behind the curtain—which, conversely, might appear to delay its opening. Rossini’s “azione tragica” Ermione (Naples, San Carlo, 1819) includes a lamenting chorus of Trojan prisoners during its mighty overture, which sets the tone for—and exposes the dramatic crux of—the opera no less than does Il crociato’s pantomime. Indeed, Meyerbeer himself (among others) followed suit: the entr’acte to act 3 of Le prophète begins with a stage-band in the wings before the curtain goes up and the band draws closer.54 And by 1859, Meyerbeer told the tragic prehistory—the separation of a bridal pair during a thunderstorm—of his comic opera Dinorah (Le pardon de Ploërmel; Paris, Opéra-Comique) in an overture with chorus and wind-machine behind two curtains, the second curtain further distancing the sound. The proscenium curtain’s refusal to open and thereby optically present (or re-present) the narrated events thus banishes these events into the past acoustically, much like a black-and-white filmic flashback might do visually. This time-shift is all the more apt for Dinorah as the title heroine has since gone mad and forgotten the cause of her misery.
Although Meyerbeer evidently hoped for at least some visualization during this overture in the form of a diorama,55 he might also have taken a page from Berlioz’s book: Berlioz’s “mélologue” Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (composed in 1831, but revised and published in 1855) had placed the entire orchestra, chorus, and soloists behind the curtain, leaving only the narrator visible in the proscenium. Here the function of the curtain is not, as is usual, to eventually unveil both a fitting stage set and the source of vocal sound, but, on the contrary, to deny any representation. All musical forces sound acousmatically, as if from the depth of the narrator’s memory or imagination. Only once he decides to rehearse his latest composition does the curtain reveal the orchestra and chorus, framing the last musical number as stage music. Accordingly, the curtain is lowered again at the end for the narrator’s final musings.56 Berlioz’s “extreme” curtain thus separates the narrator’s (merely audible) thoughts from the (both visible and audible) reality happening “live” for him. Put differently, in line with Romantic idealist aesthetics of music, the curtain privileges sound as a medium of the mind while resisting the “scopic regime” that had begun to dominate nineteenth-century life.57 Berlioz furthered the resulting audiovisual tension in Les Troyens (Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 1863), where he placed behind the curtain—albeit momentarily—not just a vocalizing chorus but also dancers, with the sound of tapping feet additionally whetting the visual appetite.
Such inclusion of singing or ambient sound effects in precurtain music unsettled the temporal boundaries between musical introduction and audiovisual drama, widening the dramaturgically ambiguous curtain-opening space. Yet it also pushed the medial boundaries between visual and auditory stimuli. Precisely when concealing the source of already audible diegetic music, the curtain, a membrane between both media, became porous; its eventual rise signaled less the long-expected arrival of the dramatic world than the visual revelation of something already aurally present (or, in fact, acoustically created). In this sense, self-conscious curtain cues were part and parcel of an increasingly graphic—which is to say, visually suggestive—musical aesthetic. More than that, they reflected a growing nineteenth-century interest in sensory correspondences between the different arts and the concomitant expansion of each medium’s sensory borders.58 All this challenged the conceptual foundation of automated curtain openings, which relied, as we have seen, on the strict separation of musical preparation and audiovisual narration.
To be sure, “delaying” the curtain emphasized its essence as what Brian Kane has called an acousmatic technique, whose general function was “to split the sensorium—to separate the ear from the eye—and intensify the act of listening”:59 the descriptive nature of orchestral music would be noted all the more as vision was denied. But this buildup of aural pointers at the same time multiplied expectations for the unveiling of the scene, thereby intensifying the audience’s gaze at the curtain. By dint of its increasingly individualized movements, in other words, the curtain began to draw more attention to itself.60 On the one hand, it became newly perceivable as a material, oblique barrier to (seeing) the stage. On the other hand, as Jacques Derrida has observed of the parergon or frame in the visual arts, it “is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”61 Despite its increased artistic prominence, the curtain’s destiny was still its eventual vanishing, and it could do so the more effectively the more audience expectations had been raised. This dialectic between presence and absence, visibility and concealment was reflected in debates on the curtain’s materiality. Contemporaries, for example, were not of one mind on whether decorating the main curtain would be pleasant or distracting—that is, whether it was primarily part of the theatrical architecture (in which case visual grandeur was in order) or of performances (in which case modest neutrality would be helpful).62 Once liberated from being an automatic switch between overture and audiovisual drama proper, then, the curtain began to mediate in increasingly complex ways between sound and vision as well as between theatrical space, the audience’s imagination, and the multimedia presentation of the drama.
MULTIPLYING CURTAINS
In view of curtains’ growing temporal flexibility and audiovisual mediation, it was logical that composers would eventually indicate them not just for an opera’s beginning but also for subsequent acts. After all, unless these acts started in a more eighteenth-century fashion with recitative, they regularly featured at most a short orchestral prelude, making the point of transition into the scene less obvious than in the case of an overture. The same concern for signposting held also for musical entr’actes or interludes, which became more common through the nineteenth century, partly because of the growing desire for dramatic continuity we have already observed regarding overtures, and partly—like the spread of act curtains themselves—for practical reasons.63 Responding to a budding appetite for historically realistic stagings encouraged by French opera since the Napoleonic period (a development that was closely tied to the fashion for historical detail in literature and the visual arts), throughout the nineteenth century operatic sets became grander, and they increasingly used practicable scenery—three-dimensional constructions and architectural set pieces—rather than just painted flats and drops. All this rendered scene changes more cumbersome and time consuming. While act curtains made invisible the maneuvering of such heavy structures and dampened the inevitable noises, entr’actes were designed to ensure performative continuity between acts and to hold audience attention, often acoustically evoking dramatic events or atmospheres in the manner of preludes. Given the entr’acte’s generically transitional function, however, it was all the more important that the actual moment of the curtain’s (re)opening be marked sonically.
Thus, true to his reputation for micromanaging every detail, Meyerbeer included not only short entr’actes but also curtain cues for virtually every act of the three works he saw into production at the Opéra. In so doing, he paraded a whole gamut of suitable orchestral curtain-raisers, whether a rising fanfare (for act 2 of Robert le diable, 1831), calming cadential passages (Robert, act 3; Les huguenots, act 2, 1836), emphatic fortissimo unisons (Les huguenots, act 4), the repeat of an opening motif (Robert, act 5), or—most frequently—chromatically rising scales over a dominant pedal (Les huguenots, acts 3 and 5; Le prophète, act 4).64 In short, most of his curtains open at musically suitable places, facilitating the listener’s understanding that vision would return while letting that vision take form in close alignment with the auditory stimulus. Particularly when rising at the end of a chromatic crescendoing ascent over the dominant (as in act 5 of Les huguenots, where the ramp ends abruptly on an augmented chord leading into the boisterous ball scene), the curtain seems to be pulled up not by invisible ropes—that is, by external technology—but by the music itself: at a point where harmonic tension, dynamics, pitch range, and texture can hardly increase further, the disclosure of the stage provides a visual relief to the musical suspense. Small wonder that Meyerbeer insisted that stage director and conductor meticulously time their mutual signals to effect this exacting coordination.65
