And according to historian of modern art and media Noam Elcott, Wagner’s Bayreuth theater was unique among audiovisual devices of its time because it alone “could accommodate countless types of performances and images,” with its “most significant legacy . . . its adoption by cinemas.”58 In short, Wagner is frequently equated with his Bayreuth theater, which in turn tends to be construed as a historically new amalgamation of arts and modern technologies. His artistic vision has become a convenient reference point for bestowing both historical roots and a weighty artistic heritage on the development of cumulative, multisensory, integrative multimedia.
In contrast to such general claims about the media-historical significance of Wagner’s ideals and their manifestation in the form of Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, I pursue a rich historical embedding of a number of specific yet oft-overlooked technologies. By opening out to a chronologically and geographically wider field of composers, locales, and traditions, these case studies show how Wagner based not only his theories but also his Gesamtkunstwerk’s staged realizations squarely on contemporary practices, and in this sense formed but a step in opera’s development toward medial integration. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus counteracts Wagner’s dominant position in media studies, while my focus on stage practice also serves as a corrective to the almost exclusive reliance of Kittler (and others) on Wagner’s idealized artistic claims. This reliance amounts to nothing less than a romanticized continuation of Wagner’s messianic self-stylization that is weirdly at odds with the otherwise blatant techno-determinism and anthropological skepticism permeating Kittler’s writings.59 After all, the incorporation of technē into Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was not without its drawbacks, even on the theoretical plane. One indication of this downside is that Wagner remained conspicuously silent about what we might call the mechanical underbelly of his envisioned music drama. Just as he originally charged opera’s music to have oppressed drama, so the three “material” arts that he invited into his drama (though architecture and painting more so than sculpture) now eclipsed the manifold technological underpinnings required to realize his vision onstage. In other words, Wagner’s theoretical recourse to the traditional arts veiled his concrete reliance on mundane theatrical mechanics.
Far from being a high-flying theorist’s oversight, this diversion was precisely what Wagner—more adamantly than other composers—required in practice as well. In his 1862 Preface to the Ring poem, for instance, he expressly demanded that, if the tetralogy was ever to materialize onstage, “the cords, ropes, laths and scaffoldings of the stage decorations” should be carefully hidden from the audience.60 That is, the mechanisms facilitating the visual scenery qua art were at the same time to be cloaked (or what we might call “artified”) by it. In Adorno’s famously critical Marxist analysis, Wagner concealed his means of production by the “outward appearance of the product”: through simulating a fictional world as seemingly natural reality, Wagner glossed over both human labor and material machinations involved in its creation. Adorno likened the result to that of the phantasmagoria, a popular optical entertainment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which, for the first time, the supporting devices (a laterna magica and screens) were masked by total darkness, thus letting projections appear “real.”61 By similarly camouflaging the technological origins of his multisensorial spectacle, Wagner sought to render it autopoietic, self-animated, and—ultimately—natural. The intended seamless, and seemingly effortless, façade identified by Adorno’s metaphor of the phantasmagoria is yet another link to the surface-oriented aesthetics of both film and new media (and, for Adorno, evidence of the commodity character of Wagner’s works).
Wagner’s apparent discomfort with the perceptibility of his enabling technologies had deep roots in his fundamentally skeptical outlook on both the arts and the world. Regarding the former, he pitted himself above all against grand opéra and what historian of science John Tresch has dubbed its “ever-escalating arms race for spectacular effects,” as epitomized by the so-called prophet sun—the first use of electric light in opera.62 Introduced at the Opéra in 1849 for the sunrise in act 3 of Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, this self-regulating electric arc apparatus was one of those technologies advertised at the composer’s behest in the production book. And it became Wagner’s bête noire of an “effect without a cause” (Wirkung ohne Ursache), a musical or scenic coup unmotivated by the drama and therefore apparently an end in itself. For Wagner, such a “master-stroke of mechanism” dissolved “the whole of Art into its mechanical components.”63 Freewheeling technological gadgetry would not only violate Wagner’s overall artistic ideal but also degrade each of opera’s other signifying components from art into technology. As such, opera’s multiple media would become mere tools for a purpose no longer achieved, and—hence—pointless technics. To the end of his life, Wagner dreaded that his own works might fall prey to such mechanistic procedures of production and perception, to which, he felt, regular operatic business was prone. Hence his frustration after the Ring premiere that many critics had focused mostly on the functioning (or failure) of his stage technologies, and his irritation that, owing to a miscalculation by his machinist, he had to deliver extra music for the overlong moving canvas of Parsifal’s first-act transformation, which thus exceeded mere dramatic necessity to become an explicitly “decorative-painterly effect.”64 Technology, Wagner continued to insist, was to be doubly concealed: by its dramatic cause as well as its artistic appearance.
A similarly troubled stance emerges in the composer’s more general utterances against industrialization. Lamenting the negative repercussions of industrial development on nature, culture, and society was common coin in nineteenth-century Europe, and went hand-in-hand (among other tendencies) with the Romantic idealization of subjectivity, a preindustrial past, and the natural world.65 Indeed, Wagner argued in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution” that industry, that real-life embodiment of everything mechanical, threatened both art and life in contemporary society: it turned the former into empty, commercial entertainment, while the latter was now the lot of denigrated humans who had become factory workers (or multimedia components), their labor bereft of purpose. Salvation of this debased civilization was to come only from a revolution, followed by a return to nature.66 And this redemption would be achieved precisely through art writ large—art freed from the shackles of the mechanical that had crystallized in modern consumerism, artificial abstractions, and fashions. As Wagner explained the distinction between the technological realm and “real” art:
the mechanical moves from derivative to derivative, from means to means, to finally bring forth but one more mean, the Machine. Whereas the artistic strikes the very opposite path: it throws means on means behind it, abandons derivative after derivative, to arrive at last at the source of every derivation, of every means, in Nature, with full satisfaction of its need.
Thus the machine is the cold and heartless benefactor of luxury-craving mankind.67
Art, then, would lead humanity back from industrial society’s profit-oriented lifestyle into wholesome attunement with the natural world, the ultimate end of creation. And this could be accomplished all the more easily if the Gesamtkunstwerk represented the vitality of nature itself: “The Scene which is to mount for the spectator the picture of human life must, for a thorough understanding of this life, also be able to depict the living image of nature, in which alone artistic man can fully render a speaking likeness of himself.”68 In other words, beyond the then-dominant credo of scenic realism, the onstage rendition of an idealized nature was crucial for the transformative effect of music drama. By the same token, Wagner’s Ring cycle was to be performed “in some beautiful solitude, far away from the fumes and industrial stench of our urban civilization.”69
Technological progress, in short, had crippled both society and art; and Wagner would remain doubtful of it to the end of his days, preferring nature and a sunny climate to the luxuries afforded by electricity. Small wonder that he was eager to mask the dependence of his stage creations on mechanical production—ironically precisely the cause of modern society’s ills that his total work of art
