopted one strike; Rossini, Mosé in Egitto [ms fs], D-B, Mus. ms. 19046, 3:32. 227. For Undine, see D-Mbs, St.th.661–23:201; for Rienzi, D-Mbs, St.th.789–92:290–91. 228. D-Mbs, St.th.1198–1:124. Titled Die Zerstörung Trojas, this vocal score of Part I was used 1895–1907. 229. Thus according to Palianti’s production book in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 176. This manual may, however, document practices postdating the opera’s 1827 premiere. On this problematic, see Jacobshagen, “Staging,” 239–60. Similarly, a later hand added a tam-tam for the same scene into the Berlin Court Opera’s ms score, Nuovo Mosé, D-B, Mus.ms. 19046, 2, no. 8, “Invocazione,” fols. 4r and 5r. 230. A-Wn, OA.385 (Robert le diable, printed score by Schlesinger with ms additions), 4:871 (this addition could date from the Viennese premiere of 1833 or a new production of 1854). 231. D-Mbs, St.th.731–16: Tannhäuser, Partition chant et piano (Paris, 1865), interleaved pages opposite 82 and 83 (performance dates on the inner plate indicate that this stage manager’s score was used between December 1887 and August 1892, i.e., before the new 1893 production conducted by Hermann Levi). The Bayreuth use is described in the stage plan, reproduced in Mack, Bayreuther Inszenierungsstil, 107; according to manuscript notes by Julius Kniese, however, it was (also?) to effect the distant church bells earlier in the act; D-BHna, Hs 224/I (8): “Tannhäuser. Requisiten,” [1]. 232. Spontini, La vestale (Paris, [1807]), D-B, N.Mus. 538. This copy of the Erard score, identical with the one reproduced in ERO 42, carries an autograph dedication to the daughter of Spontini’s librettist Étienne de Jouy dated 1848. Its additional strikes occur on p. 334 (last m.), 338 (m. 6), and 340 (last two mm.). 233. Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel 3:248 (undated entry of 1840); a misleading translation is in Diaries 2:23. 234. The uncatalogued Dresden parts for Robert in D-Ds, including the tam-tam “unter der Bühne,” were used with changes from 1834 through the 1890s, and are described in the relevant entry in https://opac.rism.info/metaopac/start.do?View=rism. For the Munich Prophète, see the note on the inner plate of the director’s score, D-Mbs, St.th. 702–19.

276

Notes to pages 156–160

235. Rossini, Semiramide, A-Wn, Mus.Hs.37053, 2: fols. 300–302. This passage corresponds to GREC 34/2:772–76. 236. Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 58; Meyerbeer, Le prophète, GMW I/10/2:456; [Ricordi], Disposizione, 54. These are but a few examples. 237. For a demonstration, see Vic Firth, “Percussion 101: Gong & Tam-Tam 3,” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn8A_Gl1MvY. 238. A-Whh, Generalintendanz der Hoftheater, Geschäftsbücher, Index 7: 1868–1875 (“Lärm auf der Bühne wird gerügt”); the actual decree is missing from the relevant box. On the Bayreuth glitches, see Carnegy, Wagner, 95. 239. For noise, see Bapst, Essai, 386; for the tam-tam, Moynet, Machinerie, 127; also Veber, “Rehearsal,” 105. 240. Kahn, Noise, 25. 241. Rilke, “Gong (I),” in his Poetry, 603. 242. Sachs, Handbuch, 32; Forsyth, Orchestration, 38. 243. Sand, Consuelo 4:294. 244. [Fraccaroli], “L’Aida” (I am indebted to Christy Thomas for this reference). The effect can be observed in the video rendition by Andy Sommer of Franco Zeffirelli’s 2010 production of Turandot. 245. Blades, Percussion, 97. On the origins of the trailer, see Wakelin, J. Arthur Rank, 73 and 244–45n14. Athletes included boxing champion “Bombardier” Billy Wells and Olympic wrestler Ken Richmond. 246. Lyrics for “Get It On” by Mark Bolan (the song was released in the United States as “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”); lyrics for “War” by Peter Blegvad; both cited according to http://www.allthelyrics.com. 247. I am indebted to Michael Veal for these references. Examples of movies with opening gong strike are The Rage of Wind (director Ng See-yuen, 1973) or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (released in the US as Master Killer; director Liu Chia-liang, 1978). 248. Brown, Hell; I am indebted to Brian Kane for this reference. 249. On this allusion, see Long, Beautiful Monsters, 231. 250. For Mercury’s allusive statements on the song and a discussion of its operatic traits (excluding the gong), see—with further references—Long, Beautiful Monsters, 221–32. 251. Marc and Thompson, Prime Time, 266; on the show’s format in general, 266–68; and Greene, Politics, 144–55. 252. Barris, Game Show King, 148. 253. For a recent debate about newly synthesized school gongs, see Hollenstein, “Pausen-Gong.” 254. Stockhausen, Texte 3:59, Stockhausen, 76. 255. For the genesis, scoring, and playing techniques of the piece, see Stockhausen, Texte 3:57–65; and Stockhausen, Stockhausen, 76–87, esp. 84–86. 256. Stockhausen, Stockhausen, 80; on the title, 78 and 87; Stockhausen, Texte 3:57. 257. Stockhausen, Stockhausen, 79. 258. Stockhausen, Stockhausen, 80. 259. On the theatricality of this and other coeval pieces of Stockhausen, see Powell, Differentiation, 162–63.

Notes to pages 160–167

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260. Stockhausen, Stockhausen, 78; Stockhausen, Texte 3:60–61. This biological conception was perhaps furthered by the fact that the tam-tam lived in Stockhausen’s garden for lack of space in his house. 261. Stockhausen, Stockhausen, 78. 262. On the novel experiences for both composer and listeners, see Stockhausen, Texte 3:58. On recording devices becoming media archaeologists, Ernst, Digital Memory, 61. 263. On Stockhausen’s general influence on spectralism, see Anderson, “Provisional History,” 7–22. C HA P T E R 4

1. Werfel, Stern, 467; translation adapted from Werfel, Star, 407. 2. Nietzsche, letter to Mathilde Maier (July 15, 1878) in Briefwechsel 2/5:337–38; “Der Fall Wagner,” in Richard Wagner, 90, translation Basic Writings, 614. 3. Goering, Messias, 53; Mann, Buddenbrooks, 548 (Mann, Buddenbrooks, translation Lowe-Porter, 404); Paul von Heyse as cited in Förster, Vorsicht Wagner!, 98; Marcuse, Das denkwürdige Leben, 81. 4. Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 220, Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, 132. For associations of the music with fog, see also e.g., Hanslick, Moderne Oper, 311; and Leone Fortis, cited in Jung, Rezeption, 290. For more sources on the perception of Wagner’s music as narcotic (a perception that became more prominent in the twentieth century), see chapter 1. 5. See Stahura, “Handel’s Haymarket Theatre,” 102; on scents Ossi, “Dalle macchine,” 25, 28–30. 6. Carlyle, “Signs,” 59. On Wagner’s negative views on industrialization and the expected salvation through his Gesamtkunstwerk, see the introduction to this book. 7. Parville, “Construction,” 31; I am indebted to Thomas Betzwieser for this reference. 8. See Habel, Festspielhaus, 370; and Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 269–70. 9. Le Sueur, Ossian, ERO 37:404. On the premiere staging of this scene, see Andries, “Modernizing Spectacle.” 10. Beethoven, Festspiele, 53–62. 11. On the ubiquitous sunrises in French operas, see Kappeler, “Attraction,” 66–68; on the increase of thunderstorms in romantic operas, Busch, “Unwetterszene.” 12. On weather effects in grand opéra, see Newark, “Staging,” 95–101; and Walton, “Looking,” 149–51; on the rise of weather forecasts in the nineteenth century, Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 249–51. 13. OD, SD 3:301, PW 2:95. For more on Wagner’s critique, see the introduction to this volume. 14. Spencer, 57, 65, 88, 112. On the spectral colors evoked in Das Rheingold, see also Dombois, “Auge,” 99, and, more generally, Kröplin, Richard Wagner: Musik 2:796–804; on the common use of green, blue, red, and yellow filters, Düringer and Barthels, TheaterLexikon, cols. 138–39; on shades of chemical light (where yellow hues were less successful), Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, 518; and Rees, Theatre Lighting, 181. 15. Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 249; translation adapted from Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, 154. The frequency of sunrises and sunsets as well as their nuanced color gradations

278

Notes to pages 167–170

was observed by other critics as well, for instance Paul Lindau in Die Gartenlaube (1876), reprinted in Großmann-Vendrey, Bayreuth 1:61. 16. Cited according to Wagner, Das Rheingold, SW 10/2:219–20; translation in Spencer, 90. 17. Grimm and Grimm, entry “Nibelung,” Wörterbuch 7 (1889), col. 690; also Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch 2:63. Hence the common nickname “Schwefelzwerge” for dwarfs. It is in the Edda tradition, not the Nibelungenlied, that the Nibelungs are dwarfs; see Magee, Richard Wagner, 76–84. Cooke details Wagner’s fusion of the different Nibelung traditions in I Saw, 194–98. 18. Wagner, “Der Nibelungen-Mythus. Als Entwurf zu einem Drama” (1848), SD 2:156; translation adapted from Magee, Richard Wagner, 77–78. See also Wagner, “Die Wibelungen,” SD 2:119–22. 19. Münchener Volksbote (April 1872), cited in Tappert, Wagner-Lexicon, 26. 20. Spencer, 57 and 344 (modified). 21. On his views of Faust, see Borchmeyer, “ ‘Faust,’ ” 133–58; and Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, 40–47; on clouds and fog in Faust, Kunz, “ ‘Luftige Welten.’ ” On symbolic weather developments in Goethe’s Werther and its possible influences on grand opéra, Newark, “Staging,” 97–99. 22. Letter to Franz Liszt of February 11, 1853, SB 5:189; translation SL, 281. On Wagner’s concept of myth as the “beginning and end of history,” see also OD, SD 4:91, PW 2:224. 23. Thus according to Plato’s rendition of the myth in Protagoras, sections 320d–322a; “Protagoras,” 18. For an account of the myth, see Hansen, “New Media,” 175–76. 24. [Louis Jacques] Solomé, Indications générales et observations pour la mise en scène de La muette de Portici . . ., reproduced in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 72. Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri, La muette’s stage designer, was sent to study Alessandro Sanquirico’s machinery; see Allevy, Mise en scène, 59–60, who also names more popular volcanic representations, including a diorama by Daguerre. Further precedents are listed in Schneider and Wild, eds., La Muette, 211; and Gerhard, Urbanization, 298–303. 25. Meyerbeer, letter to Amalia Beer of April 16, 1849, Briefwechsel 4:487. Fire scenes, of course, were also part of spoken theater, as exemplified by the notorious burning castle in act 3 of Heinrich von Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810). 26. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 117. 27. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, esp. 1–3, 46–49. 28. Wagner, Siegfried’s Tod (1848), SD 2:228; translation amended from Haymes, Wagner’s “Ring,” 185. 29. On Wagner’s various revisions of the ending, see Darcy, “Metaphysics”; Kitcher and Schacht, Finding, esp. 193–201; and Berger, Beyond Reason, 164–78. 30. Some critics accordingly complained about the “extravagant use” of the rather clichéd Bengal light throughout the cycle; see e.g., Hartmann, “Aus Bayreuth,” 723; Kalbeck, Bühnenfestspiel, 81; and Kufferath, “Richard Wagner,” 527. 31. As Kunz has argued in “ ‘Luftige Welten,’ ” 46–47, this function has predecessors in mythical and biblical stories as well as in classical drama, where clouds—if not vapor proper—regularly link heaven and earth or transport characters between different states of existence. For more on the mystical and religious imagery of clouds, see Warner, Phantasmagoria, 83–93; and Busch, “Wolken.”

Notes to pages 171–180

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32. Quoted according to SW 10/1:181, 189–90, and 2:210–11; translation Spencer, 85, 86, 89. 33. Anton Seidl, one of Wagner’s musical assistants in 1876, detailed the use of trapdoors and steam for Alberich’s transformations in a notebook preserved in US-NNC, box 3, folder 10. Alberich’s head was to remain above the stage floor; only once he had finished his mocking speech did the singer disappear fully. The transformation into a toad was effected likewise (as is still frequently the case today). The relevant page, [26r], is reproduced in Syer, “Page to Stage,” 19. On Alberich’s unsatisfactory transformations, see also Fricke, Wagner, 68. By contrast, the clouds Wagner prescribed for the aviation of Wotan and the Valkyries as well as for Siegmund’s battle were largely of practical purpose and effected with gauzes. 34. On Wagner’s fusion of, and elaboration on, different mythological concealing garments, see Grimm and Grimm, entry “Nibelung,” Wörterbuch 7: col. 483; Cooke, I Saw, 203–5; and Spencer, 365n24. Wagner used the term Nebelkappe in a skit about the Munich Rheingold premiere; see Breig and Fladt, Dokumente, 157. 35. See Mittheilung, 330–31; PW 1:378. 36. Eduard Devrient, diary entry of July 14, 1853, cited in Breig and Fladt, Dokumente, 82. See also Wagner’s letters to Franz Liszt of January 30, 1852, SB 4:270; and to Breitkopf & Härtel of June 20, 1856, SB 8:85–87; as well as Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 15. 37. Production book of Le prophète in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 159. 38. The stage directions in this passage are quoted according to the score, not the libretto, and are emended accordingly from Spencer, 69; all measure numbers refer to Wagner, Das Rheingold, SW 10/1:88–99. On this transformation music, see also, in particular, Darcy, Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” 126–28; Aringer, “ ‘Kunst,’ ” 3–17; and Faerber, “Beiträge,” esp. 152–53. On Wagner’s transformation scenes in general, see Eichner, “In träumerischer Entrückung,” 273–307; on some of their visual implications, Mungen, “BilderMusik,” esp. 280–97. 39. Darcy, Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” 127. The motif labels (used here simply to identify passages) are taken from Darcy. 40. Production book of Le siège in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Ten, 205. On the generally short and static fire scenes and their practical renditions, see Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, cols. 406–7. 41. Wolzogen, Guide, 25–27 (motifs 20 and 21). 42. Strauss in his edition of Berlioz, Treatise, 43. 43. Versuch, 85; Search, 78. 44. Translation of the directions in the score are adapted from Spencer, 265; for the directions in the libretto, see SD 6:163. 45. Carnegy, Wagner, 25 (emphasis added); Kunstwerk, 72 and 151, translation adapted from PW 1:100, 185. On the perceived rift between the musical transformations and the static drop scenes, see Oesterlein, Walküre, 29. 46. On Brandt, see esp. Kaiser, Bühnenmeister; and Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 26–52. Since Brandt and Wagner negotiated most details in person (and the former’s letters seemed annoyingly scarce to the latter), it is impossible to ascertain exactly whose idea the implementation of steam was. 47. For details of the 1876 steam technology, see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 269–71.

