The ‘New Listening’: Richard Wagner,Nineteenth-Century Opera Culture,and Cinema Theatres

Abstract

Cinema designers of the early twentieth century, in a manner that has never been acknowledged by scholars, tapped into a powerful historical discourse on listening from nineteenth-century opera culture in their work of creating ideal sonic spaces. This was the ‘new listening’ of opera in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and its detached and blissful spectators. Beginning with Wagner’s Bayreuth, and ending with the picture palaces of the 1920s/30s, I trace how an acoustical aesthetic unites these seemingly disparate artistic forms. Acoustical designers created voids that let the spectator’s body feel as if it could dissolve into nothingness as she or he bathed in sound. These cinema designs attempted to elevate film’s aural reputation to that of musical listening, by making cinemas where noise was dampened for the sake of pure artistic experience that was thrilling to the ears. In this, they continued the work Wagner began in the design of his theatre.