performing art, but also diachronic.20 Despite their hardware materiality, what we might dub “special-effects technologies” tend to be fast-changing features of both operas and the modern world in general, caught as they are in a constant—and constantly accelerating—cycle of innovation and obsolescence; by contrast, other operatic elements (such as the proscenium stage or orchestral instruments), cultural artifacts, and societal structures have proven relatively durable.21 In focusing on the technologies of staged opera, Curtain, Gong, Steam implicitly offers a historically anchored backdrop to the oft-posed question of why, in today’s operatic world, the ever-same scores are treated to always-new productions; why Werktreue at the level of music and text is frequently counterpointed with (often self-proclaimed) innovation in the realm of production; in short, why preservationist efforts for particular moments of staging are largely doomed to fail, whether in the Met’s new Ring cycle or elsewhere.
STAGING IN HISTORY
It is no coincidence that the Met pushed its authenticity-via-technology campaign for none other than Wagner. After all, no canonic composer tried to control and prescribe productions more energetically than did he. In this regard, my book’s focus on some of Wagner’s ideas and practices of staging—on Wagner’s technologies—makes good historical sense. Yet I do not want to imply that he was the first or only composer to care about the details of his operas’ physical manifestations. Wagner absorbed and pushed further a common aspiration among composers and institutions since the late eighteenth century to integrate certain facets of staging into operatic works alongside text and music. By the same token, he adopted and adjusted (rather than invented) the technologies involved in realizing this desire: hence Wagnerian technologies. Curtain, Gong, Steam is therefore about Wagner as much as it is about a larger cultural concern among nineteenth-century composers with the multimediality of their works and its practical and hermeneutic implications. In this sense, Wagner provides merely a useful focal point for this book. His voluminous (if often inflated, self-aggrandizing, or outright ideological) writings; his zealous pursuit of his ideals; the construction of his own theater; the copious commentary his works have garnered; and an uninterrupted performance history: all these factors make Wagner a suitable gateway—or paradigmatic technology—for delving into expanding nineteenth-century notions of the operatic work as implying its onstage realization.
Admittedly, Wagner’s central position might seem rather conventional, for at least two reasons. First, it privileges a composer’s visions over collaborative or institutional efforts toward an opera’s staging. Such efforts could involve any number of people (and their respective artistic traditions), including librettists, stage directors, designers, and theatrical agents. But the paper trails that reveal exactly who made which decision are fragmentary at best, and finding even those remnants requires extensive archival digging. For the purposes of Curtain, Gong, Steam, composers’ names—including Wagner’s—must therefore sometimes stand in as shorthand for the creative team that might collectively have shaped a staged operatic moment. Beyond such practicalities, however, Wagner was not alone in advocating the composer as ultimate authority on all matters of production. The career of his exact contemporary Verdi reflects a similar shift of control away from impresarios and institutions (in Verdi’s case with the support not of his own theater but of his publisher). And both Verdi and Wagner took their cue from Meyerbeer and other composers of French operas who increasingly dominated the famously complex artistic and administrative apparatus of the Paris Opéra, that hotbed of lavish illusionist stagings.
Second, my paradigmatic use of Wagner seems to echo the well-worn narrative that has him as a turning point in—even the pinnacle of—the history of opera. Wagner laid the foundation for this idealizing account when, in his seminal treatises around midcentury, he rejected the genre of opera (along with its generic label) wholesale; instead, he claimed to reinvent musical drama by going back to Greek tragedy. Despite such hyperbole, the notion of a victory of German music drama over French and Italian opera struck a chord with many (particularly Austro-German) music historians who were eager to perpetuate the ideology of Germanic dominance and superiority in the musical realm since Beethoven. In 1860, for instance, the influential music writer Franz Brendel declared, “Wagner above all could dare to break with everything existing, since he had the power to replace it with something greater.”22 From here, the notion of Wagner transcending the generic development of opera and literally forming a separate chapter in the history of music entered mainstream historiography; that perception largely persisted until both the underlying nationalism and the tendency to view all of nineteenth-century opera (and its successors) through the lens of Wagner’s theories were questioned in the twentieth century.23
Although my book is organized around what I call “Wagnerian technologies,” it does not perpetuate this outdated and ideologically suspect narrative. Instead, it seeks to problematize the idea of Wagner as operatic redeemer. For one, I examine something Wagner himself vehemently sought to deny—namely, his vital dependence on technology. Not only does this reliance put him on a par with his peers, but by looking at Austro-German, French, Italian, and some British developments before and around Wagner, my book shows just how much he took in this regard from his contemporaries, particularly from the French models he so denounced. A product of his time, he participated in, rather than broke with, important pan-European strivings in opera. What is more, both my examination of select material realities behind Wagner’s claims to innovation and my longer-term perspective, reaching beyond his lifetime, challenge the idea that he successfully achieved his artistic agenda. What will emerge, alongside a rich contextualization of specific stage technologies, is a more complex historical embedding of a composer more ambiguous than he is frequently portrayed.24
My chronological purview, then, extends out from Wagner both ways into the “long” nineteenth century. This historiographical frame warrants further explanation. For just as Wagner was not the only composer to put a premium on opera’s multimediality, the nineteenth century was by no means the first era during which such a focus developed. Definitions of opera during its first century regularly referenced machines as seminal for the genre’s appeal. To cite just one instance: in 1648 Englishman John Raymond reported that during his recent grand tour to Italy he had seen “an Opera represented . . . with severall changes of Sceanes, . . . and other Machines, at which the Italians are spoke to be excellent.”25 The tradition of mechanic effects dated back even further, to the elaborate Renaissance spectacles and their predecessors out of which opera had emerged, and whose fabled stage tricks—monsters, chariots, and all—were proudly described in contemporary treatises on theatrical architecture and staging.26
Yet there were crucial differences between these early manifestations and nineteenth-century opera in the use and status of technology, both onstage and off. To mention just an illustrative few (and at the risk of oversimplification), Baroque opera was a decidedly collaborative venture in which staging “meant not only creating a show but also shaping the opera itself.”27 An opera’s conception and critical success depended generally more on librettists, machinists, and stage designers than on composers; already the storylines tended to be conceived so as to display a variety of magnificent scenic effects and devices specially constructed in line with the available budget.28 In summarizing the aesthetics of seventeenth-century opera, Massimo Ossi has proposed its centerpiece “was a kind of competition between the audience and the architect in which the former tried to figure out the means by which the stage effects were carried out, while the latter endeavored to hide them.”29 The overall intent was to impress spectators with the quantity and quality of means (among which mechanics reigned supreme), which did not, though, necessarily cohere as integrated, illusionist musical multimedia. This wholehearted embrace of technology was furthered by the favored mythological subject matter and its dependence on supernatural interventions, sudden apparitions, and magical transformations: thus the inevitable deus ex machina arose as the quintessence of Baroque opera. So close did the association between fantastical plots and wondrous machines become that both were implied in the concept of the merveilleux, the marvelous.30 Technology, then, was not only a driving force for multimedia performance