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Notes to pages 181–182

48. The steam technology is detailed in the seventh installment of “Richard Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel in Bayreuth,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 72 (1876), “Extra-Beilage,” as well as in Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo 26 (1876): 322. On the self-promotional character and doubtful success of these reports, see Großmann-Vendrey, Bayreuth 1:44–46; and Vazsonyi, Richard Wagner, 195–96. 49. Isidor Kastan, “Das Facit der Bayreuther Festspiele,” Berliner Tageblatt (1876), in Großmann-Vendrey, Bayreuth 1:216. 50. None of the many contemporary or recent studies on the Meiningen Theater mention steam. See esp. Koller, Theatre Duke, 85–113 (esp. 101 on fog effects created with light filters); and Erck, Geschichte, 30–43. In 1873, Duke Georg II had married the actress Ellen Franz, a long-time friend of Cosima Wagner’s; see Goltz and Müller, Königin, esp. 109–14. On the Berlin performance, CWT 1:910 (April 17, 1875), CWD 1:840; on Wagner’s encounters with the Duke in Vienna, CWT 1:946–49 (November 2, 4, and 16, 1875), CWD 1:873–76. On the Brückner studio’s involvement in the Ring, suggested by Brandt, see Kern, “Soeben gesehen,” 82–92. 51. “Pièces représentées à l’académie royale de musique pendant les années 1837 et 1838, et consommant des objets d’artifice avec le prix de consummation,” F-Pan, AJ 13/221, subfolder “mise en scène.” In the same folder, see also the subsequent list of equipment for fire effects, which does not suggest the use of steam; nor do the surviving inventories of the Opéra’s stage machinery and special apparatuses in F-Pan, AJ 13/222, 223, and 530/V. 52. Palianti’s production book in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 178. Tellingly, an 1849 production book for the Frankfurt premiere, otherwise modeled on Palianti, indicated merely a “great explosion, then light red fire”; D-F, Mus Hs Opern 366 (6): opposite 22. The various performance materials of Le prophète at F-Pbmo (A 566), however, do not indicate the actual employment of steam technology. 53. Moynet, French Theatrical Production, 158. This direction was included already in the 1874 edition, L’envers, 224–25. By contrast, Bapst’s weighty 1893 Essai, 593, mentions vapor only, and specifically, in connection with the magic fire of Die Walküre, which premiered at the Opéra that year. Even so, the effects of its portable onstage fog machine could not have compared to the steam production at Bayreuth. Other late nineteenth-century theater dictionaries such as Pougin’s Dictionnaire and Oppenheim and Gettke, eds., Deutsches Theater-Lexikon, do not mention steam technology or fog effects other than gauzes. 54. Journal de Genève (August 12, 1876), cited in Schneider, “Eröffnung,” 198; also Bennett, “Nibelungen,” 585; and Charles Villiers Stanford, cited in Hartford, Bayreuth, 105. For later views, see Kufferath, “Richard Wagner,” 152; and Bulthaupt, Dramaturgie 2:280. Examples of steam-focused foreign reviews are [Anon.], “Riccardo Wagner,” 2; [Ricordi], “Da Baireuth,” 251–52; and [Anon.], “Le Théatre de Bayreuth. II,” 325. 55. See above all Eduard Hanslick’s caustic review in Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo 19 (1869): 303–4. Details of the 1869 refurbishment of the Munich theater as well as the debacle around the Rheingold premiere are documented in Petzet and Petzet, Richard WagnerBühne, 184–95, which references but only partially cites sources that might have illuminated the origin of steam technology in Munich. These documents have since been discarded at D-Mhsa. Based on his notes, Michael Petzet has been able to confirm to me only that a folder on a steam engine existed (within the former shelf-mark Staatstheaterakten Nr. 13315). Unlike in the summer theater of Bayreuth, which did not require a heating system,

Notes to pages 182–186

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however, this engine might have served heating purposes (as was the case for a steam engine documented for the Vienna Court Opera in A-Whh, Generalintendanz Hofoper, box 90 (1869), no. 450). The exact extent of Carl Brandt’s involvement in Munich’s Rheingold is blurred by the fact that his younger brother Fritz (senior) was then employed as machinist there and seems to have been the “Brandt” with whom Wagner discussed the production before it went awry; see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 29–32; and Kaiser, Bühnenmeister, 50–53. The incompletely preserved administrative documents of the Darmstadt Court Theater mention steam technology only as part of a fire-insurance inventory of 1896–97. However, the technical accessories are strikingly similar to those listed for Bayreuth’s fire insurance on July 5, 1876 (Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 308–9), except for their smaller scale, with only one steam engine in a separate “Kesselhaus,” shorter pipes, and fewer valves. D-DSsa, uncatalogued box “Feuerinventar 1896–1897, folder “Gr[oßherzogliches] Familieneigenth[um] / Maschinerie. / Mobilien / einschl[ießlich] / Electr[ischer] Bel[euchtungs-]Einricht[un]g / Privat-Feuer-Versicher[un]g,” part B. 56. Kalbeck, Bühnenfestspiel, 45. For detailed contemporary descriptions of the transformations, see Mohr, Richard Wagner, 33, 35; Kufferath, “Richard Wagner,” esp. 152; and, on tinted steam, Ehlert, Aus der Tonwelt, 199. 57. The Munich procedures are recorded in the production materials in D-Mbs, St.th. 887, especially no. 10; and in D-Mhsa: Abteilung II Neuere Bestände, Staatstheater 1151 (Werkakte Rheingold). In Bayreuth, according to Kranich, Bühnentechnik, 263, a doubleheight prospect on a grate continuously moved vertically to depict the gradual change of location (he called this “Gitterverwandlung”). In light of the above reports as well as Wagner’s own critique of September 29, 1878, reported in CWT (mentioned below), this procedure seems to date from a later time (probably 1896), when Kranich’s father, also called Friedrich and a pupil of Brandt, was technical director. It is documented in Theo Raven’s early twentieth-century Bayreuth production notes, in D-KNth, M 890; see figure 4.7. 58. Music critic Heinrich Ehrlich, for instance, in 1872 talked of steam as “a main means of transport of our time,” in his “Dampf-Musik,” 119. 59. This comment (“nicht ‘lebende Bilder’—sondern ein ‘Bild des Lebens’ soll sich überall vor uns entrollen”) was probably penciled by Henriette Glasenapp into the vocal score owned by her husband, Wagner biographer Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, during the 1876 rehearsals; D-BHna, A-M 5153/I: Das Rheingold, 105. 60. [Quidde], Ketzereien, 14–15. 61. Flüggen, Wagnerbühne, esp. 6–9. 62. Kunstwerk, 151–52, PW 1:185 (modified). 63. Porges, “Richard Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel . . ., VIII.” For similarly positive impressions of the illusionist staging’s veiling of its technological production, see Tappert, “Bühnen-Festspiel,” 271; and Kretzschmar, “Bayreuther Briefe,” 456. 64. On clouds as elemental media, see Peters, Marvelous Clouds, esp. 254–60. On transparent (or immediate) mediation, Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21–31; and the introduction to this volume. 65. Shaw, “Preface to the Fourth Edition” (1922), Perfect Wagnerite, ix. 66. See Seidl’s Bayreuth production notes in US-NNC, box 3, folder 10 (cited above); and D-Ms, St.th. 887–10, which minutely details the changing uses of steam over the years.

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Notes to pages 186–189

67. See, for instance, Nicola Sabbattini, Pratica di fabricar scene e machine ne’ teatri (Ravenna, 1637), and Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, Mannhaffter Kunstspiegel (Augsburg, 1663), both translated in Hewitt, Renaissance Stage, 111 and 229; and Butterworth, Theatre of Fire. 68. Robertson, Mémoires, 354. See also Warner, Phantasmagoria, 148; and Heard, Phantasmagoria, 126. 69. For nineteenth-century practices, see the entries by L. S. on “Beleuchtung” and Z. F. u. B. on “Feuer” in Blum et al., Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon 1:274–75 and 3:261–62; and Düringer and Barthels, Theater-Lexikon, cols. 406–11. See also the original production books for La muette de Portici and Le prophète in Cohen, Original Staging Manuals for Twelve, 71 and 178; as well as the inventory of drops used for the latter opera in F-Pan AJ/13/223, “Machines et décors, 1831–1856,” subfolder “Matériel. Décorations du Prophète,” fol. 8. Similar painted backdrops of a burning city are listed for Le siège de Corinthe in F-Pan AJ/13/134, “Mises d’ouvrages à l’Opéra,” no. 536. In Darmstadt in 1835, by contrast, this last denouement was effected through collapsing practicable structures, smoke, and red illumination; see Klein-Seger, “Bühnentechnik,” 150–53. 70. See e.g., Helm, “Walküre,” 454; Petzet and Petzet, Richard Wagner-Bühne, 217; and Carnegy, Wagner, 66–67. 71. This undated observation (“Der Feuerzauber kann nur symbolisiert, nicht mit unseren schwachen scenischen Mitteln dargestellt werden”) is set in quotation marks, thus likely stemming from Siegfried Wagner, in Raven’s annotated vocal score, which has entries from the Bayreuth productions of 1906, 1912, and 1914; D-KNth, M 891:300. 72. For Wagner’s idea of 1850, see his undated letter to Theodor Uhlig, SB 3:426. On disappointment regarding Bayreuth’s fire, see Lindau, Nüchterne Briefe, 62; and Bauer, Geschichte 1:101 (though more positively 105). Ehrlich, Für den “Ring,” 59, however, was duped into believing he saw “natural flames.” Again, steam instructions are in Seidl’s notes and, with more details, the Munich production materials in D-Ms, St.th. 887. 73. On the use of both electric light and gauzes in support of the steamy magic fire, see Carnegy, Wagner, 87, 99–101. 74. Spencer, 224, also 226. The earliest layer of production notes from the 1878 Munich premiere details this use of steam in the interleaved Regie score, in D-Ms, St.th. 956–5/1, opposite 101. 75. Koepnick, Nothungs Modernität, 191–215. 76. On the fabrication and perception of this dragon, see Cormack, “ ‘Our English Monster-Man.’ ” 77. US-NNC, box 3, folder 10:62v. 78. Letter to George Constable of May 12, 1836, quoted in Leslie, Memoirs, 277. On the idea, cultivated particularly among French impressionists from the 1860s, that artworks were primarily composed of their materials, see Drucker, “Art,” 9–10. 79. Kunstwerk, 125, PW 1:158 (adapted). On new painterly approaches to materiality and perspective as well as their affinity to Wagner, see Damisch, Theory of Cloud, 197–200. 80. Kunstwerk, 153, 148; PW 1:187, 181 (adapted). 81. On this challenge to perspectival painting, following Damisch, see Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 256. 82. Mitchell and Hansen, “Introduction,” xii; Kittler, Optical Media, 29, expanding on McLuhan. On premodern conceptions of media, also Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 46–48.

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83. Kunstwerk, 157, PW 1:191. 84. Wagner, “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth” (1873), SD 9:338; translation PW 5:335. 85. Stoeckel, “Wagner Festival,” 273. 86. This definition is in Kunstwerk, 152 (“dem vereinten Werke aller Künste”); PW 1:186. The classic—if not unproblematic—text on the concept of hyperreality is Baudrillard, Simulations. 87. Wagner, “Kunst und Revolution,” SD 3:31; translation adapted from PW 1:54. Kunstwerk, 82, PW 1:111. 88. Wagner, “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth,” SD 9:331; translation adapted from PW 5:328. 89. Letter to Franz Liszt of January 30, 1852, SB 4:270; see also Vorwort, 273; PW 3: 274–75. 90. Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, 228; translation Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, 138. See also James Davison’s review for the Times, reproduced in Hartford, Bayreuth, 103. On the industrial design of the Festspielhaus, Wyss, “Ragnarök,” 70–71. 91. CWT 1:1052 (May 25, 1877), CWD 1:965. For interpretations of Nibelheim in light of capitalism and industrial modernity, see, among others, Shaw, Perfect Wagnerite; and Koepnick, Nothungs Modernität. 92. Neumann, Erinnerungen, 155–56 (translation Neumann, Personal Recollections, 149– 50); and CWT 2:736 (May 6, 1881), CWD 2:664. On the Victoria-Theater, see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 122–27; and Leonhardt, Piktoral-Dramaturgie, 383–40. 93. Examples of positive descriptions are the brief Echo report, [Anon.], “Aus Bayreuth”; Tappert, “Bühnen-Festspiel,” 272; Bennett, Letters, 44; and Hassard, Richard Wagner, 13. 94. Steam’s gravity was particularly counterproductive in Munich; see Pohl, “ ‘Das Rheingold,’ ” 834; also Bulthaupt, Dramaturgie 2:280. On the damage to instruments and the difficulty of keeping them in tune despite the use of a condensing apparatus, see Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 270–71; and Fricke, Wagner, 68. On the smell, Shaw, Perfect Wagnerite, ix; and Miedtner, “Aufführung,” 96. 95. Kretzschmar, “Bayreuther Briefe,” 457. 96. F. A. S., “Prologue.” For locomotive associations, see Schletterer, Richard Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel, 53; Hartmann, “Aus Bayreuth,” 723; X., “L’Anneau,” 300; and N. . ., “Les représentations,” 286. For positive associations with Nibelheim, see [Anon.], “ ‘Rheingold’ und ‘Walküre,’ ” 244. 97. On Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as phantasmagoria, see Versuch, 82, Search, 74; and the introduction to this volume. 98. On the task of each art form as well as the interaction between actors and spectators, which Wagner laid out in Kunstwerk, see Koss, Modernism, 21; and the introduction to this volume. 99. On the stench of lycopodium, see P., “ ‘Robert der Teufel,’ ” 198–99; on the fumes caused by standard illumination, Johnson, Listening, 11–13. 100. On these caricatures by [Jean-Jacques] Grandville (i.e., Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), see Tresch, Romantic Machine, 176–87; and Southon, “La métaphore,” 101–4. More caricatures are accessible at http://www.hberlioz.com/Cartoons/index.htm. For an 1869 Swiss caricature that placed a whistling train at the center of Wagner’s “Music of the Future”

