Rolf Glittenberg

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Rolf Glittenberg (born on July 27, 1945 in Melle ) is a German set designer who works in drama and opera . Cooperation existed or still exists with Luc Bondy , Jürgen Flimm , Sven-Eric Bechtolf and Uwe Eric Laufenberg . He created rooms for the directors Götz Friedrich , Dieter Giesing , Martin Kušej , Peter Mussbach , Otto Schenk and George Tabori .

From 1973 he was head of set design for three large theaters, first at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, from 1979 to 1985 at the Schauspiel Köln and from 1985 to 2000 at the Hamburg Thalia Theater . As a university professor , now retired, he headed the stage design departments in Cologne and Essen.

As a set designer

Glittenberg studied stage and costume design from 1967 to 1969 with Teo Otto (1904–1968) and with Wolf-Jürgen Seesselberg at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , then with Wilfried Minks (1930–2018) at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts . He met his future wife, a German studies student at the University of Freiburg i. Br. At first he concentrated on spoken theater and worked in Nuremberg, Munich and Bochum. He tried different directors and different costume designers. After his teacher Wilfried Mink's sketches from his wife, Marianne Glittenberg , he hired her as a costume designer. She took on this task for the first time in 1976 for the Minks production of Genet's Der Balkon at the Schauspielhaus Bochum . Minks was also responsible for the set design. The artistic collaboration between the Glittenbergs began two years later, with Lulu at the Hamburg State Opera , staged by Luc Bondy and conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi . The premiere took place on June 3, 1978.

Luc Bondy

Glittenberg worked with Luc Bondy (1948–2015) for 27 years , starting in 1972 with Ionesco's chairs in Nuremberg. This was Glittenberg's first independent set and the third or fourth production by Luc Bondy. The director and set designer achieved their breakthrough in November 1973 with the following joint work - Edward Bond's Die See at the Residenztheater in Munich . Siegfried Lowitz and Walter Schmidinger played among others . The production was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen . Even in the early work of the young director, it became "clear that Luc Bondy's theater is particularly impressive when it comes to working with strong set designers," said Manfred Brauneck in his European theater history . He named three set designers with whom Bondy worked: Rolf Glittenberg, Karl-Ernst Herrmann , Erich Wonder .

Glittenberg went into his first permanent engagement at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in 1972 and worked there with various directors: with Bondy he developed Horvath's Glaube Liebe Hoffnung in Hamburg in 1974 and Ibsen's Ghosts in 1977 , with Ernst Wendt Heiner Müller's Die Schlacht and - in Vienna - the world premiere of Thomas Bernhards The President , with Ulrich Heising the obsessions of Karl Valentin and with Rainer Werner Fassbinder .

The collaboration with Luc Bondy also continued during Glittenberg's Cologne years, for example in the performances of 1980 Happy Days by Samuel Beckett and Yvonne, the Burgundy Princess by Witold Gombrowicz (both productions also invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen), Thomas Bernhard's Am Ziel and William Shakespeare's in 1982 Macbeth :

“The royal couple after the murder: the two tender, crazy people, deprived of their sleep forever. […] Rolf Glittenberg invented the boldest of his stage sets for this scene: a high castle room, only two poor tubular steel beds in it, but the walls seem transparent, with a hazy sky, as if painted by Magritte. "

- Benjamin Henrichs : Life a nightmare, death a civil servant, Die Zeit (Hamburg), February 12, 1982

Mussbach, Schenk, Fassbinder

The 1970s were Glittenberg's wild years. A larger span than that between Otto Schenk on the one hand, Peter Mussbach and Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the other hand is hardly imaginable. Here the hero of the educated bourgeoisie who declares the convention to be the norm, there scandal cause and public shock. Mussbach's interpretation of Götterdämmerung in the Glittenberg setting turned into a tangible scandal in March 1975. The end of the opera was most heavily attacked: “a frozen“ orchestra ”, as designed by George Segal , played the funeral music for the deceased Siegfried, and for the transcendental union of Brünnhilde, who had also died, with her hero, cold light shone from a totally empty one , white space and signaled the total nothingness, the total annihilation, the absolute tabula rasa as the quintessence of the piece. “The scene was unbearable, a hurricane of whistles and boos from the audience erupted, merciless reviews in the bourgeois press followed. At the same time - after the first premiere - this was the end of the Ring project in Frankfurt, because discussions about a new version ended in a legal dispute, at the end of which the Frankfurt Opera was prohibited by a judicial order from changing the Mussbach production, with the threat of a fine of up to 500,000 marks, that would have been a multiple of the production costs at the time. Thereupon the production was no longer shown at all.

