In this exploration of an emergent “culture of illusion” (p. xv) and modern, technologically inspired fusions of the visual and aural in grand opera spectacle, Gabriela Cruz highlights works by three leading composers known for their contributions to the changing operatic dramaturgy of the nineteenth century. Within case studies of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and L’Africaine, Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Tristan und Isolde, and Verdi’s Aida, she interweaves multivalent, thought-provoking concepts to construct a philosophically rich, poetically styled, and diversely sourced narrative. Cruz’s central focus on “phantasmagoria,” although broached in previous studies, brings renewed attention to the transformation of the spectacle and spectatorship of grand opera: not only does she attempt a phantasmagorical manner of interpretation, but she searches for the origins, representation, and modernity of phantasmagoria and related ideas of dreams and apparitions, which she describes as inspirational forces for—and beneficiaries of—innovations in theatrical lighting and aural-visual conceptions, instrumental illuminations of darkness, and the multisensory perceptions of listeners/spectators. Drawing upon prestigious cultural voices (Adorno, Marx, Benjamin, Said), contemporaneous observers (Gautier, Berlioz, Heine), present-day scholars (Carolyn Abbate, Mary Ann Smart, James Davies, Benjamin Walton), and her own published articles, Cruz reflects on grand opera’s new manner of phantasmagoria-enhanced engagement with the past through forms of “fabricated remembrance” (p. 4) or “remembrance without object” (p. 195), future-oriented “wish-images” (p. 6), and sensory-filled, dreamlike suspensions of reality.As she acknowledges, Cruz uses the term “grand opera” broadly, including Meyerbeerian grand opéra as “a first manner of grand opera” (p. xvi), but also encompassing Rossini’s pre–Guillaume Tell adaptations for Paris, Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse, in his “grand opera revolution” (p. 27), and Wagner’s operas, at least in their inheritance of the “spectacular aesthetics of grand opera” (p. 12). Her inclusive, though ambiguous, usage carries affinities with today’s mélomane operagoers or marketing writers, but nonetheless honors a cross-genre fluidity that is often downplayed in studies devoted to a single composer or theater or to the defining of genre exceptionality. As set out in the preface and introduction, Cruz aims to move beyond historicist narratives and the “picket fences of national expression, tradition, and politics” (p. xvi)—her metaphorical suggestion of flimsy boundaries surrounding cottages of prosaic interpretations. Although acknowledging grand opera’s break with classical aesthetics in the late 1820s, she gently dismisses readings of the political-cultural currency of French grand opéra by Jane Fulcher, Sarah Hibberd, and others and weights her discussion in Marxist categories of theatrical spectacle as revolutionary “masquerade” (p. 4) and commodities of bourgeois consumption.In grouping selected Wagner operas alongside works by his public nemesis Meyerbeer, Cruz challenges prevailing historiography that treats “music drama and grand opera [here, grand opéra] as separate and antithetical artforms” (p. 143), recognizing the overdependence on Wagner’s egocentric, anti-Semitic concealment of pesky influences that threatened his artistic ascendancy. Instead, she sees grand opera and Wagnerian opera as “twin faces of the same history” (ibid.) and offers convincing explanations for Wagner’s being “haunted” by Meyerbeer and Parisian technologies while writing Der fliegende Holländer, and for Meyerbeer’s calling upon Wagner in L’Africaine. Cruz’s apt dramaturgical connections remain Meyerbeer-centered, however: although she bookends her study with a brief spotlight on Fromental Halévy, she presents him as a memoirist who, in his latter days, hoped for “politically expansive” opera of “collective consciousness” (p. 203). As an opening allegory, she interprets Halévy’s reminiscence of a Guillaume Tell rehearsal during the 1830 Revolution as primarily a Benjaminian “wish-image” evocative of future possibilities—without noting his juxtaposed account of Adolphe Nourrit’s frequent (and documented) singing of “La Marseillaise” and the 1830 rallying cry “La Parisienne” in theaters and on the barricades. Though intriguing, Cruz’s reading of Halévy’s (likely inflated) recollection as a utopian tale useful to her study of grand opera’s modern, sensory-oriented spectacle eclipses the history of extemporaneous fusions of art and politics in the theater, as well as the impulsiveness of revolutionary passions. Although