ABSTRACT
From its inception in late sixteenth-century Italy, opera has been a multimodal art form, and each mode deployed has always contributed to its complex of musical, verbal, visual, and dramatic meanings. It is no accident that Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen use the image of the Gesamtkunstwerk for multimodality (2001, 1), but live staged opera did not have to wait for Richard Wagner’s christening of that term for the reality of the operatic “total work of art” to come into being.1 But Wagner was perhaps the fi rst composer to think-and create-multimodally: he wrote his own poetic and dramatic verbal libretti; he composed the music; he acted as stage director, helping design sets and costumes; he rehearsed the orchestra and singers; he even built his own theater at Bayreuth. He was the fi rst, in short, to foreground how each semiotic resource brought with it new meaning and did so at every stage of the creation and reception process.2
