above examples, however, some German Romantic composers tended to postpone the curtain into the first act. This deferment might have been related to an originally Germanic view of the overture as a symphonic piece in its own right, with a musical integrity that was not to be disturbed by the rustling of drapery or the distraction of the emerging scene.44 Granted, German composers also began to tie overtures more closely to their operas with regard to mood, anticipated dramatic trajectory, and musical material. But built-in curtain music or harmonically open endings would have thwarted an overture’s expressive independence, along with its ability to stand on its own in concerts, where opera overtures were regularly performed across nineteenth-century Europe.45
In Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Berlin, 1821), it is therefore after the majestic closure of the sizeable overture and ten further measures of fast, tension-building, and quickly crescendoing arpeggios and rising scales over a pulsating dominant pedal that the curtain opens, on a dominant chord at a moment of changing texture, just as a shot is heard onstage; eight measures later, the chorus enters on the tonic. Weber’s musical curtain-raiser did not close the overture but rather opened the first act. Moreover, by having it precede (rather than accompany) the curtain and by supporting the latter’s movement instead with diegetic sound, he boosted anticipation of the curtain’s rising and explicitly incorporated the latter into his introductory tableau. This propelled the forward drive of the turbulent scene and drew the audience right into the action.46 Just how unusual this audiovisual coordination was emerges from extant scores as well as twentieth-century recordings, many of which either indicate the opening curtain after the more typical eight, rather than the original ten, measures or postpone the shot (presumably to ensure its audibility).
A related case is Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling (Berlin, 1833), whose musically closed overture is placed between a prologue and act 1. To clarify this unusual beginning, Marschner prescribed an opening curtain in measure sixteen of the Prologue. It follows a four-measure crescendoing chromatic ascent to the highest pitch and dynamic levels yet and coincides with the entry of the brass, leaving ten measures of descending chromatic figuration and a drawn-out tutti cadence before the first chorus (example 2.2).47 The curtain’s rising is here set up as an important event within the compact orchestral introduction to the taut Prologue that portrays in medias res the conflict out of which the subsequent drama arises. Moreover, the same curtain music (plus additional cadential chords dwindling to a ppp) later closes the Prologue, thus supporting the curtain’s framing function acoustically. Together with the unorthodox placement of the subsequent overture, this orchestral-cum-curtain frame lets the Prologue’s condensed drama recede into the temporal distance. The resulting effect resembles that of a dissolving view—here of the gnomes’ cave—fading temporarily in and out of the sensual field, or of the cinematic narration of a prehistory before a film’s opening credits.
EXAMPLE 2.2. Heinrich Marschner, Hans Heiling, Prologue, mm. 1–26: opening curtain.
Analogously to Hans Heiling, opening curtains were also frequently specified in operas that lacked overtures altogether. In his one-act opera Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe (Paris, Opéra, 1794), Grétry specified the curtain after twelve measures of generically introductory sequencing material at a return to the tonic (example 2.3). The cue coincides with the beginning of a four-measure modulation to the dominant, with “Scène 1” (and its respective stage direction) indicated only toward the end of this modulation. The interpolated curtain passage thus suggests how long it might have taken for the curtain to disclose the stage. And to offer audiences a chance to absorb the scenery, Grétry added a varied echo of the modulatory passage and a return to the tonic before the title hero starts singing.48 Similarly, Jean-François Le Sueur desired for Ossian, ou Les bardes (Paris, Opéra, 1804) that the curtain be down at the beginning of his comparatively short orchestral introduction and raised (notably on another somber night scene) eight measures before the first chorus, at the end of a temporarily thinned orchestral texture and dominant cadence. Merging influences from Grétry and Gluck, Le Sueur followed this instruction with a dominant pedal, chromatically descending figurations, and a half-measure general pause (that is, by a generic transitional passage), after which the chorus enters on the tonic.49 In both Denys and Ossian, such musical transitions were expedient precisely because the instrumental introductions were uncommonly brief: explicit musical curtain-raisers audibly reinforced the curtain’s visual signal for the beginning of the audiovisual drama and the call for audiences to attend to the stage.
EXAMPLE 2.3. André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe: the opening of this one-act opera, with its curtain music, as rendered in CCG 28:3.
The tendency to condense and musically integrate instrumental preludes would become more pronounced with grands opéras, which increasingly abandoned long overtures. In the widely circulating orchestral score of Halévy’s La juive (Paris, Opéra, 1835), for example, the overture was cut, and a shorter instrumental prelude led directly into the innovative stage music emanating from the church that formed part of the first set. This format made a curtain indication appropriate. It occurred during the confirmation of a tonic cadence a mere measure before the full-throttle entrance of an offstage organ (whose lengthy prelude itself introduced the offstage opening chorus). Here the curtain did not allow the audience to take in the elaborate medieval scenery before the onset of diegetic music. Instead, the latter acousmatically became part of the scenery itself (thus also helping legitimate the organ, a still novel instrument in the operatic toolbox).50 Similarly, for Le prophète Meyerbeer himself replaced the overture with a prelude of merely twenty measures; the curtain rises during its final three measures of a cadential pizzicato bass line, and is likewise immediately followed by pastoral diegetic music (two clarinets imitating echoing shawms) that the emerging rustic landscape seemingly emits.51 The shorter and more integrated the musical introduction, then, the more precisely composers for the Opéra tended to time the opening curtain, and the more powerfully could that curtain transport the audience into the audiovisual setting. Particularly in introductory scenes that started with offstage music, the curtain functioned as a signal that applause be suppressed and attention channeled to the visual and acoustic scenery.
By contrast, composers of primo ottocento Italian operas seemed on the whole to favor separate overtures—both in the sense that the curtain would usually lift, without special mention, during a pause after the overture, and, relatedly, that the overture’s musical material was often independent of the ensuing opera (Rossini’s trading of overtures between works was notorious). But a link between unusual musical layout and curtain cues is obvious here as well. Rossini notated opening curtains in some Neapolitan works—for instance his “azione tragico-sacra” Mosè in Egitto of 1818 and Zelmira of four years later—that lacked overtures.52 And Donizetti, who leaned toward shorter preludes, sometimes ended them with a questioning gesture on the dominant, followed by a half-measure pause. That the curtain would routinely rise during this pause is suggested by the well-nigh ubiquitous fermata and confirmed by indications in several scores.53 Rather than simply remove the shroud between independent numbers, Donizetti thus musically prepared a silent but suspense-packed space for its vanishing, drawing all the more attention to the curtain as the musical resolution would follow only after its rise. Put differently, he rendered the silence “accompanying” the curtain both musically resonant and dramatically enticing.
Expectations for the curtain’s raising could be further amplified by the music that preceded it. Just as some composers added evocative or narrative