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Notes to pages 193–199

(along with cannons and all manner of human and animal sounds), see Grand-Carteret, Richard Wagner, 107. 101. Z., “Bilder aus Bayreuth.” 102. Auden, “New Year Letter” (1940), in Collected Poems, 236. 103. On the then-recent rapprochement between Liszt and Wagner and the public perception of the former as Wagner’s main supporter, see Walker, Franz Liszt, 341–56, esp. 355. On Bösendorfer’s support, Beard, “Audi alteram partem,” 532. 104. On this goal, articulated most explicitly in “Kunst und Revolution,” see the introduction to this volume. 105. Thus in an undated remark reported by Fricke, Wagner, 99. See also CWT 1:1001–2 (September 9, 1876), CWD 1:921–22; and the epilogue in this volume. 106. CWT 2:186 (September 29, 1878), CWD 2:159. 107. Kretzschmar, “Bayreuther Briefe,” 464. 108. CWT 2:735 (May 5, 1881), CWD 2:664. On the difficulty of hearing the music during the “exceeding noise of the vapors” in an 1882 Frankfurt production, see Pohl, Richard Wagner, 313. 109. [Anon.], “ ‘Rheingold’ und ‘Walküre,’ ” 244. On Neumann’s negotiations with Wagner over the Bayreuth inventory, see his Erinnerungen, esp. 21–25, 35, 184, 199–200. 110. Letter to Ludwig II of March 16, 1881, in Wagner and Ludwig II, Briefwechsel 3:201. On the ideal of a correct performance, see, for instance, his letter to Heinrich Esser of September 27, 1859, SB 11:260; also “Schlußbericht über die Umstände und Schicksale . . .,” SD 9:314–22, PW 5:312–19; and the introduction to this volume. 111. Wagner to Neumann, June 21, 1878, in Neumann, Erinnerungen, 77 (translation adapted from Recollections, 74–75). 112. Fricke, Wagner, 44; also Porges, Wagner, vii. On the problem of notating Wagner’s gestural ideas, see Puchner, Stage Fright, 51–52; on the introduction of interleaved vocal scores (rather than libretti) in association with Wagner stagings, Langer, Regisseur, 179–88. 113. Thus in Turin; see the review cited in Jung, Rezeption, 179. On the use of steam on tour, see also Neumann, Erinnerungen, 304–5; and Juhász, Ring, 15 and 28. 114. For reactions to the steam on tour, see Juhász, Ring, 118, 133; and the Berlin reviews signed R. F., “Im Victoria-Theater,” and §§, “Im Victoria-Theater.” Kufferath, “Richard Wagner,” 154, argued that the tour disseminated certain Bayreuth effects despite presenting only pale imitations thereof. For more on this tour, see the epilogue in this volume. 115. Kufferath, “Richard Wagner,” 153; Moynet, Machinerie, 188, also 158. On Paris, see also Nicolet, “Autour de ‘La Valkyrie.’ ” Various late nineteenth-century production books include steam for the conflagration; see, for instance, an unidentified interleaved French libretto as well as the production book from the Grand Théâtre de Lyon, both in F-Pbmo, C 6718 and B 397.6. 116. See Izenour, Theater Technology, 109. Adler had visited several European opera houses—including Bayreuth—in the summer of 1888 to facilitate the best stage technology for his Auditorium Theater. See [Adler,] “Illinois State Association of Architects,” 21–22; Gregersen and Saltzstein, Adler, 5, 21–22; and, on further Bayreuth inspirations on the architectural and aesthetic levels, Clague, “Industrial Evolution,” 492–94. 117. See the curtain instructions in D-F, Mus Hs Oper 595 D, (6): Regie-Klavierauszug, and (7): Souffleur-Klavierauszug.

Notes to pages 199–202

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118. [Anon.], “Il trionfo”; also [Anon.], “ ‘L’Oro del Reno,’ ” according to which the first transformation had been effected by a “dense veil of clouds.” On Vienna, see Oesterlein, Walküre, 14–15, 23; on New York, the extracts in Kolodin, Metropolitan Opera, 97–98, and Eisler, Metropolitan Opera, 153–54. According to Pohl, Richard Wagner, 312–13, a curtain for the Nibelheim transformations was also used elsewhere—including Leipzig—for lack of moving canvases and to afford an intermission. 119. See Porges’s observation cited in Pohl, “Orchester,” 39; and the detailed invoices by Emil Staudt & Co. from November 1881 through July 1882 in D-BHna, ASF 12/II, no. 206. For more on the moving canvases, see Carnegy, Wagner, 111–13; and chapter 2 in this volume. 120. Thus according to the 1914 production notes (with comparisons to 1896 and 1911) by Theo Raven, D-KNth, M 890, esp. 549; see also figure 4.7. Similarly, steam was absent from the funeral procession in Götterdämmerung; D-KNth, M 893:304. For an acerbic critique of the overzealous use of steam in the 1896 Nibelheim transformations, see Wirth, Fahrt, 12–15, and Entdeckung, 160–97. On steam in 1896, see also George Bernhard Shaw’s reviews, reproduced in Hartford, Bayreuth, 226, 230; and Weingartner, Bayreuth, 50, 58. 121. Thus according to Raven’s annotated vocal score of Die Walküre, referring to the Bayreuth productions of 1906, 1912, and 1914; D-KNth, M 891:300. 122. See, for instance, the Rheingold production books by Alois Hofmann (Cologne, 1897) and Albert Rosenberg Jr. (Cologne, 1905), both in D-KNth, M 884 and M 886; and Paul Stuart (Paris, 1909) in F-Pbmo, B 369. 123. Such detailed instructions are particularly evident in the Munich performance materials from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s; see esp. D-M, St.th. 890–7/II (comments on the inside cover and p. 269 of vol. 2 of this vocal score) and 11/III (inside cover). On the introduction of quiet chemical vapor, Kranich, Bühnentechnik, 21–22; and Baumann, Bühnentechnik, 75–76, 272. For the paradigmatic use of steam by the 1930s, see the production book by Hanns Niedecken-Gebhardt, D-KNth, M 888. 124. Berlioz, Les Troyens, NBE 2:443–76; Goldmark, Die Königin von Saba, 383; Boito, Mefistofele, 1; Humperdinck, Hänsel und Gretel, 109. On the complex yet steam-less staging of Boito’s Prologue according to its disposizione scenica, see Campana, Opera, 25–26. 125. Knispel, Das Großherzogliche Hoftheater, 247. 126. D-Mbs, St.th. 661–23:204; this vocal score of Undine was used to direct the stage music following the new production of either 1865 or, more likely, 1884. 127. D-Mbs, St.th. 702–16. This vocal score was likely used since Hallwachs’s new production of Le prophète opened on February 2, 1869. In light of critics’ comments on the novelty of steam effects in Das Rheingold, premiered on September 22 that year, it is likely that steam was added into Le prophète subsequently. (There are no traces of steam in the director’s score for Munich’s premiere production of Le prophète in 1850.) For Raven’s combination of steam, red light, silk flames, and gun smoke explosion, see D-KNth, L 5090, final interleaved page (production book of uncertain provenance). 128. Interleaved libretto for the lighting technician, D-Mbs, St.th. 1198–2:17, 20. 129. D-Mbs, St.th. 1198–2, opposite 17 and 20. Moynet, Machinerie, 188. 130. Review in Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt (December 19, 1915), cited in Pachl, “Das Szenische,” 132. For the stage directions, see Schreker, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, 110. Even more redolent of the Venusberg grotto is the island “Elysium” in act 3 of Die Gezeichneten (Frankfurt, 1918).

286

Notes to pages 202–213

131. Korngold, “ ‘Spielwerk,’ ” 2; Bienenfeld, “ ‘Spielwerk,’ ” 14. For more on the opera’s negative reception, which Schreker himself blamed on the opulent staging, see Hailey, Franz Schreker, 74–77. 132. Korngold, “Operntheater,” 3. For more on this production, see my essay “Voices,” esp. 168–70. 133. Atkinson, “Music Hall’s Opening.” For more on Werfel’s promotion of Verdi and a concomitant rise of anti-Wagnerism, see my Verdi, esp. 148–72. 134. Thus particularly in his second Ring of 1965; see Bauer, Geschichte 2:166–85. In 1951, he had still used red-tinted steam for the onset of the conflagration before projections set in, and replaced the dragon entirely with billows of steam (something he later considered mistaken). See Panofsky, Wieland Wagner, 41–42; and Kügler, “Ring,” 285–308. Eidam, Bayreuther Erinnerungen, 106, believed that the introduction of projections in 1927 rendered the noisy steam redundant. 135. Joachim Herz, “Gegen Unverbindlichkeit—für Phantasie,” in Mack, Theaterarbeit, 58. On connections between Herz’s and Cheréau’s productions, see also Carnegy, Wagner, 355. 136. The expression is Carnegy’s, in Wagner, 356. On the different types of vapors and Chéreau’s personal involvement, see ML, “ ‘Rheingold.’ ” Heavy use of steam had been a trademark of Chéreau’s theater productions already before the Ring; see Shevtsova, “Chéreau,” 196–97. 137. Heidegger, “Question,” 321, also 312. 138. See the definition at http://www.theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/glossary-of-technical -theatre-terms/. 139. Hanslick, Stationen, 248–49; translation adapted from Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, 153. 140. On the use of fragrances and odors in stage performances, see Sally Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” and Mary Fleischer, “Incense and Decadents: Symbolist Theatre’s Use of Scent,” both in Banes and Lepecki, Senses, 29–37 and 105–14. On the rise of postdramatic theater, see Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater; and below. 141. On this development regarding collage practices, see Drucker, “Art,” 11. 142. See Warner, Phantasmagoria, 83. 143. Seel, “Inszenieren,” 58. 144. See Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre. 145. A photograph of the 1974 recreation of the work at Western Washington University is in Morris, Robert Morris, 225. 146. Fried, “Art.” 147. See Williams, Underneath, 292–93. 148. See http://www.cinemasight.com/awards-history/57th-academy-awards-1984/57thacademy-awards-1984-nominees-and-winners/; and Dewitz, “Profi.” 149. On the rise of steampunk aesthetics, see Cherry and Mellins, “Negotiating”; and Stimpson, “Victorians,” esp. 19–22, 29–32. On its affinity with Chéreau’s Ring, Raz, “Wagnerpunk.” 150. See Kinsella, “Pink Hot Tub.” 151. On the dematerialization of art in the 1960s and its consequences, see Drucker, “Art,” 13. 152. Clark, Farewell, 7, 10; Clark, “Modernism,” 172.

Notes to pages 213–220

287

153. Gumbrecht, “Production,” 351–52 and 355; see also his Production. For a survey of “postmodern sensibilities,” see Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 178–221; on the concept of “late modernism” as well as the cyclic renewal of modernism and its breaks, Jameson, Singular Modernity, esp. 150–51. 154. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in his Painter, 13. 155. Berman, All That Is Solid, 15 and, for the full Marx citation, 21. 156. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 113, 120; Liquid Times, 1. 157. For a summary of these developments, see also Brown, “Materiality,” esp. 50. EPILOGUE

1. Ulrich Lenz in Gob Squad et al., “Robot,” 7. My description is based on my experience of the performance on July 5, 2015. On Kluge’s dictum, see his Facts, 36–37. 2. Novak, Postopera, esp. 4–6 and 25–33; Lehman, Postdramatic Theatre, 99. 3. On this shift, see Powell, Differentiation, esp. 2–3. 4. Berit Stumpf in Gob Squad et al., “Robot,” 9; Manfred Hild in Gob Squad et al., “Robot,” 8–9; on the musicians, Lenz in Gob Squad et al., “Robot,” 11–12. 5. [Quidde], Ketzereien, 73. 6. See e.g., “Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876,” SD 10:105 and 112, PW 6:98 and 104–5. 7. CWT 1:1001–2 (September 9, 1876), CWD 1:922; Wagner to Ludwig II (August 25, 1879), in Wagner and Ludwig II, Briefwechsel 3:158; translation SL, 896–97. 8. Wagner singled out these mishaps in “Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876,” SD 10:110–12, PW 6:103–4. For more on the dragon, see Cormack, “ ‘Our English Monster-Man.’ ” 9. Thus according to CWT 1:1001 (September 9, 1876), CWD 1:921; on his public praise of Brandt, see the introduction to this volume. 10. Wagner, “Ansprache an die Abgesandten des Bayreuther Patronats,” SD 12:329. 11. For similar observations on the inevitable failure of theatrical technology, see Ridout, “Opera,” 164–65; and Smith, Total Work, 187. 12. This was already articulated by the theatrical reformer Adolphe Appia, for instance in his “Comments on the Staging of the Ring of the Nibelungs” (1891–92), in Appia, Essays, 93. On the fast ageing of Bayreuth’s illusionist technologies, see also Shaw, “Preface to the Fourth Edition” (1922), in his Perfect Wagnerite, viii–xi. 13. Wagner, “Ansprache an die Abgesandten des Bayreuther Patronats,” SD 12:330–31; CWT 1:1002 (September 9, 1876), CWD 1:922. For the more famous comment that Wagner intended to “do it all differently” in a future production, see Fricke, Wagner, 99 (undated postscript). 14. CWT 2:181 (September 23, 1878), CWD 2:154. 15. Adorno, “Opera,” 62–66. 16. Carnegy, Wagner, 119. 17. Wagner to Angelo Neumann (June 21, 1878), in the latter’s Erinnerungen, 77; translation adapted from Neumann, Personal Recollections, 74–75. 18. Letters to Ernst Benedikt Kietz (September 14, 1850) and Theodor Uhlig [September 20, 1850], SB 3:426; SL, 216–17.

