Hans Dieter Schaal. Stage Architecture 2001-2021: With an Introduction by Wolfgang Willaschek

Play-acting but also the opera have only seemingly little to do with with our everyday life. Opera is a world of art in which reality is actually very much present, but condensed in such a way that it speaks to us in a particularly impressive way.

In order to make the dramatic emotional 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 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. During this time, Schaal worked on a wide variety of German and international stages. The book is captivating not only because of its abundance of mostly large-format photographs and a large number of design drawings, but also because of the detailed texts written by Schaal himself, which reveal how intensively the artist deals with the respective work.

Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, is an architect, landscape designer, stage designer, exhibition designer, and artist. His works have found an audience far beyond his home country. The author lives in Germany. Wolfgang Willaschek studied music-theatre directing at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. His work as a production dramaturg includes jobs at opera houses and festivals in Munich, Zurich, Frankfurt, Essen, London, and St. Petersburg. Since 2007 he has been professor for the dramaturgy of audiovisual media at HAW Hamburg.