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in interdisciplinary scholarship on common tendencies across artistic modernisms.⁴⁶ Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future” (which has tended to be eclipsed by the more music-focused Opera and Drama of 1850–51) is particularly worth revisiting from the perspective of staged multimedia, as it cuts to the core of his envisioned interrelationship of the various arts in performance. In turn, my book’s examination of stage-technological realities both recontextualizes and challenges his theoretical approach as well as its ties with general theatrical practices of his time.

      According to Wagner’s original articulation, “opera” had mistakenly made music dominant and thereby neglected both drama and stage representation. By contrast, the seed, unifying factor, and ultimate goal of their union “for the collective Artwork” (zum gemeinsamen Kunstwerke) was to be Drama writ large, that is, “the dramatic Action” (die dramatische Handlung) emerging from Life itself.⁴⁷ Wagner consequently conceived this “true artwork” as “an immediate vital act” (als unmittelbarer Lebensakt) to be achieved only in its “immediate physical portrayal, in the moment of its liveliest embodiment”: short-circuiting intellectual mediation, it would come into full existence only when sensually experienced as materially staged.⁴⁸ To this end, all means of human expression were needed: the individual arts were to unite and collaborate, each surrendering its separate identity and thus (paradoxically) fulfilling its true potential under the inspired stimulus and authorship of the poet-performer. To wit, Wagner cast himself as the all-encompassing “artist of the future” whose creations, once realized, would be served by and consummate all the arts, including all prior operatic achievements.⁴⁹

      This early theoretical framework helps explain why Wagner was obsessed not just with writing his own libretti, but also with providing details for and overseeing the stagings themselves. As early as his first public performance, the Dresden premiere of Rienzi in 1842, the then entirely unknown composer apparently surprised the Court Opera’s conductor and manager rather unpleasantly when he showed up to intervene at the rehearsals.⁵⁰ And throughout his career, he would seek to coach performers personally in both singing and acting. Admittedly, it was common for nineteenth-century composers (even typically part of their scritture with Italian opera houses) to oversee the rehearsals and first few performances of new works. Moreover, we have seen how Weber and Meyerbeer had already expanded this involvement to embrace direction and design. By the same token, from the 1840s on Verdi would gradually extend the composer’s authority in Italian opera, insisting on the integrity of his scores in performance as well as his influence over stagings.⁵¹ But Wagner increasingly focused not just on the presentation but also on the perception of his works, to a point where everything—gestures, blocking, lighting, design, costumes, scene changes, even acoustics and architecture—became essential for the Gesamtkunstwerk’s desired multisensorial experience. This concern with the physical manifestation continued even after 1854, when his beginning encounter with Schopenhauer’s philosophy led to a shift in emphasis from drama to music as the Gesamtkunstwerk’s chief motivator. Thus, in 1872 Wagner pondered as a generic label for his works “deeds of music made visible” (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik)—a dictum he claimed he dropped only because post-Tristan he feared that his dramas no longer offered sufficient spectacle to warrant a moniker of such audiovisual synthesis.⁵²

      Yet this declaration was clearly coquetry, or a clever ploy to avert criticism of his hyper-Meyerbeerian show in the making. After all, it was precisely in 1872 that Wagner laid the foundation stone for his festival theater, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, whose primary purpose it was to enable the long-delayed complete premiere of the Ring cycle under his own direction. On the grounds of its libretto alone (which, unusually, Wagner had published, to raise money for the project, before even starting the composition), this work had become notorious for its extraordinary demands on stage technology, given its underwater seduction scenes, cosmic peregrinations, and other seemingly impossible episodes. At the cusp of the era of illusionist theater, with its proscenium stage and its quest for visual verisimilitude, these scenic fancies required the aid not only of those architects and painters Wagner had called forth in “The Art-Work of the Future,” but also of the most skilled engineers and their contraptions. Accordingly, Wagner had his theater equipped with cutting-edge machinery designed by Carl Brandt, the foremost German authority on the modernization of stage technology. In addition, the Festspielhaus’s amphitheatrical auditorium, unobstructed sightlines, and entirely sunken orchestra pit provided a unique immersive environment that was quickly considered revolutionary in Europe’s theatrical world, outshining in this regard even the Palais Garnier, the new home of the Paris Opéra, which had opened only one year earlier.⁵³ And even apart from this architectural and technological finesse, a composer’s having a theater purpose-built for his own works and placed under his sole direction was unprecedented. With the premieres in Bayreuth of his last works—the Ring cycle (1876) and Parsifal (1882)—Wagner’s control over each and every aspect of production reached a new level indeed.⁵⁴

      Understandably, media and performance scholars have therefore tended to place Wagner at the beginning of a growing intersection of theatrical and technological modes of representation. In their view, Wagner spearheaded an emerging alliance of aural and visual media that ultimately led to their convergence in our virtual age. For instance, Wagner looms large in the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who regularly referenced the Gesamtkunstwerk as a “monomaniacal anticipation of the gramophone and the movies.”⁵⁵ Multimedia artists and theorists have likewise dated the emergence of contemporary media performance with Wagner. Chris Salter starts his survey of the modern “entanglements” of mechanical (or computational) technologies and performance with Bayreuth, while Randall Packer and Ken Jordan prominently discuss Wagner as having made “one of the first attempts in modern art to establish a practical, theoretical system for the comprehensive integration of the arts.”⁵⁶ His struggle for “aesthetic totality” as well as the Gesamtkunstwerk’s dialectically related reliance on mechanization is the connective tissue that allows literary scholar Matthew Wilson Smith to link Wagner to film, Disneyland, and virtual performance.⁵⁷ And according to historian of modern art and media Noam Elcott, Wagner’s Bayreuth theater was unique among audiovisual devices of its time because it alone “could accommodate countless types of performances and images,” with its “most significant legacy . . . its adoption by cinemas.”⁵⁸ In short, Wagner is frequently equated with his Bayreuth theater, which in turn tends to be construed as a historically new amalgamation of arts and modern technologies. His artistic vision has become a convenient reference point for bestowing both historical roots and a weighty artistic heritage on the development of cumulative, multisensory, integrative multimedia.

      In contrast to such general claims about the media-historical significance of Wagner’s ideals and their manifestation in the form of Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, I pursue a rich historical embedding of a number of specific yet oft-overlooked technologies. By opening out to a chronologically and geographically wider field of composers, locales, and traditions, these case studies show how Wagner based not only his theories but also his Gesamtkunstwerk’s staged realizations squarely on contemporary practices, and in this sense formed but a step in opera’s development toward medial integration. Curtain, Gong, Steam thus counteracts Wagner’s dominant position in media studies, while my focus on stage practice also serves as a corrective to the almost exclusive reliance of Kittler (and others) on Wagner’s idealized artistic claims. This reliance amounts to nothing less than a romanticized continuation of Wagner’s messianic self-stylization that is weirdly at odds with the otherwise blatant techno-determinism and anthropological skepticism permeating Kittler’s writings.⁵⁹ After all, the incorporation of technē into Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was not without its drawbacks, even on the theoretical plane. One indication of this downside is that Wagner remained conspicuously silent about what we might call the mechanical underbelly of his envisioned music drama. Just as he originally charged opera’s music to have oppressed drama, so the three “material” arts that he invited into his drama (though architecture and painting more so than sculpture) now eclipsed the manifold technological underpinnings required to realize his vision onstage. In other words, Wagner’s theoretical

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