The reaction of the Viennese audience was very different when the audience favorite Otti Schenk staged Chekhov at the Vienna Academy Theater. The Three Sisters premiered in June 1976. When the curtain rose, there was applause for Glittenberg's set. The costumes of Silvia Strahammer were also appreciated, of course the acting of the castle actors . Three years later, Otto Schenk invited the stage again to Vienna, now the State Opera to the Trittico by Giacomo Puccini to build attractive screenshots. In 1981 Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier followed , also at the State Opera.

Shortly after Chekhov in Vienna, Fassbinder's Camp production of Women in New York premiered in Hamburg in September 1976 , played by Christa Berndl , Margit Carstensen , Barbara Sukowa and a number of other women from the Fassbinder convoy. Frida Parmeggiani designed the costumes for this production . It was Fassbinder's last work for the stage; it was recorded as a television play by NDR in 1977 .

At the Hamburg State Opera , Rolf Glittenberg designed the sets for Luc Bondy's first opera production in 1978 - Lulu von Wedekind und Berg , at that time still in the incomplete two-act version from the composer's estate. It was there that the other Alban Berg opera, Wozzeck, followed in 1981 .

Jürgen Flimm

At the end of the 1970s, the long-term collaboration with Jürgen Flimm began with the dramatization of Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan on two evenings, realized in 1978 at the Bochum theater . At that time, Flimm was just about to take over the management of the Schauspielhaus in Cologne and hired Rolf Glittenberg as head of equipment to Cologne. He would later take over this function during the Flimm directorship at the Hamburg Thalia Theater (1985-2000). The opening premiere of the Flimm directorship in Cologne in October 1979 was Heinrich von Kleist's Käthchen von Heilbronn with Katharina Thalbach in the title role. Flimm staged a “turbulent knight spectacle in which sheet metal-armored men beat each other with huge swords.” Katharina Thalbach particularly impressed both the audience and the press. The staging “does not adapt the little girl to the present. [Flimm] shows that it is a foreign body in our world, ”said Georg Hensel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine . Glittenberg had constructed two boats on which trees grew, one in the middle of the auditorium, the other in the back of the stage and in between a huge empty playing area with plenty of space for the Kleistian language, the fights and the court proceedings. The production was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, after which many stages discovered the long-forgotten Kleist play "up and down the country" and re-enacted it.

An opera production by Jürgen Flimm at the Hamburg State Opera, Offenbach's Hoffmanns Tales , provided by the Glittenbergs, unleashed a veritable scandal . “The people screamed, were beside themselves. These elegant hamburgers, who showed the Italian 'kiss my ass' gesture, rolled up the programs to amplify their 'boos', ”says Flimm in retrospect. The reason for the excitement was the portrayal of Hoffmann as a drunkard and womanizer - a young girl climbs out of his bed, wearing only a T-shirt. For Jürgen Flimm, Glittenberg also created the rooms for two other legendary female figures of German classical music, Minna von Barnhelm with Marina Wandruszka in October 1982 at the Zurich Schauspielhaus and the Maid of Orleans with Therese Affolter in April 1985 in Cologne, both epoch-making, pioneering productions, the Minna also invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. In between, Das alten Land , Klaus Pohl's reappraisal of the displaced people in Germany's immediate post-war period, presented shortly after the world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna in May 1984 in Cologne. Flimm was not only staging “foreign” in Zurich, but after taking over the management of Thalia also at the Salzburg Festival , again together with the Glittenbergs in responsibility for the stage and costumes. The now well-established trio presented Ferdinand Raimund's Der Bauer als Millionär there in 1987 and Johann Nestroy's Das Mädl aus der Vorstadt in 1989 . The risk of entrusting two Viennese folk comedies to three North Germans succeeded - not only because Otto Schenk first played Fortunatus Wurzel, then Schnoferl. Hellmuth Karasek wrote in Der Spiegel after the first premiere:

