“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 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 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. Wagner has therefore been singled out in recent media