288

Notes to pages 221–224

19. Mittheilung, 330; PW 1:378 (modified). 20. This was reported by Porges, Wagner, vii. Richard Fricke und Anton Seidl also took copious notes. 21. Kittler, “Fiktion und Simulation,” in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 196–213, here 209, cited in Klein, “Wagners Medientechnologie,” 413. On Kittler’s Lacanian distinction between symbolic, imaginary, and real media, see Gramophone, esp. 13–17. 22. Wagner, “Ansprache an die Abgesandten des Bayreuther Patronats,” SD 12:331. On his earlier efforts, beginning in 1865, to have Ludwig II fund a music school in Munich, see Wagner’s letters to Ludwig II of July 30, 1865, and January 18, 1867, Wagner and Ludwig II, Briefwechsel 1:138–39 and 2:136; and his report of March 31, 1865, in SD 8:126–76. 23. Letter to Friedrich Schön (May 28, 1882), in Wagner, Richard Wagner an Freunde, 598; translation SL, 922. See also “Entwurf veröffentlicht mit den Statuten des Patronatsvereins” (September 15, 1877), SD 10:16–18, PW 6:19–21; “Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Friedrich Schön in Worms” (June 16, 1882), SD 10:291–96, PW 6:293–300; and “Brief an H. v. Wolzogen” (March 13, 1882), SD 10:287–90, PW 6:19–21. 24. This was most explicit in his “Entwurf ” and the letter to Wolzogen. For a critical reading of this idea of a stylistic school, see also Mösch, Weihe, 68–76. 25. According to Albert Heintz, Wagner had micromanaged the Parsifal production to such an extent “that the manner of performance was at the same time an authentic documentation of how Wagner imagines his style to be realized”; in Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung (Augsburg) (August 4, 1882), reproduced in Großmann-Vendrey, Bayreuth 2:79. 26. Kittler himself read the sunken Bayreuth orchestra as an amplifier avant la lettre in “World-Breath,” 224. 27. CWT 2:664 (January 12, 1881), CWD 2:597. 28. Wagner to Neumann (October 16, 1881), Neumann, Erinnerungen, 198, Personal Recollections, 193; also CWT 2:879 (January 25, 1882), CWD 2:796. 29. On these tours, see my Verdi, 51–54. 30. As we have seen in chapter 4, Wagner had links to, and attended several performances of, the company. Neumann meanwhile explicitly compared his tour to the Meiningen company; Erinnerungen, 251. On the Italian Lohengrin’s “transplantation,” see Vella, “ ‘Ito per ferrovia.’ ” 31. Rubow and Rump, “Das wandelnde Bayreuth,” 194. Most accounts of the tour are based on Neumann’s detailed but often unreliable Erinnerungen. More comprehensive are the surveys by the Wagner Theater’s inspector Juhász, Ring and Das Richard WagnerTheater. See also my “Authentizität.” 32. Examples of critical assessments are the London Athenaeum review (May 13, 1882), cited in Carnegy, Wagner, 128; Lessmann, “Richard Wagner’s ‘Ring,’ ” 381–83; P. F., “Tetralogia,” 160; and Wilder, “L’Anneau,” 65–66. On the size of the orchestra, see Juhász, Ring, 19. 33. See e.g., Rubow and Rump, “Das wandelnde Bayreuth,” 200–201. 34. See e.g., Kolland, “Wagner,” 117–24; and Warshaw, “ ‘Dream Organ,’ ” 184–98; also critically Joe, “Why Wagner,” 2. 35. Crainquebille [Enrico Thovez], “L’arte di celluloide,” 3; I am indebted to Christy Thomas for this reference. 36. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 33–34; see also esp. 21–22.

Notes to pages 224–230

289

37. Versuch, 98–99, Search, 92. On the distinction between transparent media and hypermedia, see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21–44. 38. Kittler, Optical Media, 39. 39. See, for example, Friedberg, “End”; and, critically, Elsaesser, Film History, 17. The many discussions of an “opera crisis” during the 1920s testify to early cinema’s perceived threat to opera. A paradigmatic summary of contemporary concerns regarding the influence of HD broadcasts on live opera is Tommasini, “Success.” 40. See Pela, “Vinyl Revival.” For more on this renewed fascination with older media, see also Schrey, “Analogue Nostalgia,” 27–38; and the introduction to this volume. 41. For similar observations, see Walker, “Digital Culture”; and Elsaesser, Film History, 385. 42. Cowan, “Warcraft.” 43. Ernst, Digital Memory, 55. 44. Richard Schechner, “Actuals: A Look Inside Performance Theory,” cited in Schneider, Performing Remains, 15. On this and the following, see also Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, esp. 17–23. 45. For these and the following claims, see Abramović and Jones, “Live Artist,” esp. 545, 560. 46. Abramović and Jones, “Live Artist,” 562. 47. “Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, Hudson, New York: Instructions for the Institute,” in Orrell, Abramović, 53. See also Orrell, Abramović, 17–18; and Genocchio, “Seeking.” The Foundation, established in 2007, has meanwhile been rechristioned, less ambitiously, the Marina Abramović Institute. 48. Following a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, the Institute now also has an online presence: https://mai.art/about-mai/. 49. My commentary on this production is based on the live experience of all four operas, each from a different section in the auditorium, on October 9, 2010; May 9, 2011; November 5, 2011; and January 27, 2012, as well as the HD transmissions—either live or encored—of them, all of which are now available online on Met Opera on Demand as well as on DVD. 50. Thus read the initial screen titles of Eisenhardt and Froemke’s documentary film, Wagner’s Dream. 51. Lepage in Eisenhardt and Froemke, Wagner’s Dream, chapter 7. 52. Thus reporter Vivian Lee in the introductory section of Eisenhardt and Froemke, Wagner’s Dream. 53. See, for instance, Wakin, “Valhalla Machine.” Designed by Carl Fillion, the machine is a descendant of similar such devices used in Lepage’s theatrical shows; see Dixon, Digital Performance, 351–58. 54. Kunstwerk, 130–40, PW 1:162–74. 55. Lepage himself confirmed these observations in an interview in Eisenhardt and Froemke, Wagner’s Dream. Clarke, “Wagnerism Embodied,” has argued for the machine as integrating architecture itself. On machines in Lepage’s earlier theatrical productions as an “extension of his own or his performers’ bodies,” see Innes, “Puppets,” 124. 56. Kittler, Gramophone, xxxix (though the German formulation—“Medien bestimmen unsere Lage”—is somewhat less deterministic; Kittler, Grammophon, 3).

290

Notes to pages 230–237

57. Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott, 1982; The Matrix, directed by the Wachowskis, 1999; Avatar, director James Cameron, 2009. Lepage has indeed cited Blade Runner as a visual influence; see Smith, “Gesamtkunstwerk,” 71. 58. Wakin and Lohr, “3-D.” 59. For the original set designs, see Bauer, Josef Hoffmann, 91–111; for the costumes, Zeh, Das Bayreuther Bühnenkostüm, figures 1–35. The costumes of Lepage’s production were designed by François St-Aubin. 60. For similar criticism, see Ross’s acerbic “Diminuendo,” 82–83; and Shengold, “45 Tonnen Technik,” 23. 61. Appia, Essays, 94. On Lautenschläger, see Baker, From the Score, 254. 62. https://www.media.mit.edu/people/tod (quoted text archived at https://web.archive. org/web/20161028225919/https://www.media.mit.edu/people/tod). See also Ijem, “Transhumanism.” The opera was premiered on September 24, 2010, at the Salle Garnier in Monte Carlo, Monaco. My comments are based on the Blue-ray disk recording of a 2014 production by Dallas Opera. 63. On this trend, see Eckersall, “Towards a Dramaturgy,” esp. 129. 64. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 19. 65. On this challenge in many early Abramović performances, see Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 11–18. On the reenactment of Imponderabilia, singled out by many commentators as particularly disappointing, Biesenbach, Marina Abramović, 100–103. My commentary is based on media coverage as well as a visit to the retrospective on April 3, 2010. 66. For this reason, Abramović has admitted to updating and changing some of the original technologies and ploys of pieces she herself has reperformed; Abramović and Jones, “Live Artist,” 549–52, 556–57. 67. An example is the 2005 show Kà; see http://www.mgmgrand.com/entertainment/ ka-cirque-du-soleil-show.aspx. A similar argument has been made by Woolfe, “Seeing Met’s ‘Ring.’ ” 68. Schoenberg, “Gibt es eine Krise der Oper?,” 209. 69. For a similar conclusion, see Drummond, “Western Opera.” 70. Ashman, “A Ring,” here in the DVD booklet to Das Rheingold, 6. My discussion is based entirely on this DVD version. 71. Cited in Ashman, “A Ring,” 6.

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A-Whh (Generalintendanzen Burgtheater, Hoftheater, Hofoper) A-Wn (scores) D-B (scores) D-Bga (I. HA; BPH) D-BHna (A-M; ASF; Hs) D-DSsa (D12, 30/42, digitized at https://arcinsys.hessen.de/arcinsys/detailAction.action? detailid=v4156275; uncatalogued documents) D-F (Mus Hs Opern) D-KNth (set designs, libretti, scores) D-Mbs (Bestand Staatstheater) D-Mhsa (Abteilung II Neuere Bestände, 3. Staatstheater) D-WRdn (digitized scores) F-Pan (AJ/13, Opéra; AJ/37/81, Consérvatoire) F-Pn (scores) F-Pbmo (performance materials, maquettes, documents) I-Mas (Spettacoli pubblici) I-Mr (Copialettere) I-Mt (Spettacoli pubblici) UK-Boosey & Hawkes Archive, Horniman Museum US-NNC (Anton Seidl Collection) 291

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Index

Abramović, Marina, 225–26, 233–34 acousmatic technique, 72, 73–74, 77–80, 81, 152 acoustic curtain, gong as, 157, 196 acoustic technologies: Bayreuth’s orchestra pit as technology, 93, 144–45; gong as sound technology, 111, 112, 124, 133, 147, 150, 154–60; overtures and use of curtain, 61–66, 63–64ex; in Tannhäuser, 33–35, 34ex; use of, 23–24; Wagner curtain and, 93–94; Wagner on orchestra as technology, 18, 48–49, 148–49. See also gong (tam-tam); music; stage technology; technology act curtains, use of, 73–80, 252n21; musicalizing the curtain, 97–104, 101ex, 103ex, 261n161. See also drop scenes; moving canvases action, relationship to music, 35 Adler, Dankmar, 198–99 Adorno, Theodor, 25, 44, 81, 100, 112, 149–50, 155, 220, 224; on Wagner’s works as phantasmagoria, 15, 151, 179, 192, 218 Africaine, L’ (Meyerbeer, 1865), 127 Agnes von Hohenstaufen (Spontini, 1837), 78, 132 Aiblinger, Johann Caspar, 137 Aida (Verdi, 1871), 127 Alceste (Gluck, 1767, 1776), 62, 64 alloys, gong composition, 139–40, 142 Amiot, Joseph, 135–36, 139 Amphitryon (Grétry, 1786), 62, 63–64ex

Anacréon chez Polycrate (Grétry, 1797), 62 analog media, renewed interest in, 25, 224–25 Anders, Michael, 56, 99 Angely, Louis, 123 Anna Nicole (Turnage, 2011), 107–8 Antheil, George: Ballet mécanique (1926), 153–54 Appia, Adolphe, 94, 232 architecture, theatrical, 3–4, 6, 8, 20; curtain as part of, 22, 55–58, 72, 92–94; Gesamtkunstwerk and, 13–15, 229, 289n55 Aristotle, on technology, 4 Arlen, Harold, 211–12 Armida (Rossini, 1817), 77, 128–29, 138 Armide (Gluck, 1777), 165 aroma. See scent “Art and Revolution” (Wagner, 1849), 16 “Art-Work of the Future, The” (Wagner, 1849), 12, 32–33; on architecture, 229; on landscape painting, 36, 189; Wagner curtain and, 95 Auber, Daniel François Esprit: curtain, use of, 59, 77; fire, use of, 168; gong, use of, 132; La muette de Portici (1828), 19, 59, 77, 132, 142, 155, 168, 178, 181, 186 Aufschreibesystem, 221, 224 authenticity: of Angelo Neumann’s touring Ring production (1882–83), 95, 197, 222–23; Bayreuth as guarantor of, 208–9, 221–22;

335

336

index

of Cosima Wagner’s Tannhäuser production (1891), 47, 155; of gong uses, 117, 152–53; of Lepage’s Ring production (2010–2012), 1–2, 6, 25, 47, 226–27, 230–32, 238; of new media, 233; of performance, 2, 6, 225; of performance art, 233–34; of steam, 189, 205, 207 automata, 8 Baden-Baden, Festspielhaus, 42, 45fig Ballet mécanique (Antheil, 1926), 153–54 ballet pantomime, 31, 46 Balò, Maurizio, 46fig Banks, Sir Joseph, 115, 139 Baroque opera: curtain, use of, 56–57, 105, 163, 165; and deus ex machina, 8, 217; and picture stage, 56, 106; stage technologies in, 8–9, 75–76, 90 Barrow, John, 115, 139 bass drum, 265n54; in Ballet mécanique, 154; in Chant national, 120; in Fernand Cortez, 128; as “noise,” 143–44; in La princesse jaune, 151; in Samson et Dalila, 132; replacing tam-tam in Armida, 138; in Tarare, 121 Baudelaire, Charles, 213, 247n56 Bauer, Raimund, 45fig Bauman, Zygmunt, 213 Bayreuth Festspielhaus: architecture of, 13–14, 107; machinic facilities of, 19, 39, 180, 191–96, 218–20, 232; “mystic abyss,” 189; noise in, 157, 192; as recording mechanism, 197–98, 208–9, 221–23, 226; as school for artists, 221–22, 226; steam, production techniques, 163, 164, 180–81, 199; steam, use of, 24–25, 180–88, 190–92, 199, 200fig, 231; sunken pit, 93, 144–45, 191, 196–97; support for, 191, 193–96, 195fig; Tannhäuser in, 27–28, 46–47, 51, 98, 100, 102, 155; as temple, 193, 212; as Venusberg, 21–22, 30, 37–40, 191; Wagner curtain, 23, 55, 58, 91–97, 92fig, 93fig, 108, 193, 260n138; Wagner’s vision for, 13–14, 20–21. See also Parsifal; Ring des Nibelungen, Der; stage technology; Tannhäuser Beatrice et Benedict (Berlioz, 1862), 98 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, as gong owner, 121, 136, 138, 265n59 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7; Egmont (1810), use of curtains, 79; König Stephan (1811), 166 beffroi, 114, 121, 154. See also gong (tam-tam) Bellini, Vincenzo: Norma (1831), 77, 127, 255n68; Il pirata (1827), 132

