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cultural concern among nineteenth-century composers with the multimediality of their works and its practical and hermeneutic implications. In this sense, Wagner provides merely a useful focal point for this book. His voluminous (if often inflated, self-aggrandizing, or outright ideological) writings; his zealous pursuit of his ideals; the construction of his own theater; the copious commentary his works have garnered; and an uninterrupted performance history: all these factors make Wagner a suitable gateway—or paradigmatic technology—for delving into expanding nineteenth-century notions of the operatic work as implying its onstage realization.

      Admittedly, Wagner’s central position might seem rather conventional, for at least two reasons. First, it privileges a composer’s visions over collaborative or institutional efforts toward an opera’s staging. Such efforts could involve any number of people (and their respective artistic traditions), including librettists, stage directors, designers, and theatrical agents. But the paper trails that reveal exactly who made which decision are fragmentary at best, and finding even those remnants requires extensive archival digging. For the purposes of Curtain, Gong, Steam, composers’ names—including Wagner’s—must therefore sometimes stand in as shorthand for the creative team that might collectively have shaped a staged operatic moment. Beyond such practicalities, however, Wagner was not alone in advocating the composer as ultimate authority on all matters of production. The career of his exact contemporary Verdi reflects a similar shift of control away from impresarios and institutions (in Verdi’s case with the support not of his own theater but of his publisher). And both Verdi and Wagner took their cue from Meyerbeer and other composers of French operas who increasingly dominated the famously complex artistic and administrative apparatus of the Paris Opéra, that hotbed of lavish illusionist stagings.

      Second, my paradigmatic use of Wagner seems to echo the well-worn narrative that has him as a turning point in—even the pinnacle of—the history of opera. Wagner laid the foundation for this idealizing account when, in his seminal treatises around midcentury, he rejected the genre of opera (along with its generic label) wholesale; instead, he claimed to reinvent musical drama by going back to Greek tragedy. Despite such hyperbole, the notion of a victory of German music drama over French and Italian opera struck a chord with many (particularly Austro-German) music historians who were eager to perpetuate the ideology of Germanic dominance and superiority in the musical realm since Beethoven. In 1860, for instance, the influential music writer Franz Brendel declared, “Wagner above all could dare to break with everything existing, since he had the power to replace it with something greater.”²² From here, the notion of Wagner transcending the generic development of opera and literally forming a separate chapter in the history of music entered mainstream historiography; that perception largely persisted until both the underlying nationalism and the tendency to view all of nineteenth-century opera (and its successors) through the lens of Wagner’s theories were questioned in the twentieth century.²³

      Although my book is organized around what I call “Wagnerian technologies,” it does not perpetuate this outdated and ideologically suspect narrative. Instead, it seeks to problematize the idea of Wagner as operatic redeemer. For one, I examine something Wagner himself vehemently sought to deny—namely, his vital dependence on technology. Not only does this reliance put him on a par with his peers, but by looking at Austro-German, French, Italian, and some British developments before and around Wagner, my book shows just how much he took in this regard from his contemporaries, particularly from the French models he so denounced. A product of his time, he participated in, rather than broke with, important pan-European strivings in opera. What is more, both my examination of select material realities behind Wagner’s claims to innovation and my longer-term perspective, reaching beyond his lifetime, challenge the idea that he successfully achieved his artistic agenda. What will emerge, alongside a rich contextualization of specific stage technologies, is a more complex historical embedding of a composer more ambiguous than he is frequently portrayed.²⁴

      My chronological purview, then, extends out from Wagner both ways into the “long” nineteenth century. This historiographical frame warrants further explanation. For just as Wagner was not the only composer to put a premium on opera’s multimediality, the nineteenth century was by no means the first era during which such a focus developed. Definitions of opera during its first century regularly referenced machines as seminal for the genre’s appeal. To cite just one instance: in 1648 Englishman John Raymond reported that during his recent grand tour to Italy he had seen “an Opera represented . . . with severall changes of Sceanes, . . . and other Machines, at which the Italians are spoke to be excellent.”²⁵ The tradition of mechanic effects dated back even further, to the elaborate Renaissance spectacles and their predecessors out of which opera had emerged, and whose fabled stage tricks—monsters, chariots, and all—were proudly described in contemporary treatises on theatrical architecture and staging.²⁶

      Yet there were crucial differences between these early manifestations and nineteenth-century opera in the use and status of technology, both onstage and off. To mention just an illustrative few (and at the risk of oversimplification), Baroque opera was a decidedly collaborative venture in which staging “meant not only creating a show but also shaping the opera itself.”²⁷ An opera’s conception and critical success depended generally more on librettists, machinists, and stage designers than on composers; already the storylines tended to be conceived so as to display a variety of magnificent scenic effects and devices specially constructed in line with the available budget.²⁸ In summarizing the aesthetics of seventeenth-century opera, Massimo Ossi has proposed its centerpiece “was a kind of competition between the audience and the architect in which the former tried to figure out the means by which the stage effects were carried out, while the latter endeavored to hide them.”²⁹ The overall intent was to impress spectators with the quantity and quality of means (among which mechanics reigned supreme), which did not, though, necessarily cohere as integrated, illusionist musical multimedia. This wholehearted embrace of technology was furthered by the favored mythological subject matter and its dependence on supernatural interventions, sudden apparitions, and magical transformations: thus the inevitable deus ex machina arose as the quintessence of Baroque opera. So close did the association between fantastical plots and wondrous machines become that both were implied in the concept of the merveilleux, the marvelous.³⁰ Technology, then, was not only a driving force for multimedia performance but also an artistic miracle in and of itself. It encompassed both “function and illusion, goal and play, math and magic”: hence the display of machines alongside classical art and natural objects in early modern Kunstkammern (or “cabinets of arts and curiosities”) and the widespread cultural fascination with automata and clockworks, mechanisms seen to mirror and, therefore, to reveal the hidden order of the world.³¹

      However, early opera’s aesthetics of the marvelous and its attendant celebration of machines already displeased some seventeenth-century commentators. An influential critique came from the essayist Charles de Saint-Évremond, regarding Italian operas performed in Paris around 1660:

      Machines may satisfy the curiosity of ingenious Men, who love Mathematical Inventions, but they’ll hardly please persons of good judgment in the Theatre: the more they surprize, the more they divert the mind from attending to the Discourse; and the more admirable they are, the less Tenderness and exquisite Sense they leave in us, to be touch’d and charm’d with the Music. The Antients made no use of Machines, but when there was a necessity of bringing in some God; nay, the Poets themselves were generally laughed at for suffering themselves to be reduc’d to that necessity. If men love to be at expences, let them lay out their Money upon fine Scenes, the use whereof is more natural and more agreeable than that of Machines.³²

      This multilayered rebuttal of stunning machinery in opera prefigured many arguments that would become commonplace in eighteenth-century discourse leading up to the Enlightenment. At its core lay the emerging split between science and art, or a mutually exclusive separation of technē into technics and aesthetics, a division that was fundamental to the changing status of the mechanical in society at large. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp’s engaging account of the Kunstkammer and its demise, mechanics in the sixteenth century was considered a means of perfecting nature. Since it was the purpose of all art to imitate nature, animated mechanical devices

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