Exploring opera from the perspectives of media studies and technology studies, this pioneering book examines how composers since the late eighteenth century have increasingly integrated specific audiovisual details into their creative visions, thereby furthering the development of stage machineries as well as the means of their codification. In particular, composers fostered what the author calls “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensory devices intended to veil both the artificiality of illusionist stage representation and their own mechanicity. Building on Richard Wagner’s theories of the total ... More

Exploring opera from the perspectives of media studies and technology studies, this pioneering book examines how composers since the late eighteenth century have increasingly integrated specific audiovisual details into their creative visions, thereby furthering the development of stage machineries as well as the means of their codification. In particular, composers fostered what the author calls “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensory devices intended to veil both the artificiality of illusionist stage representation and their own mechanicity. Building on Richard Wagner’s theories of the total work of art and exposing its reliance on technology, the book looks in detail at the uses and effects of curtains, the gong (or tam-tam), and steam. Designed to appeal directly to the audience’s sensorium like media interfaces, these technologies not only mediated between the sound and sight of a production but also smoothed over its heterogeneous materialities. Drawing on scores, performance documents, treatises, reviews, and cultural discourses, the book traces the practical, hermeneutic, and artistic implications of each titular technology in a wealth of European operatic works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him. Each technology was temporarily absorbed into common notions of the relevant operas but gradually transformed in later productions, in its own mechanical evolution, and its resurgence across performance genres of the last half century. With its interdisciplinary angle on the history and materiality of staging, Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work.