Pesaro: Ricordi and Fondazione Rossini Pesaro, 1979–ongoing.Note on Presentation
All translations into English are my own unless a translated edition is referenced (sometimes alongside the original source) in the notes. Original-language citations are included only where a phrasing is particularly distinctive or the source text is not easily available in published literature or online.
Introduction
Opera, Staging, Technologies
New York, 2010. Like many opera houses around the world, the Metropolitan Opera prepares for the 2013 bicentenary of Richard Wagner by launching a new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Boasts the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, “Since Wagner was way ahead of his time, I believe he would be pleased by what we are attempting.”1 Indeed, according to the season book, “this new Ring is faithful to the libretto and to Wagner’s vision. . . . Yet it is also strikingly contemporary. The production uses modern stage techniques and state-of-the-art technology.”2 In a truly Wagnerian paradox, the new Ring cycle is being heralded as both inviolate and innovative, as completing an “authentic” vision with hypermodern means. The gist is clear: the Met purports to show “the Ring that Wagner would have wanted all along” if only he had known the latest technologies that director Robert Lepage now introduces.3 Here, in twenty-first-century New York, not in Wagner’s own theater in nineteenth-century Bayreuth, we are to experience the fullest realization of Wagner’s complex illusionist music drama.
To be sure, much of this rhetoric may be attributable to marketing tactics. Given today’s increasingly Wagner-saturated operascape, Gelb needed to emphasize something novel about his production, but he wanted to avoid radical innovation on the level of direction. For years, Gelb had been trying to placate fears among more conservative opera patrons that his company might be invaded by what has become known as Regietheater, or director’s opera—stagings with a strong interpretive concept that are often slanted toward updated sociopolitical or psychological readings and therefore frequently depart from the scenery and settings described in the score. Regarding the Ring, Gelb instead appealed to an “audience that is more visually astute than ever before, thanks to its exposure to a widening range of media”:4 he shifted the terms of innovation from conceptual revisionism to the staging’s optical surface and its pioneering technology. Even so, he faced opposition for discontinuing the Met’s previous Ring in the first place, a purposely “Romantic,” traditionalist staging created in 1986–88 by Otto Schenk that was partly based on Wagner’s original designs. Amid such conflicting demands, Gelb opted to veil the modern—the mere shock of a new production, or of up-to-the-minute stage devices—with a veneer of fidelity, selling his expensive technological enterprise and artistic compromise as the real(ist) deal.
Such a chameleon-like PR campaign was understandable in the post-2008 economy, not least for such a costly work as Wagner’s Ring cycle. But Gelb’s particular recourse to authenticity in his sales pitch could seem surprising. For musicologists, any claim to an authentic production might appear both stale and problematic following the heated discussions of the 1980s and 1990s over historically informed performance practice (dubbed “HIP”) in the early music scene. As several scholars have argued, HIP is based on questionable claims about our knowledge (and the knowability) of composers’ intentions and “original” yet irrevocably lost sound worlds, performance traditions, and listening habits. Instead, in Richard Taruskin’s oft-cited analysis, it is driven by a very contemporary quest for the always new under a banner of authenticity that is merely “commercial propaganda,” and thus HIP stands as the truly modern performance style of today.5
Beyond such general skepticism, the Met’s rhetorical coupling of authenticity with technology raises a more specific set of issues. Unlike HIP or those historicist opera stagings of recent decades that employ “original” (often reconstructed) hardware—whether Baroque instruments, “period” costumes, or eighteenth-century stage machines—in a claim to historical accuracy, Lepage displays ultramodern gadgets, including such novel features as interactive videos and 3D projections. Ironically, his means are entirely of our time—which is also to say that they are decidedly not authentic. It is their end that is supposedly HIP. The Met’s reasoning is that Wagner himself was dissatisfied with his original production since his demands far exceeded the possibilities of even the most advanced nineteenth-century stages. But in the early twenty-first century, technology has at long last caught up with Wagner, and Lepage professes to be realizing the composer’s utopian vision.6 In so doing, however, he highlights precisely the element of operatic production—its mechanical conditioning—that Wagner had been most eager to downplay in both theory and practice. Furthermore, Lepage’s equipment partially malfunctioned and (arguably worse for his cause) partly developed further even during the initial run of his production. The latter’s asserted authenticity proved tenuous at best, its finality fleeting.
Although I leave a more detailed discussion of Lepage’s endeavor for the epilogue, its focus on enabling technologies and their historicity provides a useful starting point for my book. In the most general terms, Curtain, Gong, Steam examines the relationship between opera and technology from the dual yet
