Stage architecture

Play-acting but above all the opera have only seemingly little to do with our everyday life. In fact opera is a very artificial work of art in which reality is nevertheless very much present, but condensed in such a way that it touches us throughout the ages. In experiencing opera performances, we thus become companions of the bard Orpheus in Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, who mourns the death of his beloved nymph Eurydice with his laments. We transform ourselves into sympathetic and compassionate brothers and sisters of Orpheus, Wozzeck, Tosca, Tristan, Isolde or Jenufa and are thus directly referred to the perils – and also pleasures – in our own lives. In order to make the visual and sound dimensions of an opera tangible for the audience, a close interaction of dramaturges, actors, singers, dancers, directors, stage designers and technicians is necessary. What role do stage designers play in this? Don’t some performances owe their success primarily to the work of the set designer? The stage settings created by Hans Dieter Schaal, who has worked on almost all German stages, but also in many important international theatre venues, including Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and San Francisco, have, over and over again, such a lasting effect due to their visual power that they remain in the memory of the audience for a long time. The first volume on Hans Dieter Schaal’s stage settings covered the years 1982 to 2000, and this book now brings out a further volume dedicated to the works from 2001 to 2021. The book is captivating not only because of its abundance of mostly large-format photographs and many design drawings, but also because of the detailed texts written by Schaal himself, which reveal how intensively the artist deals with the respective work. As a result he invents images that often trigger a completely new perspective on the works.