Conference Agenda

In the last aria of Zémire et Azor (1771), Grétry’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, the heroine desperately calls for her woolly prince. Azor has secluded himself in a cave, disillusioned for not inspiring Zémire’s spell-breaking love. Zémire is losing faith, when—as if propelled by a sudden cadential outburst—the stage unexpectedly transforms into an enchanted palace where a newly shorn Azor sits enthroned. When performed in Hamburg in the early 1800s, a striking play of light was added. A contraption of moving candles, mirrors, and plates lit the darkened stage. The chiaroscuro enhanced the scene’s pathos and visual impact. It also provided an unforeseen audiovisual resonance: the dashing light beams could now be heard as mimicking—or perhaps materializing—the string’s cadential outburst.

The light effect in Hamburg’s Zemire is but one example of how turn-of-the-nineteenth-century theaters created new arrangements of sound and image by altering stage effects. In this paper, I examine surviving Souffleurbücher—libretti with handwritten notes indicating, among other things, stage effects—from the Hamburger Stadttheater to show that companies frequently added, omitted, substituted, and displaced stage effects. By reimagining visually charged scenes from operas like Zemire und Azor, Der Königssohn aus Ithaka, and Das Donauweibchen, I show that the Stadttheater amplified, smoothed, or transformed the sensory impact of a scene. For example, adding light effects to a stage transformation increased its visual allure and created new audiovisual resonances—as in Zemire’s aria. But the Stadttheater occasionally omitted scenic changes and left their accompanying music to sound on its own. Lacking a visual input, audiences were free to hear new meanings in the stand-alone music.

By considering how new audiovisual configurations emerged as operas traveled beyond their original stages, my work expands on the growing scholarship that reexamines the impact of technology in nineteenth-century audiovisual culture within and beyond the opera house (Loughridge 2016; Kreuzer 2018; Cruz 2020). Attending to the malleability of audiovisual effects, my paper invites us to look beyond textual interpretation and consider how sensorial perception may shape an opera’s meaning.

This paper examines contemporary stagings of early Baroque operas, questioning whether their approach differs from that of later operatic periods in connecting past and present while challenging the concept of “work.” Recent productions of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643), for example, demonstrate a significant shift away from traditional practices, even within the avant-garde style of Regietheater (e.g., Carsen, Alden, Bieito). This trend extends to other early Baroque works, illustrated by Romeo Castellucci's pastiche Le lacrime di Eros (Amsterdam, 2024), which assembles segments from opera arias, madrigals, and choruses into a new creation—a "curated" opera with a nearly nonexistent narrative thread. Claus Guth's 2015 Vienna production of Poppea, incorporating electronic music, anticipated these hybridizing practices.

Christoph Marthaler's groundbreaking 2024 production of Poppea in Basel—my main case study—represents a more radical departure. Marthaler's staging interweaves spoken and musical interludes by Pasolini, D'Annunzio, Senfl, and Schoenberg and introduces Mussolini's daughter as a non-singing character, disrupting the "original" work. These and other additions, insertions, and modifications deviate from the standard practice of maintaining the musical and verbal texts intact, transforming Poppea into an "open work" with gaps, interruptions, and omissions. This approach, however, surpasses the "open work" model, as Marthaler's staging delves into history by emphasizing the Baroque concept of dissimulation. The production's atmosphere of impending violence eventually extends to the murder of Nero during the famous final duet, ultimately applying these canceling and violent strategies to the operatic text itself. This contrasts sharply with productions like Calixto Bieito's 2018 Zurich Poppea, revived in 2023 in Barcelona, which similarly emphasized violence but did so without altering the musical or textual integrity of the work (itself a construct).

Drawing on Hans-Thies Lehmann's concept of "postdramatic" theater and the work of David Levin, Ulrike Hartung, and Jelena Novak in opera performance studies, I argue that Marthaler's production and recent similarly “curated” stagings of early Baroque works in Europe and the U.S. balance historical engagement with a deconstruction of traditional operatic forms. In doing so, they challenge assumptions about the universality of operatic staging practices across different historical periods, questioning the retrospective applicability of the work concept.

Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973) was one of the driving forces in reforming Italian opera during the advent of fascim in Italy. On the basis of broader discussions on the nationalistic foundations of Italian music he created a musical theatre, which was defined as synthetical: It unites diverse aspects such as musica antica, Ballets Russes, Pantomime, Theatre of Masks and the Grotesque as older Italian literature into a compact futuristical structure. As innovative as his new musical theatre was, as deeply rooted it seems to be in nationalistic thought. While it's aesthetical coordinates have already been examined in detail, the composers' visions of staging have to be uncovered yet.

In my talk, I will present a contextual analysis of the visions of staging in Malipieros Tre commedie goldoniane (1926) and take them as a starting point to broaden the scope beyond the single work. This opera consists of three one-act plays, which are deeply rooted in commedia dell'arte and the everyday Venice as their inspirational foundations. Questions I will discuss are: What is the overarching vision of staging and how strong is it fixed and envisaged by the composer? How do scenic means work in relation with other levels such as music, plot and dramaturgy? How was the vision of staging embedded in broader sociocultural contexts? My aim is, to present visions of staging in the Primo Novecento and to discuss their relation to fascist thought in Italy critically. While visions of staging were already uncovered e.g. regarding Richard Wagner (Gundula Kreuzer) or Giaccomo Puccini (Richard Erkens), their examination regarding Malipiero and the generazione dell'ottanta at this crucial historical turning point of Italian opera is still a desideratum. My work will contribute to draw a broader picture of multimedial dimensions in the history of opera in general.

Literature

Alberti, Luciano, “L’interpretazione registica e scenografica”, in: Omaggio a Malipiero, ed. by Mario Messinis, Studi di Musica Veneta 4, Florence 1977, pp. 55–77.

Nicolodi, Fiamma, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Con una postfazione 2018, Storie e linguaggi, 2nd. rev. ed., Padua 2018.