time to wrest technology from Wagner’s ideology of concealment and to acknowledge its central role in nineteenth-century opera, whether by Wagner or anyone else. Curtain, Gong, Steam can thus be read as an attempt to approach the Gesamtkunstwerk less philosophically than materially: as a product of technological modernity.
TECHNOLOGY VERSUS MEDIA
Wagner was obviously not alone in his deep ambivalence toward the technological sphere, whether in society or onstage. In fact, it was precisely the pervasiveness of this attitude that gave rise to the long-lasting theoretical neglect of technics we have observed. Over the last several decades, however, poststructuralist thinkers have expanded the originally pejorative notion of technology as “mere” supplement into an affirmative stance toward humans as essentially “prosthetic” beings—as creatures whose survival, communication, and cultural development are inevitably bound up with technics exterior to themselves. As the pioneer of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, famously proposed, technologies are “extensions of man”:71 they appear to be as indispensable (and thus, paradoxically, as natural) to human life as nature itself.
Regarding Wagner, this approach proves fruitful. On the one hand, his conceptual neglect of stage machinery, the most obviously “technical” contributor to his Gesamtkunstwerk, can be pinpointed as dismissing the ancillary essence of technology. Hence Wagner’s condemnation to invisibility of ropes and pulleys, such annoyingly necessary mechanical aids. Yet, on the other hand, it was in part precisely this urge to conceal that confirmed their status as “mere” technology rather than an artistic medium. To explicate this difference, we can understand media with Kittler (following McLuhan) as “intersecting points (Schnittstellen) or interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other.”72 Qua interfaces, media offer “surface effects,” or what Alexander R. Galloway has evocatively called “those mysterious zones of interaction that mediate between different realities.”73 In other words, technical devices that appeal directly to our sensory organs (and thus simultaneously provide both means and end) may be considered media—or, in Wagner’s terms, fully legitimate constituents of the total artwork. By contrast, we can describe those devices operating in the background as a means to an end and, therefore, as remaining in the realm of technics: Wagner’s detested technologies. To be sure, this is a pragmatic distinction of degree, not of kind, as the common expressions “technical media” or “media technologies” imply: whether or not a contraption tends toward the technology or the medium end of my spectrum depends on its contextual use and (often subjective) reception. Nonetheless, my terminological differentiation between technology and medium offers a helpful heuristic that captures both the conceptual understanding and the concrete tools embraced by Wagner and other nineteenth-century composers in their efforts to generate and control their operas’ illusionist effects.
That Wagner practiced such a hierarchical division into perceptible creative media and merely facilitating technologies is evident in his notion of the opera orchestra as a “mechanism for tone-production.” As he explained in the 1862 Ring Preface, this apparatus (like those ropes) should be veiled, lest the spectator, “through the inevitable sight of the mechanical auxiliary movements during the performance of the musicians and their conductor, is made an unwilling witness to technical evolutions which should really remain concealed from him.”74 Music, of course, was one of the key arts in Wagner’s music drama. But the orchestra amounted to a sheer “technical source” (den technischen Herd) of this acoustical art.75 As such, it was to stay hidden in order not to disrupt—and distract from—the multimedial illusion onstage. In other words, Wagner severed the orchestra’s optical and acoustic interactions with the audience, thereby turning the orchestra from embodied audiovisual medium into disembodied technology behind an acoustic medium. In the context of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the orchestra was no less technological than the stage’s ancillary ropes—a mere mechanical implement for the generation of one of his music drama’s constitutive media.
And yet, the view of technology as human appendage highlights that Wagner the artist was himself in need of such accessories. After all, his unease with technology had very practical reasons as well. As the poet-performer he had envisioned in “The Art-Work,” Wagner was fully capable of writing his own libretti and music, of coaching singers and musicians, and of directing gestures and blocking: legends of him bounding onto stage during rehearsals and demonstrating the movements and expressions of his characters are legion. All he needed in this regard—as did all composers—were singers capable of personifying these roles: in this sense, singing bodies became extensions of Wagner. But he had much less command over the scenic, lacking as he did both painterly skill and technical acumen. As Patrick Carnegy has argued, Wagner’s inability to concretize his interior visions created serious hurdles en route to his stage productions: he had to find painters and costume designers able to realize his visual conceptions—mediators in the flesh who were not only receptive to Wagner’s inspirations but also amenable to having their sketches critiqued until they sufficiently approximated the composer’s ideas to be submitted to a studio for material execution.76
With regard to stage technology, Wagner’s need for support was even greater. This want was felt acutely by Brandt, Wagner’s chief machinist for Bayreuth. During the early stages of planning the theater’s equipment, Brandt observed that “Wagner rhapsodizes in the ideal. Everything real is too foreign to his nature.”77 Insofar as Wagner mentioned the machinist in his more practice-oriented writings (particularly those that advocated stagings of his works), he did so always in tandem with the painter; together, painter and machinist created a singular scenic art (rather than separate painterly and technological arts).78 In reality, though, Brandt became the right hand not of the painter but of Wagner himself: he was Wagner’s “most important helper” and the only person other than the composer without whom, as Wagner frankly confessed, producing the Ring would have been impossible.79 Brandt, then, functioned as technological supplement to Wagner and his artistic ideals. Again, such collaboration was typical for opera composers. But for a Gesamtkunstwerk artist set on total control—one who had even managed to establish his own theater—having to count on someone else’s ingenuity and on machines can hardly have been comfortable. His scant technological savvy and resulting dependency offer yet another reason why Wagner was so eager to obscure his productions’ reliance upon technics.
From a wider perspective, this covering-up of dependence on others included also the inherited musical, dramaturgical, and stage-practical techniques on which Wagner built his Gesamtkunstwerk. The extent to which he used his contemporaries’ operatic models as multimedia quarries is perhaps most obvious with Rienzi, the work Wagner consciously designed in the late 1830s to make a name for himself. As he retrospectively admitted, he sought to achieve this repute by outdoing “in reckless extravagance” every aspect of grand opéra, “with all its scenic and musical splendor, its spectacular and musically amassing fervor.”80 Not only was Rienzi longer and arguably louder than any previous opera, but it also blatantly showcased many audiovisual effects borrowed from French works. For example, Wagner adopted interactive on- and offstage choirs, organ, and bells from Meyerbeer and from Halévy, whose 1835 La juive had left a striking impression on the composer. Processions, religious and military ceremonies, and (yes) sunrises had long been operatic staples, while conflagrations had more recently become fashionable: Wagner’s grim denouement expanded on Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe (1826) and the eruption of Vesuvius in Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828), one of the few French works Wagner admitted to admiring. And, as we shall see, he prescribed curtains and signaled with a tam-tam not one but two dramatic peripeties. Contemporary critic Ludwig Rellstab surely had grounds to decry Rienzi for an abundance of scenic “facts” without dramatic motivation—for providing “a number of effects without the cause.”81 Just how much this parade of mechanical wonders must have embarrassed the later Wagner of Opera and Drama is clear from the fact that he adopted Rellstab’s diatribe against himself in order to hurl it in turn at Meyerbeer, thereby allegedly stigmatizing the cause of all opera-technological
