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 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 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 proven relatively durable.21 In focusing on the technologies of staged opera, Curtain, Gong, Steam implicitly offers a historically anchored backdrop to the oft-posed 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.
STAGING IN HISTORY
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.