aid for future performances at the original theater.43
Among composers, above all Meyerbeer came to personify grand opéra’s emphasis on extravagant showiness and audiovisual synthesis. Although he was far from the only composer for the French stage interested in details of production, his published diaries and correspondence testify to the remarkable power he achieved in this regard, as he obsessively commanded, rehearsed, and commented on each and every feature of his operas onstage. Moreover, after the 1849 premiere of Le prophète (his last grand opéra he saw into production), Meyerbeer was also involved in the creation of its stage manual. Along with other additions, he explicitly requested more detailed technical descriptions of this opera’s most innovative special effects as well as the inclusion of contact details for the Parisian distributor of the necessary mechanical contrivances. And he urged the livret’s author to make haste with its publication for the benefit of both provincial and Germanic theaters. As Arnold Jacobshagen has argued, the resulting and unprecedentedly extensive production book is “the first comprehensively documented evidence to date of a composer claiming for himself the ultimate control over the various aspects of both the musical and the scenic realization of his work, and not only for the premiere but as far as possible also for future stagings and performances elsewhere.”44 Toward the mid-nineteenth century, then, several composers began to expand their reign beyond music and text, developing a vision of opera as what we today would call immersive musical multimedia.
GESAMTKUNSTWERK
Wagner significantly borrowed from and built on these holistic approaches to opera when he formulated his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” around midcentury. True, he was not the first to employ this term, nor did he use it consistently.45 Furthermore, his treatises are fraught with contradictions and sociopolitical ideologies, and he would later adjust his ideas in both writing and practice. Nonetheless, his theory was then the most sustained argument in favor of a centrally regulated unification of the theatrical arts. As such, it has recently garnered renewed attention in interdisciplinary scholarship on common tendencies across artistic modernisms.46 Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future” (which has tended to be eclipsed by the more music-focused Opera and Drama of 1850–51) is particularly worth revisiting from the perspective of staged multimedia, as it cuts to the core of his envisioned interrelationship of the various arts in performance. In turn, my book’s examination of stage-technological realities both recontextualizes and challenges his theoretical approach as well as its ties with general theatrical practices of his time.
According to Wagner’s original articulation, “opera” had mistakenly made music dominant and thereby neglected both drama and stage representation. By contrast, the seed, unifying factor, and ultimate goal of their union “for the collective Artwork” (zum gemeinsamen Kunstwerke) was to be Drama writ large, that is, “the dramatic Action” (die dramatische Handlung) emerging from Life itself.47 Wagner consequently conceived this “true artwork” as “an immediate vital act” (als unmittelbarer Lebensakt) to be achieved only in its “immediate physical portrayal, in the moment of its liveliest embodiment”: short-circuiting intellectual mediation, it would come into full existence only when sensually experienced as materially staged.48 To this end, all means of human expression were needed: the individual arts were to unite and collaborate, each surrendering its separate identity and thus (paradoxically) fulfilling its true potential under the inspired stimulus and authorship of the poet-performer. To wit, Wagner cast himself as the all-encompassing “artist of the future” whose creations, once realized, would be served by and consummate all the arts, including all prior operatic achievements.49
This early theoretical framework helps explain why Wagner was obsessed not just with writing his own libretti, but also with providing details for and overseeing the stagings themselves. As early as his first public performance, the Dresden premiere of Rienzi in 1842, the then entirely unknown composer apparently surprised the Court Opera’s conductor and manager rather unpleasantly when he showed up to intervene at the rehearsals.50 And throughout his career, he would seek to coach performers personally in both singing and acting. Admittedly, it was common for nineteenth-century composers (even typically part of their scritture with Italian opera houses) to oversee the rehearsals and first few performances of new works. Moreover, we have seen how Weber and Meyerbeer had already expanded this involvement to embrace direction and design. By the same token, from the 1840s on Verdi would gradually extend the composer’s authority in Italian opera, insisting on the integrity of his scores in performance as well as his influence over stagings.51 But Wagner increasingly focused not just on the presentation but also on the perception of his works, to a point where everything—gestures, blocking, lighting, design, costumes, scene changes, even acoustics and architecture—became essential for the Gesamtkunstwerk’s desired multisensorial experience. This concern with the physical manifestation continued even after 1854, when his beginning encounter with Schopenhauer’s philosophy led to a shift in emphasis from drama to music as the Gesamtkunstwerk’s chief motivator. Thus, in 1872 Wagner pondered as a generic label for his works “deeds of music made visible” (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik)—a dictum he claimed he dropped only because post-Tristan he feared that his dramas no longer offered sufficient spectacle to warrant a moniker of such audiovisual synthesis.52
Yet this declaration was clearly coquetry, or a clever ploy to avert criticism of his hyper-Meyerbeerian show in the making. After all, it was precisely in 1872 that Wagner laid the foundation stone for his festival theater, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, whose primary purpose it was to enable the long-delayed complete premiere of the Ring cycle under his own direction. On the grounds of its libretto alone (which, unusually, Wagner had published, to raise money for the project, before even starting the composition), this work had become notorious for its extraordinary demands on stage technology, given its underwater seduction scenes, cosmic peregrinations, and other seemingly impossible episodes. At the cusp of the era of illusionist theater, with its proscenium stage and its quest for visual verisimilitude, these scenic fancies required the aid not only of those architects and painters Wagner had called forth in “The Art-Work of the Future,” but also of the most skilled engineers and their contraptions. Accordingly, Wagner had his theater equipped with cutting-edge machinery designed by Carl Brandt, the foremost German authority on the modernization of stage technology. In addition, the Festspielhaus’s amphitheatrical auditorium, unobstructed sightlines, and entirely sunken orchestra pit provided a unique immersive environment that was quickly considered revolutionary in Europe’s theatrical world, outshining in this regard even the Palais Garnier, the new home of the Paris Opéra, which had opened only one year earlier.53 And even apart from this architectural and technological finesse, a composer’s having a theater purpose-built for his own works and placed under his sole direction was unprecedented. With the premieres in Bayreuth of his last works—the Ring cycle (1876) and Parsifal (1882)—Wagner’s control over each and every aspect of production reached a new level indeed.54
Understandably, media and performance scholars have therefore tended to place Wagner at the beginning of a growing intersection of theatrical and technological modes of representation. In their view, Wagner spearheaded an emerging alliance of aural and visual media that ultimately led to their convergence in our virtual age. For instance, Wagner looms large in the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who regularly referenced the Gesamtkunstwerk as a “monomaniacal anticipation of the gramophone and the movies.”55 Multimedia artists and theorists have likewise dated the emergence of contemporary media performance with Wagner. Chris Salter starts his survey of the modern “entanglements” of mechanical (or computational) technologies and performance with Bayreuth, while Randall Packer and Ken Jordan prominently discuss Wagner as having made “one of the first attempts in modern art to establish a practical, theoretical system for the comprehensive integration of the arts.”56 His struggle for “aesthetic totality” as well as the Gesamtkunstwerk’s dialectically related reliance
