Flat Bayreuth: A Genealogy of Opera as Screened

Abstract

Gundula Kreuzer challenges common assumptions about the ‘screenification’ of contemporary opera productions by reconsidering historical screening techniques within staged opera. Beginning with the Baroque picture-frame stage, she highlights how a desire for visual illusion on stage came into conflict with the increasingly complicated array of equipment, scenery, and props required to produce such elaborate scenes. Retracing strategies tested out at Wagner’s Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, she argues that the theatre’s curtain line came to imply an invisible screen with the capacity to organize the various media on the deep stage into a unified whole, a perception fostered by the visual and acoustic environment of the auditorium. Rather than a part of the telos of modernist painting, she highlights this flattened planar format as the outcome of technical and aesthetic conflict, whose legacy proves highly relevant to contemporary experiments with operatic staging.