ERWARTUNG
(Expectation):Music by Arnold Schoenberg, Libretto
by Marie Pappenheim; Musical Direction: Sir Georg Solti; Stage Direction:
Peter Ustinov; Covent Garden, 1957
Erwartung was a milestone in Schneider-Siemssen's career: the stage
design, his first for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, marked his
entry into the international opera scene. Soon after, he was commissioned
to design the London Ring Cycle.
The projected images are as expressionistic as the music and as stream-of-consciousness
as the text of this opera about the psychologically unstable state of a
woman who has lost her lover.
PELLÉAS
ET MÉLISANDE: Music by Claude Debussy, Libretto
by Maurice Maeterlinck; Musical and Stage Direction: Herbert von Karajan;
Vienna State Opera, 1962
Debussy's impressionistic, and at the time ultramodern, opera about feelings
and yearnings within the structure of a love triangle was another milepost
in Schneider-Siemssen's career. Staged in 1962 at the Vienna State Opera,
it was the first of what became a life-long series of collaborative works
between Schneider-Siemssen and von Karajan. Here again, he used projections
to achieve stunning effects and proved in the face of an impending strike
by stagehands that lighting effects can replace most stage furniture! It
was a great success and the word spread all over Europe. One writer proclaimed
it to be "Karajan's most beautiful production."
A
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM:Music by Benjamin Britten,
Libretto by Britten and Peter Pears; Stage Direction, Werner Düggelin;
Vienna State Opera, 1962
Schneider-Siemssen has fond memories of this opera staged in Vienna in 1962.
Of Britten's adaptation of Shakespeare's play about love among other-worldly
characters, he had this to say:
"...A truly enchanting opera. I really did some magic here! Again
I used light and projections which changed every moment to create a dreamy
forest on a summer night..." *
MOSES
und AARON:Music and Libretto by Arnold Schoenberg;
Musical Direction, Sir Georg Solti; Stage Direction, Otto Schenk; Paris
Grand Opera 1973
Schneider-Siemssen found setting the stage for this powerful opera to be
as powerful a task: how does one succeed at graphically depicting such a
momentous biblical event as the Israelites' flight through the Wasteland
into the Promised Land? But succeed he did - at his Paris debut. This opera,
Schoenberg's biggest staged work, is musically complex and difficult as
most all of his twelve-tone compositions are - even opera enthusiasts need
a second or a third hearing to begin to appreciate the work! But at the
Paris Opera in 1973, the audience were lucky, because Schneider-Siemmsen
surely helped them see the music!
UN
RE IN ASCOLTO (A King Listens): Music and Libretto
by Luciano Berio; Musical Direction: Lorin Maazel; Stage Direction: Götz
Friedrich; A World Premiere - Salzburg Festival 1984
This work by Italy's preeminent living composer is, by his own definition,
not an opera but an "azione musicale" (musical action). And it
is not about a king either, but about a dying opera impresario and his visions
of his ideal female protagonist (and in the final analysis, it is really
a discourse about what opera or theater ought to be). The premiere was a
great success.
Here is how Schneider-Siemssen saw and went about this ultramodern work:
"This
is an opera without any real content or at least any recognizable, definable
content. At first we had to fashion scenes, trying to invent space, in a
deeper sense completely contrary to the normal operas of Wagner, Verdi or
Mozart, where the authors, poets and composers indicate exactly, what they
imagine and how they want to see it presented in the theater. Here everything
was vague and the director and stage designer were encumbered to some extent
by trying to make sense of it. I found the interpretation wonderful and
so fantasy-oriented as is rarely seen in the theater."
*
And by the stage director's own account, the production succeeded primarily
because of Schneider-Siemssen whose inventive scenic device consisting of
a hydraulically movable metallic platform with a hole in the middle is shown
above.
Elsewhere
in FanFaire... more on the Italian composer Luciano Berio.
* [From
G. Schneider-Siemssen in conversation with K. Pahlen: Die
Bühne, mein Leben
, Selke Verlag 1996;
(The Stage, My Life
- English translation by James Mulder, in press)]