her study is not a “panoramic account” or “inventory of illusions” (p. xv), Cruz curiously makes no footnote asides about the role played by Halévy’s six grands opéras (or other significant Parisian works) in the genre’s innovations or the phantasmagoric elements in, for example, Guido et Ginevra (1838) or Charles VI (1843). While acknowledging Halévy’s belief in grand opera’s power to “kindl[e] remembrance” (p. 200), she nonetheless portrays him as distant observer rather than active participant and restricts his ideas of theatrical freedom, which he in fact expressed publicly in 1848 as Assemblée Nationale candidate, to a dying wish as Académie des Beaux Arts spokesperson.Though stressing the “technical revolution” (p. 3) pioneered at the Opéra, Cruz directs partial attention to the “revolution” of Rossinian singing in 1820s Paris: broaching a thorny historiographic paradox, she views “old-fashioned” (p. 14) early bel canto as a source not only of memorable vocality and operatic beauty, but also of modernity. Given the highlighting of grand opera’s visual phenomena in promotional and preliminary pages, beginning chapter 1 with Malibran’s and Sontag’s Parisian performances of Rossini’s Tancredi and Semiramide (particularly the Semiramide-Arsace grand duo) seems questionable, but Cruz’s intention gradually becomes clear as she artfully combines the power of the “lyrical souvenir” (p. 18) with the “alluring apparition” (p. 37) of the diva as an object of sight-oriented consumption, as illustrated in Gautier’s capitalist (rather than “male”) gaze, and—again—a wish-image that foresees illusion-filled spectacle and “technologized remembrance” (p. 16). Secondarily, she underscores bel canto’s bridging of the aesthetic divide often constructed between the Théâtre-Italien and the Opéra and their respective audiences. Although the eclectic mix of Italian and French vocal styles is well noted in grand opéra studies, Cruz accentuates an aesthetic meshing of Parisian creators through Gautier’s reminiscence, in his Portraits contemporains (1874), of Meyerbeer, Halévy, Auber, and Rossini queuing for tickets at the Italien ca. 1829 (despite the improbability that these composers, who included the Italien’s former director and former chef de chant, would have needed to stand in a ticket queue).The concepts of phantasmagoria at the heart of Cruz’s study emerge gradually, perhaps in conscious emulation of “darkness to light” methods in certain formulations. First described as “the early art of projecting moving images” (p. xv), phantasmagoria mutates into varied definitions, metaphors, and applications, from Marxist analogy and ghost-raising “optical illusion” (p. 9) to Gautier’s “phantasmagoria of the diva” (p. 39) in chapter 1 and “audio-visions” and “sonic ghosts” in later chapters. In chapter 2, in resonance with recent phenomenological explorations, Cruz briefly traces German-derived phantasmagoric ghostly displays in non-theater settings in Paris, including Philidor’s 1792 experimental phantom creations of Mirabeau and other revolutionary figures “emerging from darkness … then disappearing into a point of light” (p. 55), and Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s ambitious 1798 spectacles that promised to bring the dead to life upon request. While the techniques of phantasmagorists varied—Robertson adding the glass harmonica’s eerie sounds, and later disembodied voices and “body-voice synchronization” (p. 62)—Cruz writes that these concocted phantoms of historical figures, loved ones, or criminals served as an outlet for nostalgia, grief, fear, and even retribution.Such illusions would filter onto the operatic stage, made more impressive, Cruz argues, through the possibilities of gaslight. While recognizing the importance of illumination throughout theatrical history, she emphasizes the 1822 introduction of gaslight to the Salle Le Peletier (following earlier uses in Philadelphia and London theaters) as the starting point for the gradual development of theater-based phantasmagoric effects, modern stage technology, and a “new sense of seeing” (p. 46). Replacing oil and argand lamps, gaslight illuminated the stage suddenly and brilliantly, shifting from or plunging into total darkness, as she describes in the Opéra’s first use of it in Nicolas Isouard’s opéra féerie, Aladin, ou La lampe merveilleuse. The importance of gaslight dissipates in her narrative after she moves away from the Opéra: she omits discussion of the lighting in the German theaters that premiered Wagner’s operas or in Aida’s Cairo theater; moreover, she fleetingly refers to electric light at the 1865 Parisian premiere of L’Africaine without further commentary.Among the phantasmagoric visual allusions