Wagner the orchestra rendered audible the innermost essence
concealed behind the visible events on the stage and provided a
“musical narrator” in the voice of the composer. The musical
will not settle for the layered mystification of such talk, but it
does depend on the idea of omniscience in the orchestra, and
no one defined that idea more clearly than Wagner.^1
The overture with which musicals normally begin is no idle
affair: it is the orchestra’s announcement of its authority. It al-
ready can play the tunes that will arise in the plot. (It might even
know themes that have been cut, as in the “Misery’s Comin’
Round” theme in Show Boat, which Kern kept in a prominent
place in the overture after cutting it from its place in the book.)
It puts the tunes in the minds of the audience, too, so that by
repetition through the evening a hit song or two will be cre-
ated, but this is the commercial rendition of an aesthetic fact:
numbers are detachable, and can be set into the overture for
the orchestra to use in the conventional assertion of its author-
ity and omniscience.
The overture can be a number unto itself rather than a collec-
tion of the later tunes. The classic case is the “Carousel Waltz”
with which Carouselbegins. For the first fifty measures this
could be taken as the beginning of a conventional overture, but
then the curtain rises and the stage is filled with the pantomime
we discussed in chapter 4. For nearly ten minutes the orchestra
roars on with its gorgeous waltz while the pantomime shows
128 CHAPTER SIX
(^1) Wagner said that music is the mother of drama, and his term for the or-
chestra pit was mystischer Abgrund(mystic chasm). For further discussion of the
importance of the orchestra in the nineteenth century, see Dahlhaus, “What is
a musical drama?” “Omniscience” has been tamed in recent literary criticism,
and it no longer has the transcendence Wagner looked for. I am grateful to
Jonathan Culler for pointing this out in regard to the narrator of nineteenth-
century fiction. See J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction, p. 64, and
Maxwell, “Dickens’s Omniscience.” Perhaps “omniscience” should be replaced
with “near-omniscience” or “quasi-omniscience” to catch the postmodern feel
of things, but I am not going to do this. In rehearsals, the moment when the
members of the cast first hear the orchestrations for their numbers is a major
experience. For an account of the sitzprobein rehearsing Follies, see Chapin,
Everything Was Possible, p. 137.