Theatre Design & Technology - Dec 1971 - 16

to make it effectively even wider. This phenomenal
stage opening was dictated by two major considerations: First, since the only possibility for a new
theatre in cramped, antique Salzburg was to gouge
into the granite M6nchsberg which fortifies the city
on one side, the stage and auditorium had to run
parallel to the mountain wall. Secondly, in the
event of rain, the stage had to be able to accomodate Jedermann and operas and plays from the
Felsenreitschule, both of which have wide, shallow
stages suitable for simultaneous settings. The obvious gain is for the spectators. In the more than
two-thousand seats, no one is very far from the
stage-picture.
Gigantism did not stop with the proscenium opening. The stage space behind it is substantially
larger, so much so that it comfortably encloses a
cyclorma which is forty-five meters wide. The stage
is twenty-three meters deep. The planners, architects Professor Clemens Holzmeister and Professor
Walther Unruh, were, however, just as capable of
thinking small as of thinking big. It is possible to
close down the stage openi ng to make it fit the
dimensions of the Staatsoper in Vienna, so that
Viennese productions can also be seen effectively
in Salzburg.
Von Karajan has never seemed to be afraid of
anything: man nor opera. In the late Teo Otto,
and in Gunther Schneider-Siemssen-who also designs his Wagner productions for Salzburg and the
Met, he found designers of equal mettle. That the
great Salzburg stage looks like nothing so much as
two football fields joined end-to-end has never
intimidated Von Karajan or his co-workers. Even in
intimate scenes, they have found ways of more or
less successfully filling the vastness with scenery
which did not draw too much attention away from
the center of action.
Teo Otto was less able to cope than SchneiderSiemssen has been. Otto was a master of the
monumental, of the solidly plastic, of the imposing
and the expensive. When he indicated coppersheeting on settings for Richard III at Munich's
Kamm erspiele , he wou Idn' t settle for copper-colored
paper. His Salzburg Carmen (1966) was a catalogue
of his virtues and defects. Surviving photos are
cropped, so the total width of setting is not revealed. Not only did Carmen work in one of
Spain's largest cigarette factories, but the tiny
taverna of Lilias Pastia became a sprawling nightclub built in the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. The
smuggler's hideout, presumably in the mountains
near land-locked Seville, featured a rotting shiphulk. Questionable verisimilitude, but it filled the

stage. The final act put a large portion of a
Plaza de Taros on stage.
Gunther Schneider-Siemssen's scenic solutions
have been rather more brilliant. His Boris Gudonov
(1965) concentrated attention on stage center,
generally assisted by the centrality of Von Karajan's
staging. When the width of the stage encouraged
it, however, he permitted sets to stretch to seeming infinity. With a long, rustic city wall, it worked.
With an intimate scene between the False Dmitri
and his betrothed, Marina, it didn't: a chaiselou nge backed by end less vistas of windows made
it anything but intimate.
What Schneider-Siemssen has learned, however,
is that both in the painting and the lighting of
such Cinerama settings, the great width can be
killed or muted by concentrating color and illumination toward the center. What still defeats him occasionally, though, is the actual immensity of the
whole stage. Thus, in his Don Giovanni {1968l,
the Commendatore's statue, instead of being lifesize-as it so often is, being nothing more than
the opera-singer playing that role made up white-is super-heroic. Since it seems to be placed in one
of those Italian cemetaries [though the nominal
scene of the action is in Spain] which specialize in
portrait statuary, the towering plastic is too much.
In initial performances, the giant head nodded
acceptance of Don Giovanni's dinner invitation.
Now it remains immobile. Even Don Giovanni's
home, striking though it is, resembles more closely
Grand Central Station than a banquet chamber.
This past season, Von Karajan and SchneiderSiemssen premiered a new mounting of Verdi's
Othello. Visually, it was almost overwhelming. The
harbor of Venice, bounded on one side by massive
city walls, was an impressive first scene. Von
Karajan and his assistants used this space to excellent effect with chorus and extras-just as he had
so brilliantly in the Coronation and Rebellion scenes
in Boris. He seems, as a stage-director, the equal
of that other famed Salzburg impressario, Max
Reinhardt. Even in later scenes of Othello, when
it is necessary for an army of choristers to crowd
into Othello's Cyprus audience chamber in a matter
of seconds, this is accomplished so swiftly and the
singers are so artfully grouped that the effect is
magic-€ven if it seems thoroughly unreal. Especially when they vanish again just as speedily. But
that, alas, is one of the unreal exigencies of
Romantic opera. The great difficulty in this Othello
was for singers Jon Vickers (Othello), Peter Glossop {Iago}, and Mirella Freni {Desdemona} to fill
these huge spaces solo, in duo, or in trio, skilled
though they are vocally. More acting presence,
more magnetism is needed for this stage.

THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

DECEMBER, 1971

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