More
"painting with light" in the operas of Richard Wagner:
PARSIFAL
Schneider-Siemssen has designed the stage for many a Parsifal production
in Europe and America. How apt that in this opera about redemption, light
should play such an important role, as seen in the drawings and scenes from
the Bremen, Salzburg and the Metropolitan Opera productions shown here.
Countless lighting variations were used to create such effects as the seamless
transformation of trees into columns of the Temple of the Holy Grail, a
complicated technical process involving the use of projections, but a master
designer like Schneider-Siemssen makes it look so easy.
TRISTAN
und ISOLDE
For Schneider-Siemssen, this most intensely erotic opera is unquestionably
also a most cosmic opera - in which the real and the unreal converge, as
passion-lust transforms into love-death. Thus he developed a basic, compact
design for Tristan (which he has staged in Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin,
New York, Pretoria* and Wels) that allowed for fast and smooth transitions
between real and unreal worlds: "The ship's bow in the first
act becomes the garden terrace in the second and a bleak rock in the third."
He achieved the other-worldly effects shown in these pictures, as the dramatic,
largely internal, action progressed into love-death (Liebestod),
by again "painting with light".
* In this production, in addition to being the stage and
lighting designer, Schneider-Siemssen was also, and for the first time,
the stage director. As noted elsewhere, happily for him, the first has not
been his last.
THE
FLYING DUTCHMAN
"A fascinating task for the stage designer! This fusion of a
small, real world - that of a Norwegian fisherman, Daland,... and the fantastic
unreal world of the ghostly Flying Dutchman, his ghost ship foretelling
his tragic fate. It was for me a great and wonderful challenge." *
Here again, he achieved amazing visual effects by the use of light
and projection technology. The scene shown here is from the 1983 Salzburg
production with Herbert von Karajan.
*[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)]
