Painting the Stage: Artists as Stage Designers

From the 19th century to the present day, the meeting of music and the avant-garde visual arts has produced groundbreaking innovations in both fields. Nowhere is this meeting of the arts as intense as it is on the operatic stage.

Painting the Stage charts the close and catalytic relationship between opera and the visual arts from Karl Friedrich Schinkel's 19th-century stage designs for Mozart's Magic Flute to William Kentridge's 21st-century operas (with artists such as Andr Derain, Balthus, Salvador Dal , Andr Masson, Oskar Kokoschka, Robert Indiana, David Hockney and Robert Wilson appearing in between). At the end of the book, a series of interviews with contemporary artists such as William Kentridge, Daniel Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Bill Viola and Robert Longo show that opera today, more than ever, is a form of Gesamtkunswerk or "total art," beyond what Wagner could ever have imagined.

Denise Wendel-Poray is a Canadian writer and critic holding degrees from Yale University in Connecticut, and McGill University in Montreal. Formerly an opera singer, she performed principal roles throughout Europe (Covent Garden, l’Opera de la Bastille, Theatre du Chatelet). She is the author of several books and essays concerning the relationship between art, theatre and music. (Frauen-Liebe und Leben, Hatje-Cantz, 2013) She has been curator and music adviser for the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany, and guest lecturer on stage decor at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. She lives and works in Paris.