"Flimm's stage and costume designer couple Rolf and Marianne Glittenberg had performed lavishly and beautifully without leaving the children's and fairy tale world of the theater, which unfolds its greatest charm when, with all its deception and illusionary magic, it also shows that the backdrops are shaky, made of cardboard and only covered with silver paper. "

- Hellmuth Karasek : Ashes and diamonds in Salzburg

Back in Hamburg again great classical drama, for example in 1989 Chekhov's Platonov with Hans Christian Rudolph and Elisabeth Schwarz in leading roles. Again with an invitation to the Berlin Theatertreffen.

Giesing, Schaaf, Friedrich, Tabori, Düggelin

Starting in the 1980s, Rolf Glittenberg designed stage sets for the realism-oriented director Dieter Giesing throughout the German-speaking area. After a Feydeau production at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, the collaboration was continued in 1984 at the Vienna Burgtheater with Demons by Lars Norén . This was followed by three premieres of David Mamet's pieces : 1986 Hillside view of the sea in Stuttgart, 1988 The Favor of the Hour at the Volksbühne Berlin and 1995 The Cryptogram in Zurich.

Demons and a hillside view of the sea were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen.

The 1990s began for the Glittenbergs with top-class opera productions with Jürgen Flimm and a number of new directors. In January 1990 the curtain rose in Amsterdam for a Così fan tutte with Flimm and Harnoncourt , described by the Dutch press as “magnificent”. In 1991, in the last season of artistic director Claus Helmut Drese at the Vienna State Opera, the Glittenbergs presented together with Jürgen Flimm Schreker's Der ferne Klang , an opera that the National Socialists had permanently banished from the repertoire of opera houses. Gerd Albrecht conducted. This was followed at the Salzburg Festival in 1991 by Die Zauberflöte , staged by Johannes Schaaf , and there in 1992 by Die Frau ohne Schatten , staged by Götz Friedrich . Both productions were conducted by Sir Georg Solti - and in retrospect were quickly classified as "legendary" or "coronation". 1993 again two operas with Flimm and Harnoncourt, in May a brilliant Figaro premiere in Amsterdam and in July the Salzburg Festival premiere of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea on the stage of the Great Festival Hall .

Drama followed again. In June 1994 Rolf Glittenberg took over the set design for Delirium , a poem collage by Hans Magnus Enzensberger , staged by the then 80-year-old George Tabori .

“The location of the action in Hamburg's Thalia Theater is perhaps the viewing terrace of a hotel in the Zauberbergisches; others claim to have recognized the aft deck of a ship of fools anchored in a fjord. Icy fog hangs over painted mountains. Rolf Glittenberg built a set that was unusually concentrated for his standards [...]. On the boards that mean the madhouse (that is, art, that is the world, etc.), the actors have plenty of space to play: with each other, with white chairs, beautiful texts, a grand piano and themselves. "

- Robin Detje : Theater truancy , Die Zeit (Hamburg), June 10, 1994

1995 saw the first collaboration with Sven-Eric Bechtolf - Heiner Müller's Die Schlacht - and a remarkable Jürgen Flimm production of Schnitzler Das weite Land , both at the Thalia Theater. The taz wrote about the latter : “The performance is so beautiful that you can't help but scratch at it somewhere. Alone: ​​It doesn't work. "

In 1997 and 1998 Dieter Giesing and Rolf Glittenberg met again in Zurich - for Robert Musils seldom played enthusiasts and for Ingmar Bergman's stage versions of scenes from a marriage . The Bergman production was later taken over by the Schaubühne on Lehniner Platz in Berlin. Also in 1998, also in Zurich, there was the only collaboration with Werner Düggelin : Thomas Hürlimann's Lied der Heimat was premiered to mark the 150th anniversary of the Swiss constitution . The production was invited to the Mülheim Theater Days.

