Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera by Gundula Kreuzer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera by Gundula Kreuzer Nicholas Vazsonyi Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera. By Gundula Kreuzer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 348. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0520279681. Gundula Kreuzer has written an imaginative, highly original, and stunningly researched book. It is not just about Wagner, but is instead a minihistory of selected technologies employed by European theater going as far back as the baroque and right up to our own time, where Wagner serves as a fulcrum and point of constant reference. Wagner is also the frame, more specifically, of Robert LePage's controversial 2010 production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at New York's Metropolitan Opera. The star of that production was a giant mechanical contraption, dubbed "the machine," that was a permanent fixture on the stage and, because of its capacity to have its contours almost infinitely varied, could, in theory, be made to fit all the various locations of Wagner's seventeen-hour epic. Kreuzer's selection of LePage's production is a master-stroke, because, as she shows throughout her book, his decision to make a piece of technology the visible centerpiece of this production harkens back to the original conceptual and practical problems Wagner faced when he first staged the Ring at his purpose-built theater in Bayreuth—except in reverse. How was Wagner to create the realistic illusion of his multifarious worlds without revealing the ponderous mechanisms of doing so? While Wagner wanted to mask the use of technology as much as possible, his theater ironically became quickly known as marking a seismic leap in the use of technologies for the creation of a sort of natural realism that would ultimately require film technology to be fully realized. So, in a sense, Wagner failed twice over: he neither managed to conjure the kind of other-worldly realism he sought, while at the same time he was unable to fully conceal his methods for trying to do so. By contrast, LePage made technology his centerpiece and also proudly declared that, in so doing, he was being faithful to Wagner's original intentions. Not only was LePage's contention a complete distortion of Wagner, but, as Kreuzer deftly shows, an artistic failure reminiscent of the first Bayreuth to boot. Each of the terms in the main title—curtain, gong, and steam—is given its own chapter, but preceding them is a section on Wagner's opera Tannhäuser, with particular focus on the famous Venusberg scene that opens the work. In a remarkable and inventive reading, Kreuzer suggests that Venus, who stages an alternate reality [End Page 375] that entices and captivates Tannhäuser, is actually anticipating what Wagner aspired to achieve on stage, especially with the Ring. Venus creates a perfected world of total illusion that fully masks the source of production which, in this case, is magic. Wagner used technology to attempt the same effect, but ultimately failed. This is in many respects the central thesis of the book. However, I am not really doing full justice to Kreuzer's intricate and extended reading of Tannhäuser, and so simply recommend it as required reading for anyone who is working with this opera. In any event, only with the advent of the cinematic experience has Wagner's vision of the Venusberg been realized. One would think this puts Kreuzer in the camp of those who have long claimed that, had Wagner been alive in the twentieth century, he would have been a filmmaker. But in her epilogue, Kreuzer again surprises by arguing, and convincingly, that, on the contrary, Wagner was committed to the idea of three-dimensionality, to the physical presence of people on the stage. The chapter on "curtain" sets Kreuzer's general approach, which is executed similarly in the following two chapters on "gong" and "steam." It opens with an at-once broad but also quite detailed history of the curtain in European theater. Kreuzer also looks carefully at the scores of dozens of operas both preceding and concurrent with Wagner, to explore how the timing and speed of curtains both at the beginning...