Art and opera

David Hockney: Set for the Rake's Progress

I have done a lot of work with the Leeds Creative Timebank over the years and because the timebank members come from right across the creative spectrum, have often thought of using it to facilitate or produce some sort of opera based on my drawings. I was reminded of this when I heard that Marina Abramovic's opera 'The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas', had opened in Munich recently. Opera is an old and somewhat awkward art form, one that when you look at big productions requires a huge logistics operation and immense cooperation from everyone involved, even so, it is worth thinking about, if only for the challenge. It was David Hockney, whose series of set designs for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera introduced me to the idea that artists could get involved in operatic productions. At some point he began to lose his hearing and he lost his interest in this type of work, but during the period of his interest in opera, Hockney was able to translate his drawings into stage sets in such a way that he was able to hold on to his personal idiosyncratic style and yet still evoke the various periods the operas were set in. 

Hockney: designs for Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress

A recent version of Wagner’s Parsifal was produced in Munich, that had sets designed by Georg Baselitz, Parsifal becoming very like one of Baselitz’s defeated “Heroes” coming back from the Second World War. Again an artist was able to maintain a sense of their own style or way of working with images, whilst also reflecting the needs of the operatic production. Perhaps it’s the sense of opera being ‘over the top’ that allows artists to operate in this way. Audiences expect the sets for an opera to be dramatic and often rather abstract or very expressionist, therefore an artist with a strong personal style can be seen as someone capable of both adding to the emotional mix and being able to control dramatic expression.

Georg Baselitz: Wagner’s Parsifal 

Georg Baselitz: Rebel 1965

Georg Baselitz 

I thought it was interesting to see that Georg Baselitz had managed to bring in his trademark upside down images into his set designs and still make the idea work. In fact I thought in many ways the idea of an upside down world made more sense as a stage idea than as a painting. 

William Kentridge has used powerful projection technology to make his animated drawings interrelate with operatic characters onstage. His drawings have often been projected to fill the huge prosceniums we find in some of the grand venues for opera and he has worked very closely with musicians to develop his own music, such that now his interest in opera, has spawned new work entirely generated by Kentridge himself. 

Wozzeck: an opera by Alban Berg Image projection William Kentridge

William Kentridge: Refuse the hour

Anish Kapoor: Tristan and Isolde

Anish Kapoor designed sets for the English National Opera’s Tristan and Isolde. The set featuring a gold pyramid in the first act, designed to keep the lovers physically apart, and a rockface in the final act, where they were thrust together but unable to touch. 

Anish Kapoor: Tristan and Isolde

The tradition of having well known artists design sets for operas is an old one, and perhaps it was Salvador Dali that demonstrated that contemporary artists could work in this way. 

Dali: Salome

Salvador Dali collaborated with Peter Brook on Salome at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1949, this collaboration would not however have come about if Brook had not seen Alfred Hitchcock's 'Spellbound', a film that Dali had designed Surrealist sets for. 

A Dali designed set from Alfred Hitchcock's: Spellbound 1945

I'm convinced that for some artist's collaboration brings out the best, or at least it stretches them and forces them to work at scales they had never thought possible. My first attempt at something of a large scale was painting sets for a school production of 'She Stoops to Conquer' by Goldsmith. I was asked to paint a magnolia tree on one of the flats, which for the first time made me aware of issues about size, scale, readability and the need for speed. 

Marcel Dzama

It's not just opera that visual artists are drawn to. Marcel Dzama has made sets and costumes for the New York City Ballet's production of 'The Most Incredible Thing'.

Marcel Dzama: Drawings for ballet costumes

In the video Dzama explains how having to work with the ballet production team has stopped his drawing work from getting stale. Perhaps this is what this post is really about. New challenges that take us away from what we think is central to our practice are often rewarding and they make us re-invent ourselves.

See also:

William Kentridge

Drawing and the theatre

Drawing and film

Marcel Dzama and collaboration