and magic”: hence the display of machines alongside classical art and natural objects in early modern Kunstkammern (or “cabinets of arts and curiosities”) and the widespread cultural fascination with automata and clockworks, mechanisms seen to mirror and, therefore, to reveal the hidden order of the world.31
However, early opera’s aesthetics of the marvelous and its attendant celebration of machines already displeased some seventeenth-century commentators. An influential critique came from the essayist Charles de Saint-Évremond, regarding Italian operas performed in Paris around 1660:
Machines may satisfy the curiosity of ingenious Men, who love Mathematical Inventions, but they’ll hardly please persons of good judgment in the Theatre: the more they surprize, the more they divert the mind from attending to the Discourse; and the more admirable they are, the less Tenderness and exquisite Sense they leave in us, to be touch’d and charm’d with the Music. The Antients made no use of Machines, but when there was a necessity of bringing in some God; nay, the Poets themselves were generally laughed at for suffering themselves to be reduc’d to that necessity. If men love to be at expences, let them lay out their Money upon fine Scenes, the use whereof is more natural and more agreeable than that of Machines.32
This multilayered rebuttal of stunning machinery in opera prefigured many arguments that would become commonplace in eighteenth-century discourse leading up to the Enlightenment. At its core lay the emerging split between science and art, or a mutually exclusive separation of technē into technics and aesthetics, a division that was fundamental to the changing status of the mechanical in society at large. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp’s engaging account of the Kunstkammer and its demise, mechanics in the sixteenth century was considered a means of perfecting nature. Since it was the purpose of all art to imitate nature, animated mechanical devices surpassed even the revered classical arts, especially sculpture; moreover, such dynamic contraptions contained both godlike and playful qualities (which were summoned so resonantly in the dei ex machina). But with the growing—and reductive—spread in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of rationalism and the mechanistic worldview associated with Descartes, machines increasingly became codified as objects of scientific study and human progress. The rise of mercantilism and utilitarianism furthered the focus on the practical applicability of technology. Conversely (as evinced in Saint-Évremond’s reasoning), artists began to associate themselves with the intellectual realm, that other side of the Cartesian body-mind dualism. Eventually, idealist thinkers conceptualized the arts as superior to other forms of human activity and episteme, owing to their ideal grasp (rather than mere imitation) of nature, their metaphysical transcendence of materiality and functionality, and their access to the spiritual world beyond appearances.33 Add to this the unsettling changes to traditional lifestyles and environments engendered by the ever-faster pace of technological innovation and industrialization, and it becomes clearer why composers increasingly sought to cut themselves free of everything that smacked of mechanical forces, by now—in Bredekamp’s words—tokens of “lifelessness as well as stylistic aberration.”34
Bredekamp carves out one important trajectory that helps explain why the use of machines onstage, and the general dependence of theatrical success on technical effects, would appear infinitely more problematic during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Italy, fostered by the ascent of comic opera and a shift in serious opera toward historical subject matter, machines and anything supernatural (along with large casts and sensationally sprawling plots) became secondary. From at least the mid-eighteenth century through to early Rossini, Italian operas tended to come with minimal stage directions and to require few extravagant machines. Instead of stunning audiences (audio)visually, they sought to move them musically and morally.35 It was on the always more sumptuous French stages that the merveilleux lingered as a residue of mechanical magic. Yet even here, its metaphysical presence was sublimated into plots less dependent on physical spectacle, while its mechanical artifice began to be concealed, given the increasing demand by audiences for illusionist immersion, lifelike representation, and lyrical sensitivity—the “natural” and “agreeable” performance evoked by Saint-Évremond.36 An unencumbered embrace of modern technologies and spectacular effects would instead reemerge in popular entertainments of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a new cultural middle ground between the now-divorced realms of technology and mass fabrication on the one hand and high art, with its cult of originality, on the other.
So why did the stage-practical dimension eventually gain renewed importance in serious opera during the long nineteenth century, and why did composers themselves now address specifics of stage effects and their enabling machineries? Even in a nutshell, several factors contributed to what we might call the expansion of these composers’ creative visions. As Lydia Goehr has argued, around 1800 the “regulative concept” of the musical work began to influence compositional practice.37 This work-character was primarily associated with “absolute” instrumental music rather than with collaborative, heterogeneous, and occasion-driven opera, whose products were also highly amenable to changes in future productions on different stages. Nevertheless, a repertory began to emerge also in opera, implying a longer stage life and wider dissemination of successful operas—an extension that spatially and temporally transcended the composers’ direct sphere of influence on productions (as well as on casting and musical execution). It was to ensure their works’ optimal appearance and, with it, utmost economic profit that composers increasingly tried to prescribe the scenic realization as well.38 What is more, the Romantic movement fostered an appetite for descriptive detail and accuracy of representation across the arts, while the invention of photomechanical reproduction technologies, the concomitant flood of images, and the advent of optically focused mass entertainments such as panoramas, cycloramas, and dioramas resulted in what Jonathan Crary has described as a “new valuation of visual experience” during the long nineteenth century.39
Small wonder, then, that questions of staging and design became more urgent in operatic culture and for individual works, and that composers started to raise their voices in these debates. Between 1817 and his untimely death in 1826, for instance, Carl Maria von Weber overturned traditional rehearsal practices at the Dresden Court Opera when, as kapellmeister, he addressed not just the music but also the overall production. As his letters reveal, he even concerned himself with the mechanics of desired stage effects.40 And in the famous Wolf’s Glen scene of his romantic opera Der Freischütz (Berlin, 1821), he set new standards regarding the quantity and quality of audiovisual stage directions and their integration into the musical drama, providing a model for the next generation of German composers.
For his part, Weber had been influenced by French opera. The nexus between a growing attention to audiovisual detail in opera—traditionally the most complex of the performing arts—and the rise of new media was particularly evident in Paris, one of the nineteenth-century capitals of multimedia stimulation and technical invention. As the cultural flagship of the French nation, the Opéra, Paris’s primary opera house, had long lavished the largest sums of money on the mise-en-scène and boasted the most luxurious productions in Europe. Reflecting the splendor of the Napoleonic Empire, for example, Spontini’s historical operas of the early 1800s were of unprecedented scale and pomp. During the Restoration, serious opera declined in popularity; in response, the Opéra in 1827 formed a Staging Committee specifically to set higher standards of design and production, and by the early 1830s, the Opéra’s short-term yet influential director Louis Véron was encouraging the introduction of enticing methods of décor and dazzling optical effects found in boulevard theaters to modernize opera and attract a wider, more bourgeois audience.41 Thus emerged the spectacular genre of grand opéra, “a product of technology” (in Hervé Lacombe’s words) whose historical subject matters and often-gruesome denouements offered additional opportunities for immersive pictorial display and jaw-dropping shock effects.42 The arrival of production books—the so-called livrets de mise en scène—from 1828 on palpably manifested this recent concern with the “how-to” of stagings and their detailed relation to both music and drama, whether these manuals were primarily meant to preserve
