curtains, although he did so more frequently than other composers, and his curtains became crucial atmospheric indicators. This heightened demand for flexibility stimulated a new mechanical curtain technology. First installed in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the diagonally pulled “Wagner curtain” both set the scene for and sealed the intended final impression of an opera, its newly variable gestures embodying Wagner’s wish to govern both stage and audience. So ubiquitous did Wagner’s agogic curtain become that few composers after him could ignore it. Small wonder that Brecht looked above all to the curtain when he sought to herald onstage his break with Wagnerian illusionism.
Where chapter 2 traces the artistic transformation, during the long nineteenth century, of an old stage technology into an artistic medium, chapter 3 describes a more complex trajectory as it follows the ambivalent migration of a new sonic device—the gong or tam-tam—between the musical and the mechanical. As foreign import and curiosity, gongs initially wandered in Western Europe between science labs, collectors, and popular shows. But with their (partial) cachet as musical instruments rather than “mere” technologies, they left more substantial paper trails than did curtains, deemed simply material objects. (Likely for the same reason, the gong is also the only technology featured in this book on which Wagner himself commented.) Composers in the mercantile metropolis of London and in post-Revolutionary Paris promoted the instrument’s soon-to-be ubiquitous theatrical roles as exotic signifier and acoustic signal. Looking at its operatic employment through the 1830s, I lay out a gamut of semantic “gong topoi” that permeated operas and, later, symphonic music well into the twentieth century. By midcentury the loud tam-tam strike was so customary a sound effect that even Wagner added it to his 1861 Paris Tannhäuser, to mark the Venusberg’s disappearance. Yet his mature operas would utilize it more sparingly. Instead, he cultivated subtle sounds and playing techniques designed to mask the prototypical gong strike’s metallic essence. This musically tamed tam-tam added significant color to Wagner’s increasingly rich timbre and thus aided the dematerialization of his orchestra’s synthetic sound: it was a technology in the service of heightened sonic mediality.
At the same time, production books and performance materials reveal an alternative to Wagner’s acoustic veiling: loud gong strokes helped coordinate backstage technologies or cover the sound of noisy machines. As such, theaters treated the tam-tam as a gratuitous accessory for earlier operas as well, which left it fluctuating between orchestra pit and backstage, music and machinery, intended artistic medium and technological supplement. By exploring this porous acoustic space, chapter 3 challenges the common equations of stage technology with optical effects and of stagings with opera’s “visual” side. Indeed, the piercing tam-tam strike might be perceived as epitomizing the Gesamtkunstwerk acoustically as much as the curtain typifies the Gesamtkunstwerk optically: it consummates the collaboration of all participating art forms in one orgiastic climax. When Puccini elevated the tam-tam to central stage prop in Turandot (1926), he ultimately staged its role as central dramatic agent.
Chapter 4 turns to the most multisensorial and innovative technology directly linked to Wagner: the onstage use of steam. Although French operas had occasionally utilized vapor to enhance their beloved conflagrations, Wagner’s foggy Ring libretto summoned it excessively. By invoking mists to suggest both unspoiled nature and Nordic mythology, Wagner allowed actual steam to become the most “real” element of his scenic make-believe—a feature that embodied his desire to render art as nature. As such, it came to serve further theatrical functions as well, shrouding and simultaneously enlivening open transformations or simulating changes in the corporality of protagonists. Its amorphous physicality also superbly mediated between the scenery’s two- or three-dimensional contrivances and the singers’ bodies, thus providing a multivalent medial glue to connect opera’s various materialities into one multimedia interface. Steam was a real-life equivalent of Venus’s magic—the ultimate expression of the Gesamtkunstwerk-as-staged. Accordingly, it was quickly (and closely) associated with Wagner. Employed for Ring productions around the world, it is perhaps the clearest example of a technology becoming part of the popular idea of a work itself.
Like no other stage effect, however, onstage steam also pinpoints the friction inherent in Wagner’s conceptions and uses of technologies. Although intended to simulate nature, steam relied on Bayreuth’s most plainly industrial exploit: two huge locomotive boilers and a complex system of pipes and valves. Even as it boosted Wagner’s theatrical illusion, moreover, steam exposed this total—and totally controlled—artistic experience as a mirage: its smell transported spectators into the laundry room, its noise evoked the railway station. The new theatrical medium could not conceal its mechanical essence; unwittingly, Wagner staged the latter’s corruption of (idealized) nature. This paradox was prefigured in the Ring’s dramatic trajectory itself, where the smoke of artificial fires (according to Greek mythology, the oldest human technology) gradually replaces the fogs of mythical nature. Indeed, Wagner turned grand opéra’s ubiquitous stage fires from an isolated special effect into a quasi-natural ambient signifier. Unsurprisingly, Bayreuth used steam to simulate these extended blazes as well, seemingly merging nature and technology into a single vaporous medium. Steam might thus symbolize the illusory redemption of technology through art that Wagner had hoped to achieve through his Gesamtkunstwerk overall. And yet, precisely because of the tensions it inherently signaled—between medium and technology, nature and artifice, archaic myth and hypermodern progress, stage and life, and so on—steam was able to outlast the nineteenth-century illusionist theater, having long since become a fixed feature of light engineering across the performing arts. Ultimately, we can read steam as a cipher for the ephemerality and contingency of staged opera at large: the epitome of theatricality and a token of the rapidly changing meanings and uses of Wagnerian technologies.
This longer-term perspective reveals that the incorporation of special technologies and audiovisual effects into the common idea of particular works was both volatile and transitory. Wagner was left notoriously disappointed by the premiere of the Ring but nevertheless continued to promote his staging as a “model performance” for other theaters. The epilogue addresses the resulting fissures between these preservationist efforts on the one hand and the short life cycle and limited transparency of stage technologies on the other by describing Wagner’s Bayreuth theater—along with its touring derivative—as a kind of recording mechanism: a technology of inscription and dissemination that advocated an unprecedented fixity of staged opera while eschewing the mediation of symbolic storage media. Yet precisely because of its material hybridity, this storage technology, too, disintegrated quickly.
This observation will bring us back to the present day and to the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 Ring cycle. Examining Lepage’s production in more detail, I suggest that its most authentic trait was neither its emphasis on pioneering technology nor its re-creation of some aspects of the 1876 design: it was the failure of Adorno’s phantasmagoric illusion. With the introduction of digital 3D projections onto a fully kinetic stage “machine,” Lepage foregrounded matters of materiality, agency, and the interstices of opera’s contributing media. Yet his multimedia conception broke down along the same lines Wagner’s had, with mechanical glitches and misguided attempts at literal presentations of mythical magic. The creaks of Lepage’s hardware thus disclose that no technology can ever fully bridge the divide between singers and scenery, real bodies and artificial simulation, man and machine.
Comparing both Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk ideal and Lepage’s practical realization to a recent postdramatic opera that explicitly foregrounds the relationship between humans and technology, I end with a question, wondering whether unified operatic illusionism and “transparent” technological remediation are goals worth pursuing onstage in today’s world of virtual realities and ubiquitous shiny interfaces. If there is a glimmer of promise in Lepage’s approach, it seems to lie in its self-consciously “hypermedial” features, emphasizing as they do the fundamental unsettledness of opera’s multiple media.87 A brief look at one further technology-savvy recent Ring production, by the theater group La Fura dels Baus, fosters this suggestion. Their 2007–9 staging revels
