Conference Agenda

The Magic Flute culminates with spectacular flair: its vivid stage descriptions indicate claps of thunder, sinking trap doors, hidden characters revealed, and the sudden transformation of a garden into a sun. Amid the visual chaos, tempestuous strings and boisterous trombones break through from the orchestra. Though striking, this kind of bedazzling ending was not exclusive to Mozart. Final transformations—and their flamboyant displays—frequently appear in magical singspiels of the late eighteenth century. In fact, all the magical operas performed in Emanuel Schikaneder’s theater before The Magic Flute culminate with similar climatic transformations. Despite their popularity, final transformations challenged some viewers: their excessive effects and abrupt change of scenery defied verisimilitude. Music, however, could alleviate matters.

By examining commentaries on staging and performance materials, I show that music helped negotiate the tension between verisimilitude and spectacle in final transformation scenes. Starting in the 1750s, writers like Charles Batteaux criticized mid-act transformations for disrupting the drama with impossible location changes. Responding to these critiques, Jean-George Noverre and Franz Ludwig Catel proposed to dim the lights or drop a curtain in order to smooth scene changes. Though court theaters adopted Noverre’s and Catel’s ideas, German popular theaters—like Schikaneder’s Wiednertheater—carried out scenic transformations in full view, dramatizing their improbability with visual and sonic effects.

Earlier in the century, music rarely accompanied scene changes. However, prompter’s librettos and performing parts show that Viennese composers increasingly wrote transformation music for operas like Der Stein der Weisen (1790), Der Spiegel von Arkadien (1794), and Der Königssohn aus Ithaka (1795). In some cases, music increased a transformation’s spectacular flair, adding raucous music to the sonic effects. Yet music could also smooth a transformation’s abruptness by coordinating with the scene change while depicting the onstage action. In these cases, music seems to guide the viewers through the transformations, attenuating its disruption.

It might be tempting to see magical operas and their transformations as steppingstones toward the sophisticated illusions of Wagner and Meyerbeer. However, we can better understand them as carefully staged negotiations between the high-minded mandates of theatrical verisimilitude and the popular demand for visual spectacle.

Beginning in the mid eighteenth century, exhibiting spirit characters on stage became fashionable in the public entertainment industry. Ghost images that were projected from the magic lantern and accompanied by the glass harmonica, which suggested a supernatural aura, were popular in major European cities, including Paris. Whereas the artificial ghosts have inspired recent scholars with novel readings of standard repertoire of the time, the relationship between vision and the sound of the ghostly has been left unchallenged.

In this paper, I illustrate Wagner’s search for a spectral “tone” in the genesis of Der fliegende Holländer, an opera intended for Paris. I argue that, in both a visual and an auditory sense, Wagner’s construction of Act III Scene 1 conveys a revisionist approach to the popular culture of ghosts, which can be read as his dialogue with the era’s visual culture. In his drafts of the text, Wagner hesitated about whether the phantom crew of the haunted ship should be visible and in which color they should appear. His early musical drafts emphasize the ghosts’ hostile nature in their confrontation with the humans. In his orchestration, he shifted his attention to their supernatural identity, which he constructed with special timbre and onstage instruments. After the opera’s premiere, Wagner revised this scene again, instructing that the phantoms’ voices be projected through megaphones. While he made the phantoms visible, this decision to mediate their voices creates an illusion of offstage music. This acoustic thus challenges the phantoms’ appearance on stage, casting their visual presence into doubt.

These negotiations between the sight and sound of ghosts offer us a fresh way to contextualize this opera. Despite Wagner’s repeated denial of French influence, his creative process suggests his awareness of the prevailing convention of ghost exhibitions at the time. His audiovisual pursuit of the ghostly adds to what Emily Dolan terms “ethereal technologies” in early nineteenth-century music aesthetics, which focuses on novel timbre alone. Furthermore, Wagner’s changing construction of the ghostly “tones” problematizes the emphasis on the correspondence between vision and sound, an approach that dominates recent scholarly discourse in nineteenth-century music and visual culture.

On 16 April 1849, Giaccomo Meybeer’s opera Le Prophète premiered to rapturous applause, owing in part to the work’s special effects. At the close of the third act, through an experimental prototype designed by scientist Léon Foucault (1819-1868), audiences were presented with an actual sunrise—not a picture of the sun painted on a scrolling backdrop, but instead one generated by electricity. In scale, intensity, and verisimilitude, nothing previous in stage lighting compared. While lighting special effects were not new, and were even part of Meyerbeer’s previous repertoire (albeit with gas), the arc lamp and the bright and striking sun it produced marked an important moment for science at the Opéra, centered on a group of scientists, engineers, instrument makers, and technicians necessary for the operation and maintenance of the arc lamp. This community of scientists thus contributed to the ever-growing importance of special effects and production techniques in nineteenth-century French opera, and more broadly, to the unprecedented application of practical electricity indoors.

Drawing together the work of historians of science (Lachapelle, Tresch), operatic technology (Cruz, Kreuzer, Fuchs, Davies, Trippet and Walton) and nineteenth-century French opera (Huebner, Everist, Lacombe), we reconsider the Paris opera as space for scientific experimentation. We draw connections between stage craft, technology, the flourishing world of public science, and the popular industry of magic shows and illusion that dominated the French capital at the time. Indeed, early experiments with arc lamp technology evolved into one of Le Prophète’s signature attractions, drove audience appetites, and inspired new artistic pathways forward. Drawing together the reception and creation of the lighting effects premiered in Le Prophète, we argue that the relationship between production team and opera audience opens up a new way for discussing the development of opera aesthetics in the nineteenth century, one where science and art intersected during a period of accelerated innovation and exploration.