Curtain, Gong, Steam - Gundula Kreuzer

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      The existence of such standard practices may make one suspect that opera composers did not need to indicate curtains, at least not for works that followed musical conventions; and this assumption seems to be borne out by contemporary scores. Admittedly, some caution is in order when conjecturing about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century curtain routines on the basis of scores. A look at the recent critical editions of Meyerbeer’s trend-setting grands opéras underlines the liberty with which curtain cues were omitted, adjusted, or added in the often abridged published scores of the era (whether orchestral or vocal), and even more extensively in later editions. Moreover, original performance materials, where extant, reveal further discrepancies between written instructions and actual procedures. This situation thwarts any conclusive findings on when, why, and by whom curtains were first prescribed, what or who might have motivated this development, and how exactly the practices of various countries, theaters, and composers influenced each other. What is more, changes in the placement of curtains between houses or over time (as evinced in many performance scores) were related not only to artistic considerations but also to the variable speed of curtains, a product of their weight, cloth, and mechanisms. Alas, hardly any documentation survives for this material aspect or for the precise tasks and physical labor performed by the stagehands operating the curtains.31 But a sampling of available critical editions, facsimile autographs, nineteenth-century scores, production books, and occasional performance materials does reveal general trends among the core French, Italian, and Austro-German repertories—tendencies that increasingly individualize the generic framing described above.

      PRECOCIOUS OPENINGS

      Before approximately the 1820s, curtains at the beginnings of operas tended to be notated in the score only where the onset of the first scene was musically ambiguous or—relatedly—where a composer sought to achieve a special effect. Both situations occurred particularly in operas that blended the overture seamlessly into the music of the first act proper, often by eschewing musical closure. As Patrick Taïeb has shown in his extensive study of French opera overtures between 1770 and 1820, their integration with the main drama was a chief objective of French composers who, in the wake of Gluck’s reforms, wanted to make all music dramatically relevant. In Taïeb’s analysis, beyond acoustically heralding a performance and thereby hushing the audience, overtures were now often tailored to serve either or both of two main functions: to set the general atmosphere of the opera (or its key moments) and/or to prepare for the first scene.32 Particularly in the latter case, it was expedient for overtures to link directly into the first act, so as not to interrupt the established sonic ambience with a pause and applause. This intended continuity encouraged closer interaction of music and curtain, which in turn required the curtain’s opening to be specified.

      The oeuvre of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, who was known for—among other innovations—experimental treatments of overtures and entr’actes, offers a helpful platform for gauging how the curtain consequently became more relevant in specific musical and dramatic situations. What emerges from this exploration is that the joining of overture and first act frequently precipitated what we might call a “precocious” curtain relative to the onset of the first scene. In his comedy Le magnifique (Paris, Comédie-Italien, 1773), for instance, Grétry asked for the curtain to be raised seventeen measures before the triumphant end of his substantial overture, during the forte repeat—turned from minor to major—of a four-measure closing motif that leads into two cycles of emphatic I–IV–V–I cadences and five loud tonic chords before a half-measure rest. With a two-measure general pause following, this caesura would have been the traditional—and natural—place for the curtain. But Grétry requested that the first scene be “linked” with the overture. And since act 1 starts with a sole drum tattoo sounding “in the distance,” it was necessary to raise the curtain earlier, for only thus could the silence initiating act 1 become dramatically meaningful (rather than occasioning applause for the emerging scene) and the tattoo audible.33 Its audibility is all the more important as the tattoo frames the overture itself: it recalls the drumbeats that had sounded in the wings behind the closed curtain at its beginning and that continue to punctuate the first scene’s military marches. The launch of act 1, then, retrospectively reveals the overture to have been partly diegetic music (including its sometimes polyphonic texture and the inclusion of a popular song). This unusual format was inspired by Michel-Jean Sedaine’s libretto, according to which during the overture “a file of prisoners will be seen passing behind the scene; the chanting of priests will be heard”: Grétry designed his overture as an imaginary, musically stylized “representation” of this pantomime. And its effect depended on the curtain first denying and then prematurely granting vision.34

      Grétry’s operas Amphitryon (Versailles, 1786) and Anacréon chez Polycrate (Paris, Opéra, 1797) merged their overtures with the subdued first scenes not merely via an early curtain but also through an explicit musical transition that impeded a break. As Taïeb has argued, such sonic links were generally favored for nocturnal scenes (as in Amphitryon) or the sunrises recurrently launching French operas (as in Anacréon)35—dusky settings that did not lend themselves to sudden exposure and applause. Accordingly, Grétry did not close the overtures harmonically but specified the curtain opening at caesuras fifteen and eight measures before their ends, respectively. In Amphitryon, the curtain coincides with a sudden rallentando and a thinning of texture and dynamics for a temporarily static sound field on the dominant that seamlessly morphs into the subtle sunrise evocation of act 1 (example 2.1); in Anacréon, the curtain opens, conversely, with the triumphant return of the full orchestra on the tonic leading to a drawn-out modulation—a passage that sonically prepares a space for the shimmering pianissimo figurations of scene 1 that paint the dawn proper. Interpolated curtain-raising passages thus provided time for the curtain to open as part of the show,36 while the curtain only began a process of making-visible that continued with the slowly increasing light onstage. Overture and first scene were welded together both aurally and through a continuing process of optical revelation initiated by the premature curtain.

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      Grétry was not the only composer exploring early curtains as a means of interlocking overtures and first scenes. Gluck, for one, employed the device to enhance a not subtle but instead unusually forceful opening. In his widely influential Paris Alceste of 1776, he indicated “lever la toile” eight measures before the overture’s close, during a passage that repeats an otherwise unassuming motif from four measures earlier with an increasingly wider harmonic and dynamic range leading—again—to the dominant. The instruction was likely added because the first act starts immediately with the full chorus rather than an instrumental introduction and recitative, as had been the case in the 1767 Vienna version. Thus, the steady buildup in dynamics and texture over a pulsating dominant pedal during the overture’s last six measures leads breathlessly to the ensuing choral outcry on a diminished chord. By asking for the curtain to (begin to) raise about fifteen seconds before that chorus, Gluck achieved a continual accumulation of audiovisual tension while ensuring that the audience could marvel at the stage sets before focusing on the action and singing proper. As Taïeb has argued, the choral anguish, in turn, explained the overture’s unusually dramatic transition. The early curtain thus drives home the urgency at the onset of the opera—the exceptional circumstance that it begins, rather than ends, with the impending death of a king.37

      This is not to say that every idiosyncratic beginning required the written placement of a curtain. In his 1784 opéra-comique Richard Cœur-de-lion, Grétry fully integrated a condensed overture into the first number, which—following Italianate models—was a choral introduction. Here, the music itself suggests the timing of the opening curtain at the end of the short initial Allegretto, after an emphatic turn to the dominant

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