Читать книгу Curtain, Gong, Steam - Gundula Kreuzer - Страница 9

Preface and Acknowledgments

In the digital age, opera may appear like a dinosaur among audiovisual media, ill-equipped to thrive in the fast-changing climate of virtual realities. Some directors therefore seek to boost its chances of survival through generous infusions of modern technologies, such as that giant computerized machine-set in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010–12 production of Richard Wagner’s ever-challenging Ring cycle depicted on the cover of this book (see also figure E.4). Yet opera has long enlisted the latest gadgets from within and beyond the theatrical realm in an attempt to fuse its various contributing elements into one immersive spectacle. During my earlier research on Verdi I chanced upon and became fascinated by the release of water vapor in the first productions of the Ring—a use so striking and ample that it came to be associated both with Wagner and with a particular idea of what the Ring should look like onstage. While investigating these steam effects, I noted in turn that Wagner parodies frequently mocked the ways in which he deployed curtains, and discovered the freehand addition of the tam-tam to a wide range of scores and theatrical satires. My curiosity piqued, I launched an exploration of all three phenomena as both independent theatrical tools and technologies integral to the conception of individual nineteenth-century operas. Thus paradigmatically addressing opera’s mechanical conditioning, I strove to enhance our understanding of the genre as a multimedia art form. I also hoped to dismantle Wagner’s overbearing position in the historiography of operatic production by exposing his borrowing of technologies from his contemporaries. It was with some chagrin that I realized in due course how instrumental Wagner had been, after all: not for inventing but for pushing and twisting the uses of each technology.

Put in more abstract terms, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera examines how composers since the Industrial Revolution began to integrate specific production details into their creative visions, thereby unleashing a quest for new or updated machineries. In particular, they cultivated what I call “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensorial illusionist devices intended to veil the artificiality of stage representation along with their own mechanicity. Each of these technologies mediated not just between sound and sight but also more generally between staged opera’s heterogeneous materialities, smoothing over the latter’s interstices. Concretely, I explore uses and effects of the curtain, the gong, and steam in a wealth of works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him, drawing on scores, historical performance documents, theatrical treatises, reviews, and wider cultural discourses. My book traces each titular technology’s (temporary) absorption into a common notion of the relevant operas as well as its gradual transformation over time—in later productions, in its mechanical evolution, as well as in its resurgence across various performance genres of the last half century. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work and offers a new, technological angle on the history (and historicity) of staging.

As the term “Wagnerian technologies” suggests, my theoretical toolbox partly derives from Wagner’s writings and their later exegetes. I reexamine some of these texts from a dual perspective, both hermeneutic and stage-practical, to pinpoint their inherent failure to account for the gritty actuality of operatic production, which no idealist thinking could transcend. But I acknowledge that Wagner was not the only proponent of this elusive ideal of concealing opera’s artifice through the deployment of ever-more sophisticated technologies. Indeed, the devices and techniques harnessed for his coveted medial fusion all squarely derived from contemporaneous stage practices. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus embeds Wagner within a larger, pan-European concern among nineteenth-century composers with opera’s multimediality and teases out some of the latter’s pragmatic and theoretical implications, both then and now.

My subtitle’s second term also invites explanation. While focusing on technologies, it is what I consider to be their medial aspiration—their affordance of creative perceptible interfaces with the audience’s sensorium—that defines their “Wagnerian” quality, in contrast to the “merely” enabling (and therefore ideally imperceptible) mechanics behind their operation. Here and elsewhere, Curtain, Gong, Steam builds on recent media theories, especially Friedrich Kittler’s provocative emphasis on the medial conditions of any form of human expression. Far from following his techno-determinism, however, I venture that the technologically mediated concealment of staged opera’s mechanics has always been doomed to fail. Instead, it may be opera’s very hybridity that can sustain the genre in our unprecedentedly mediatized age. The accelerating obsolescence of media technologies ironically continues to render a perfectly transparent illusionist stage chimeric. But with its imaginative and deliberate collaboration between bodies and technologies, opera may in the end prove anything but a medial dinosaur: it offers a welcome site for contemporary negotiations among ephemeral virtualities, a reviving interest in the material, and our own dogged corporeality. In this spirit, and with a nod to the book’s extended gestation, a framing look at some recent productions consciously historicizes my own scholarly endeavors.

• • •

The bulk of Curtain, Gong, Steam was conceived, my eyes fixed on the tenure clock, during a Junior Faculty Leave at Yale University in 2011–12; and it was essentially completed while I held a fellowship at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in 2015–16. Chapter 1 partly derives from a lecture I gave in Bayreuth in 2011, published as “Venus als Wagner” in Tannhäuser—Werkstatt der Gefühle: Wagner-“Concil” Bayreuther Festspiele 2011, edited by Clemens Risi, Bettina Brandl-Risi, Anna Papenburg, and Robert Sollich (Freiburg: Rombach, 2014), 159–76. Large parts of chapter 4 are based on my essay “Wagner-Dampf: Steam in Der Ring des Nibelungen and Operatic Production,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011): 179–218. Chapter 3 and the epilogue profited from the interdisciplinary insights of my co-fellows at the superbly stimulating Italian Academy: Angelika Kaufmann, Arianna Cecconi, Beatrice Vallone, Cammy Brothers, Chiara Franceschini, Christine Jeanneret, Emmanuel Alloa, Emmanuele Coccia, Eric Bianchi, Federico Lauria, Federico Pierotti, Leon Chisholm, Manuela Bragagnolo, Michele Cometa, Paola Giacomoni, Thomas Hilgers, as well as Barbara Faedda and David Freedberg. Two Yale awards for my first monograph (the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize) supported my research, while permissions and illustrations were covered by a generous grant from the Frederick Hilles Fund.