bell piano (Glockenklavier), 154–55 bell sounds: compared to gong, 115, 121; as curtain signal, 60, 156; in opera, 19, 121, 151–52; use of gong, 154–55 Benvenuto Cellini (Berlioz, 1838, 1852), 263n14, 268n99 Berg, Alban, 107; Lulu (1937), 262n168; Wozzeck (1925), 102–4, 103ex Berlin: Court Theater, stage technologies in, 76, 137, 266n69, 270n131; Ring performances in, 187fig, 191, 196, 198, 206, 222; VictoriaTheater, 140, 187fig, 191; Wagner in, 181, 198, 257n98; Wagner parodies in, 54, 209, 210fig. See also Komische Oper Berlin Berlioz, Hector, 71–72, 193; Beatrice et Benedict (1862), 98; Benvenuto Cellini (1838, 1852), 263n14, 268n99; curtain, use of, 71–72, 98; La damnation de Faust (1846), 129, 131, 135, 150, 154; gong, use of, 109, 110, 120, 127, 129, 131, 134–35, 150, 154, 263n14, 265n57, 268n99; Grande messe des morts (1837), 120; Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840), 109, 120; Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (1831–32), 71, 129, 142; Messe solennelle (1825), 120; on orchestration, 129, 136, 144, 150; Les Troyens (1863), 72, 127, 131, 155, 201 Berman, Marshall, 213 Betzwieser, Thomas, 121 Bins, Jacques, comte de Saint-Victor, 127 Bizet, Georges, 50, 162; Les pêcheurs de perles (1863), 127 black magic, gong use and, 128–31, 130ex Blumauer, Franz, 46fig bohème, La (Puccini, 1896), 99 “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Queen, 1975), 158 Böhm, Martin, 54, 76, 105, 183 Boito, Arrigo: Mefistofele (1876), 201 Bolter, Jay David, 224, 233 Boosey company, 138–39 Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky, 1869), 154 Boswell, James, 115, 117, 133, 142 Brandt, Carl, 13, 19, 157, 196, 207, 219; steam, use of, 180–88, 281n55 Brandt, Fritz, junior (son of Carl Brandt), 196 Brandt, Fritz, senior (brother of Carl Brandt), 281n55 Brecht, Bertolt, 23, 55, 104–6; Threepenny Opera (1928), 105; “Die Vorhänge” (1951), 105 Bredekamp, Horst, 9, 40 Brendel, Franz, 7 Brown, James, 158

index Busby, Thomas, 264n46 Busoni, Ferruccio: Turandot (1917), 104, 152, 262n172 Buttmann, Patrick, 45fig Carlyle, Thomas, 163 Carnegy, Patrick, 18–19, 180, 220 Catel, Louis, 75 Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni, 1890), 260n146 ceremonial music, gong use in, 120, 127, 135, 153 Chant national (Méhul, 1800), 120 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 141fig Charlton, David, 113, 119, 120, 122, 134, 135, 265n61 Chéreau, Patrice, 204–5, 204fig, 205fig, 211, 212 Cherubini, Luigi, 120, 122, 168; Hymne du Panthéon (1794), 120; Lodoïska (1791), 168 Chicago, Auditorium Theater, 198–99 China, history of gong in, 114–17, 118fig Chinese gong. See under gong (tam-tam) Chladni, Ernst, 134, 137 Christian iconography, 96 cinema: curtain, use of, 105–6; electronic audiovisual media, 223–24; gong, use of, 269n99; influence on Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12), 227, 232; influence on opera, 102; realism offered by, 234; steam, use of, 211–12; Wagner and, 14–15, 223–24 Clark, T. J., 213 clockworks, 8 clouds, 37, 147; cloud curtains, 76, 163, 171; to create atmospheric or nature settings, 166, 182; to facilitate stage transformations, 89, 201, 255–56n79; in Goethe’s Faust, 167; mystical imagery of, 278n31; in Romantic painting, 188–89; Wagner’s use of, 166–68, 170, 172, 227, 279n33 Cocteau, Jean, 104 color, Wagner’s use of, 40–42 Constable, John, 189 Corri, Domenico, 117; The Travellers, or Music’s Fascination (1806), 116–17, 118fig Crary, Jonathan, 10 crociato in Egitto, Il (Meyerbeer, 1824), 65 curtain: aesthetic importance of, 55–56; Brecht curtain, 105–6; cinema, use in, 105–6; cloud curtain, 76, 163, 171; delayed opening, 66–72, 68ex, 69–70ex, 255n67; different terms for, 74–75; Filet curtain, 54, 105; fire curtain, 259n124; German theaters, use of, 58–59, 255n70; history of, 56–57, 250–51n6, 251n17, 251–52n20, 252n23; Italian theaters,

337

use of, 58, 252n23, 255n67; musicalizing the curtain, 97–104, 101ex, 103ex, 261n161; operatic use of, overview, 57–58; parodies of, 54–55; precocious openings, 61–66, 253n40, 253n44, 254n52; proscenium (main) curtain, 56–57, 59–60, 71, 74, 75, 91, 102, 104–7, 212, 216, 252nn30–31, 262n180; Der Ring des Nibelungen, use in, 54–55, 80; Tannhäuser, use in, 54, 86, 89, 98; as theatrical frame, 22, 55, 58–61, 67, 72, 80, 93fig, 251n17; as tool of seduction, 96; traditional role of, 55; Wagner curtain, 23, 91–97, 92fig, 93fig, 258–59n120; Wagner’s, use of, 22–23, 80–91, 83–85ex, 87ex, 257n102. See also act curtains; drop scenes curtain line, 80, 93 cymbals, 110, 114, 120, 128, 139–40, 144, 272n185 damnation de Faust, La (Berlioz, 1846), 129, 131, 135, 154 dance: “The Art-Work of the Future” and, 32–35; grand opéra, 31–32; and Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12), 229; in Tannhäuser, 31–32, 249n81 Darcet, Jean-Pierre-Joseph, 139–40, 142 Darmstadt Court Theater: Brandt as theater technician, 180; gong acquisition, 134, 138; La vestale (Spontini), 134, 137; steam and fire technology, 182, 201, 281n55, 282n69 David, Félicien: Herculanum (1859), 132, 150–51, 168 death, gong use for, 122–31, 125–126ex, 130ex Death of Captain Cook, The (Arnould-Mussot, 1789), 116 Death and the Powers (Machover, 2010), 233 Debussy, Claude: Pelléas et Melisande (1902), 100 demons, gong use and, 128–31, 130ex Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe (Grétry, 1794), 67, 69–70ex Derrida, Jacques, 72, 79, 243n71 Devrient, Eduard, 171 diabolical worlds, gong use and, 128–31, 130ex digital age, xi, 213–14 dinner gongs, 115–16, 157, 269n116 Dinorah (Meyerbeer, 1859), 71 director’s opera. See Regietheater dissolving views (Nebelbilder), 32, 37, 39, 67, 89, 94, 245n18 Doepler, Emil, 181 Dolan, Emily I., 112 Dombois, Johanna, 56, 94 Dom Sébastien, roi du Portugal (Donizetti, 1843), 74, 154, 156

338

index

Don Carlos (Verdi, 1867, 1884, 1886), 74, 131, 156, 202, 255n67 Donizetti, Gaetano, 70–71, 140; Dom Sébastien, roi du Portugal (1843), 74, 154, 156; La favorite (1840), 123; Les martyrs (1840), 123; Poliuto (1848), 123 Dresden Court Theater: Rienzi premiere, 13; Tannhäuser premiere, 31; Weber’s rehearsal practices at, 10 drop scenes, 75–77; in French and German opera, 76; in London, 76; static, 89; Wagner’s use of, 89–91 Dyson, Frances, 145 Ebert-Schifferer, Sibylle, 96 École des arts et métiers, 140 Edgar (Puccini, 1889), 99 Egmont (Beethoven, 1810), 79 Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 113 Elcott, Noam, 14 electronic audiovisual media, 223–24 Elektra (Strauss, 1909), 153 Enchanted Castle, The (Shield, 1786), 117 endless melody (unendliche Melodie), 48–49, 163 Engert-Ely, Ruthild, 44fig Ermione (Rossini, 1819), 71, 77 Ernst, Wolfgang, 5, 113 Esclarmonde (Massenet, 1893), 97 Ex Machina (production company), 228fig, 229 Expositions Universelles, 151 eye, Wagner curtain as, 95 fanciulla del West, La (Puccini, 1910), 261n15 fantastical subjects, gong use and, 128–31, 130ex Faust (Gounod, 1859), 131–32, 167 favorite, La (Donizetti, 1840), 123 Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête de Mexique (Spontini, 1809), 128 Fétis, François-Joseph, 139 Fillion, Carl, 228fig film: curtain, use of, 105–6; electronic audiovisual media, 223–24; gong, use of, 268n99; realism offered by, 234; steam, use of, 211–12 fire: as ancient technology, 24, 142, 168, 202; as effective operatic denouement, 24, 172, 178; in film, 211; in Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12), 228fig, 230; onstage simulation of, 168, 180, 181, 186, 187–88, 187fig, 191–92, 196, 198–99, 202, 208, 209, 236, 279n40, 281n55, 282n69; as technology in the Ring, 24, 147, 167–70, 171, 172, 209, 230; theater regulations on, 191; Wagner’s use of steam

and sound to simulate, 147, 149, 178–80, 186–87, 187fig fire curtain, 259n124 Fiske, Roger, 116 fliegende Holländer, Der (Wagner, 1843): curtain, use of, 59, 81, 88; gong, use of, 111–12, 142, 143, 147 florentinische Tragödie, Eine (Zemlinsky, 1916), 260n149 Floros, Constantin, 153 fog. See steam, stage use of fog machines, 211–12 forza del destino, La (Verdi, 1869), 97 France. See French opera Frankfurt Theater: curtain, use in, 199; gong, use in, 137–38, 154; Ring performances in, 199, 206, 206fig; steam, use in, 284n108 Freischütz, Der (Weber, 1821), 11, 66, 81, 165 French opera, 7; curtain, use in, 59, 73–74, 77–78; drop scenes, use in, 76; gong, use in, 110, 111, 121–22, 135–36; history of staging, 11; influence on Wagner, 11, 19–20; overtures and use of curtain, 61–64; steam, use in, 181. See also grand opéra; Paris; names of specific composers and works French Revolution, gong use and, 117–22, 119fig Fried, Michael, 211 Friedrich, Caspar David, 97, 189 Friedrich, Götz, 206 Fuchs, Eduard, 188fig, 209–10, 210fig funeral music, gong use in, 120–21 Furttenbach, Joseph the Elder, 56, 57 Galloway, Alexander R., 17–18, 66, 94 Gambill, Robert, 45fig Garnier, Charles, 60 Gautier, Judith, 41 gauzes, 76, 171, 256n80; Berg, use of, 102, 104; fire and smoke depictions, 181, 186, 198, 199; nature depictions, 182, 184–85fig, 199, 200fig; Venusberg, use in, 89 gazza ladra, La (Rossini, 1817), 78 Geisterinsel, Die (Reichardt, 1798), 165 Gelb, Peter, 1–2, 47 German theaters: curtain, use in, 58–59, 66–67, 78; drop scenes, use in, 76 Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), 12–17, 19, 20, 21–22, 32, 35–36, 104–5, 149, 169–70, 216; and curtain, 23, 82, 91, 96, 97; dependence on technologies, 13, 15, 17–19, 21, 47, 51–53, 97, 112, 164, 205, 218; and electronic audiovisual media, 223–24; failure of, 21–22, 48–52, 148,

index 223; and film, 224; and gong, 23–24, 112, 143, 145, 146ex, 148, 149–50, 157; and La Fura dels Baus’s Ring production (2007–9), 236–37; and Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12), 25, 227, 229, 234; and modern culture, 212; Parsifal as, 52–53; and steam, 24–25, 162–63, 165, 188, 189–90, 196, 208–9, 211; Tannhäuser as, 27–28, 47–48; Venusberg as allegory of, 21–22, 29–30, 31–37, 34ex, 39–40, 48–51, 94, 190, 209, 246n41; Wagner’s vision for staged realization of, 30, 37–40, 48, 50–53, 94, 189, 221 Gezeichneten, Die (Schreker, 1918), 285n130 Girardi, Michele, 152 Gisbert, Paul, 54–55, 79, 88 Gitelman, Lisa, 113 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 61, 62, 64, 67, 165; Alceste (1767, 1776), 62, 64; Armide (1777), 165; Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), 165 glückliche Hand, Die (Schoenberg, 1910–13, premiered in 1924), 153 Gob Squad, 215–18; My Square Lady (2015), 215–18, 216fig Goehr, Lydia, 10 Goering, Theodor, 162 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 79, 167 Goffman, Erving, 55 gong (tam-tam): as acoustic curtain, 157, 196; as acoustic technology, 111, 112, 124, 133, 147, 150, 154–60; association with death and the uncanny, 122–31, 125–126ex, 130ex; association with magic, 128–31, 130fig; as both musical and mechanical, 23–24, 154–57; as call to arms, 127–28; Chinese gongs, 114, 115, 134, 138–39; climactic gongs, 131–33; costs, 138, 140; criticism of use, 110–11; definition of, 109, 114; diversity of sounds, 150–57; evoking of archaic peoples, 123–24; exotic allure of, 114–17; funeral music, use in, 120–21; history of, 113, 114–17, 133, 135–38; in London, 23, 115–17, 118fig, 134; manufacture of, 138–42; metal composition of, 114, 139–40, 142; name variations of, 109, 114, 115, 263–64n29; as revolutionary sound, 117–22, 119fig; as scientific tool, 136–37, 139– 42; size of, 134–35, 139; as sonic prop, 124, 157; as sounding object, 133–38, 143–44, 154–57; twentieth-century uses of, 157–61; types and sounds of, 114–15, 138–40; use of for storms and natural disasters, 132, 145, 146ex; Wagner on use of, 109–13; Wagner’s use of, 142–50, 146ex. See also pitched gong gong ageng, 113

339

Gong Show, 159 Gossec, François-Joseph, 135; Marche lugubre (1790), 119–22, 134 Götterdämmerung (Wagner, 1876), 148, 169–70; curtain, use of, 86, 87ex, 89, 90, 92, 257nn106–8, 258n111, 260n151; fire in, 169–70, 179–80, 202; gong, use of, 147–48, 151, 272n185; La Fura dels Baus production (2009), 235; Lepage production (2012), 230–31; steam, use of, 167, 169, 202, 285n120. See also Ring des Nibelungen, Der Gounod, Charles: Faust (1859), 131–32 Gozzi, Carlo, 152 Grande messe des morts (Berlioz, 1837, 1853), 120, 265n57, 269n123 Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (Berlioz, 1840), 109, 120 grand opéra, 11, 15, 27, 31, 67, 70, 150–51, 166, 169; cataclysms of, 132, 172; Wagner and, 15, 19–20, 24, 27, 111, 148, 209 Grandville, Jean-Jacques, 193, 194fig Great Britain, and use of gong, 114–17, 118fig, 122 Greek tragedy, 7, 32–33; Greek drama, 163 Greenwald, Helen, 56, 99 Gregor, Joseph, 202 Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste, 61–66, 77, 81, 99; Amphitryon (1786), 62, 63–64ex; Anacréon chez Polycrate (1797), 62; Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe (1794), 67, 69–70ex; Guillaume Tell (1791), 65; Le jugement de Midas (1778), 65; Le magnifique (1773), 61–62, 65; Richard Cœur-de-lion (1784), 64 grotto, Venus’s choice of, 40, 247n58 Grube, Max, 97 Grusin, Richard, 224, 233 Guillaume Tell (Grétry, 1791), 65 Guillaume Tell (Rossini, 1829), 59, 76, 166, 252n21 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 213 Guntram (Strauss, 1894), 98 Halévy, Fromental, 19, 67, 70, 123; La juive (1835), 19, 67, 70, 123, 127; Le juif errant (1852), 267n95 Hall, Adelaide, 211–12 Hallwachs, Reinhard, 202 Hänsel und Gretel (Humperdinck, 1893), 97, 260n146 Hansen, Mark, 4 Hans Heiling (Marschner, 1833), 36, 66–67, 68ex, 149 Hanslick, Eduard, 94, 163, 166–67, 191, 202, 207 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 205

