LITMIR.BIZ

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it does so with a vengeance. At the end of the Rheingold skit, it comes down “with horror, dumbfounded” at Fasolt’s death. After Die Walküre, it falls “with dignity and decency” on the (apparently uncomfortable) sight of a sleeping woman. In Siegfried, the title hero knowingly provokes an indignant curtain when calling for love out of wedlock; as a “precaution,” the curtain “indeed comes down little by little” lest the illicit couple exhibit their love publicly. And at the end of Götterdämmerung, nothing is left for the curtain but “to fall, thoroughly speechlessly.”³ Gisbert’s satire turns the curtain into a mute character whose movements pronounce emotional reactions and ethical judgments: in the manner of a commentator or chorus, the curtain proclaims the moral, protecting, bonding with, and gesturing toward the spectators. Beyond just participating in the farce, this curtain becomes its master. Mediating between audience and author, it has the final (scoffing) word.

      All three parodies highlight Wagner’s curtains as unusual, whether by means of their speed, their ineffectual fabric and virtual absence, or (on the contrary) their explicit intervention in the drama. Indeed, Wagner is the only composer—and, along with Brecht, the only dramatist tout court—to have a particular type of curtain named after him, a circumstance that seems to confirm his extraordinary attention to curtain practices. Aside from satirists, though, nineteenth-century critics rarely mentioned the workings and effects of the curtain in ordinary Wagner productions, save some observations on the innovative curtain technology of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The composer himself, otherwise so verbal about every artistic aspect of his creations, likewise remained curiously shy about the subject, thereby suggesting its association with “mere” technology (as discussed in the introduction). And most composers and opera scholars have shared in this silence. An integral part of theatrical architecture from the time of opera’s beginnings, the curtain has mostly been taken for granted. As a character in Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park laconically declared, “there is very little sense in a play without a curtain.”⁴ In other words, the curtain appears fundamental for establishing a performative situation, which it achieves by separating the latter from everyday actions. Even outside the theater, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, a curtain alone can manifest that fundamental “line . . . between a staging area where the performance proper occurs and an audience region,” thereby signaling both the transformation of actors into characters and the onset of make-belief that together establish what he dubs the “theatrical frame.”⁵ It is thus unsurprising that the red velvet curtain so beloved of theaters since the nineteenth century has turned into an icon of theatrical performance per se.⁶

      Precisely because of its ubiquity, however, the curtain has received much less critical attention than have other, more novel aspects of nineteenth-century stage technology, such as electric light effects or contraptions rendering complex scenic fantasies ever more realistic. Despite its blatant visibility, the curtain has—ironically—tended to remain conceptually invisible: its practical, artistic, and hermeneutic contributions to staged opera have often lingered in obscurity. This is the case even where, since the late eighteenth century, composers increasingly employed the curtain as an individual, expressive ingredient. To be sure, as I will show, this perceptual “disappearance” was part and parcel of the immersive illusionist aesthetic that drove the customization of curtain uses in the first place. (In this regard, our satirists’ very noticing of the curtain points to a failure of Wagner’s endeavor to conceal his technologies.) But only recently have scholars begun to theorize the aesthetic import of curtains since the establishment of the Baroque stage—that is, after curtain technology had ceased to be a novelty. And they have tended to do so either from a dramaturgical angle and often concerning contemporary theater,⁷ or with regard to select composers who paid special attention to curtains. Foundational studies of the latter kind are Patrick Taïeb’s examination of how French composers began to connect overtures to the ensuing opera during the half century around 1800, and Helen Greenwald’s insightful discussion of Puccini’s carefully crafted opening curtains a century later: both analyze the multifaceted potential of relating sound and sight at an opera’s beginning by means of deliberately placed curtains. Michael Anders has expanded this discussion to address Puccini’s closing curtains, while Johanna Dombois’s recent metaphorical exploration of the Wagner curtain’s signification pioneers an anatomic approach to curtain technology.⁸ Building on all this work, this chapter pursues a longer, transnational perspective on nineteenth-century opera’s growing use of the curtain as creative artistic medium. By tracing its gradual rise as what I have called a Wagnerian technology, I show how composers progressively scripted the curtain to precisely entwine opera’s visual and aural domains. The curtain not only furthered multimedia smoothness, but also opened new spaces, literally, for creative—and increasingly subtle—mediations between opera’s various media.

      Historically, the curtain does emerge as time-honored theatrical equipment that has undergone relatively few changes over the past four centuries. After its early uses in classical Roman theater as well as medieval mystery plays (among other ritual performances), the curtain had intermittently appeared only as part of stage sets, to close off particular onstage areas.⁹ In Shakespeare’s theater-in-the-round, for instance, small curtains occasionally covered doors, alcoves, or other “diegetic” spaces within the set to obscure the entrances or exits of characters.¹⁰ The proscenium curtain proper was reintroduced in sixteenth-century Italy with the emergence of the enclosed box-theater and its picture-frame stage: for the Baroque theater (as this illusionist, perspective stage is often summarily called) a large front curtain became quasi-constitutive for hiding the stage setup and its ornate decorations until the beginning of a performance. This function was particularly important for the new genre of opera, with its unprecedented media complexity and scenic pomp. Indeed, the stage curtain was popularized across Europe above all by Italian opera.¹¹ As one of the earliest commentators on stage technology, the Italian-trained German architect Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, explained in 1640, “Since the spectators, on entering the theater, should not be able to see the complete scene of the stage, a curtain appropriate to the following action is hung in front of the scene. . . . When the spectator takes his seat he must be content for a short time with anticipation, which will only whet his appetite.”¹² By veiling the scene, the front curtain marked both the stage space and the impending performance upon it as extraordinary—so exceptional as to be revealed only temporarily and at particular, predetermined times. Thus it also increased expectations for this special event.

      In creating anticipation, however, the curtain reinforced its own subsidiary essence. After all, it was a placeholder or blank space, a promise of something yet to come, and its chief purpose was to be eventually—and inevitably—removed to disclose the “real” show behind it. This indexical function of curtains was pinpointed as early as the first century AD by Pliny the Elder in his famous account of the legendary artistic competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. After the former painted grapes so realistically that birds came to feed on them, the latter produced a picture veiled by a curtain that Zeuxis instinctively went to draw to see the alleged painting—only to realize that the curtain itself was painted.¹³ Casting the curtain as mechanism to protect an artwork, Pliny at the same time stresses the anticipated effect of its removal precisely by denying it—by having Parrhasius’s touch transform the (painted) curtain into the artwork itself. Conversely, Baroque proscenium curtains in particular were often richly decorated or painted with landscapes or mythological scenes.¹⁴ This appearance was intended not only to elevate the theater’s splendor, but also to channel the spectators’ gaze toward the stage before a show and, thereby, amplify the impression of both perspectival depth and realism once the static, flat canvas gave way to animated stage action. Curtain and picture merged to elevate claims to artistry—of Parrhasius’s painterly skills or of theatrical performance in general.

      In order to intensify the anticipation incited by the theatrical curtain, Furttenbach and other early seventeenth-century authors recommended that it be removed as quickly as possible, making audiences suddenly feel transported into the stage action.¹⁵ To this end, around 1600 some Italian stages imitated classical models by having the curtain drop into a groove at stage front.¹⁶ Alternatively, curtains were pulled up, rolled up, or parted in the middle and drawn aside. Either way, they

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