Curtain, Gong, Steam also bears significant traces of Yale’s intellectual community. I am particularly grateful to Brian Kane for his endlessly stimulating questions, challenges, and recommendations, without which some sections would have taken a less interesting course; Daniel Harrison for shepherding me through the administrative tangles of Yale’s notorious tenure system; Ellen Rosand for her prudent and candid mentorship; Ève Poudrier for her humane presence, now missed; Gary Tomlinson for pushing my arguments at decisive junctures; Ian Quinn for his friendship from day one; James Hepokoski for his critical eye and unfailing trust; Michael Veal for probing my short foray into popular culture; Patrick McCreless for our “Wagner lunches” and his all-around generosity; and Rick Cohn as well as, more recently, Anna Zayaruznaya, Henry Parkes, and Rebekah Ahrendt for enhancing the Music Department’s friendly vibe. Beyond Stoeckel Hall, Francesco Casetti, John Durham Peters, Katie Trumpener, Milette Gaifman, Paola Bertucci, Pauline LeVen, Rüdiger Campe, and Tim Barringer have added helpful perspectives. In the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Helen Bartlett, Karl Schrom, Remi Castonguy, and Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy went out of their way to obtain what they must often have considered obscure materials. Not least, a string of wonderful graduate students—many by now professional scholars in their own right—have aided my research in ways (and locations) too numerous to list: my heartfelt thanks to Alexandra Kieffer, Annelies Andries, Carmel Raz, Christy Thomas, Henry Balme, Joseph Salem, Julia Doe, Kamala Schelling, Marco Ladd, and Sylvia Leith. Leanne Dodge was an astute copyeditor in the earliest stages; and Hilary Purrington patiently set the music examples. Finally, at a time when the book should long have been in production, Rona Johnston abetted its extra editorial loop and requested slimming with her keen eye for linguistic detail.

Although—like Wagnerian technologies—I will inevitably fail to cover everyone who has helped the genesis of this book, I would like to thank Alessandra Campana, Clemens Risi, David J. Levin, Jutta Toelle, Laura Tunbridge, Lydia Goehr, and Mauro Calcagno for their encouragement, feedback, friendship, and sometimes hospitality over the years; David Charlton for sharing his unpublished dissertation and his expertise on Parisian tam-tams; Benjamin Steege, Florence Grétreau, and Matthew Goodheart for their help with other gong-related matters; Anselm Gerhard, Charles Kronenberg, Daniel KL Chua, David Rosen, Francesca Brittan, Katherine Hambridge, Laurence Dreyfus, Mary Ann Smart, Ralph Locke, Thomas Betzwieser, and my interlocutors at various colloquia for their valuable comments on early presentations of individual chapters; Sarah Hibberd for inviting me to two science-and-technology workshops that provided important stimuli for chapters 2 and 3; and Ryan Minor for being my most consistent interlocutor and conspirator in all things operatic (as well as lending a second set of eyes to chapter 4). Axel Körner, Benjamin Walton, David Trippett, Flora Willson, Gavin Williams, Katherine Fry, and Sarah Hibberd took it upon themselves to read and critique several chapters in a further workshop at King’s College, London. Roger Parker not only organized this unique occasion but, once again, accompanied my book’s path from the first ideas to its final shape; his uncanny ability to solve structural issues and stoke the creative fires—not to mention his enduring friendship—remain invaluable for my work and myself. I am likewise indebted to Stephen Hinton and my friend Emanuele Senici, the (then) anonymous readers of this manuscript, for their astute observations, critique, and constructive encouragement. At the University of California Press, Mary Francis and, more recently, Raina Polivka have been ardent advocates; Zuha Khan and Benjy Malings lent welcome help during the protracted final stages of preproduction editing, and Dore Brown, Kristine Hunt, and Nicholle Lutz saw the book into print.

My research could not have been undertaken without countless librarians and archivists on both sides of the Atlantic. I am particularly indebted to the following representatives and their staff: Kristina Unger, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth; Marie-Luise Adlung, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and Martina Rebmann, Musikabteilung der Staatsbibiliothek, Berlin; Rainer Maaß, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, and Silvia Uhlemann, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt; Ann Kersting-Meuleman, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt; Gerald Köhler, Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung der Universität Köln; Sabine Kurth, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and Markus Schmalzl, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich; Andrea Harrandt, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, and Irmgard Pangerl, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna; Bérengère de l’Epine, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville, Magali Lacousse, Archives nationales, and Pierre Vidal, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, Paris; Mariagrazia Carlone, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, and Matteo Sartorio, Museo Teatrale alla Scala, Milan; Giovanna Caridei, Archivio di Stato, Naples; Gavin Dixon, Horniman Museum, London; Tara Craig, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York; and Christina Linklater, Loeb Music Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Personally, curtains, gongs, and steam have accompanied me through both the happiest and the most challenging times of my life. The book would not have taken its present shape without the loving support I encountered along the way. I am indebted to Shakur for the time we had; Jonah and Zachary for opening their worlds to me, and keeping them open (those Minecraft axes are for you); Elizabeth, Eve, Jaia, Leah, Lisa, Nora, and Penelope for caring like sisters; Mother Clare (now dearly missed), Christine, Johanna, Lucille, and Michael for their wisdom and time; Benjamin, Eric, Jackie, Jessamyn, Ryan, and Yuval for standing by in NYC; my parents, Arthur and Gisela, for their wholehearted backing in every possible way; and Anselm and Britta with Milla and Lale for so joyfully embracing me as an auntie. My own aunt Barbara has graced my life with her ongoing interest in my scholarly pursuits and, even more, with her empathy, her ability to listen without judgment, and her spiritual resonance. It is to her and her quiet love that I dedicate this book in gratitude.

New Haven, June 2017