LITMIR.BIZ

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between presence and absence, visibility and concealment was reflected in debates on the curtain’s materiality. Contemporaries, for example, were not of one mind on whether decorating the main curtain would be pleasant or distracting—that is, whether it was primarily part of the theatrical architecture (in which case visual grandeur was in order) or of performances (in which case modest neutrality would be helpful).⁶² Once liberated from being an automatic switch between overture and audiovisual drama proper, then, the curtain began to mediate in increasingly complex ways between sound and vision as well as between theatrical space, the audience’s imagination, and the multimedia presentation of the drama.

      MULTIPLYING CURTAINS

      In view of curtains’ growing temporal flexibility and audiovisual mediation, it was logical that composers would eventually indicate them not just for an opera’s beginning but also for subsequent acts. After all, unless these acts started in a more eighteenth-century fashion with recitative, they regularly featured at most a short orchestral prelude, making the point of transition into the scene less obvious than in the case of an overture. The same concern for signposting held also for musical entr’actes or interludes, which became more common through the nineteenth century, partly because of the growing desire for dramatic continuity we have already observed regarding overtures, and partly—like the spread of act curtains themselves—for practical reasons.⁶³ Responding to a budding appetite for historically realistic stagings encouraged by French opera since the Napoleonic period (a development that was closely tied to the fashion for historical detail in literature and the visual arts), throughout the nineteenth century operatic sets became grander, and they increasingly used practicable scenery—three-dimensional constructions and architectural set pieces—rather than just painted flats and drops. All this rendered scene changes more cumbersome and time consuming. While act curtains made invisible the maneuvering of such heavy structures and dampened the inevitable noises, entr’actes were designed to ensure performative continuity between acts and to hold audience attention, often acoustically evoking dramatic events or atmospheres in the manner of preludes. Given the entr’acte’s generically transitional function, however, it was all the more important that the actual moment of the curtain’s (re)opening be marked sonically.

      Thus, true to his reputation for micromanaging every detail, Meyerbeer included not only short entr’actes but also curtain cues for virtually every act of the three works he saw into production at the Opéra. In so doing, he paraded a whole gamut of suitable orchestral curtain-raisers, whether a rising fanfare (for act 2 of Robert le diable, 1831), calming cadential passages (Robert, act 3; Les huguenots, act 2, 1836), emphatic fortissimo unisons (Les huguenots, act 4), the repeat of an opening motif (Robert, act 5), or—most frequently—chromatically rising scales over a dominant pedal (Les huguenots, acts 3 and 5; Le prophète, act 4).⁶⁴ In short, most of his curtains open at musically suitable places, facilitating the listener’s understanding that vision would return while letting that vision take form in close alignment with the auditory stimulus. Particularly when rising at the end of a chromatic crescendoing ascent over the dominant (as in act 5 of Les huguenots, where the ramp ends abruptly on an augmented chord leading into the boisterous ball scene), the curtain seems to be pulled up not by invisible ropes—that is, by external technology—but by the music itself: at a point where harmonic tension, dynamics, pitch range, and texture can hardly increase further, the disclosure of the stage provides a visual relief to the musical suspense. Small wonder that Meyerbeer insisted that stage director and conductor meticulously time their mutual signals to effect this exacting coordination.⁶⁵

      Small wonder also that it was often under Parisian influence that composers of Italian operas became more attentive to act curtains. For example, Donizetti composed out his curtain-opening space in his last work written for the Opéra, Dom Sébastien, roi du Portugal (1843). For its final act, the curtain precedes the prelude’s concluding pause by two measures, rising on a sudden fortissimo tonic chord that is then followed by a seventh chord and fermatas. This curtain postpones the harmonic suspense into the opened stage, thus shifting expectations from the scene’s revelation to the beginning of the dramatic action proper.⁶⁶ Similarly, although Verdi’s overtures or preludes were usually tonally closed and followed by the curtain, in Don Carlos, his 1867 magnum opus for the French capital, he musically integrated no fewer than four opening curtains. Rather than interpolating transitional passages, though, Verdi aligned these curtains with structural shifts in thematic material. The first-act curtain coincides with the sudden turn from a miniature atmospheric prelude to the more energetic lead into the choral introduction. And for the last two acts, the curtain opens at the repeat (with heightened melodic urge) of each act’s opening orchestral motif, thus visually intensifying the already expressive—and oppressive—musical scene-painting while leaving audiences free to take in this setting before tending to the soloists’ heartaches.⁶⁷ The shockingly immediate beginning of Otello (Milan, La Scala, 1887) would barely have been possible without such a concise coordination of graphic music and timed curtain.

      In addition to the more widespread use of act curtains, the generally slowed-down scene changes also encouraged curtains to transcend the outer edges of an act by descending in its midst. A traditional method for transformations within acts had been to alternate between “short” and “long” sets: an intimate (often interior) scene was played at the front of the stage while the next set was being prepared behind a painted backdrop whose removal would quickly disclose the subsequent, grander scene.⁶⁸ Hence the longstanding equation, in French and Italian parlance, of toile or tela—meaning “canvas”—with theatrical curtains of all sorts, even after the more materially or functionally appropriate terms rideau (in reference to the folded texture) and sipario (linking to ancient Roman practice) began to be applied to the heavy proscenium curtain.⁶⁹ Swift transformations via midstage drops continued to be practiced in the nineteenth century, especially among Italian composers (French production books for Donizetti operas detail them copiously). But after around 1830, the number of sets and changes per opera decreased dramatically in French works, which instead emphasized the finesse, originality, and splendor of each individual set. Various opera houses therefore started to employ curtains for transformations within acts as well—a procedure already common in spoken theater and popular shows across Europe.⁷⁰

      As the notion of the curtain as theatrical frame suggests, the introduction of such intermediary curtains was no small disruption of operatic habits. In the absence of interludes, an intermediary curtain could mislead spectators into believing that an intermission was afoot. Within acts, theaters therefore usually moved not the main (proscenium) curtain but a second curtain, hung behind the first. This so-called drop scene (Zwischenvorhang or rideau de manœuvre) was lighter and could veil scene changes faster, while the main curtain maintained the spatiotemporal frame of the performance.⁷¹ True, practices and nomenclatures varied widely; just like tela and toile, the simple terms rideau, sipario, Vorhang, or curtain were often used interchangeably for both proscenium and act curtains, while Zwischenvorhang and drop scene sometimes specifically referred to painted canvases lowered in the middle of the stage (rather than in front of it) to veil a long set.⁷² But, clearly, different kinds of curtains marked various structural places within an opera, thereby helping along appropriate audience behavior.

      Aesthetically, however, the introduction of drop scenes within acts remained contested, even beyond opera. In 1837, the Prussian actor, playwright, and theatrical director August Lewald observed of transformations on Parisian stages that “a curtain is always lowered for a few moments, which conceals the stage from sight.” And he recommended this method to German theaters, since their frequent open changes within acts, with their “jumps from the forest into the living room, from the church into the garden etc.,” did not foster theatrical illusion.⁷³ But not everyone agreed. As early as 1802, the French architect Louis Catel had suggested darkening the theater during transformations in spoken drama instead of lowering curtains, since the former procedure was more stimulating to the human imagination, which conjures images from darkness. Two years later, an anonymous Parisian reviewer praised the performance of a pantomime for not having been “unpleasantly interrupted by a drop which comes down and destroys the

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