Wagner’s Venusberg

This chapter explicates how the opening Venusberg scenes of Wagner’s Tannhäuser allegorically anticipate the composer’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk,as well as its limitations. Both the Venusberg and Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth are removed from civilization, elevated on a mountain, hermetically closed, artificially lit, and accessible only to the initiate. By micromanaging her grotto, Venus choreographs an overwhelming medial crescendo of the sort demanded by Wagner in “The Art-Work of the Future.” The Venusberg thus illustrates the desired stage appearance of Wagner’s ideals and how to realize it: Venus is Wagner’s total director. Parallels between Venus and Wagner are reinforced by their shared personal obsessions and underlined in recent productions of Tannhäuser. However, Wagner’s Tannhäuser flees the Venusberg, with his rejection of Venus’s magic (or technologies) presaging Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner’s total medial immersion. Wagner may have intimated the unattainability of his multimedia ideals from their inception.

Epilogue

Looking beyond individual stage technologies, the epilogue proposes that Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus can be understood as a preelectric recording machine, and Angelo Neumann’s touring “Wagner Theater” of 1882–83 as its embodied extension. Yet operatic fixity was as illusory as Wagner’s ridding technologies of their technicity, themes explored throughout this book. Even the most advanced devices quickly become obsolete and opaque, and the experience of digital multimedia is more immersive than ever possible for live opera. A discussion of Robert Lepage’s 2010–12 Ring at the Metropolitan Opera challenges the illusionist ideal, while Marina Abramović’s “authentic” productions of recent works reveal the historical contingency of performative effects. Operatic productions by Gob Squad and La Fura dels Baus instead paradigmatically embrace opera’s mixed mediality. The epilogue ends by suggesting that such hypermedial approaches might boost opera’s relevance in the current era of virtual realities, as nostalgia for embodied media encounters the new materialism.

Steam

Wagner’s abundant evocation of fogs and fires in Der Ring des Nibelungen was unprecedented. The water vapor used in 1876 at Bayreuth’s inaugural festival provided Wagner with his most “real” stage ingredient. Additionally, the chapter proposes, steam could mediate between bodies and painted scenery and could both enliven and veil open transformations. Yet while onstage vapors became a visual icon of the Ring, steam also drew attention to tensions within Wagner’s works and theories. Although intended to evoke unspoiled mythic nature, this novel and multisensorial technology generated smells and sounds associated precisely with the industrial modernity that Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was to overcome. Allegorically, steam’s rendering of both fogs and fires anticipated the vanquishing of nature in the Ring by fire, the oldest human technology. Ultimately, its multivalence allowed steam to transcend both scenic realism and the operatic stage to become a cyp her of both modernity and performativityper se.

Introduction

Starting with the Metropolitan Opera’s paradoxical emphasis on both authenticity and technological innovation in its 2010–12 Ring cycle, the introduction highlights the longstanding dissociation in European thought of the technical and the cultural, a distinction that influenced both the aesthetics and the study of nineteenth-century opera. A post-revolutionary appetite for realism and spectacle was fed by the ever more advanced stage technologies that composers deployed to realize their creative visions. But, as Richard Wagner championed in his 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future,” the artificiality of these supplementary machineries had to be veiled so that they might appear a natural part of the illusionist stage image. Novel “Wagnerian technologies” were designed to be perceived as media interfaces and thus to promote opera’s intended seamless multimediality. The study of their application and reception over time sheds new light on the materiality, ephemerality, and historicity of operatic staging.

Gong

First imported to Europe in the 1780s, Chinese gongs (or tam-tams) are shown in this chapter to have migrated between commerce, science, theater, orchestra, technology, and stage prop. Their novel sound effect was adopted into opera in London and Paris for a range of music-dramatic situations that are discussed here as “gong topoi.” Yet the tam-tam’s unusually loud, non-pitched resonance challenged conceptions of musical tone, while its European dissemination required either costly imports or metallurgical experiments. By midcentury, Berlioz and Wagner were experimenting with more subtle playing techniques that might enhance their orchestration while masking the instrument’s metallic timbre. Less nuanced, the chapter proposes, were the theater practitioners who gratuitously struck the gong to enhance climaxes or cover stage noises, rendering it an all-purpose sound technology. Puccini’s Turandot consummated the tam-tam as audiovisual prop. Its loudness was subsequently reconciled with musical aesthetics in twentieth-century music, both popular and avant-garde.

Curtain

This chapter explores how the proscenium curtain, previously simply a spatial and temporal frame for the performance, increasingly mediated between sound and sight. In the late eighteenth century, Grétry and other composers had begun to align the curtain’s movements with both music and drama, and during the nineteenth century, the curtain became increasingly expressive. Thus, for example, an early opening curtain might allow for pantomimic scene-setting, while “delayed” curtains could mask diegetic sound. Rossini’s prematurely closing curtain conveyed continuing drama. Novel drop scenes masking mid-act transformations further expanded the curtain’s functions and shapes. In prescribing curtain tempi as atmospheric indictors, Wagner built on such practices, his heightened attention producing the flexible “Wagner curtain” at Bayreuth. Few composers subsequently omitted curtain directions, with Berg’s scores completing the curtain’s musicalization. It was consequential, then, that Brecht dismissed the full-length curtain in his battle against illusionist theater.