340

index

Heinrich, Reinhard, 44fig Helmholtz, Hermann: Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (1863), 144 Henry Cow, 158 Hepokoski, James, 153 Herculanum (David, 1859), 132, 150–51, 168 Hérold, Ferdinand: Zampa (1831), 168 Herz, Joachim, 204 Herzog, Werner, 42–44, 46fig Heyse, Paul von, 162–63 Hibberd, Sarah, 132 historically informed performance (HIP), 2, 234 Hoffmann, Josef, 181, 230 huguenots, Les (Meyerbeer, 1836), 73, 77, 132–33, 156 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 91, 98, 201; Hänsel und Gretel (1893), 97, 260n146 Huneke, Walter, 92fig Hymne du Panthéon (Cherubini, 1794), 120 hypermediacy, 212, 224, 233 hypermedial gestures in opera, 122, 124; hypermedial opera, 25, 232–38, 236fig, 237fig iconography, 96 industrialization, xii, 9, 16–17, 35, 163–65, 190–92, 213; effects of, 203–4; sounds of, 144, 192 industrial modernity, 133, 193, 209, 213, 283n91 industrial technology. See under technology; Wagner Ipsiboë (Kreutzer, 1824), 127 Iris (Mascagni, 1898), 151, 271n142 Italian opera, 7, 242n51; curtain, use of, 56, 58, 70–71, 74, 77–78; history of staging, 8–10, 13, 202. See also names of specific composers and works Jackson, Myles W., 136–37 Jacobshagen, Arnold, 11–12 Janz, Tobias, 112 Jones, Richard, 107 Jordan, Ken, 14 jugement de Midas, Le (Grétry, 1778), 65 juif errant, Le (Halévy, 1852), 267n95 juive, La (Auber, 1835), 19, 67, 70, 123, 127, 254n50 Kahn, Douglas, 112, 113, 157 Kalbeck, Max, 94, 182 Kalisch, David, 54, 250n1 Kane, Brian, 72 Kastner, Georges, 129 Kemp, Wolfgang, 97

Kittler, Friedrich, 14–15, 17, 20, 80, 160, 189, 221, 230 Klaproth, Heinrich, 139 Klič, Karl, 193, 195fig, 196 Kluge, Alexander, 215 Koepnick, Lutz, 187 Komische Oper Berlin, 215–18, 216fig, 232 König Stephan (Beethoven, 1811), 166 Korngold, Julius, 202 Kreowski, Ernst, 188fig, 210fig Kreutzer, Rodolphe: Ipsiboë (1824), 127; La mort d’Abel (1810), 128 Kufferath, Maurice, 198 Kunstkammern (cabinets of arts, curiosities), 8, 9 Lacombe, Hervé, 11 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 4 La Fura dels Baus, Ring production (2007–9), 25–26, 234–38, 236fig, 237fig landscape painting, 49, 57, 181, 188–89; Wagner and, 36, 52, 189 Lang, Fritz, 211 Langlé, Honoré: Soliman et Eronime (1792), 265n61 Lasalle, Albert de, 111, 154 “late modernism,” 213 Latour, Bruno, 5 Lautenschläger, Karl, 232 Lavignac, Albert, 92, 98 Lehnhoff, Nikolaus, 42, 44fig, 206 Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, Die (Helmholtz, 1863), 144 Leipzig, Ring performances in, 191, 197, 198, 204, 285n118 Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (Berlioz, 1831–1832), 71, 129, 142 Leoncavallo, Ruggero: Pagliacci (1892), 104, 260n146 Lepage, Robert: Cirque du Soleil, 234; Ring production (2010–12), 1–2, 20, 25–26, 206, 226–32, 228fig, 229fig, 231fig, 233–34, 235, 238 Le Sueur, Jean-François, 67, 120, 122–24, 150, 166, 266nn69–72; La mort d’Adam (1809), 123, 128; Ossian, ou Les bardes (1804), 67, 123–124, 127–28, 133, 135, 152, 158, 165, 266nn69–72; Télémaque (1796), 122, 128, 150 Levi, Hermann, 145 Levin, David J., 5 Lewald, August, 75 Lichtenberg, Ludwig von, 134, 137, 138, 140, 142 Lichtenthal, Pietro, 134

index light effects: Bengal light, 181, 186, 278n30; colored light, 21, 35–37, 166–67, 186, 200fig, 202, 236; electric light, 15, 55, 110, 186, 203; light curtain, 206; spotlight, 106, 131 “liquid modernity,” 213 Liszt, Franz, 150, 193, 195fig, 196; gong, use of, 153; Lélio, role in, 142; relation to Wagner, 193 Lodoïska (Cherubini, 1791), 168 Lohengrin (Wagner, 1850): caricature of, 209–10, 210fig; curtain, use of, 80, 81, 88, 257n106, 257n108; and Gesamtkunstwerk, 27; gong, use of, 111, 145; tour of, 222 London: dissolving views in, 32; drop scenes in, 76; gongs in, 23, 115–17, 118fig, 122, 128, 134, 136, 138; Ring performances in, 188fig, 198, 206, 222; and Royal Opera House curtain, 107–8; Wagner and, 41, 191 Lortzing, Albert: Undine (1845), 131, 155, 201 Lulu (Berg, 1937), 262n168 Macbeth (Verdi, 1847, 1865), 77, 129 Machover, Tod: Death and the Powers (2010), 233 Macpherson, James, 123–24 Madama Butterfly (Puccini, 1904), 98, 100, 101ex, 151–52 magic, gong use and, 128–31, 130ex, 145, 155 “magic curtain” (rideau de magie), 76 magnifique, Le (Grétry, 1773), 61–62, 65 Mahler, Gustav, 100, 113, 153 maître de chapelle, Le (Paër, 1821), 123 Mann, Thomas, 162, 201 Manon (Massenet, 1884), 97, 98 Manon Lescaut (Puccini, 1893), 99–100, 261n161 Marche lugubre (Gossec, 1790), 119–22, 119fig, 134 Marcuse, Ludwig, 163 Marschner, Heinrich, 244n7; curtain, use of, 66–67, 68ex, 77; gong, use of, 129; Hans Heiling (1833), 36, 66–67, 68ex, 149; steam, use of, 165; Der Vampyr (1828), 77, 129, 154, 165 martyrs, Les (Donizetti, 1840), 123 Marx, Karl, 15, 149, 213 Mascagni, Pietro, 152, 153, 223; Cavalleria rusticana (1890), 260n146; Iris (1898), 151 Massenet, Jules, 98, 153; Esclarmonde (1893), 97; Manon (1884), 97, 98; Le roi de Lahore (1877), 152; Thaïs (1894), 98, 260n149; Werther (1892), 98 McLuhan, Marshall, 17, 20, 52, 243n71 media: curtain as media technology, 56, 65–66, 72, 80, 82–83, 91; development of, 5, 11, 22, 224, 233; digital media, 66, 212, 213–14, 223–24, 226, 234; electronic media, 160–61, 223–24, 226;

341

“elemental media,” 169; of Gesamtkunstwerk, 18, 48–49, 149, 164, 189–90, 192; increased social use of, 2, 108, 224; integration of, in La Fura dels Baus’s Ring production (2007–9), 234–38, 236fig, 237fig; as interfaces with sensory organs, 4, 17–18, 24, 189, 209; news media, 166; obsolete media, renewed interest in, 25, 224–25; operatic media, 3, 16, 25–26, 56, 58, 106, 111, 216–17, 232, 234–38; in Tannhäuser, 32–33; vs. technology, 17–21, 91, 94, 97, 209, 219, 243n71; transparency of, xiii, 25, 94, 165, 183, 212, 224, 226, 233–34; virtual media, xi, 214. See also hypermediacy; hypermedial gestures in opera; multimedia; remediation media archaeology, 5, 225, 235 media studies, 3–5, 14, 20–21, 225 Mefistofele (Boito, 1876), 201 Méhul, Joseph: Chant national (1800), 120; Uthal (1806), 124, 127 Meier, Waltraud, 45fig Meiningen Court Theater, 181, 222, 280n50 Meistersinger, Die (Wagner, 1868), 80, 88, 257n108 Mercadante, Saverio: La vestale (1840), 123, 127 Mercury, Freddie, 158 Meridian (Gold) (Tajima, 2016), 212 merveilleux (the marvelous), 8, 10 Messa da requiem (Verdi, 1874), 222 Messe solennelle (Berlioz, 1825), 120 metals, and gong production, 114, 139–40, 142 Metropolitan Opera, New York: Das Rheingold (1889), 199; Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12), 1–2, 25–26, 226–32, 228fig, 229fig, 231fig, 234 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 7, 11, 13, 20; L’Africaine (1865), 127; Il crociato in Egitto (1824), 65; curtain, use of, 59, 60, 70, 71, 73–74, 76, 77; Dinorah (1859), 71; fire, use of, 168; gong, use of, 110, 127, 129–33, 130ex, 138, 143, 150, 154, 156; Les huguenots (1836), 73, 77, 132–33, 156; overture, use of, 65; Robert le diable (1831), 73, 76, 77, 129–31, 130ex, 137, 138, 155, 156; steam, use of, 166. See also prophète, Le Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 136–37, 168, 199 Mikrophonie (Stockhausen, 1964), 159–61 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 119, 119 fig, 121 Mischklang (mixed sound), 149, 155 model performance (Musteraufführung), 25, 28, 181, 197–98, 221–23 modernism, 12, 213. See also “late modernism”; postmodernism

342

index

Moïse et Pharaon (Rossini, 1827), 131, 155 mons horrisonus, 33 Morris, Robert: Steam (1967), 211 mort d’Abel, La (Kreutzer, 1810), 128 mort d’Adam, La (Le Sueur, 1809), 123, 128 Mosé in Egitto (Rossini, 1818), 70–71, 78, 155, 254n52 moving canvases (Wandeldekorationen), 16, 90–91, 199, 258nn117–19 Moynet, Georges, 198, 202 Moynet, Jean-Pierre, 181 muette de Portici, La (Auber, 1828), 19, 59, 77, 132, 142, 155, 168, 178, 181, 186 multimedia: “The Art-Work of the Future” (Wagner, 1849) and, 12; effects, 207; electronic audiovisual media, 223–24; events, 212; film as, 158, 224, 227; Gesamtkunstwerk as, 14, 20, 37, 50–51, 104, 221, 229; immersion afforded by, 12, 157; La Fura dels Baus’s Ring production (2007–9) as, 234–38, 236fig, 237fig; Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12) as, 25, 232; in nineteenth century, 11, 90, 112, 168, 223; opera as, xi–xii, 6, 7–8, 12, 14, 22, 24, 29, 52–53, 56, 58, 80, 100, 163, 208, 218, 225; performance art, 207, 211–12; system, 80, 104; Venusberg as, 21, 29, 31–37, 39–40, 45–46, 48, 188, 209; Wagner, influence on, 14, 20–21; Wagner’s vision for staged music drama as, 29–30, 31–37, 48, 50–53, 82, 145, 188, 209. See also media; recording technologies Munich: Court Theater, 137, 155, 163, 182–83, 184–85fig, 201–2, 227, 260n138, 280–81n55; model performances in, 197, 221 music: act curtains and, 73–74, 77–80; “The Art-Work of the Future” (Wagner, 1849) and, 32–35; and delayed use of curtain, 66–72, 68ex, 69–70ex; diegetic music, 49, 62, 65, 70–72, 78, 81–82, 98; and Gesamtkunstwerk, 13, 51; musicalizing the curtain, 97–104, 101ex, 103ex; musical mists, 171–80, 173–78ex; overtures and use of curtain, 61–66, 63–64ex; relationship to action, 35. See also endless melody; gong (tam-tam); orchestration Mussorgsky, Modest: Boris Godunov (1869), 154 My Square Lady (Gob Squad, 2015), 215–18, 216fig mythology, 8, 57, 165, 183; Greek, 24, 32, 43fig, 123, 168; Der Ring des Nibelungen, 24, 167, 170–71, 197, 210; Tannhäuser, 32–33, 247n49 Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 4, 42–44, 46fig, 128–29, 137

natural disasters: gong use and, 132; steam, use of, 168, 186. See also volcanic activity in opera nature: ironies of Wagner’s use of steam and, 188–96, 195fig, 209, 210fig; La Fura dels Baus’s Ring production (2007–9), 237–38; landscape paintings, 36, 49, 57, 181, 188–89; musical mists, 171–80, 173–78ex; Parsifal, 52–53; return to, 35, 49–50, 96; staging in, 183; Venusberg scenes, 35–36 Nebelbilder. See dissolving views Nebelkappen, 171 Nemirova, Vera, 206, 206fig Neumann, Angelo, 95, 108, 187fig, 188fig, 191, 197, 198, 222–23, 226, 288n31. See also Wagner Theater new materialism, 3 Nibelheim, use of steam, 167, 170–71, 182–83, 184–85fig, 191, 199, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 50, 52, 162, 201 nitrogen, liquid, 211–12 noise: gong use and, 132–33, 143–44, 157; vs. musical sounds, 144; steam production and, 24, 191–92; treatment of in theater, 113, 157 nonnarrative theater, 211. See also postdramatic theater Norma (Bellini, 1831), 77, 127, 255n68 Oettinger, Eduard Maria, 110 O’Keefe, John, 116 Olimpie (Spontini, 1819), 134 Omai, or, A Trip Round the World (Shield, 1785), 116 opera: analog media in, 25–26, 234–38, 236fig, 237fig; and cinema, 14, 102, 106, 211, 223–24, 227, 232, 234; crisis, 289n39; hybridity of, xii, 25–26; hypermedial opera, 25, 232–38, 236fig, 237fig; staging in history, 6–12. See also French opera; Gesamtkunstwerk; Italian opera; media Opéra, Paris, 7, 11, 13–14; bells, use of, 154; curtain, use of, 59, 60, 67, 70; dance and pantomime, 31–32; drop scenes, use of, 76; gong, use of, 135–36; steam, use of, 181 Opera and Drama (Wagner, 1850–51), 12, 27, 33, 82; on orchestration, 148–49; on relationship between music and action, 35 opéra féerie, 90, 181, 211 orchestra: as disembodied technology, 18; expansion of, 112, 128, 136–38, 149, 193; and Gesamtkunstwerk, 32–35, 34ex, 39, 48–49, 81–83, 148–49, 207; hiding of, 20, 37, 39, 71,

