"The moon has crashed to earth, or the ship in space has smashed to pieces against it. The fragments lie scattered. The ruins of Romanticism. The lovers have been struck dead by their own longing. The planets in the overarching night sky circle indifferently on." (Hans Dieter Schaal, set for Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner, Staatsoper Hamburg, 1988.)
Hans Dieter Schaal worked on opera with Ruth Berghaus for ten years, he also created unforgettable stage architecture for the operas of Heinz Werner Henze. Almost all the important European opera houses, for example those in Berlin, Brussels, Stuttgart, Paris, Vienna and Zurich, served as vehicles for his extraordinarily expressive artistic powers, which he used to captivate the public. As an architect he extended architectural thinking into the space occupied by free art. He has been a household word as a master of applied building art since his early books of signs, in which he plumbed the basic conditions and archetypes o f architecture. Following his exhibition architecture, which decisively changed awareness of the dramatic revaluation of everyday and artistic objects, and which was published by Edition Axel Menges under the title In-Between, Exhibition Architecture, Schaal's set designs are now being presented in a comprehensive form for the first time. Here too Schaal confronts the musical and scenic events with stereo- metric basic forms, primary colours and effective in-depth perspective. And so he brings, more clearly than the set designers, who are essentially painters, a third creative dimension on to the operatic or theatrical stage, which the scenic events echo particularly effectively, but which sometimes create considerable friction with them.
Gottfried Knapp is responsible for architectural reporting as cultural editor of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He has written on contemporary architecture and urban development in almost all the specialist publications in Germany. Frank R. W erner held the chair of building history and architectural theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste Stuttgart from 1990 to 1993, since 1993 he has been Director of the Institut fuer Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universitaet in Wuppertal. He studied painting, architecture and architectural history at the Kunstakademie in Mainz, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover and Stuttgart University.