of his position within operatic history.
WAGNERIAN TECHNOLOGIES
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 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 prescribe 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,