to curtain technology.8 Building on all this work, this chapter pursues a longer, transnational perspective on nineteenth-century opera’s growing use of the curtain as creative artistic medium. By tracing its gradual rise as what I have called a Wagnerian technology, I show how composers progressively scripted the curtain to precisely entwine opera’s visual and aural domains. The curtain not only furthered multimedia smoothness, but also opened new spaces, literally, for creative—and increasingly subtle—mediations between opera’s various media.
Historically, the curtain does emerge as time-honored theatrical equipment that has undergone relatively few changes over the past four centuries. After its early uses in classical Roman theater as well as medieval mystery plays (among other ritual performances), the curtain had intermittently appeared only as part of stage sets, to close off particular onstage areas.9 In Shakespeare’s theater-in-the-round, for instance, small curtains occasionally covered doors, alcoves, or other “diegetic” spaces within the set to obscure the entrances or exits of characters.10 The proscenium curtain proper was reintroduced in sixteenth-century Italy with the emergence of the enclosed box-theater and its picture-frame stage: for the Baroque theater (as this illusionist, perspective stage is often summarily called) a large front curtain became quasi-constitutive for hiding the stage setup and its ornate decorations until the beginning of a performance. This function was particularly important for the new genre of opera, with its unprecedented media complexity and scenic pomp. Indeed, the stage curtain was popularized across Europe above all by Italian opera.11 As one of the earliest commentators on stage technology, the Italian-trained German architect Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, explained in 1640, “Since the spectators, on entering the theater, should not be able to see the complete scene of the stage, a curtain appropriate to the following action is hung in front of the scene. . . . When the spectator takes his seat he must be content for a short time with anticipation, which will only whet his appetite.”12 By veiling the scene, the front curtain marked both the stage space and the impending performance upon it as extraordinary—so exceptional as to be revealed only temporarily and at particular, predetermined times. Thus it also increased expectations for this special event.
In creating anticipation, however, the curtain reinforced its own subsidiary essence. After all, it was a placeholder or blank space, a promise of something yet to come, and its chief purpose was to be eventually—and inevitably—removed to disclose the “real” show behind it. This indexical function of curtains was pinpointed as early as the first century AD by Pliny the Elder in his famous account of the legendary artistic competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. After the former painted grapes so realistically that birds came to feed on them, the latter produced a picture veiled by a curtain that Zeuxis instinctively went to draw to see the alleged painting—only to realize that the curtain itself was painted.13 Casting the curtain as mechanism to protect an artwork, Pliny at the same time stresses the anticipated effect of its removal precisely by denying it—by having Parrhasius’s touch transform the (painted) curtain into the artwork itself. Conversely, Baroque proscenium curtains in particular were often richly decorated or painted with landscapes or mythological scenes.14 This appearance was intended not only to elevate the theater’s splendor, but also to channel the spectators’ gaze toward the stage before a show and, thereby, amplify the impression of both perspectival depth and realism once the static, flat canvas gave way to animated stage action. Curtain and picture merged to elevate claims to artistry—of Parrhasius’s painterly skills or of theatrical performance in general.
In order to intensify the anticipation incited by the theatrical curtain, Furttenbach and other early seventeenth-century authors recommended that it be removed as quickly as possible, making audiences suddenly feel transported into the stage action.15 To this end, around 1600 some Italian stages imitated classical models by having the curtain drop into a groove at stage front.16 Alternatively, curtains were pulled up, rolled up, or parted in the middle and drawn aside. Either way, they moved primarily at the commencements of performances. Only gradually did it become customary to veil the stage again at the ends of shows or (even later) of individual acts; as we shall see, this development was related to a growing emphasis on uninterrupted illusion and the concomitant ambivalence about the visibility of machines.17 Against this brief historical snapshot, it is small wonder that the curtain could easily be understood to operate merely outside and independently of individual theatrical performances.
And yet, this chapter shows that in opera the use of the curtain became more frequent and more nuanced from the late eighteenth century on, as composers gradually took cognizance of it: they drew the curtain into their operatic visions by coordinating its movements ever more purposefully with the drama, envisioned stage imagery, and music. The old technology of the curtain thus no longer just enhanced audience enchantment, demarcated performances as out-of-the-ordinary, and signaled their beginnings and endings. Instead, I suggest, it became an operatic medium in its own right. As such, the curtain operated across multiple spatial, temporal, medial, and conceptual borders. This left it moving between total visibility and (almost) complete concealment, static architecture and dynamic performance, permanent machinery and ephemeral effect, stage and auditorium, actors and spectators, dramatic time and real time, fictional world and reality, musical evocation and visual presentation. Wagner’s idiosyncratic curtain dramaturgy to which the parodies alluded was thus but part of a longer-term development, one that partook of the budding concern among composers with key aspects of staging.
In order to assess this larger history, the first sections of this chapter survey operatic curtain practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, moving from opening curtains via intermediary drops to closing curtains, and from standard procedures to composers’ specification of curtains to align sound and vision in dramatically resonant ways. Having disclosed how these conventions developed before Wagner began his career, I will then zoom in on both his works and the actual curtain he used in Bayreuth to examine the sites where his zeal to conceal everything technological manifested most literally, and to understand why our satirists would alight on his curtains as unusual. A concluding peek into the twentieth century confirms Wagner’s influence on the continuing exploration of the curtain’s expressive potential as well as the eventual rejection of that potential in light of an anti-illusionist (and anti-Wagnerian) reemphasis on the technological conditioning of all theater. Lifting the operatic curtain on itself, as it were, this chapter thus expands our awareness of a facet of opera’s material complexity in performance that brings new insights into opera’s characteristic interplay of acoustic and optical media. In the end, the curtain might epitomize not just theatrical performance but also the smooth multimedia surface commonly aspired to by operatic composers and producers of the long nineteenth century and beyond.
FRAMING A SHOW
Until well into the nineteenth century, operating the theatrical curtain seems to have remained mostly a mechanical concern. As the voluminous Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon explained in 1839 for both opera and spoken drama, “The opening of the curtain should, as an absolute rule, occur immediately after the completion of the overture or interlude. Every pause has a disruptive effect.”18 An Italian stage directors’ manual of 1825 additionally warned not to interrupt the overture “with the inopportune raising of the curtain.”19 The latter was, then, to be aligned exactly with the end of the musical introduction and the beginning of the show proper. By the same token, it would close with the end of the stage performance. More of a novelty was the practice of lowering the curtain at the close of each act—pioneered, it seems, in Germanic theaters. German plays, in fact, habitually mention the curtain simply to indicate the beginnings and endings of acts. Hence the traditional German term for “act,” Aufzug (literally, the pulling open or drawing up), a term to which Wagner reverted beginning with Der fliegende Holländer (Dresden, 1843) in his quest to create a distinctly German national opera.20
At the Paris Opéra, by contrast, open transformations had traditionally taken pride of place. But the Staging Committee, established in 1827, appears to have instituted the closing of curtains not just before intermissions but also at the ends of intermediary
