Stinton, Cecilia Violet; (2022) Opera as Multimedia: The Experiments of Wassily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova and Kurt Schwitters, 1908-1924. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the prominent role of visual media in nineteenth and twentieth-century opera through developments in media technology and changing notions of perception. In particular, it investigates the operatic experiments of the visual avant-garde: Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang (1909), the Ballets Russes’ Liturgie (1915) and Schwitters’ Merzbühne (1919) and Normalbühne Merz (1924). These works tend to be considered in relation to Richard Wagner and his Gesamtkunstwerk, to whom the artists themselves alluded. I seek, however, to relativise Wagner’s legacy by positioning these unperformed works in an expanded field of technical and mass media, and through their recreation in performance. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the Paris Opéra of the 1820s catered to a new kind of observer and mobilised mise-en-scène to suit novel conditions of perception and attention driven by a burgeoning mass entertainment sector. I argue that the institution prepared the ground for the artistic avant-garde who, in a competitive twentieth-century mass mediascape, released opera from a narrative-bound dramaturgy. In this vein, Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang used lighting technology to stimulate in the listening observer a specifically artistic kind of experience which I situate in the discourses of Neo-Kantianism and Einfühlung. Chapter 2 considers the artistic and commercial pressure placed on opera by the new medium of film as exemplified by the Ballets Russes who, in their unrealised ballet-opera Liturgie, borrowed filmic techniques in the spirit of tribute and rivalry, or remediation. Chapter 3 considers the parallels between Schwitters’ Merz stage works and the radical staging practices at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House (1927-1931). I explore their strategy of montaging a historically consistent operatic score and libretto with a contemporary staging in the light of Ernst Bloch’s theory of Ungleichzeitigkeit (non-contemporaneity), a constellation which demonstrates the demands made of the perceptual faculties of the observer across media and institutions.

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