index 219; as machine, 193, 195fig, 243n74; orchestra pit as technology, 13, 93, 144–45, 191; Wagner on orchestra as technology, 18, 48–49, 148–49. 87ex. See also gong (tam-tam) orchestration, 179, 245n25; and gong, 110, 112, 128, 129, 131, 145, 157; percussion, 128, 144, 153–54; and Wagner, 143, 148–49, 192–93 Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck, 1762), 165 Ossi, Massimo, 8 Ossian, ou Les bardes (Le Sueur, 1804), 67, 123–124, 127–28, 133, 135, 152, 158, 165, 266nn69–72 Otello (Verdi, 1887), 98, 132 overture: delayed use of curtain, 66–72, 68ex, 69–70ex; gong in, 109, 117, 118fig, 151; use of curtain and, 61–66, 63–64ex; Verdi, 74 Pacini, Giovanni: L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825), 168 Packer, Randall, 14 Padrissa, Carlus, 234–38, 236fig, 237fig Paër, Ferdinando, 256n82; Le maître de chapelle (1821), 123 Pagliacci (Leoncavallo, 1892), 104, 260n146 painting: curtain and stage as, 59, 95–97; frames, 97, 107; landscape, 36, 52, 49, 57, 181, 188–89 Palais Garnier, Paris, 13, 60. See also Opéra, Paris pantomime, 75, 116, 117; overtures and, 62, 65, 71; in Lepage’s Ring production (2010–2012), 229; in Das Rheingold, 82, 99; Venusberg and, 31–32, 46, 82, 99 Parade (Satie, 1917), 104 Paris: fragrance from, 41; gongs in, 23, 110, 117–27, 133, 134–36, 137, 140–42, 141fig; Italian opera in, 8–10; Tannhäuser in, 28, 30, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 39–40, 42, 46, 111; Wagner in, 28, 38, 86, 142, 151. See also French opera; Opéra, Paris; Palais Garnier; Théâtre Feydeau, Paris parola scenica, 128 Parrhasius, 57 Parsifal (Wagner, 1882), 14, 21, 41, 47, 219, 220; castration in, 52, 250n101; curtain, use of, 88, 90, 259n123; gong, use of, 150, 154–55, 275n224; moving canvases, 16, 199; as school for artists, 221–22; Wagner curtain, 93fig; as staged Gesamtkunstwerk, 52–53 Parville, Henri de, 163–64 patriotic music, gong use in, 120 Paul, William, 106 pêcheurs de perles, Les (Bizet, 1863), 127 Peduzzi, Richard, 204fig, 205fig

343

Pelléas et Melisande (Debussy, 1902), 100 Pentcheva, Mariana, 46fig performance art, 107, 160, 207, 211, 217, 220, 225–26, 233–34 perfume: use of in performance, 163, 165, 207; Wagner’s use of, 41, 49. See also scent Perle, George, 102 Peters, John Durham, 169 Petite messe solennelle (Rossini, composed 1863), 222 phantasmagoria, 15, 131, 186; Wagner’s works as, 15, 142, 151, 179, 192, 218 Philidor, Paul, 131 pink color. See rose (rosa) color pirata, Il (Bellini, 1827), 132 pitched gong: definition, 114; use of, 138–39, 151–52, 154–55, 268n111 Pliny the Elder, 57 poetry, and “The Art-Work of the Future” (Wagner, 1849), 32–35, 229 Poliuto (Donizetti, 1848), 123 popular music, gong use in, 158–61 Porges, Heinrich, 82, 94, 96, 180–81, 183 postdramatic theater, 107, 207, 211, 216–18, 238 postmodernism, 213, 287n153 Pougin, Arthur, 59, 76 presence culture, 213 preservation: of operatic stagings, 3, 6, 11, 20–21, 25, 29, 52, 208–9, 220, 221–24, 238; of performance art, 225–26. See also recording technologies princesse jaune, La (Saint-Saëns, 1872), 151 production books (stage manuals, livrets de mise en scène), 11–12, 20; acoustic veiling, notes on, 23–24; choreographing curtains, 74, 77–79, 98–104, 260n151; gong, use of, 156; La muette de Portici, 132, 155, 168; Le prophète, 11–12, 15, 141, 181; Das Rheingold, use of steam, 184–85fig, 199–201, 200fig; Tannhäuser, 46–47; Wagner and, 45, 197–89 prophète, Le (Meyerbeer, 1849): curtain, use of, 70, 71; electric light, use of, 15; fire in, 168; gong, use of, 110, 138, 156; production book, 11–12, 15, 141, 181; steam, use of, 166, 171, 181, 202 prophet sun, 15. See also under light effects proscenium, 5, 59, 80, 92, 232; arch, 44; in Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 29, 39, 92–93, 93fig, 95; and illusion, 13, 39, 258n115; stage, 5, 13, 106, 107. See also under curtain Puccini, Giacomo, 56, 99–100, 102, 151–52, 153, 223; La bohème (1896), 99; Edgar (1889), 99; La fanciulla del West (1910), 261n15; Madama

344

index

Butterfly (1904), 98, 100, 101ex, 151–52; Manon Lescaut (1893), 99–100, 261n161; Il tabarro (1918), 99; Turandot (1926), 23–24, 152–153, 273n209 puppet theater, 170, 259n120 Queen (band), “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975), 158 Radau, Rodolphe, 142 Radio City Music Hall, New York, 107, 203 Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford, 116, 268n111 Raven, Theo, 102, 186, 199, 200fig, 201, 202 Raymond, John, 8 recording technologies, 20–21, 25, 136, 208, 220, 221–24, 225–26, 238 Regietheater, 1, 106–7, 212 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich: Die Geisterinsel (1798), 165 Reicher-Kindermann, Hedwig, 223 Rellstab, Ludwig, 20 remediation, 25, 108, 221, 224, 234 reperformance, 225–26, 233–34, 290nn65–66 repertory, in opera, 10 Reyer, Ernest: Sigurd (1884), 202 Rheingold, Das (Wagner, 1869): colors in, 166–67; curtain, use of, 82, 83–85ex, 86, 98, 143, 199; fire in, 168–69, 178; gong, use of, 145, 146ex; La Fura dels Baus production of (2007), 236, 236fig, 237fig; leitmotifs, 88, 172; Lepage production of (2010), 227, 229fig, 231, 231fig, 233; musical mists, 171–80, 173–78ex; opening of, 39, 82, 94; open transformations in, 89, 90, 170–72, 179, 196; parody, 54; spectacular effects in, 47, 166–7; steam evoked in, 90, 163, 167–68, 171–80; steam in productions of, 182–83, 184–85fig, 189–90, 196, 199, 200fig, 202, 204–5, 204fig; Wagner curtain, 94. See also Ring des Nibelungen, Der Ricci, Luigi, 99 Ricciardo e Zoraide (Rossini, 1818), 127 Richard Cœur-de-lion (Grétry, 1784), 64 Richter, Hans, 182 Ricordi company, 138–39 rideau de magie (“magic curtain”), 76 rideau de manœuvre, 75–77. See also act curtains; drop scene Riemann, Hugo, 261n165 Rienzi (Wagner, 1842), 13, 19–20, 27, 31; curtain, use of, 86, 88; gong, use of, 111–12, 127, 132–33, 142, 155 Rigoletto (Verdi, 1851), 76

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 157 Ring cycle. See Ring des Nibelungen, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Der: caricatures of, 194fig, 195fig; critics on, 49, 163, 191–92; curtain, use of, 54–55, 80; fire in, 24, 168–70, 172, 179–80; fogs, evocations of, 24, 90, 163, 167–68, 170, 171–80; gong, use of, 112, 145–48, 146ex; La Fura dels Baus production (2007–9), 25–26, 234–38, 236fig, 237fig; Lepage production (2010–12), 1-2, 6, 22, 25–26, 226–32, 228fig, 229fig, 231fig; modern productions of, 203–14, 204fig, 205fig, 206fig; musical mists, 171–80, 173–78ex; parodies of, 54–55, 76, 79, 88, 105, 162, 183; premiere of (1876), 13–14, 16, 25, 164, 196; steam, use of, 24–25, 162–65, 166–67, 180–88, 184–85fig, 193–96, 194fig, 195fig; 185fig, 191–92; steam, use of in non-Bayreuth productions, 191, 196–201, 200fig; tour of, 95, 198, 222–23; and Wagner curtain, 91, 95; Wagner on staging of, 15, 16, 18, 171, 180, 190; Wagner’s ideas for producing, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27, 38, 219, 220–21; weather effects in, 166. See also Götterdämmerung; Rheingold, Das; Siegfried; Wagner Theater; Walküre, Die Robert le diable (Meyerbeer, 1831), 73, 76, 77, 129–31, 130ex, 137, 138, 155, 156 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard, 131, 186 roi de Lahore, Le (Massenet, 1877), 152 Romantic movement: aesthetics, 71; and dress codes, 42; and fantastical subjects, 128, 165; and history of staging, 10; and industrialization vs. art, 16; and painting, 97, 188–89 Roméo et Juliette (Steibelt, 1793), 121, 266n62 rose (rosa) color: and fashion, 42; Wagner’s use of and preference for, 40–42, 43fig, 107–8 Rosenkavalier, Der (Strauss, 1911), 102 Rossini, Gioachino: Armida (1817), 77, 128–29, 138; curtain, use of, 59, 70–71, 77, 78, 79, 254nn52–54; Ermione (1819), 71, 77; fire, use of, 168; La gazza ladra (1817), 78; gong, use of, 123, 127, 128–29, 131, 136, 137–38, 155; Guillaume Tell (1829), 59, 76, 166, 252n21; history of staging, 10; Moïse et Pharaon (1827), 131, 155; Mosé in Egitto (1818), 70–71, 78, 155, 254n52; Petite messe solennelle (composed 1863), 222; Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818), 127; Semiramide (1823), 123, 129, 136, 156; Le siège de Corinthe (1826), 19, 77, 127, 142, 168, 172, 178, 256n84; steam, use of, 166; touring company, 222; Il turco in Italia (1814), 77; Zelmira (1822), 70–71, 254n52

index Rubinstein, Anton: Der Thurm zu Babel (1870), 152 sacred music, gong use in, 120, 131 sacre du printemps, Le (Stravinsky, 1913), 153 Saint-Évremond, Charles de, 8–9, 10 Saint-Saëns, Camille: La princesse jaune (1872), 151; Samson et Dalila (1877), 132 Salieri, Antonio: Tarare (1787, 1790), 121 Salome (Strauss, 1905), 153 Salter, Chris, 14 Samson et Dalila (Saint-Saëns, 1877), 132 Satie, Erik: Parade (1917), 104 scenery, painting of: act curtains, 74–77; landscapes, 36 scent: “rosy scent,” Venusberg, 32, 37, 39–42, 46, 49, 89, 96, 164, 166, 190, 202, 209; steam, smell of, 191–92. See also perfume Schafer, Murray, 113 Schaidt, Günther, 212 Schechner, Richard, 225 Schenk, Otto, 2, 230 Schmid, Giovanni, 129 Schmidt-Futterer, Andrea, 45fig Schoenberg, Arnold, 234; Die glückliche Hand (1910–13), 153 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 13, 51, 169 Schott company, 138–39 Schreker, Franz, 202, 260n149; Die Gezeichneten (1918), 285n130; Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin (1913), 202, 286n131 Schuler, Duane, 45fig scientific research, gongs and, 136–37, 139–42 scrims, 76, 182, 186, 199 Seel, Martin, 208, 209 Seidl, Anton, 95, 188, 222 Semiramide (Rossini, 1823), 123, 129, 136, 156 Shaw, George Bernard, 183, 215 Shield, William, 116, 117; The Enchanted Castle (1786), 117; Omai, or, A Trip Round the World (1785), 116 siège de Corinthe, Le (Rossini, 1826), 19, 77, 127, 142, 168, 172, 178, 256n84 Siege of Belgrade, The (Storace, 1791), 116 Siegfried (Wagner, 1876): curtain, use of, 54, 81–82, 89, 257n106; fire in, 179; gong, use of, 147; Lepage production (2011), 231, 232; motifs in, 86, 179; parody, 54; representation of dragon, 187, 187fig, 188fig, 231, 236; steam, use of, 187–88, 187fig, 188fig, 204–5, 205fig, 206fig. See also Ring des Nibelungen, Der Siegfried’s Tod (Wagner, 1848), 89, 169

345

Sigurd (Reyer, 1884), 202 Simon Boccanegra (Verdi, 1881), 127, 254n54, 255n67 site-specific art, 211, 212, 226, 234 smells. See perfume; scent Smith, Matthew Wilson, 14 Solomé, Louis Jacques, 168 sonic reduction, 113 sound effects, overview, 23–24, 113, 263n22; and curtain, 172; gong as source of, 23, 124, 131, 153, 156 sound technology, gong as, 111, 124, 133, 147, 150, 154–60. See also gong (tam-tam) special-effects technologies, 11–12; pace of change in, 5–6, 218; fire, 165; steam, 206, 230 Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, Das (Schreker, 1913), 202 Spontini, Gaspare: curtain, use of, 78; Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête de Mexique (1809), 128; gong, use of, 124–29, 125–26ex, 132, 134, 140, 150, 156; history of staging, 11; Olimpie (1819), 134; La vestale (1805), 124–29, 125–26ex, 134, 136, 137, 155 stage manager: curtain use, 60; in My Square Lady (2015), 216; steam, use of, 182, 184–85fig stage manuals. See production books stage technology: in Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 13–14, 16, 19, 180–83, 188, 191–92, 198; in contemporary productions, 216–17, 226–7, 232–33, 235–36; curtain as, 23, 76–77, 91, 106; development of, 3, 7–12, 55–57, 75–76, 164, 180–81, 213, 218–19, 222; failure of, 16, 80, 192, 196, 218–20, 223, 231–32; fast ageing of, 25, 210, 213, 219, 232–33; gong as, 112, 154, 161, 164; vs. music, 60; necessity of, 5, 8, 47–48, 91, 238; noise of, 23, 25, 89, 157, 196, 230; sonic dimension of, 23, 112–13, 154, 161; steam as, 163–64, 199–201, 203, 210; study of, 3, 7, 12, 55; term, use of, 3–4; types and effects of, 15, 19–20, 54, 76, 186, 204–5; Wagner, control over, 30, 45; Wagner, veiling of, 48, 51, 97, 157, 161. See also curtain; gong (tam-tam); moving canvases; sound technology; steam, onstage use of; technology; Wagnerian technologies staging: challenges for, in Ring cycle, 13, 22, 171–72, 180, 182, 188; committee for, at Opéra, 11, 59; curtain and, 99, 107; Gesamtkunstwerk and, 12–17, 48, 51, 165; history of, 6–12, 13–14, 58, 73, 168, 207,

