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.
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.
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 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 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 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