since the late eighteenth century increasingly embraced select audiovisual details as integral to their creative efforts, inscribing certain facets of staging into their operas and thus expanding the notion of what constitutes the operatic work. These attempts involved technics both in their inclusion of evermore-specific stage technologies to facilitate the envisioned effects and in their quest to “fix” the latter for future productions. I suggest that it is precisely at the intersections of both technological processes—at operatic moments when composers required idiosyncratic mechanical procedures or audiovisual results—that we can clearly observe the importance of technology for the overall conception and efficacy of opera onstage. Curtain, Gong, Steam, then, explores select composer-prescribed stage technologies in view of their dramatic, musical, aesthetic, and cultural meanings; their material functioning and sensorial effects; their absorption (at least temporarily) into a widely shared vision of the respective operas; and the gradual transformation of all these aspects in later productions or works.
Although the study of opera has traditionally focused on text and music while committing the history of stage technology to specialist treatises, scholars over the last several decades have moved decidedly toward a concept of opera as existing on three signifying levels, frequently summarized as verbal, musical, and visual.7 Such a triangulation, however, risks obscuring the microcosm of agents and media involved in each of these levels. In particular, the visual component does not simply provide music and text with a pictorial surface or directorial playground: it comprises a host of media and materialities. Not all of these operate purely on the optical level, and each carries its own tradition, resilience, and interpretive potential. Indeed, the “performative turn” across the humanities has notably shifted attention to corporal aspects of performance, such as singers’ bodies or the physicality of voices.8 And still more recent investigations have begun to address the significance of specific mechanical procedures (and of technology as such) for staged opera and, consequently, for opera studies, usually in view of individual composers, works, or institutions.9 Even beyond opera, interest in the technicity of musical cultures—indeed, of all human expression—and in music’s medial qualities has begun to flourish, informed by recent media studies, a renewed fascination with the histories of science and technology, and the advent of what has been dubbed “new materialism.” Partaking in all these trends, my book aims to deepen our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of both historical operatic practice and individual works by exploring select technologies across a wide geographic and chronological spectrum and by showing how their implications often reach to the present day.
Technology, of course, can mean many things, including the compositional techniques, orchestral instruments, or theatrical architecture required for the production of opera. In 1817 Stendhal described the reopened Teatro San Carlo in Naples wholesale as a “machine for music.”10 Lurking behind such a general notion of technology is the Aristotelian division between physis and technē, between nature and the human “bringing-forth” or making of something that, unlike nature, does not generate itself.11 According to Aristotle, all technē imitates nature. Yet it does so in two different modes: “On the one hand,” according to the exegesis of philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “techne carries to its end [accomplishes, perfects, epitelei] what phusis is incapable of effecting . . . ; on the other hand, it imitates.” From the latter sense was derived the classic construal of art in terms of mimesis; from the former emerged technē in its modern, narrow conception: the generation of something that was not previously in existence “but which supplements a certain deficiency in nature, its incapacity to do everything, organize everything, make everything its work—produce everything.”12 With regard to this notion of useful, manmade artifacts, in the late eighteenth century the neologism technology began to be cultivated, referring to the “branch of knowledge dealing with the mechanical arts and applied sciences.” As such, technology became increasingly associated with the practical and economic spheres of manufacture and industry as well as with specific equipment (or technics), in contradistinction to the arts.13 From this split emerged a somewhat dismissive perception of technology as a means to an end, a mere aid that was subordinate both to the vitality of nature and to what was now taken as the self-contained purpose of art. In turn, this condescension lies at the root of the trend to distinguish within operatic culture between the “artistic” (music, text, set designs, or staging concepts proper) and the mechanical—all those structures and devices that are necessary for the former’s “bringing-forth” onstage but that, as seemingly auxiliary appendages, have often been deemed irrelevant for hermeneutic exegesis. It is technology in this practical, mechanical sense that this book addresses.
The relative neglect of the technical sphere thus circumscribed in favor of the artistic (or scientific) has a long tradition in academia. According to literary scholar Mark Hansen, that disregard results from a penchant for what he calls “technesis, or the putting-into-discourse of technology”—a tendency he believes to have persisted even among modern philosophers of technology, with their inclination to bracket out the material reality of technology in order to focus on what Heidegger famously postulated as its nontechnological essence. In Hansen’s analysis, this assimilation of the technical with thought perpetuated the priority accorded mind over matter.14 Indeed, even in early media studies (just as in opera studies) the focus was often on the end product, on shiny screens and their interactions with audiences and users, rather than on the nuts and bolts of their facilitating operations. Such medial myopia has epistemological consequences. First, it sidelines the often-troublesome details and unwieldy materialities that afford and effect those sensory interfaces to arrive instead at an essentially immaterialized and idealized notion of media (or opera). Second, it disregards the ways in which these media are conditioned by, and in turn condition, technological developments that are themselves bound up with societal changes, thus limiting the site of critical engagement with cultural meaning.15 For opera scholars, such cultural half-heartedness with regard to technologies has created practical hurdles as well: unlike “artistic” sources, documents relating to mechanical aspects of historical productions tend to be scattered across administrative and musical archives or to have been discarded altogether.16 And yet, as Bruno Latour has observed, humanists will find that “if they add interpretation of machines to interpretation of texts, their culture will not fall to pieces; instead, it will take on added density.”17 More recently, media scholar Wolfgang Ernst has asserted that “media archaeology exposes the technicality of media, not to reduce culture to technology but to reveal the technoepistemological momentum in culture itself.”18 Curtain, Gong, Steam pursues precisely such material and conceptual enrichment, specifically for our idea of opera and historical operatic culture.
In a way, then, this book could be described in Latourian terms as an effort to partially reverse the “blackboxing” of the operatic event—to unpack the carefully concealed machineries behind those illusionist stagings nineteenth-century composers desired.19 Put differently, it seeks to disclose the technological grounding of an opera’s staging as nontransparent and nonliteral—as not simply ready and available to “translate” a given work onto stage, but instead as contributing, significantly and idiosyncratically, to the overall effect, material reality, and hermeneutic potential of a work as both conceived and staged. Although striving to illuminate the nuances with which opera’s many technologies engage in specific works or moments thereof, however, I do not pursue an actor-network theory approach: I am less concerned with questions of agency or the collaboration between humans and nonhumans in the creation of staged opera than I am with composers’ visions and the technologies applied toward their realization. My focus is the historical context and hermeneutic potential of specific technologies in (operatic) action rather than their genesis or functionality per se.
Ironically, though, my book embraces mechanical conditions of historical productions even as it simultaneously confirms the details of these conditions to be historiographically ephemeral. Uncovering the technological thus also sheds light on the historicity of production: it highlights staged opera’s fundamental instability from a perspective that is both practical and historical. After all, what David J. Levin has