346

index

212; nature of, 3, 4, 23, 45, 49, 51, 52–53, 170, 192, 208–10, 238; touring, 222–23; types of, 1–2, 5, 53, 73, 107, 191, 197, 219, 230; Wagner and, 12–14, 19, 25, 49, 183, 197–98, 219. See also Regietheater; Wagner Theater; and under Ring des Nibelungen, Der; Tannhäuser Starcke, Herrmann, 98 Staunton, Sir George Leonard, 114–15 Steady, Susan, 115 Steam (Morris, 1967), 211 steam, onstage use of: association with industrial technology, 24, 163–65, 190–96, 194fig, 195fig, 203–5, 208, 209–13; association with Wagner, 24, 162–65, 201–3; challenges of, 191, 192, 219; critical commentary on, 162–63, 191–96, 194fig, 195fig, 209–10, 210fig; historical precedence for, 163, 166–71; ironies of Wagner’s use of, 24, 188–96, 194fig, 195fig; and modernity, 213–14; modern uses of, 203–14, 204fig, 205fig, 206fig, 217, 231, 231fig; musical mists, 171–80, 173–78ex; mystical association, 203; overview, 24–25; production techniques and uses, 180–88, 184–85fig, 187fig, 188fig, 191–92, 199, 200fig, 201, 204, 280n53, 280–81n55; simulating fire, 181, 186, 187–88, 187fig, 191–92, 196, 198, 202, 208, 209; smells and noises from, 24, 191–92, 196, 199; steam curtain, 183, 198, 212; steam as a medium, 208; suggestive power of steam, 205–8; on tour, 191, 198, 222–23; use in non-Bayreuth Ring productions, 196–201, 200fig; “Wagnerian vapors” (Wagner-Dämpfe), 201–7; Wagner’s artistic utopia, contradictions of, 209; Wagner’s use of, 168–71 steam art, 211, 225 steampunk, 205fig, 212 Steibelt, Daniel, 121–22; Roméo et Juliette (1793), 121–22, 265n61 Steingräber, Eduard, 154 Sterne, Jonathan, 20 Stockhausen, Karlheinz: Mikrophonie (1964), 159–61 Stoeckel, Gustave, 94, 189–90, 191 Storace, Stephen: The Siege of Belgrade (1791), 116, 253n46 storms, 166–67; gong use and, 132, 145 Strakosch, Maurice, 222 Strauss, Richard, 98, 153, 178; Elektra (1909), 153; Guntram (1894), 98; Der Rosenkavalier (1911), 102; Salome (1905), 153; Tod und Verklärung (1888–89), 153

Stravinsky, Igor: Le sacre du printemps (1913), 153 Svoboda, Josef, 206 tabarro, Il (Puccini, 1918), 99 tableau vivant, 36, 78 Taïeb, Patrick, 56, 61, 62, 64 Tajima, Miak: Meridian (Gold) (2016), 212 tam-tam. See gong (tam-tam) Tannhäuser (Wagner, 1845, 1861, 1875): Cosima Wagner production (1891), 27, 46–47, 98, 100, 102, 155, 249n81; Cosima Wagner’s defense of, 27–28, 29, 51; curtain, use of, 81, 86, 88, 89, 100, 102, 257n108; Dresden version (1845–60), 30, 31, 38; endless melody (unendliche Melodie) in, 48–49; flight of Tannhäuser, 48–50; as Gesamtkunstwerk, 27–28, 47–48; gong, use of, 23, 111–12, 155; Nikolaus Lehnhoff production (2008), 42, 45fig; overview of, 27–30; Paris version (1861, 1875), 30, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 42, 111; parodies of, 41, 54; steam, use of, 166–67, 171; Venusberg as epiphany of Gesamtkunstwerk, 31–37, 34ex; Wagner on production of, 21–22, 31–32, 35–36, 46–48, 98–99; Wagner’s vision for, 50–53; Werner Herzog production (1998), 42–44, 46fig; Wolfgang Wagner production (1985), 42, 44fig. See also Venusberg Tarare (Salieri, 1787, 1790), 121 Taruskin, Richard, 2 Taylor, Roger, 158 technē, 4, 9, 202, 238 technesis, 4 technological determinism, xii, 15, 230 technology: in Chéreau’s Ring production (1976), 204–5, 204fig, 205fig; communication technology, 60, 157–8, 166, 198; composers and, xii, 3, 6–8, 10–12; concealment of, Wagner’s ideas on, 15, 17–18, 37, 47–48, 51–52, 55–56, 91, 94, 109-10, 112, 142, 150, 183, 192; development of, 5, 8–9, 52–53, 163–64, 190; electronic technologies, 160, 223–24; function of, in Wagner’s Ring libretto, 168–70, 172, 207, 209; as human supplement, 17–18, 52, 205, 232; industrial technology, 24, 116, 140, 164, 187, 188fig, 193, 196, 204–5, 210, 212–13, 227; in La Fura dels Baus’s Ring production (2007–9), 25–26, 234–38, 236fig, 237fig; in Lepage’s Ring production (2010–12), 1–2, 25, 226–32, 228fig, 229fig, 231fig, 234; vs. media, 17–21, 91, 94, 97, 209, 219, 243n71; neglect of, in academia, 3, 4–5, 17, 55; in opera, 2–3, 5–6, 7–12, 19–20,

index 25–26, 29–30, 40, 53, 105–6, 113, 165, 208–10, 216–18, 232–38; pace of change, xii-xiii, 5–6, 190, 210, 213; rise of, 142, 168; robotic technologies in opera, 193, 215–17, 216fig, 223, 233, 235–36, 236fig; use of term, 3–4; Wagnerian technologies, xii-xiii, 6, 7, 21–26, 155, 161, 164–65, 181, 209, 217, 238; Wagner, use of, 13–16, 17–23, 24–25, 30, 45, 90–91, 164, 171, 219–20; Wagner, negative views of, 15–17, 35, 96–97, 190, 218. See also hypermediacy; hypermedial gestures in opera; industrialization; media; multimedia; recording technologies; sound technology, gong as; stage technology Télémaque (Le Sueur, 1796), 122, 128, 150 Thaïs (Massenet, 1894), 98, 260n149 Théâtre Feydeau, Paris, 121–22, 124, 135–36 Thompson, Emily, 134 Thomson, Thomas, 139 Threepenny Opera (Brecht and Weill, 1928), 105 thunder machine, 123, 132, 137, 155 Thurm zu Babel, Der (Rubinstein, 1870), 152 Tod und Verklärung (Strauss, 1888–89), 153 total work of art. See Gesamtkunstwerk touring companies, 222–23. See also Wagner Theater transparencies, 76 Travellers, or Music’s Fascination, The (Corri, 1806), 116–17, 118fig traviata, La (Verdi, 1853), 77, 98–99 Tresch, John, 15 T. Rex, 158 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner, 1865), 29, 86, 88, 162, 166, 197, 257n101 trovatore, Il (Verdi, 1853), 78, 260n146 Troyens, Les (Berlioz, 1863), 72, 127, 131, 155, 201 Turandot (Busoni, 1917), 104, 152, 262n172 Turandot (Puccini, 1926), 23–24, 152–153, 273n209 turco in Italia, Il (Rossini, 1814), 77 Turnage, Mark-Anthony: Anna Nicole (2011), 107–8 Turner, William, 189, 190 ultimo giorno di Pompei, L’ (Pacini, 1825), 168 Un ballo in maschera (Verdi, 1859), 78 Undine (Lortzing, 1845), 131, 155, 201 unendliche Melodie (endless melody), 48–49, 163 Uthal (Méhul, 1806), 124, 127 Vampyr, Der (Marschner, 1828), 77, 129, 154, 165

347

vapor. See steam, stage use of Varsányi, András, 113, 114, 134, 135 Venusberg, 21, 23, 247n49; as allegory of Gesamtkunstwerk, 21–22, 29–30, 31–37, 34ex, 39–40, 48–51, 94, 190, 209, 246n41; Bayreuth as Venusberg, 21–22, 30, 37–40, 191; choreography, 31–32, 249n81; Dresden version (1845–60), 30, 247n56; endless melody (unendliche Melodie) in, 48–49; grotto, choice of, 40, 246n41, 247n58; and mons veneris, 246n41; music, 32–35, 34ex, 48–49; Paris version (1861, 1875), 30; return to nature and, 35–36; “rosy scent” of, 32, 37, 39–42, 46, 49, 89, 96, 164, 166, 190, 202, 209; set change, 46, 89–90, 100, 102; steam, use of, 166–67, 171; Tannhäuser, flight of, 48–50; Venus as Wagner, 40–48, 43fig, 44fig, 45fig, 46fig. See also dissolving views (Nebelbilder); Tannhäuser Verdi, Giuseppe, 7, 13, 242n51; Aida (1871), 127; Un ballo in maschera, 78; curtain, use of, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 97, 98, 255n67; Don Carlos (1867, 1884, 1886), 74, 131, 156, 202, 255n67; La forza del destino (1869), 97; gong, use of, 127, 129, 131, 132; Macbeth (1847, 1865), 77, 129; Messa da requiem (1874), tour of, 222; Otello (1887), 98, 132, 260n146; Rigoletto (1851), 76; Simon Boccanegra (1881), 127, 254n54, 255n67; La traviata (1853), 77, 98–99; Il trovatore (1853), 78, 260n146 Véron, Louis, 11 Versalle, Richard, 44fig vestale, La (Mercadante, 1840), 123, 127 vestale, La (Spontini, 1805), 124–29, 125–26ex, 134, 136, 137, 155 Vienna: Burgtheater, red curtains in, 250–51; Court Opera, use of gongs, 137, 155, 157; Rheingold in, 199; Ringtheater fire, 259n124; Tannhäuser in, 28, 30, 32, 46, 111 visual experience, history of staging, 10–12 vocal music: curtain and, 71–72, 82; in Tannhäuser, 32–35, 34ex, 48. See also music volcanic activity in opera, 132, 155, 168; volcanic appearance of Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 39 Volta, Alessandro, physics collection, 136 “Vorhänge, Die” (Brecht, 1951), 105 Wagner, Cosima: on barbarism, 143; on Bayreuth Venusberg, 39; contacts with Meiningen Theater, 181, 280n50; curtain, use of, 98; defense of Tannhäuser, 27–28, 29, 51; gong,

348

index

use of, 155; relationship with Richard Wagner, 40, 41, 109; and Rienzi, 243n82; steam, use of, 196, 199, 200fig; Tannhäuser production (1891), 27, 46–47, 98, 100, 102, 155, 249n81; Tannhäuser production standards, 46, 47, 155, 249n79, 250n99 Wagner, Minna, 41, 109, 111 Wagner, Richard: on barbarism, 109, 121, 142, 143; clouds and mists, use of, 166–68, 170, 172, 227, 279n33; color preferences, 40–42, 43fig; curtain, use of, 22–23, 54–55, 80–91, 83–85ex, 87ex, 257n102; efforts to create Ring project, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27, 38, 219, 220–21; and film, 14–15, 223–24 ; gong, use of, 109–13, 127, 132–33, 142–50, 146ex, 154; in history of staging, xi, 6–12; on industrial modernity, 16–17, 35, 133, 190–91; and media studies, 14–15; musical mists, 171–80, 173–78ex; music school, plans for, 221–22, 226; on orchestra as technology, 18, 48–49, 148–49; on relationship between music and action, 35; rose scent, use of, 41; steam, use of, 168–71; Venus as Wagner, 40–48, 43fig, 44fig, 45fig, 46fig; vision for staged music drama, 30, 37–40, 48, 50–53, 94, 189, 221; “Wagnerian vapors” (Wagner-Dämpfe), 202–3. See also Gesamtkunstwerk; steam, onstage use of; technology; Venusberg Wagner, Richard, works of: Die Meistersinger (1868), 80, 88; Tristan und Isolde (1865), 29, 86, 88, 162, 166, 197, 257n101. See also Götterdämmerung; Lohengrin; Parsifal; Rheingold, Das; Rienzi; Ring des Nibelungen, Der; Siegfried; Tannhäuser; Walküre, Die Wagner, Richard, writings of: “Art and Revolution” (1849), 16; “Beethoven” (1870), 51; Siegfried’s Tod (1848), 89, 169. See also “Art-Work of the Future, The”; Opera and Drama

Wagner, Siegfried, 47, 100, 102, 166, 186, 282n71 Wagner, Wieland, 203, 286n134 Wagner, Wolfgang, 42, 44fig Wagner curtain, 23, 91–97, 92fig, 93fig, 258–59n120 Wagnerian technologies, xii-xiii, 21–26, 155, 161, 164–65, 181, 209, 217, 238; use of term, 6, 7 Wagner Theater, touring company, 95, 222–23, 226, 288n31. See also Neumann, Angelo Wagner winches, 91–92, 92fig Walther, Johann Gottfried, 114 Walküre, Die (Wagner, 1870): curtain, use of, 88; fire in, 149, 169, 178–79, 186; gong, use of, 147–48, 150; individual performances of, 222; parody, 54; steam, use of, 182, 186, 198, 202. See also Ring des Nibelungen, Der Wandeldekorationen. See moving canvases weather, in opera, 166. See also storms Weber, Carl Maria von, 10–11, 13, 110; Freischütz, Der (1821), 11, 66, 81, 165 Weber, Gottfried, 110 Werfel, Franz, 162, 202, 203 Werktreue, 6 Werther (Massenet, 1892), 98 Whale, James, 106 Wittmann, Carl Friedrich, 98 Wolzogen, Hans von, 178 Woodrow, Alan, 46fig Wozzeck (Berg, 1925), 102–4, 103ex Zampa (Herold, 1831), 168 Zelmira (Rossini, 1822), 70–71, 254n52 Zemlinsky, Alexander: Eine florentinische Tragödie (1916), 260n149 Zeuxis, 57 Zwischenvorhang, 75–77. See also drop scenes