Verdi's Macbeth was Rolf Glittenberg's last joint work with Luc Bondy, created in 1999 as an original Scottish Opera production for the Edinburgh International Festival and subsequently shown at the Wiener Festwochen , at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux and at De Nationale Opera in Amsterdam.

Sven-Eric Bechtolf

The Glittenbergs' work with the actor-director Sven-Eric Bechtolf spanned two decades and can essentially be divided into three phases: 2000–2012 during the artistic directorship of Pereira at the Zurich Opera House , 2006 to 2014 during the artistic directorships of Holender and Meyer at the Vienna State Opera and from 2012 to 2014 at the Salzburg Festival . In addition, the director, set designer and costume designer also worked together in acting (in Hamburg and Vienna). Furthermore, in 2002 a new production of Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann was made at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.

Sven-Eric Bechtolf's first opera production was Wedekind / Bergs Lulu at the Zurich Opera House in 2000 . Laura Aikin sang the title role. The critic wrote: “There is no crackling eroticism here, but a climate of more or less latent violence. Even the standard room designed by Rolf Glittenberg, a large bourgeois living room in the style of the 1930s modernism, exudes an aggressive coldness. ”This production was recorded for television and shown several times on 3sat . Otello (2001), Die tote Stadt (2003), Der Rosenkavalier and Pelléas et Mélisande (both 2004) followed in Zurich, and between 2006 and 2009 Mozart's three Da Ponte operas , conducted by Franz Welser-Möst , Salome (2010) and finally Don Carlos (2012).

An exemplary and highly successful Arabella by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss opened the joint work of Bechtolf with the Glittenbergs and Franz Welser-Möst on the podium at the Vienna State Opera in 2006. From 2007 the entire Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner followed , in 2010 an expressionist interpretation of Hindemith's Cardillac . In November 2012, Ariadne's set and costumes were adopted for the Naxos production of the Salzburg Festival, but not for the original version, but for the fully composed version. At Haus am Ring, Bechtolf and the Glittenbergs also developed a lively Cenerentola in January 2013 , set in the 1930s. It conducted Jesús López Cobos . Rusalka followed in 2014 . Jirí Belohlávek conducted it .

In 2012, Alexander Pereira took over the artistic direction of the Salzburg Festival , and Bechtolf became acting director. Together with Rolf and Marianne Glittenberg, he worked on the original version of Hofmannsthal / Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos in the Haus für Mozart in 2012 , with Daniel Harding on the podium, and the three of them began a new Da Ponte cycle in 2013 , this time with Christoph Eschenbach as conductor after Franz Welser-Möst had canceled his participation. The joint project did not have a good star and was canceled after Così fan tutte (2013) and Don Giovanni (2014).

Peymann, Kušej, Moretti

Parallel to the intensive work with Bechtolf, a number of interesting projects with other directors were created. In 2002, Rolf Glittenberg was invited by Claus Peymann , the long-time director of the Burgtheater and the Berliner Ensemble , to design the stage for a Peter Turrini premiere at the Salzburg Festival - Da Ponte in Santa Fe .

The set designer took on a number of other tasks at the Zurich Opera House: in 2003 he worked with Martin Kušej for the first time - for Strauss'sche Elektra , conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi . This was followed by four works with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the podium, in 2004 an exemplary Fidelio , staged by Jürgen Flimm, in 2006 Mozart's early work La finta giardiniera directed by Tobias Moretti , in 2007 and 2008 two further Kušej productions, Die Zauberflöte and Genoveva .

