and comic opera. The first such curtains may have appeared in Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828) and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829).21 That they were adopted at the Opéra partly for practical reasons can be inferred from the fact that Meyerbeer, who had envisioned an open transformation after the first act of Le prophète (1849), suggested, in rehearsal, that the curtain be lowered after all.22 And such “act curtains” quickly became the norm. By 1860, a comparative manual for German, French, and English stages stated plainly that the curtain “closes the opening [of the stage] during the entr’actes.” Similarly, in 1885 French music writer Arthur Pougin defined the main or proscenium curtain (rideau d’avant-scène) as that “which closes the scene from the eyes of the spectators, [and] which one lifts and lowers at the beginning and end of each act”:23 the curtain provided an on/off switch for the audiovisual drama.
Across European opera houses, in other words, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the curtain established as a default frame for each act. While the proscenium itself optically resembled the static, material frame around a painting, the curtain provided a dynamic, temporal equivalent for the time-bound art of stage performance. Much like the traditional gilded picture frame, it functioned primarily to delimit and present, in the words of a late eighteenth-century aesthetician, “that which is already complete”:24 it marked the end of everyday reality and the onset of the represented world that would transport the spectator into a different spatiotemporal as well as narrative universe.25 This boundary was regularly permeable only to “mere” instrumental music before or between acts. In spoken theater, in fact, at least until the 1850s musical entr’actes normally reinforced the curtain’s frame; they were to start “right after the curtain has fallen and cease not until it rises again.”26 Curtain and musical interludes thus joined forces to mark the “edges” of individual acts and bridge the time between them both visually and sonically. And since audiences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rarely left the auditorium (foyers were not yet common), entr’actes also helped sustain the emotional “space” of the drama or afforded relaxation, their length regularly exceeding the time required to change the stage sets.27
By comparison, the operatic curtain carried more bordering weight on its own. After all, music marked the stage performance proper without necessarily being suspended between acts, while silence (conversely) did not always immediately signify the end of an act. An 1841 Theater-Lexikon therefore recommended that in opera the sign for maneuvering the curtain (usually a bell—hence the saying “to ring down the curtain”) should be given to the stagehands not by the stage manager, as in spoken drama, but by the prompter, by means of a wire connected to a backstage bell. The prompter would have received the signal—via a noiseless wire pull attached to moveable sticks—from the conductor:28 obviously, the latter knew the musical structure best. In addition to the preelectric transmission technologies involved in perfecting the curtain’s timing (effected by telegraph later in the century), this arrangement reveals an inverted hierarchy of music and stage technologies when compared to spoken theater. For opera, the machinists ideally accorded with musical timings rather than themselves determining the length of entr’actes.
In practice, though, directing curtains remained a collaboration between stage manager and conductor, to be worked out for each piece. When intermediary acts were preceded not by an intermission but by an entr’acte, for example, the conductor needed to be notified at the appropriate time that the stage was ready.29 Furthermore, the stage manager oversaw the riggers who in most nineteenth-century theaters manually operated the curtain by pulling its counterweighted rope. In Paris, the curtain therefore remained part of the stage manager’s purview until 1875, when Charles Garnier’s new opera house pioneered an electric curtain mechanism that conductors themselves could activate (or play like an instrument) via a simple button.30 This electrification neatly symbolizes composers’ increasing control of the curtain that this chapter will trace, while highlighting the curtain’s continuing practical dependence on (and essence as) technology. Nonetheless, the artistic decision as to when the proscenium curtain should reveal or conceal the stage was mostly a done deal in early nineteenth-century theaters.
The existence of such standard practices may make one suspect that opera composers did not need to indicate curtains, at least not for works that followed musical conventions; and this assumption seems to be borne out by contemporary scores. Admittedly, some caution is in order when conjecturing about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century curtain routines on the basis of scores. A look at the recent critical editions of Meyerbeer’s trend-setting grands opéras underlines the liberty with which curtain cues were omitted, adjusted, or added in the often abridged published scores of the era (whether orchestral or vocal), and even more extensively in later editions. Moreover, original performance materials, where extant, reveal further discrepancies between written instructions and actual procedures. This situation thwarts any conclusive findings on when, why, and by whom curtains were first prescribed, what or who might have motivated this development, and how exactly the practices of various countries, theaters, and composers influenced each other. What is more, changes in the placement of curtains between houses or over time (as evinced in many performance scores) were related not only to artistic considerations but also to the variable speed of curtains, a product of their weight, cloth, and mechanisms. Alas, hardly any documentation survives for this material aspect or for the precise tasks and physical labor performed by the stagehands operating the curtains.31 But a sampling of available critical editions, facsimile autographs, nineteenth-century scores, production books, and occasional performance materials does reveal general trends among the core French, Italian, and Austro-German repertories—tendencies that increasingly individualize the generic framing described above.
PRECOCIOUS OPENINGS
Before approximately the 1820s, curtains at the beginnings of operas tended to be notated in the score only where the onset of the first scene was musically ambiguous or—relatedly—where a composer sought to achieve a special effect. Both situations occurred particularly in operas that blended the overture seamlessly into the music of the first act proper, often by eschewing musical closure. As Patrick Taïeb has shown in his extensive study of French opera overtures between 1770 and 1820, their integration with the main drama was a chief objective of French composers who, in the wake of Gluck’s reforms, wanted to make all music dramatically relevant. In Taïeb’s analysis, beyond acoustically heralding a performance and thereby hushing the audience, overtures were now often tailored to serve either or both of two main functions: to set the general atmosphere of the opera (or its key moments) and/or to prepare for the first scene.32 Particularly in the latter case, it was expedient for overtures to link directly into the first act, so as not to interrupt the established sonic ambience with a pause and applause. This intended continuity encouraged closer interaction of music and curtain, which in turn required the curtain’s opening to be specified.
The oeuvre of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, who was known for—among other innovations—experimental treatments of overtures and entr’actes, offers a helpful platform for gauging how the curtain consequently became more relevant in specific musical and dramatic situations. What emerges from this exploration is that the joining of overture and first act frequently precipitated what we might call a “precocious” curtain relative to the onset of the first scene. In his comedy Le magnifique (Paris, Comédie-Italien, 1773), for instance, Grétry asked for the curtain to be raised seventeen measures before the triumphant end of his substantial overture, during the forte repeat—turned from minor to major—of a four-measure closing motif that leads into two cycles of emphatic I–IV–V–I cadences and five loud tonic chords before a half-measure rest. With a two-measure general pause following, this caesura would have been the traditional—and natural—place for the curtain. But Grétry requested that the first scene be “linked” with the overture. And since act 1 starts with a sole drum tattoo sounding “in the distance,” it was necessary to raise the curtain earlier, for only thus could the silence initiating act 1 become dramatically meaningful (rather than occasioning applause for the emerging scene) and the tattoo audible.33
