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, 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.
FRAMING 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 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 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