Uwe Eric Laufenberg

In 2015, the Glittenbergs, together with the director Uwe-Eric Laufenberg, were responsible for a new production of Elektra by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss at the Vienna State Opera. The paternoster with the corpses of Klytämnestra and Aegisth provoked the conservative audience of the Vienna Opera. This production also led to a continuous collaboration with the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden , whose artistic director Laufenberg has been since 2014. Rolf Glittenberg designed the sets for several Laufenberg productions in a row, for Wagner's Tannhäuser and the Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (2017), Mozart's Idomeneo and his Titus (2019) in the opera and in the play for Kleist's Zerbrochner Krug (2019) and the Beckett - trilogy Happy days , waiting for Godot , Endgame , running Berg's response to the shutdown of the cultures of Europe as a result of COVID-19 pandemic . His wife worked as a costume designer in most of the productions. Shakespeare's King Lear is announced for autumn 2020 .

The collaboration with Philipp M. Krenn , the young in-house director of the Hessian State Theater, began in Wiesbaden - for the drama version of Takis Würgers Der Club , for Britten's Peter Grimes and for Verdi's Trovatore , whose premiere had to be postponed due to COVID-19.

As a teacher

Rolf Glittenberg taught at two art schools. In 1979 he was appointed professor for stage design at the Werkkunstschule Cologne , which was later incorporated into the Technical University of Cologne . His students there included Florian Etti , Gisbert Jäkel and Kaspar Zwimpfer , as well as today's painter Gabriele Heider , Alexander Müller-Elmau and Tony Strnad , who now works as a design manager, TV production manager and freelance artist. Later he was appointed professor of stage design at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

From among his former assistants, Kaspar Glarner , Siegfried E. Mayer , Elke Scheuermann and Katrin Lea Tag are now active as set designers.

Invitations to the Berlin Theatertreffen

The following productions, for which Rolf Glittenberg designed the set, were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen (the year stands for the premiere of the respective production):

See also

literature

Short biographies
Interviews

proof

  1. ↑ Theater director Luc Bondy has died. In: derstandard.at. Der Standard , November 28, 2015, accessed June 5, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Peter von Becker : Like a late summer guest , Die Zeit , November 30, 2015
  3. ^ Manfred Brauneck: The world as a stage: history of the European theater. Fifth volume: 2nd half of the 20th century, Springer 2016, p. 365
  4. ^ Die Zeit (Hamburg): Life a nightmare, death a civil servant , theater: “Macbeth” in Cologne, “Hamlet” in Freiburg, criticism by Benjamin Henrichs , February 12, 1982
  5. ↑ Heinz Josef Herbort : What is a director allowed to do? , Die Zeit (Hamburg), August 22, 1975
  6. ^ Daniela Elena Trummer: The reception of Russian dramas at the Vienna Burgtheater from 1955 to 2005 , diploma thesis at the University of Vienna, October 2008, p. 92
  7. ^ Hamburger Abendblatt : As told by children , March 21, 1981
  8. ↑ Dirk Grathoff: Kleist: History, Politics, Language , Essays on the Life and Work of Heinrich von Kleist, Springer 2013, p. 149
  9. ↑ Quoted here. after William C. Reeve: Kleist on Stage, 1804-1987 , McGill-Queen's Press 1993, p. 129
  10. ^ Nikolaus Merck: Bernd Noack: Theaterskandale, Salzburg 2008 .
  11. ↑ Hellmuth Karasek: Aschen and Diamant in Salzburg , Der Spiegel (Hamburg), August 17, 1987
  12. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : As a witness of a historical moment , criticism of the new production by Christof Loy of Julia Spinola that took place twenty years later , August 1, 2011
  13. ^ Der Standard (Vienna): German director Johannes Schaaf died , November 3, 2019
  14. ↑ taz: Chatter and two dead , discussion by Dirk Knipphals , October 9, 1995
  15. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung : The man, the woman , Berg's “Lulu”, two-act, in the Zurich Opera House, July 10, 2000
  16. ^ Bavarian State Opera (Munich): FLORIAN ETTI , accessed on June 5, 2020
  17. ↑ Landestheater Linz : Short biography of Gisbert Jäkel , accessed on June 5, 2020
  18. ↑ Kaspar Zwimpfer , official website, accessed on June 5, 2020
  19. ↑ Berliner Theatertreffen : Advanced search Rolf Glittenberg , accessed on June 7, 2020

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Glittenberg, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German set designer
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Melle