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62 We have come to think of the bourgeois theater stage as a space separated from the audience by a proverbial fourth wall. Translated in 1760 into German by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Denis Diderot’s seminal treatise De la poésie dramatique advised playwrights and actors to carry out their respective activities as if no audience were present in front of the stage. “Imagine a big wall at the outermost edge of the stage which is to set apart the parquet. Play as if the curtain had not been raised.”1 With the exception of some Romantic eccentrics eager to rupture the stage’s autonomy a few decades later, German dramatists, stage directors, and actors readily followed Diderot’s formula throughout the nineteenth century. Though German linguistic conventions turned Diderot’s impenetrable stage wall into a “Guckkastenbühne” (peep-hole stage), nineteenth-century German staging practices relied greatly on Diderot ’s efforts to purchase realism and illusionism by radically segregating the different spaces of dramatic communication.2 Theatrical plays best captured the viewers’ minds and emotions, it was believed, if they presented themselves as self-enclosed universes. However ornate in design, the purpose of the theater’s proscenium was not to connect stage and auditorium but to separate them; not actively to frame the viewer’s viewing but rather to generate illusions of unseen and hence voyeuristic seeing. A synecdoche for Diderot’s fourth wall, the frame of the proscenium came to present the world on stage as one emancipated from the strictures of framing. It granted naturalistic effects and viewer identification by disguising its own status as an interface, as a site of bi-directional communication. 2 Richard Wagner and the Framing of Modern Empathy 63 Richard Wagner’s musical theater, as it was envisioned in the composer’s critical writings in the late 1840s and at its eventual institutional home in Bayreuth in 1876, has often been seen as the apex of this nineteenth-century history of illusionism. Conventional wisdom explains Wagner’s desire to integrate poetry, music, and dance under the umbrella of one effective Gesamtkunstwerk as an attempt to perfect the bourgeois tradition of the fourth wall and thus produce peep-hole theater at its best. Wagner’s theatrical initiatives, we are told, aimed at the creation of spectators affectively invested in the spectacle precisely because they were experiencing the action on stage as one wholly independent of the theater’s mundane mechanisms of framing, staging, and reception. In trying to achieve this, Wagner’s work in fact—one frequent conclusion has it—foreshadowed nothing less than the operations of twentieth -century mass culture, that is, the bliss of modern-day spectators gazing at the cinematic dream screen from the darkened womb of the auditorium. This chapter confronts and complicates crucial aspects of this genealogy not only by conceptualizing the Wagnerian stage as a window of ambiguous attractions but by investigating the extent to which Wagner’s theatrical initiatives illuminate post-Albertinian conceptions of the window as they took hold in the course of the nineteenth century. The task of the following pages is to locate the median position of Wagner’s stage on a spectrum ranging from the bourgeois notion of peep-hole illusionism and perspectival space on one end and the double challenge to Diderot’s fourth wall as it emerged around 1900 on the other. Though Wagner’s theater was designed to engineer powerful illusions and emotional effects, it significantly modified how Diderot’s followers defined the relationship of different theatrical spaces and their impact on the spectator. And even though Wagner’s ambitions indeed prefigured central issues relevant for our understanding of both aesthetic modernism and twentieth -century industrial culture, we cannot reduce his theatrical interventions to a single dominant and coherent principle. Wagner’s proscenium was a site of constitutive tensions and contradictions, a crossroads of conflicting aspirations indexing the historical ruptures of Wagner’s own lifetime. Wagner’s ambition, I suggest, was neither to separate the stage by means of a fourth wall nor to do away with whatever might disconnect actors and spectators. Torn between different conceptions of the stage and its relation to the audience, Wagner’s theater instead envisioned the proscenium as an interactive membrane able to secure an equilibrium between the classical and the modern, between dissimilar aesthetic traditions and incompatible social visions. It is when considering Wagner’s stage as a window frame, as a semi-transparent screen of different Richard Wagner and Modern Empathy...

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