Curtain, Gong, Steam - Gundula Kreuzer

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whose lilting rhythm both alludes to the first scene’s rustic setting and leads into the introductory chorus.38 Conversely, curtain instructions might occasionally appear without obvious dramatic motivation or despite musical closure of the overture.39 But in general, it was overtures leading directly into act 1 that tended to align their precocious curtain with suitable musical material: the curtain might open during a caesura or fermata; before a shift of key, dynamics, or texture; or to final cadential chords. And the fact that these curtain-raising moments often commenced an even number of measures before the first scene suggests that they were a function of the music more than of the emerging visual setting.

      Given this evident desire to tie some overtures into the action by repurposing their endings, it is unsurprising that some composers experimented with raising the curtain even earlier, so as to utilize more (or all) of the overture for nonvocal stage setting. An obvious way to do so was with mimed action during the overture. What he had not dared in Le magnifique, for instance, Grétry risked in his farce Le jugement de Midas (Paris, Palais Royal, 1778): its curtain opens right with the overture, which satirizes both musically and through pantomime some well-worn topoi of tragédie lyrique, including a sunrise and deus ex machina. And in Guillaume Tell (Paris, Comédie-Italienne, 1791), the composer simply declared the opening pastoral pantomime (complete with ranz de vaches, echo effects, and the ubiquitous dawn) to be the first scene of his “drame.”40 Such use of the overture to evoke an opera’s key locale was expanded by Meyerbeer to illustrate the drama’s motivating conflict. The Sinfonia of Il crociato in Egitto (Venice, La Fenice, 1824) not only includes a banda, but less than a third into it, the curtain discloses a minutely scripted pantomime of Christian slaves who (once more at daybreak) begin their forced labor and suffer mistreatment before breaking into a lamenting chorus—the opera’s introductory number.41 The early curtain was crucial for Meyerbeer’s gradual buildup of audiovisual information. Rather than merely separating instrumental music from vocal and visual drama, the curtain’s placement guaranteed that the overture would be infused first with diegetic sounds and then with both scenic and pantomimic visuals before the dramatic situation was clarified in song. As we have seen in chapter 1, the resulting crescendo of medial signification would become characteristic of Wagner’s theories, although he never mentioned the curtain, a central catalyst thereof.

      Even without the addition of pantomimes, the specification of early, musically accompanied curtains widened the curtain’s operation from a momentary, quasi-automatic action outside the audiovisual diegesis into a deliberate aligning of music and the emerging visual expression. As such, curtain-raising moments became not only perceptually longer but also dramatically more meaningful: they established a transitional space between the “real” time of the musical introduction and the represented time (and space) of the drama. Not unlike Gérard Genette’s literary paratexts conceived as a threshold or vestibule, they provided “an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside” of the drama.42 Albeit transient and unidirectional, this vestibule expanded the quasi-two-dimensional border marked by the traditional opening curtain into a multidimensional space—one that allowed for novel ways to interlink musical and visual media. By acoustically underlining and dramaturgically exploiting this space, Grétry and other composers directed the spectators’ senses to (and between) specific moments of an opera’s beginning to heighten dramatic effect. Intricately mediating “between different realities,” early curtains became akin to what Alexander R. Galloway has theorized for digital interfaces as “autonomous zones of activity.”43

      DELAYED VISION

      Such attention to the timing and musical rendition of opening curtains became more widespread during the first half of the nineteenth century, not only in French but also in German works. Unlike in the above examples, however, some German Romantic composers tended to postpone the curtain into the first act. This deferment might have been related to an originally Germanic view of the overture as a symphonic piece in its own right, with a musical integrity that was not to be disturbed by the rustling of drapery or the distraction of the emerging scene.44 Granted, German composers also began to tie overtures more closely to their operas with regard to mood, anticipated dramatic trajectory, and musical material. But built-in curtain music or harmonically open endings would have thwarted an overture’s expressive independence, along with its ability to stand on its own in concerts, where opera overtures were regularly performed across nineteenth-century Europe.45

      In Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Berlin, 1821), it is therefore after the majestic closure of the sizeable overture and ten further measures of fast, tension-building, and quickly crescendoing arpeggios and rising scales over a pulsating dominant pedal that the curtain opens, on a dominant chord at a moment of changing texture, just as a shot is heard onstage; eight measures later, the chorus enters on the tonic. Weber’s musical curtain-raiser did not close the overture but rather opened the first act. Moreover, by having it precede (rather than accompany) the curtain and by supporting the latter’s movement instead with diegetic sound, he boosted anticipation of the curtain’s rising and explicitly incorporated the latter into his introductory tableau. This propelled the forward drive of the turbulent scene and drew the audience right into the action.46 Just how unusual this audiovisual coordination was emerges from extant scores as well as twentieth-century recordings, many of which either indicate the opening curtain after the more typical eight, rather than the original ten, measures or postpone the shot (presumably to ensure its audibility).

      A related case is Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling (Berlin, 1833), whose musically closed overture is placed between a prologue and act 1. To clarify this unusual beginning, Marschner prescribed an opening curtain in measure sixteen of the Prologue. It follows a four-measure crescendoing chromatic ascent to the highest pitch and dynamic levels yet and coincides with the entry of the brass, leaving ten measures of descending chromatic figuration and a drawn-out tutti cadence before the first chorus (example 2.2).47 The curtain’s rising is here set up as an important event within the compact orchestral introduction to the taut Prologue that portrays in medias res the conflict out of which the subsequent drama arises. Moreover, the same curtain music (plus additional cadential chords dwindling to a ppp) later closes the Prologue, thus supporting the curtain’s framing function acoustically. Together with the unorthodox placement of the subsequent overture, this orchestral-cum-curtain frame lets the Prologue’s condensed drama recede into the temporal distance. The resulting effect resembles that of a dissolving view—here of the gnomes’ cave—fading temporarily in and out of the sensual field, or of the cinematic narration of a prehistory before a film’s opening credits.

Kreuzer

      Analogously to Hans Heiling, opening curtains were also frequently specified in operas that lacked overtures altogether. In his one-act opera Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe (Paris, Opéra, 1794), Grétry specified the curtain after twelve measures of generically introductory sequencing material at a return to the tonic (example 2.3). The cue coincides with the beginning of a four-measure modulation to the dominant, with “Scène 1” (and its respective stage direction) indicated only toward the end of this modulation. The interpolated curtain passage thus suggests how long it might have taken for the curtain to disclose the stage. And to offer audiences a chance to absorb the scenery, Grétry added a varied echo of the modulatory passage and a return to the tonic before the title hero starts singing.48 Similarly, Jean-François Le Sueur desired for Ossian, ou Les bardes (Paris, Opéra, 1804) that the curtain be down at the beginning of his comparatively short orchestral introduction and raised (notably on another somber night scene) eight measures before the first chorus, at the end of a temporarily thinned orchestral texture and dominant cadence. Merging influences from Grétry and Gluck, Le Sueur followed this instruction with a dominant pedal,

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