Momme Hinrich's stage design for the Flying Dutchman in St. Margarethen
Ship ahead
Richard Wagner's fairy tale is visually staged in the opera in the quarry by Momme Hinrichs, who has been attracting international attention as co-founder of the artist duo fettFilm since 2000. His stage design for The Flying Dutchman at the Donbass Opera in Donetsk, for example, was honored with the Taras Shevchenko Prize, Ukraine's highest cultural award.
Hinrichs was immediately impressed and inspired by Philipp M. Krenn's directorial concept: “Our visions coincided from the very first second, which is rare,” he says in the interview. “So all the other ideas came naturally. Right from the start, there was also exceptionally close collaboration with the technical trades at the St. Margarethen quarry. We spent a long time discussing practical processes such as sight lines, accessibility, feasibility and even weather-related circumstances. All of this had a major influence on the final model.”
"The quarry itself offers a fantastic landscape, which we wanted to take advantage of right from the start. The motto was not to build the Norwegian coast into the quarry, but rather to disguise the quarry itself as the Norwegian coast, to make it so."
"There will be big waves, a versatile house, spectacular stunts and - of course - a ship! The basic idea, as already mentioned, is to transform the quarry into a Norwegian coastal landscape, with all its roughness, huge waves breaking on the shore, but also depicting the storm from which Daland's encounter with the Dutchman originates."
The focus, especially in the second act, is on Daland's house, where the fateful encounter between Senta and the Dutchman takes place in a “huge intimate play”
"Of course, as in previous years, video and projections will play a major role again this year: the events in Daland's house, for example, will be projected onto the rocks on which the house stands using live cameras."
"In the third act, these elements, water and coast, grow together more and more. Further details are yet to be revealed. In any case, we can look forward to a great spectacle!"
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