his music-dramaturgical armory. Instead, he also glossed over Rienzi itself: the mature Wagner disavowed his early opera as a “convolute of monstrosities” that had little to do with his later Gesamtkunstwerk. (And yet, as with his stage technologies, he continued to depend on the successful Rienzi—in this case for income.82) Wagner thus reduced this opera from medium to technology no less than he did his veiled orchestra.
The example of Rienzi discloses the extremes to which Wagner would go to camouflage his—and his works’—historical, practical, and technological roots. Throughout his career, Wagner aspired to transform and conceal acquired techniques and gadgets through their specific multimedial integration within his music dramas. The resulting high demands on these technologies in turn fostered their further innovation. In this sense, the staged Gesamtkunstwerk functioned like a new medium whose content, according to McLuhan, “is always another medium”: the “total work of art” is opera and all its technologies remediated.83 Just as the outside of his brick-and-timber Festspielhaus, to the amazement of many contemporaries, resembled an industrial plant, so Wagner himself emerges as a transformer and merger of media.
Finally, if Wagner so finely calibrated various stage effects for his works but depended on a congenial machinist for their realization, how could he reliably communicate the precariously balanced multimedia end-products to his contemporaries, let alone posterity? Here we come full circle to Lepage and the question of preservation. According to Kittler, both linguistic writing and musical notation are symbolic technologies of inscription, recording, and dissemination, and we can easily expand this notion to production books, with their abstract sketches of blocking and stage layout. Yet Wagner increasingly searched for nonsymbolic “real” means of conveying his multimedia ideas—for technologies in the sense of what Jonathan Sterne has called “repeatable social, cultural, and material processes crystallized into mechanisms” that mediated his Gesamtkunstwerk as multimedia performance.84 Put differently, Wagner pursued an exteriorization of individual and collective memories so as to store and communicate a performative event and its experience.85 Although neither the idea of an artist’s own theater nor that theater’s architecture was widely imitated at the time, Bayreuth did mobilize contemporary desires, not only for multimedial integration, but also for its conservation—strivings that would ultimately manifest in a range of twentieth-century media. Wagner has therefore been singled out in recent media studies as a conceptual steppingstone largely in view of relations between opera and newer media, rather than in light of his position within operatic history.
WAGNERIAN TECHNOLOGIES
Using the ideals and realities of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as an important lens, Curtain, Gong, Steam explores in detail three audiovisual technologies that proved vital to a range of nineteenth-century operas. These technologies were not necessarily newly discovered; but they came into vogue because of their potential to veil both other appliances and their own mechanical nature—in other words, because of the ease with which they could be pushed toward the media end of the spectrum. Their effects leaned toward the ephemeral, making them conducive to being reserved for important moments and, as such, to being requested in the score. At the same time, these devices could appeal to more than one sensory organ, something that rendered them particularly useful for glossing over the interstices between opera’s various media. I call them “Wagnerian technologies,” then, to emphasize both their mechanical essence and their propensity to be perceived—or conceived—as seemingly natural media.
As a second introduction of sorts, chapter 1 fleshes out Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged beyond the thumbnail sketch of his key treatises found in this introduction. In order to take a fresh look at both his desire to mastermind productions and his concomitant dependence on technologies, I open up a third space between Wagner’s theoretical writings and his practical stagings by reading the Venusberg scenes of Tannhäuser, act 1 (1842–75) as an allegory of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its realization. These scenes, I suggest, provide a conceptual laboratory in which we can gain insight into Wagner’s inner vision of his operas’ staged appearances and the ways in which he sought to bring them about onstage. For instance, the Venusberg boasts lifelike simulations of nature and visual effects—red lights, veiling mists, sudden transformations—that Wagner would continue to evoke through Parsifal. Moreover, Venus seeks to overwhelm Tannhäuser, her audience, by micromanaging every aspect of her grotto’s multimedia appearance; and her realm is hermetically closed, artificially lit, removed from civilization, elevated on a mountain, and accessible only to the initiate—in a word, a proto-Bayreuth. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that Wagner abandoned his revisions of Tannhäuser a year before the opening of Bayreuth proper, where his conceptual grotto materialized as real theater: Wagner could henceforth act like Venus herself.
And yet, even in his own theater Wagner would lack the goddess’s magical powers, necessitating auxiliary technologies instead. Indeed, Tannhäuser prefigures the practical breakdown of Wagner’s ideal. On the one hand, it is the opera that particularly incited his search for prescriptive and executive technologies, and on whose staging he spilled the most ink. On the other hand, Venus—the total director—fails to win over her audience by completely dominating its sensory experience. “Too much,” Tannhäuser moans before fleeing from her. Anticipating Nietzschean anti-Wagnerism, the Venusberg scenes thus cast doubt on the attainability of total control—something that, as chapter 4 will show, was ultimately borne out in Bayreuth itself. When, shortly before his death, Wagner pronounced that he still owed the world his Tannhäuser,86 he may have been referring not only to a final revision of the score but also to his overall artistic ideal and its facilitating technologies.
Notwithstanding this failure of Venus, Wagner would pay ever-greater attention to production details throughout his career. And these features included not just attention-grabbing stage-technical challenges such as swimming nixies or singing dragons, but also those less obvious—and, hence, less frequently discussed—Wagnerian technologies that helped smooth over opera’s multimedia surface. Chapters 2 (“Curtain”), 3 (“Gong”), and 4 (“Steam”) each focus on one such technology and its historical, cultural, theatrical, and hermeneutic resonances before, within, and beyond Wagner’s works. Moving from the oldest contrivance to the newest and from an omnipresent machinery to a device expressly associated with Wagner, I combine analyses of technology-rich moments in both canonic and lesser-known scores by Wagner and the generations of opera composers around him with readings of historical materials on productions and technologies (both published and unpublished), theatrical treatises, and reception documents. In tracing these technologies and their effects into the twentieth century, I register the ultimate impossibility of inscribing technology-driven audiovisual effects into works to the same degree, and with the same historical durability, as text and music. In a sense, then, Curtain, Gong, Steam is about failure as much as it is about transformation: it shows how each Wagnerian technology continually morphs, reappearing over time in productions of the same and other pieces—even in new types of media—in different forms and shapes. The emphasis on technology in the Met’s new Ring is but one example.
Raising the curtain on my discussion of Wagnerian technologies proper, chapter 2 addresses the curtain itself, that time-honored frame of the illusionist stage and paradigmatic cipher of theater per se. Particularly French composers of the late eighteenth though the mid-nineteenth centuries paid increasing attention to its movements, thus liberating the curtain from being merely a universal temporal frame of spectacles as a whole. Operating in a liminal space between stage and auditorium, architecture and performance, machinery and effect, the curtain became a commentator on the staged action. Its deliberate use allowed for the temporary dissociation of sound and vision and, thus, a newly expressive relation between auditory and visual media. In addition, the curtain’s functions and shapes became diversified with the rise of idiosyncratic
