Technologies of Opera

In Tobias Kratzer's production of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine at the Oper Frankfurt (2018), the titular African woman appears as a blue alien out of James Cameron's Avatar; the opera's European explorers are a modern space agency. This is one of many recent "director's theater" productions which have translated an earth-bound opera into an interstellar experience, a concept I dub "space opera." In this paper, drawing on Joy Calico's analysis of estrangement in director's theater, I will investigate this "alienation" in light of opera's interlocking signification of music, words, and visuals. In particular, I am interested in how despite their surface novelty and complexity, space operas ultimately reinscribe a nostalgic and, for opera studies, familiar longing for pure voice. Like the deathless voices recently examined by Michal Grover-Friedlander, space opera seeks a space where the operatic voice can echo in a vast nothingness, signifying only itself. 


Considering the space opera opens up new intersections of operatic production with voice, the canon, and coloniality. Particularly in its more family-friendly forms, space opera can play on the divisions between high and low art, juxtaposing trashy sci-fi with the purportedly high art of opera (such as in the Berkeley Opera production The Riot Grrrl on Mars). Other productions, such as Claus Guth's La bohème (Paris, 2017) use technology and lunar landscapes to cast opera itself as an emotionally pure relic of a prelapsarian world. Finally, Kratzer's L'Africaine seeks to decolonize its nineteenth-century operatic text by recasting its exotic people as an imaginary alien population. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I put these productions in the context of modern institutional diversity, arguing that what Ahmed calls "the messy work of 'againstness'" can only exist in the context of a preserved, conventional operatic culture. Particularly in their estranged longing for a world before post-colonial theory and modernity, space operas are uneasily self-aware exhibits in the museum of musical works. 

In typical testimonies of rock concert bootlegging, interviewees describe their motivation for illicit recording as a dedication to the preservation of cultural heritage beyond the hegemony of record companies, concert venues and even artists themselves. Similarly, the gay opera enthusiast Leroy Allan Ehrenreich (1929–2016), whose daytime job as scriptwriter at the New York stock market enabled him to finance his evening passion as an opera bootlegger, agreed with this viewpoint. As a self-proclaimed "pirate-queen", belonging to a network of like-minded bootleggers, he compiled an impressive collection of over 2000 reel-to-reel tapes comprising around 10,000 hours of private bootleg recordings made between 1965 and 2010 at the major opera venues in New York. After his death, his lifework was donated to the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) with the specific request of making available for research any contents valuable for posterity


While bootlegging has traditionally featured in popular music genres, the Ehrenreich collection affords an unrivaled opportunity to investigate this cultural practice with respect to opera. Due to its unauthorized and transgressive nature, bootlegging practice has until recently been bypassed or ignored in scholarly literature. In the field of popular music studies, the importance of bootlegging has received some attention in recent years (Heylin 1995, Marshall 2005), but in opera discourse the quality and relevance of such recordings as documents of musical cultural practice have yet to receive any sustained critical attention.  


In this paper I contextualize this unique collection within the social phenomenon of bootlegging, focusing specifically on aspects of listener/audience experience and value by considering the unique qualities of these recordings. Utilizing notably Eric Clarke's ecological approach to the perception of music (Clarke, 2005), I examine the affordances of the virtual spaces and audience sounds captured in the Ehrenreich tapes. Specific attributes of these recordings, such as the reverberation of the vocal and instrumental music, the distance from the stage, as well as the quality of the murmuring, coughing, grunting, shuffling, clapping and shouting noises of audience members, vary over time and between the different New York venues which Ehrenreich used for his bootlegging. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides unrivaled evidence of the experience of opera as embodied participatory event in which the audience plays a key part (Burland/Pitts 2014). I explore how the distinct sounds of musical experience contained within these bootlegs enrich and enfold our understanding of operatic practices, social networks and audience identities both past and present.


This study fills important knowledge gaps in the area of bootlegging practice with respect to classical music and, by extension, the acousmatic character of audience behavior in the construction of meaning. The almost unexamined phenomenon of opera bootlegging reveals fresh insight into how the opera listener can become a co-creator of the event, thus placing the production and consumption of 20th/21st-century opera at the intersection between recording practices, the ephemerality of performance and the democratization of art.

Recent histories of opera and media have made much of the establishment of the théâtrophone service in 1890: a quintessential late nineteenth-century communications technology. Yet a longer narrative might instead begin with Antonio Meucci, who developed a prototype telephone while working at Florence's Teatro della Pergola during the 1830s (Pelosi, 2011). Developed from shipping technologies, Meucci's device enabled communication between the stage and control room, reflecting evolving theatrical design in Italy during the mania for theatre construction across the 1820s and 1830s (Sorba, 2001). Within a Florentine context, the inventor's work also intersected with wider developments in the natural sciences – signalled by the Regio Museo di Storia e Fisica Naturale (1775) and Conservatorio delle Arte e Mestieri (1809) – as well as the renovation of the Pergola's technological infrastructure around 1826-8. Meucci later refined his device at Havana's Teatro Tacón, supplementing operatic experiments with medical and engineering feats (Price, 2014). Moving from internal to external communication, Meucci thus affirmed the theatre as a uniquely multi-dimensional site for technological research, encompassing activity within, behind and beyond the stage.
This paper takes Meucci's experiments as an entry point to consider opera's relationship with the 'telephonic' more broadly during the mid-nineteenth century. I address this firstly with regard to the crucial role of Italian theatres in changing productions of sonic experience: from backstage technologies to newly forceful modes of vocal use that challenged conventions of human 'projection'. In the paper's final section, I then consider links between these emerging stage technologies (broadly conceived) and the increasing use of acousmatic sounds in Italian operatic works, focusing on Donizetti's _Parisina_ (Florence, 1833): an opera in which, I suggest, distant sounds and physical enclosure are regularly juxtaposed. In so doing, I investigate the role of both the opera house and of Italian operatic works in defining acoustic practices and modes typically identified with later communication technologies, engaging with recent scholarship on opera and nineteenth-century science (Martin, 2012, Schwartz 2016; Davies & Lockhart, 2016, Trippett & Walton, 2019). What might be gained, I ask, from an alternative operatic history of telephonic listening?