Sound, color, light, gesture and text: new media technologies in the Austrian musical theater of the early 20th century

Abstract

Optical media, being introduced into an opera score, can influence the interaction of different compositional planes (musical, verbal, stage ones) as well as significantly change the structure of the opera text. These issues are considered in this article on the example of two works – the musical drama Die Glückliche Hand by A. Schoenberg (1913) and the opera Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin by F. Schreker (1912).

In Die Glückliche Hand we see a fundamental change in the principle of distribution of dramatic material, the concentration of the event plan in the field of visual solutions (color, light, gesture), which leads to a significant predominance of the non-sounding word in the score (in the author’s remarks) over the sounding word (in the parts of the characters). Correlation between the optical layer of dramaturgy and musical material forms here a free counterpoint of autonomously moving plans.

In Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, the author’s directorial and scenography is expressed as clearly as in Die Glückliche Hand, but the traditional structure of the libretto as a whole is not broken, and the color part is subordinated to the logic of musical and dramatic action. A distinctive feature of Schreker’s remarks is manifested in the attention to acoustic appearances (indications of the various sources of sound, their location and movement).