performance and audience here fuse. By the end of his life, Wagner’s artwork was no longer in need of allegorical seclusion. Not even Tannhäuser might have fled this gracious (and spacious) landscape—just as critics tended to be less polemical about Parsifal than about any previous Wagner opera.
In Parsifal, in short, Wagner confidently pursued the Gesamtkunstwerk’s victory over artifice. Innocence, compassion, and faith overcome the magic castle and its technological wonders that were built on—and symbolic of—modern society’s capital offense against nature, Klingsor’s self-castration: no operatic moment illustrates more literally (and ghoulishly) media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “[a]ny invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies.”101 Klingsor’s magic realm is a prosthesis to take the place of his virility, the epitome of a manmade mechanical effect displacing the organic power of nature. By implication, its rejection and destruction reinstate nature’s principles. As Wagner had outlined in his early theories, the newfound return to nature enacted in Parsifal thus not only opens up a space for his total artwork, but also heralds—at least on the level of plot—the salvation of mankind. Moreover, the simple belief exhibited by Parsifal, “pure fool made wise by compassion,” might suggest the attitude an ideal audience was to assume for this salvation to take place—and for the illusionist staging to succeed.
Still, this victory could be made perceptible onstage only through those same technical means that Wagner (like other contemporary composers and practitioners) had honed, with variable success, throughout his life. Even the overcoming of technics by nature had to be staged within the realm of technē. Let us descend, then, into opera’s technological Venusberg, the mechanical underbelly of Wagner’s theories and practices, and peer at the instruments he and others wielded in the attempt to turn into a directorial Venus. Just like Tannhäuser, though, we shall eventually resurface to full daylight at the end of each of the following chapters, taking a bird’s-eye view of the durability of technologies and stage effects, the perpetuity composers at least implicitly desired for aspects of their stagings, and these facets’ Venusberg-like transformations over time. Having used Wagner’s Tannhäuser as a lens through which to view the nineteenth-century desire to achieve multimedia fusion on the opera stage, we shall now zoom in on select material practices and mechanical procedures by which composers sought to realize—and force onto stage—this metaphysical utopia.
2
Curtain
Berlin, 1858. The popular satirist David Kalisch starts a parody of Wagner’s Tannhäuser: “The curtain rises slowly.”1 His mention of an opening curtain would seem unremarkable were it not that it occurs not in the stage directions but in the rhymed verses proper, where the narrating singer describes the curtain’s motion before evoking Venus “sprawled out on roses.” As chapter 1 has shown, Tannhäuser’s first scene might well have incited scorn among contemporaries, given its long initial vocal silence—something perhaps alluded to by the slowness of Kalisch’s curtain. But the curtain’s opening was, one should think, standard theatrical fare. And yet, other Wagner skits similarly spoofed the curtain. In 1890, a much- performed sendup of Der Ring des Nibelungen by Martin Böhm (another successful author of Berlin farces) listed as central dramatic components “completely new decorations, machines, and bright lights, as well as a curtain made of Filet [finely laced cloth] that neatly separates the four days’ works.” The stage directions later explain that this Filet-Vorhang falls “quasi as a drop scene; thus, while the backstage is being changed, one can see everything through it.”2 In other words, the specially announced Filet curtain is revealed as a red herring and, hence, ridiculous. In the 1878 satire Der Ring, der nie gelungen by Berlin-based journalist Paul Gisbert, the curtain does fall properly. But it does so with a vengeance. At the end of the Rheingold skit, it comes down “with horror, dumbfounded” at Fasolt’s death. After Die Walküre, it falls “with dignity and decency” on the (apparently uncomfortable) sight of a sleeping woman. In Siegfried, the title hero knowingly provokes an indignant curtain when calling for love out of wedlock; as a “precaution,” the curtain “indeed comes down little by little” lest the illicit couple exhibit their love publicly. And at the end of Götterdämmerung, nothing is left for the curtain but “to fall, thoroughly speechlessly.”3 Gisbert’s satire turns the curtain into a mute character whose movements pronounce emotional reactions and ethical judgments: in the manner of a commentator or chorus, the curtain proclaims the moral, protecting, bonding with, and gesturing toward the spectators. Beyond just participating in the farce, this curtain becomes its master. Mediating between audience and author, it has the final (scoffing) word.
All three parodies highlight Wagner’s curtains as unusual, whether by means of their speed, their ineffectual fabric and virtual absence, or (on the contrary) their explicit intervention in the drama. Indeed, Wagner is the only composer—and, along with Brecht, the only dramatist tout court—to have a particular type of curtain named after him, a circumstance that seems to confirm his extraordinary attention to curtain practices. Aside from satirists, though, nineteenth-century critics rarely mentioned the workings and effects of the curtain in ordinary Wagner productions, save some observations on the innovative curtain technology of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The composer himself, otherwise so verbal about every artistic aspect of his creations, likewise remained curiously shy about the subject, thereby suggesting its association with “mere” technology (as discussed in the introduction). And most composers and opera scholars have shared in this silence. An integral part of theatrical architecture from the time of opera’s beginnings, the curtain has mostly been taken for granted. As a character in Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park laconically declared, “there is very little sense in a play without a curtain.”4 In other words, the curtain appears fundamental for establishing a performative situation, which it achieves by separating the latter from everyday actions. Even outside the theater, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, a curtain alone can manifest that fundamental “line . . . between a staging area where the performance proper occurs and an audience region,” thereby signaling both the transformation of actors into characters and the onset of make-belief that together establish what he dubs the “theatrical frame.”5 It is thus unsurprising that the red velvet curtain so beloved of theaters since the nineteenth century has turned into an icon of theatrical performance per se.6
Precisely because of its ubiquity, however, the curtain has received much less critical attention than have other, more novel aspects of nineteenth-century stage technology, such as electric light effects or contraptions rendering complex scenic fantasies ever more realistic. Despite its blatant visibility, the curtain has—ironically—tended to remain conceptually invisible: its practical, artistic, and hermeneutic contributions to staged opera have often lingered in obscurity. This is the case even where, since the late eighteenth century, composers increasingly employed the curtain as an individual, expressive ingredient. To be sure, as I will show, this perceptual “disappearance” was part and parcel of the immersive illusionist aesthetic that drove the customization of curtain uses in the first place. (In this regard, our satirists’ very noticing of the curtain points to a failure of Wagner’s endeavor to conceal his technologies.) But only recently have scholars begun to theorize the aesthetic import of curtains since the establishment of the Baroque stage—that is, after curtain technology had ceased to be a novelty. And they have tended to do so either from a dramaturgical angle and often concerning contemporary theater,7 or with regard to select composers who paid special attention to curtains. Foundational studies of the latter kind are Patrick Taïeb’s examination of how French composers began to connect overtures to the ensuing opera during the half century around 1800, and Helen Greenwald’s insightful discussion of Puccini’s carefully crafted opening curtains a century later: both analyze the multifaceted potential of relating sound and sight at an opera’s beginning by means of deliberately placed curtains. Michael Anders has expanded this discussion to address Puccini’s closing curtains, while Johanna Dombois’s recent metaphorical exploration
