Abstract
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871–1949), hereafter Mariano Fortuny, was the rarest of theatre designers: a ‘triple threat’ who could create scenic, costume, and lighting designs. His innovations in developing electrical lighting instruments and electrical installation protocol revolutionized how theatres attacked the technical limitations of this newly developed technology. His ‘dome’, a precursor of what would eventually be adapted into the modern cyclorama, was an essential scenic design form integral in shifting designers away from nineteenth-century painted flats. His innovations in textile design, dyeing techniques, and clothing forms were valued for their uses in the costume construction process. This chapter analyses the oeuvre of Fortuny’s design wizardry, and its relevance to Wagner’s operas, theatre directors, designers, and the audience.
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Notes
John Russell Brown, The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 364.
Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 151.
Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 213.
Guillermo De Osma, Fortuny: The Life and Work of Mariano Fortuny (London: Aurum Press, 1980), 79.
De Osma, Fortuny, 24. Original source: Corrado Tumiati, ‘Il mio vicino mago’, Corriere della Sera, 6 September 1932.
Caroline Rennolds Milbank, Couture: The Great Designers (New York: Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1997), 94.
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 31. Magee cleverly coins Wagneralotry as the phenomenon of the ‘worship of Wagner’ during the mid- to late nineteenth century by artists and cultural figures as varied as Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Pierre Louÿs. Egusquiza and Appia would also be part of this network.
Adolphe Appia, Staging Wagnerian Drama, trans. Michael Peter Loeffler (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1982). 39.
The English version of this text, Music and the Art of Theatre, was published in 1962; Adolphe Appia, Music and the Art of Theatre, trans. Robert Corrigan and Mary Douglas Dirks (Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1962).
Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 57.
Anne-Marie Deschodt and Doretta Davanzo Poli, Fortuny (New York City: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 123.
De Osma, Fortuny, 65. De Osma’s translation is from Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (ed.), éclairage scénique: Système Fortuny Paris (1904), 1–2.
De Osma, Fortuny, 71. De Osma’s translation of Cronachetta Artistica, ‘Gli scenari del Tristano et Isota’, Emporium Vol. XIII, No. 73 (January 1901).
De Osma, Fortuny, 72. De Osma’s translation of Feder, ‘Gli scenari del Tristano et Isota’, la Lettura Vol. 1 (January 1901).
Carnegy’s translation from Adolphe Appia, Oeuvres Complètes (II), ed. Marie L. Bablet-Hahn (Bonstetten, Switzerland: 1983–91), 349.
De Osma, Fortuny, 78. Original source: María de Cardona, ‘Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo’, Arte Español, January-April 1950, 36.
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© 2013 Brandin Barón-Nusbaum
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Barón-Nusbaum, B. (2013). Forgotten Wizard: The Scenographic Innovations of Mariano Fortuny. In: Reilly, K. (eds) Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_5
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