and audio-visual synchronizations or simulations treated in chapters 3 to 6, Cruz highlights Meyerbeer’s creation of a “musical dramaturgy of light and darkness” (p. 66) in Robert le diable as she revisits the oft-discussed supernatural nun scene, correlating (as have other writers) his musical techniques with visions of ghostly shrouded dancers and emphasizing the radical spectacle’s influence on enhanced theatrical perception. In chapter 4, she more uniquely expands grand opera studies with her linkages of the “phantom ship” of Der fliegende Holländer and L’Africaine to precedents in London’s nautical theater, including the awe-inducing apparition of a brightly lit, storm-tossed ship in Edward Fitzball’s The Flying Dutchman (1826), and to water effects adopted in Parisian theaters such as the Théâtre Nautique and the Cirque Olympique in the 1830s.1 Rather than accept Wagner’s “obliviousness” to this trend, Cruz views Holländer as a “close cousin” of Fitzball’s drama (p. 117), whose nautical foghorn signal echoes that of Le naufrage de la Méduse (1839), which appeared at the Théâtre de la Renaissance shortly before Wagner began composing his opera in Paris. She compares Wagner’s transformation of images into music, such as the sonic emergence of the foghorn “from an acoustical point of near-silence,” to phantasmagoria’s materializing of images from a “single point of light” (p. 123). Turning to various versions of L’Africaine, Cruz locates borrowings from nautical theater and the Dutchman legend (hinting that the composer scrubbed references to the latter), stresses the visual and psychological significance of the off-balance ship, and differentiates Meyerbeer’s comparatively “static” storm music and sonically unconvincing shipwreck effects from Wagner’s, while suggesting that the maritime depictions in both operas were at least partly geared toward habits of inattentive spectatorship, rather than the totalizing spectacle of Wagner’s later works.In chapter 5, Cruz refocuses on L’Africaine, now with connections to the “dream images” and poetic “perfumes” of Tristan und Isolde (pp. 143, 150).2 With allusions to Baudelairean symbolism, she correlates the manchineel tree’s fragrant, poisonous image and Sélika’s intoxicated visions in act 5 of L’Africaine with the “narcotic, sensual immersion” (p. 151) of Isolde’s Liebestod. Cruz sensitively describes Meyerbeer’s musical representation of Sélika’s intoxication and novel experiments with “purely musical” (ibid.) moments, such as the sixteen-measure unison instrumental passage that she notes would become a commodified relic of Meyerbeerian homage. Paradoxically, she problematizes her goal of overturning historiographical trends by commending Meyerbeer for his “progress as a Wagnerian” as charted in diary entries and by portraying him (particularly via Sélika’s “trivial waltz”) as a failed Wagnerian who “falls off the bandwagon of the future” (p. 164).Cruz ends with an imaginative contemplation of phantasmagoria in Verdi’s Aida, a celebrated inheritor of grand opéra spectacle. Her linkage to “Egyptomania” avoids visual-musical codes of orientalist exoticism and instead centers on the symbolism of the mummy and related death artifacts, particularly the flute (including Verdi’s wished-for “hyper-flute”) and its association with sonic disembodiment and the spectral beyond.3 She highlights flute passages as key to Verdi’s musical illuminations in the moonlit opening scene of act 3—both the ghostly foreshadowing of Aida’s voice and the bird-song effects of her romanza—but not in the life-suspending tomb scene of act 4. Cruz also finds a correspondence between Aida’s flute-voice “double entrance” in act 3 and Sélika’s final scene, but Aida ultimately serves her narrative as an icon of grand opera’s “after-life” (p. 199). In an Adorno-centered epilogue—a rather weak and dissatisfying end to her narrative—she writes that Aida would eventually lead modern “vacationing spectators” to look beyond its suppressing, “politically menda[tious]” art to freely indulge in its musical richness (pp. 200–203).In Cruz’s metaphor-laden text, which swirls with eddies of poetic description, intertextual analogies, and absorbing, enigmatic ideas, the overlapping Romantic concepts of “fantasy” and “fantastique,” though referenced, are generally sidestepped, while the copyediting of text and music examples is inconsistent and at times negligent. Nonetheless, Cruz’s exploration of the multisensory illusions of phantasmagoria in grand opera is a valuable undertaking, reminding us of the once-powerful innovations of the genre (however circumscribed), the mutability of spectatorship, and, she hopes, the potential for fresh evaluations of nineteenth-century opera.