Humoristische Blätter (1876)
4.7. Theo Raven’s production score for Das Rheingold documenting the 1914 Bayreuth staging and how it differed from earlier productions
4.8. The steaming hydroelectric dam in Patrice Chéreau’s centennial production of Das Rheingold, scene 1 (Bayreuth, 1976)
4.9. Mime’s industrial (and proto-steampunk) smithy in Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 Bayreuth production of Siegfried, act 1
4.10. Vera Nemirova’s cosmically misty unit set for the Ring (Opernhaus Frankfurt, 2010–12)
4.11. “Steam Swan,” in Berliner Wespen (1882)
E.1. Robot Myon arrives in front of a red velvet curtain in the Gob Squad production of My Square Lady (Komische Oper Berlin, 2015)
E.2. The “machine” in operation: models of Carl Fillion’s unit set for the Ring in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010–12)
E.3. The Rhinemaidens splash about and exhale interactive digital bubbles in scene 1 of Das Rheingold in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010)
E.4. Alberich has morphed into a skeletal dinosaur in scene 3 of Das Rheingold in Robert Lepage’s production at the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 2010)
E.5. Robotic giants and gods in mechanical cranes argue over the embodied Nibelung hoard in La Fura dels Baus’s Das Rheingold, scene 4 (Valencia, 2007)
E.6. The gods move towards Valhalla, an acrobatic body sculpture suspended in midair, in La Fura dels Baus’s Das Rheingold, scene 4 (Valencia, 2007)
Preface and Acknowledgments
In the digital age, opera may appear like a dinosaur among audiovisual media, ill-equipped to thrive in the fast-changing climate of virtual realities. Some directors therefore seek to boost its chances of survival through generous infusions of modern technologies, such as that giant computerized machine-set in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 production of Richard Wagner’s ever-challenging Ring cycle depicted on the cover of this book (see also figure E.4). Yet opera has long enlisted the latest gadgets from within and beyond the theatrical realm in an attempt to fuse its various contributing elements into one immersive spectacle. During my earlier research on Verdi I chanced upon and became fascinated by the release of water vapor in the first productions of the Ring—a use so striking and ample that it came to be associated both with Wagner and with a particular idea of what the Ring should look like onstage. While investigating these steam effects, I noted in turn that Wagner parodies frequently mocked the ways in which he deployed curtains, and discovered the freehand addition of the tam-tam to a wide range of scores and theatrical satires. My curiosity piqued, I launched an exploration of all three phenomena as both independent theatrical tools and technologies integral to the conception of individual nineteenth-century operas. Thus paradigmatically addressing opera’s mechanical conditioning, I strove to enhance our understanding of the genre as a multimedia art form. I also hoped to dismantle Wagner’s overbearing position in the historiography of operatic production by exposing his borrowing of technologies from his contemporaries. It was with some chagrin that I realized in due course how instrumental Wagner had been, after all: not for inventing but for pushing and twisting the uses of each technology.
Put in more abstract terms, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera examines how composers since the Industrial Revolution began to integrate specific production details into their creative visions, thereby unleashing a quest for new or updated machineries. In particular, they cultivated what I call “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensorial illusionist devices intended to veil the artificiality of stage representation along with their own mechanicity. Each of these technologies mediated not just between sound and sight but also more generally between staged opera’s heterogeneous materialities, smoothing over the latter’s interstices. Concretely, I explore uses and effects of the curtain, the gong, and steam in a wealth of works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him, drawing on scores, historical performance documents, theatrical treatises, reviews, and wider cultural discourses. My book traces each titular technology’s (temporary) absorption into a common notion of the relevant operas as well as its gradual transformation over time—in later productions, in its mechanical evolution, as well as in its resurgence across various performance genres of the last half century. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work and offers a new, technological angle on the history (and historicity) of staging.
As the term “Wagnerian technologies” suggests, my theoretical toolbox partly derives from Wagner’s writings and their later exegetes. I reexamine some of these texts from a dual perspective, both hermeneutic and stage-practical, to pinpoint their inherent failure to account for the gritty actuality of operatic production, which no idealist thinking could transcend. But I acknowledge that Wagner was not the only proponent of this elusive ideal of concealing opera’s artifice through the deployment of ever-more sophisticated technologies. Indeed, the devices and techniques harnessed for his coveted medial fusion all squarely derived from contemporaneous stage practices. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus embeds Wagner within a larger, pan-European concern among nineteenth-century composers with opera’s multimediality and teases out some of the latter’s pragmatic and theoretical implications, both then and now.
My subtitle’s second term also invites explanation. While focusing on technologies, it is what I consider to be their medial aspiration—their affordance of creative perceptible interfaces with the audience’s sensorium—that defines their “Wagnerian” quality, in contrast to the “merely” enabling (and therefore ideally imperceptible) mechanics behind their operation. Here and elsewhere, Curtain, Gong, Steam builds on recent media theories, especially Friedrich Kittler’s provocative emphasis on the medial conditions of any form of human expression. Far from following his techno-determinism, however, I venture that the technologically mediated concealment of staged opera’s mechanics has always been doomed to fail. Instead, it may be opera’s very hybridity that can sustain the genre in our unprecedentedly mediatized age. The accelerating obsolescence of media technologies ironically continues to render a perfectly transparent illusionist stage chimeric. But with its imaginative and deliberate collaboration between bodies and technologies, opera may in the end prove anything but a medial dinosaur: it offers a welcome site for contemporary negotiations among ephemeral virtualities, a reviving interest in the material, and our own dogged corporeality. In this spirit, and with a nod to the book’s extended gestation, a framing look at some recent productions consciously historicizes my own scholarly endeavors.
• • •
The bulk of Curtain, Gong, Steam was conceived, my eyes fixed on the tenure clock, during a Junior Faculty Leave at Yale University in 2011–12; and it was essentially completed while I held a fellowship at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in 2015–16. Chapter 1 partly derives from a lecture I gave in Bayreuth in 2011, published as “Venus als Wagner” in Tannhäuser—Werkstatt der Gefühle: Wagner-“Concil” Bayreuther Festspiele 2011, edited by Clemens Risi, Bettina Brandl-Risi, Anna Papenburg, and Robert Sollich (Freiburg: Rombach, 2014), 159–76. Large parts of chapter 4 are based on my essay “Wagner-Dampf: Steam in Der Ring des Nibelungen and Operatic Production,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011): 179–218. Chapter 3 and the epilogue profited from the interdisciplinary insights of my co-fellows at the superbly stimulating Italian Academy: Angelika Kaufmann, Arianna Cecconi, Beatrice Vallone, Cammy Brothers, Chiara Franceschini, Christine Jeanneret, Emmanuel Alloa, Emmanuele Coccia, Eric Bianchi, Federico Lauria, Federico Pierotti, Leon Chisholm, Manuela Bragagnolo, Michele Cometa, Paola Giacomoni, Thomas Hilgers,
