Aida, Egyptomania, and the After-life of Grand Opera

This chapter explores three related themes present in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida: the nexus between the imaginative display of the flute and the wider nineteenth-century fascination with ancient Egypt; Verdi’s turn to the affective poetics of phantasmagoria—its focus on loss, mourning and consolation—as he mobilized grand opera for the project of empire in the 1870s; and finally, his timely consideration of the lyrical voice of Aida, which calls attention to the role of memory in listening to opera and comments on the spectral nature of grand opera, suggesting that it survives in operatic modernity as a musical after-image, that is, a trace of a past musicality that potentiates the critical awareness of opera today.

The Diorama, Apparitions, and Dream Image in Robert le diable

The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead left their graves, and, phantom-like, haunted the stage. Those “ghosts” of deceased nuns clad in white ushered in a new genre, the ballet blanc, while another phantom—Robert’s mother—bestowed on grand opera the gift of lyric spectrality when Alice, in Act V, relayed the woman’s last words. Parisian mélomanes regarded this moment of song with special reverence after the 1830s and, arguably, its lyrical qualities guided efforts to reform singing in the 1830s and 40s. But, at the same time, Robert ushered in a new understanding in Paris of opera as an art of dream-like states: indeed, it was the visual procedures of phantasmagoria and diorama that inspired the radical change in Meyerbeer’s art of composition.

The Poetics of Sensation in L’Africaine and Tristan und Isolde

Chapter 5 investigates Meyerbeer’s and Wagner’s treatments of operatic perception and sensation in L’Africaine, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. The discussion highlights the preoccupation with pleasure and innervation that the two composers shared during the late 1850s and 60s. The music dramaturgies of Wagner and Meyerbeer centered on exotic tress and poisonous blossoms are discussed in parallel, not to show, as others have done, what Wagner learned from Meyerbeer and improved upon, but rather to draw attention to the works’ shared preoccupation with enhanced perception and the role of dreamlike experience in the theater. This shared preoccupation is considered in light of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics of modernity.

The Phantom Ship in Der fliegende Holländer and L’Africaine

This chapter describes two instances of the re-mediation of grand opera by phantasmagoria, discussing side by side two deployments of the figure of the phantom ship—a seafaring image produced by phantasmagoria at the Adelphi Theatre in of Edward Fitzball’s nautical drama The Flying Dutchman (1826)—in Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843) and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865). Wagner’s music for the apparitional scenes, discussed in detail in the chapter, suggests a manner of composition adapted from the technical procedure of phantasmagoria and the nautical theatrics cultivated by Fitzball in London. L’Africaine’s nautical scene was also partially inspired by the English figure of the Flying Dutchman, exploring the same idea of magnification that was central to phantasmagorical procedure and to Wagner’s approach to the nautical.

Gaslight and Phantasmagoria at the Opéra

Phantasmagoric, evanescent figurations began competing for attention on the operatic stage following the introduction of gas lighting to the Salle Le Peletier in 1822. Gaslight provided a new environment for the creation of optical illusions in the theater, introducing darkness as a dramaturgical means of facilitating dreamlike perceptivity. In this environment, opera was re-mediated in light of phantasmagoria, the eighteenth-century art of conjuring ghosts developed by Paul Philidor and Etienne Robertson, to become a medium for the production of illusions. Louis Daguerre deployed his new art of the diorama at the Opéra beginning in the 1820s.

Opera and Beauty

Chapter 1 considers the emergence of a spectacular sensibility for song and singing in Paris after the 1820s. Parisian mélomanes wrote imaginatively and at length about opera, leaving for posterity a treasure trove of “souvenirs.” When contemplating the idea of beauty in the contemporary opera stage, these recollections often revisited a single musical event led by Henriette Sontag and Maria Malibran in 1829, which, they claimed, bequeathed to them something extraordinary: a new lyrical mood, at once blissful and discontented, which ushered into opera the divided affect of modernity. Théophile Gautier elaborated on this divided affect a few times in his poetry and in the process, he invented the figure of the diva, the allegory of beauty.

Introduction

Beginning in the 1820s, grand opera developed into a new artistic medium for the delivery of historical spectacles which, in turn, afforded audiences a new way of seeing and hearing the past. Afterwards, grand operatic spectacles fetischized the past while obfuscating the crisis of memory brought about by the 1789 revolution. They became vehicles for remembrance, relying on which Charles Baudelaire would later describe as a mnemotechnics. Jacques Fromental Halévy’s Derniers mémoirs et souvenirs (1863) provides us with a roadmap for reading opera as a medium of memory. Pursing a memnotechnical sense of grand opera, I investigate the introduction of new visual and musical technologies (gaslight illumination, the diorama, orchestration and singing) at the Opéra, and consider the role played by these technologies in shoring up the central concern with memory in grand opera.