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Spectral Mechanics and the Technical Failures of the Monograph
Review products
DeirdreLoughridge, Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 291pp.
GundulaKreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. xix + 348pp.
GabrielaCruz, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xx + 290pp.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2022
Extract
In 2018, Maria Callas rose from the dead. During a series of tours dubbed Callas in Concert, local orchestras performed with a three-dimensional hologram of the departed diva as she re-sounded arias of her past. This virtual manifestation of Callas put on a convincing show. Listeners were struck by the quality of the diva's voice – ‘from heart-breaking vulnerability to imposing strength’ – and marvelled at foley effects such as the clicking of her heels and rustling of her gown. Notably, however, the performance fell victim to repeated technical failures. In Chicago, a glitch caused her final encore to end prematurely; in Blacksburg, Virginia, audience members were distracted by the transparent nature of the hologram, which gave Callas an ‘especially ghostly appearance’. The performances set the operatic sphere atwitter with questions of ethics and taste, debates over classical music's obligations to the living and devotions to the dead. Anthony Tommasini likened the performances to a grand séance, an act of operatic necrophilia. Catherine Womack interpreted the spectral shows as a sign that ‘in the twenty-first century, living and breathing are not prerequisites for a successful performing career’. However, as Deirdre Loughridge, Gundula Kreuzer and Gabriela Cruz demonstrate in their monographs, Callas in Concert is not a phenomenon unique to the twenty-first century. Indeed, the authors show that technologically mediated resurrections of the dead, operatic appeals to nostalgia, and illusion-busting technical failures are instead part of a long operatic tradition, one which began well before the holographic revitalisations of Maria Callas.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Michael Pecak, ‘An Audible Huff of Awe and Amusement: Maria Callas in Concert’, Schmopera (September 9 2019).
2 Tom Huizenga, ‘Raising the Dead – And A Few Questions – With Maria Callas’ Hologram’, NPR (6 November 2018).
3 Anthony Tommasini, ‘What a Hologram of Maria Callas Can Teach Us about Opera’, New York Times (15 January 2018).
4 Catherine Womack, ‘With “Callas in Concert”, an Opera Diva Makes a Holographic Encore’, Los Angeles Times (8 April 2019).
5 David Trippett and Benjamin Walton, eds., Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (Cambridge, 2019); Karen Henson, ed. Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age (Cambridge, 2016); Evan Baker, From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago, 2013).
6 ‘Gaslight, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/view/Entry/76963; ‘Gaslight, v.‘, Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/view/Entry/255554.
7 Cruz, Gabriela, ‘Aida's Flutes’, Cambridge Opera Journal 14/1–2 (2002), 177–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Laura Protano-Biggs, ed., Cambridge Opera Journal (special issue: Nineteenth-Century Grand Opéra on the Move), 29/1 (2017).
9 This establishes a pattern – continued in each of Kreuzer's chapters – of declaring the object of her study (Venusberg, curtain, gong, steam) to be a metaphor of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk as a whole.
10 As an instance of Wagnerian technology, Venusberg is steeped in irony and ends in failure. The sublime ‘naturalness’ of Venusberg relies heavily upon technological intervention and Tannhäuser ultimately escapes Venus's immersive enchantments as technology fails once again.
11 For a concise overview of spectral opera companies, see Burdekin, Russell, ‘Pepper's Ghost at the Opera’, Theatre Notebook 69/3 (2015), 152–64Google Scholar. See also Alexandra Wilson's discussion of opera's ‘entertainment status’ and ‘highbrow’ associations in ‘Killing Time: Contemporary Representations of Opera in British Culture’, Cambridge Opera Journal 19/3 (2007), 249–70. While Wilson does not deal with Wagner explicitly, she offers important contextualisation for nineteenth- and twentieth-century performances of Wagner's Ring and earlier works such as Lohengrin.
12 Loughridge and Cruz make similar connections to the present, albeit to a lesser degree. Loughridge's conclusion centres upon her argument that the so-called ‘audiovisual turn’ of the digital age is in fact an audiovisual return to a mode of multisensorial listening that appeared as early as the eighteenth century. Reading through Adorno, Cruz offers an image of ‘the listener who unexpectedly comes to his senses in grand opera, having been awakened to the world by its music’ (203), an image that channels phantasmagoric nostalgia and ‘potentiates the critical awareness of opera today’ (13).
13 Norman, Don, The Design of Everyday Things (New York, 2013, originally published 1988), 66Google Scholar.