“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1929, as he contemplated modern technology’s effect on the human mind and body. In the next breath, however, Freud veers away from this perspective, instead giving voice to his anxieties about technology: “But those organs... still give him much trouble at times.” Dreams and fears about technology have coexisted well into the present century. This panel investigates utopic and dystopic visions for various technologies through the lens of European operatic and concert culture from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

 Early nineteenth-century spectacles displayed on the stage of the Paris Opéra prompted wide-ranging discussions about the nature and function of technology, with contemporary writers and musicians negotiating technology’s many meanings in their critical reception, compositions, and performances. Continuing into the twentieth century, sound recording and cinematic technologies profoundly affected perceptions of music and its performers. These technologies offered singers a means of constructing innovative understandings of the voice and body, while also subjecting female bodies to male-dominated modes of reception. The unceasing development of these technologies continues to create new, interactive ways for exploring the past and shaping a future for the classical repertoire. The conflicts addressed in these five papers add to discourses about one of modernism’s most enduring crises: the role of the machine in modern life.