Since the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876, Wagner has been widely considered an innovator of the illusionist stage who foreshadowed twentieth- and twenty-first-century immersive multimedia. Yet a sole focus on his stage-technological achievements glosses over many revealing ironies. Not only was Wagner deeply ambivalent about technological progress; but he conceived of his Gesamtkunstwerk as an aid to overcome what he perceived as the socio-culturally alienating effects of industrialisation. This chapter illuminates Wagner’s ultimately fraught strategy, in both theory and practice, to advance and simultaneously conceal his stage machinery. Although pushed to new extremes, Bayreuth’s stage-technical solutions for the particularly challenging Ring cycle were firmly based on contemporary practices; moreover, they fell far behind Wagner’s idealist visions. In the end, the inevitable technologisation of Wagner’s stage presented a critical predicament in his aspiration to outdo both opera and the machine.

Wagner’s attitude towards the Paris-centred tradition of grand opéra and its German-language cousin, große Oper, was equivocal. On the one hand, he mercilessly dissects the shortcomings of the genres in his Zurich writings; on the other hand, borrowings are rife and a notable exemplar exists in Rienzi. After disentangling and contextualising that contradiction in relation to Wagner’s early works and writings, this chapter considers the tensions between municipal and international resources in staging ‘grand’ works, the shifting associations of German genre such as Singspiel, große romantische Oper, and große Oper, and the witness born to this by Wagner’s prose drafts for incomplete works such as Die Sarazenin and Friedrich I.