that had sounded in the wings behind the closed curtain at its beginning and that continue to punctuate the first scene’s military marches. The launch of act 1, then, retrospectively reveals the overture to have been partly diegetic music (including its sometimes polyphonic texture and the inclusion of a popular song). This unusual format was inspired by Michel-Jean Sedaine’s libretto, according to which during the overture “a file of prisoners will be seen passing behind the scene; the chanting of priests will be heard”: Grétry designed his overture as an imaginary, musically stylized “representation” of this pantomime. And its effect depended on the curtain first denying and then prematurely granting vision.34
Grétry’s operas Amphitryon (Versailles, 1786) and Anacréon chez Polycrate (Paris, Opéra, 1797) merged their overtures with the subdued first scenes not merely via an early curtain but also through an explicit musical transition that impeded a break. As Taïeb has argued, such sonic links were generally favored for nocturnal scenes (as in Amphitryon) or the sunrises recurrently launching French operas (as in Anacréon)35—dusky settings that did not lend themselves to sudden exposure and applause. Accordingly, Grétry did not close the overtures harmonically but specified the curtain opening at caesuras fifteen and eight measures before their ends, respectively. In Amphitryon, the curtain coincides with a sudden rallentando and a thinning of texture and dynamics for a temporarily static sound field on the dominant that seamlessly morphs into the subtle sunrise evocation of act 1 (example 2.1); in Anacréon, the curtain opens, conversely, with the triumphant return of the full orchestra on the tonic leading to a drawn-out modulation—a passage that sonically prepares a space for the shimmering pianissimo figurations of scene 1 that paint the dawn proper. Interpolated curtain-raising passages thus provided time for the curtain to open as part of the show,36 while the curtain only began a process of making-visible that continued with the slowly increasing light onstage. Overture and first scene were welded together both aurally and through a continuing process of optical revelation initiated by the premature curtain.
EXAMPLE 2.1. André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Amphitryon: after the return of the overture’s opening material in m. 102, a subtle curtain-raising passage leads smoothly into the nocturnal act 1.
Grétry was not the only composer exploring early curtains as a means of interlocking overtures and first scenes. Gluck, for one, employed the device to enhance a not subtle but instead unusually forceful opening. In his widely influential Paris Alceste of 1776, he indicated “lever la toile” eight measures before the overture’s close, during a passage that repeats an otherwise unassuming motif from four measures earlier with an increasingly wider harmonic and dynamic range leading—again—to the dominant. The instruction was likely added because the first act starts immediately with the full chorus rather than an instrumental introduction and recitative, as had been the case in the 1767 Vienna version. Thus, the steady buildup in dynamics and texture over a pulsating dominant pedal during the overture’s last six measures leads breathlessly to the ensuing choral outcry on a diminished chord. By asking for the curtain to (begin to) raise about fifteen seconds before that chorus, Gluck achieved a continual accumulation of audiovisual tension while ensuring that the audience could marvel at the stage sets before focusing on the action and singing proper. As Taïeb has argued, the choral anguish, in turn, explained the overture’s unusually dramatic transition. The early curtain thus drives home the urgency at the onset of the opera—the exceptional circumstance that it begins, rather than ends, with the impending death of a king.37
This is not to say that every idiosyncratic beginning required the written placement of a curtain. In his 1784 opéra-comique Richard Cœur-de-lion, Grétry fully integrated a condensed overture into the first number, which—following Italianate models—was a choral introduction. Here, the music itself suggests the timing of the opening curtain at the end of the short initial Allegretto, after an emphatic turn to the dominant (complete with a long-held chord whose pragmatic utility is obvious) and right before a 6/8 Larghetto whose lilting rhythm both alludes to the first scene’s rustic setting and leads into the introductory chorus.38 Conversely, curtain instructions might occasionally appear without obvious dramatic motivation or despite musical closure of the overture.39 But in general, it was overtures leading directly into act 1 that tended to align their precocious curtain with suitable musical material: the curtain might open during a caesura or fermata; before a shift of key, dynamics, or texture; or to final cadential chords. And the fact that these curtain-raising moments often commenced an even number of measures before the first scene suggests that they were a function of the music more than of the emerging visual setting.
Given this evident desire to tie some overtures into the action by repurposing their endings, it is unsurprising that some composers experimented with raising the curtain even earlier, so as to utilize more (or all) of the overture for nonvocal stage setting. An obvious way to do so was with mimed action during the overture. What he had not dared in Le magnifique, for instance, Grétry risked in his farce Le jugement de Midas (Paris, Palais Royal, 1778): its curtain opens right with the overture, which satirizes both musically and through pantomime some well-worn topoi of tragédie lyrique, including a sunrise and deus ex machina. And in Guillaume Tell (Paris, Comédie-Italienne, 1791), the composer simply declared the opening pastoral pantomime (complete with ranz de vaches, echo effects, and the ubiquitous dawn) to be the first scene of his “drame.”40 Such use of the overture to evoke an opera’s key locale was expanded by Meyerbeer to illustrate the drama’s motivating conflict. The Sinfonia of Il crociato in Egitto (Venice, La Fenice, 1824) not only includes a banda, but less than a third into it, the curtain discloses a minutely scripted pantomime of Christian slaves who (once more at daybreak) begin their forced labor and suffer mistreatment before breaking into a lamenting chorus—the opera’s introductory number.41 The early curtain was crucial for Meyerbeer’s gradual buildup of audiovisual information. Rather than merely separating instrumental music from vocal and visual drama, the curtain’s placement guaranteed that the overture would be infused first with diegetic sounds and then with both scenic and pantomimic visuals before the dramatic situation was clarified in song. As we have seen in chapter 1, the resulting crescendo of medial signification would become characteristic of Wagner’s theories, although he never mentioned the curtain, a central catalyst thereof.
Even without the addition of pantomimes, the specification of early, musically accompanied curtains widened the curtain’s operation from a momentary, quasi-automatic action outside the audiovisual diegesis into a deliberate aligning of music and the emerging visual expression. As such, curtain-raising moments became not only perceptually longer but also dramatically more meaningful: they established a transitional space between the “real” time of the musical introduction and the represented time (and space) of the drama. Not unlike Gérard Genette’s literary paratexts conceived as a threshold or vestibule, they provided “an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside” of the drama.42 Albeit transient and unidirectional, this vestibule expanded the quasi-two-dimensional border marked by the traditional opening curtain into a multidimensional space—one that allowed for novel ways to interlink musical and visual media. By acoustically underlining and dramaturgically exploiting this space, Grétry and other composers directed the spectators’ senses to (and between) specific moments of an opera’s beginning to heighten dramatic effect. Intricately mediating “between different realities,” early curtains became akin to what Alexander R. Galloway has theorized for digital interfaces as “autonomous zones of activity.”43
DELAYED VISION
Such attention to the timing and musical rendition of opening curtains became more widespread during the first half of
